Professional Coaching Career
Kush moved to the Canadian Football League the following year, serving as head coach of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In his only season with the team, he led his squad to an 11–4–1 mark and a berth in the CFL Eastern Conference championship game. Controversy followed him to the CFL, however, with Kush quarreling with some Ti-Cats players when he attempted to ban the common practice of taping shoes and ankles.
That performance helped Kush return to the United States when the Baltimore Colts hired him in 1982. During the strike-shortened season, the Colts had the dubious record of being the first NFL team since the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to not win a game during the season, finishing 0–8–1. John Elway's refusal to play for the Colts after they chose him first overall in the 1983 draft has been attributed to his desire not to play for Kush.
The Colts improved the following year with a 7–9 record, then moved to Indianapolis during the off-season. After just four wins in fifteen games in 1984, Kush quit on December 13, just days before the final game of the season. Citing a desire to be closer to friends and family, Kush accepted a three-year contract with the United States Football League's Arizona Outlaws.
However, the league folded in August 1986, with Kush then living off his personal services contract with Outlaws owner Bill Tatham by offering assistance to beginners in a local youth football league, joking, "I'm the highest-paid Pop Warner coach in the country." Kush also used his disciplinarian image to serve as director of the Arizona Boys Ranch, a facility used to reform juvenile offenders.
Read more about this topic: Frank Kush
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or career:
“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)