Tarkenton still knows value of improvisation

Friday, Sept. 24, 2004 | 9:26 a.m.

How does the son of a Methodist preacher develop the brashness to put himself into his first college football game?

Before addressing a group of 66 small-business owners Thursday afternoon at the Harley-Davidson Cafe on the Strip, Fran Tarkenton howled for a few seconds at that query.

"Well, I don't know about brashness," he said. "But, you know, I've always felt that to get anything done one has to have a sense of desperation. Not urgency, it has to be more than urgency."

In 1958, the University of Georgia trailed Texas, 7-0, in the fourth quarter when Tarkenton, a sophomore quarterback for the Bulldogs, substituted himself into his first varsity game without consulting coach Wally Butts.

Then he guided Georgia on a 21-play, 95-yard touchdown drive. Butts sent on the kicking unit, but Tarkenton waved it off to attempt a two-point conversion for the lead.

Rolling right as a decoy, he lobbed the ball to tight end Bill Herron in the left corner of the end zone to give Georgia the Southeastern Conference title and a berth in the Orange Bowl.

"The people who become great in life -- athletes, politicians, the fireworkers and the police -- create a sense of desperation to improve who they are and bring about positive change in their lives," Tarkenton said. "They turn problems into solutions, those types of things.

"I did put myself into my first game because I just was desperate to play and I thought I could help my team. There was an opportunity and I ran on the field, and the next thing I know I'm playing."

Man on the move

Tarkenton knows plenty about capitalizing on opportunities. His 18 years of elusive scrambles and desperation tactics in the NFL, mostly with the Minnesota Vikings, earned him a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1986.

And he parlayed his own business interests and abilities as a motivational speaker, and author, into a lucrative career when his playing days ended.

"I've worked all my life," said Tarkenton, 64. "I developed a work ethic when I was a little boy, 7 years old, with a paper route in Washington, D.C."

When he was 11, Tarkenton, his two older brothers and parents moved from D.C. to Athens, Ga., in 1952, when his father, Dallas, chose to pursue a doctorate at the University of Georgia.

By then, Fran had honed the instincts in countless games of alley football in the narrow corridors of the nation's capital, that would help him lead Athens High to a state title in 1955.

Four years later, as a junior for the Bulldogs, Tarkenton added to his legend when he drew a play in the dirt at the south end of Sanford Stadium.

Georgia, behind 13-7, faced a fourth-and-goal situation at Auburn's 13 with 30 seconds left and another SEC championship up for grabs.

Butts had sent in a play, but Tarkenton again changed gears. He knelt beneath his offensive unit, dug a finger in the dirt and diagramed what turned into Georgia's game-winning touchdown pass.

"You had to improvise," Tarkenton said of his maneuver against Auburn.

In his 25-minute address to local business figures Thursday, Tarkenton emphasized a willingness to learn new ideas, recognizing value and market streams, and tightly monitoring expenses and revenues "by the day, hour and minute," he said.

He also said New England's Bill Belichick, the architect of two of the past three Super Bowl championships, is the best coach in the NFL.

"He has no personality," Tarkenton said. "But let me tell you what he does, he manages that business."

Perhaps Tarkenton could have managed some of his business affairs better, but the three-time Super Bowl loser has always claimed to learn more from losses than victories.

Disgruntled business associates and failure, he said, come with that territory.

He has started more than a dozen companies, including a motivational business during his playing career, and claims to have influenced the growth of more than 100 operations.

During a chance meeting at LaGuardia Airport in New York in the mid-1980s, Tarkenton inspired former Aerosmith rock band road manager Rich Guberti to increase his limousine fleet from four to more than 50, boosting its annual sales to $6 million.

The highs and lows

Thursday, Tarkenton lauded his GoSmallBiz.com firm, which has 30,000 small-business owners in its data base and allows them access to news and resources, and insight into the global economy.

However, Tarkenton's computer software company, KnowledgeWare Inc., became the target of lawsuits and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation after it admitted accounting irregularities in 1994.

Two years later, lawsuits brought by friends, family and business associates of Irwin Jacobs, who had combined to invest $13.9 million in KnowledgeWare, were settled out of court. Confidentiality agreements kept those terms private.

Tarkenton sold the company to Dallas-based Sterling Software at a major loss, with the understanding that Sterling would be liable for any litigation judgments against him and that he would receive $300,000 annually as a Sterling consultant.

In 1999, he reportedly paid six figures to settle SEC charges of alleged fraud in the software venture.

Pre-Paid Legal Services, Inc., which had a poster-size advertisement board on display Thursday by a staircase that led to Tarkenton's speaking area, has been another lawsuit target with accusations of being an illegal pyramid scheme.

A former Pre-Paid director, Tarkenton stepped down from the company's board to become its most visible spokesman after that '99 incident with the SEC.

All of which made Tarkenton a subject of an HBO "Real Sports" segment in 2001.

"In business, there's always people who disagree with you," Tarkenton said. "I think the people disagree with President Bush sometimes, and John Kerry. If you're in the arena, there will be people who disagree with you.

"I was on the board of directors of Coca-Cola Co. when we had 250 lawsuits against us at one time. So does that make Coca-Cola bad? Or me bad? Or the other board members bad? No, obviously not."

Jacobs called Tarkenton "a loser" in a 1995 Minneapolis Star-Tribune article. In the same feature, former Vikings teammate Ron Yary said of Tarkenton, "It's not that he was selfish, it's that he was self-serving."

Conversely, Stu Voight, who played in Minnesota with Tarkenton, was overjoyed when the scrambler once agreed to appear, at his own expense, at a rare public benefit for the vegetative daughter and injured wife of former teammates.

According to one speakers bureau, Tarkenton commands up to $30,000 for a speaking engagement. Thursday, as a favor to Pre-Paid networking guru Earnest "Ace" Fair, Tarkenton appeared for free.

"You have to have a focus and a plan," he said privately. "You have to have discipline. Then, when things go awry -- which they do -- then you have to improvise.

"But if you have really studied and planned and prepared, which I always did, then your improvisation is not just something out of the air. It's something that makes sense, that's learned ... that is a responsible direction to go."