Cooperation, not just innovation, paved Don Coryell’s path to the Pro Football Hall of Fame

The musical accompaniment to this article is “San Diego Super Chargers.”

Recommended attire: “Charger Power” gold T-shirts worn by thousands of locals to Mission Valley.

It took forever, but the day is upon us.

The late Don Coryell, whose San Diego Chargers teams exhilarated much of America between 1978 and 1986, will in fact be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Saturday in Canton, Ohio.

Set off the Chargers Cannon. Donald David Coryell is taking his place among the sport’s greats.

Coryell changed how professional football was coached, played and viewed, fostering a more entertaining sport. Able to turn around forlorn NFL franchises in St. Louis and San Diego, he furthered greatly the league’s rise into a revenue giant that every year now apportions close to $400 million in national media money to each of its 32 clubs, no matter their competence.

Above all, Coryell’s football immortality owes to his brilliance as an innovator.

Propelling him as well, however, were his cooperative skills, our theme today — and couldn’t a lot of walks of life benefit from improved cooperation?

Coryell was the lead conductor in a football symphony. The song wasn’t “Kumbaya “ — Dan Fouts and teammates bickering often — but the performances were often harmonious. There was a flow, a precision to how “Air Coryell” breezed down the field. As impressive as the parts were, the whole was often better, beginning with the quintet of blockers working in unison.

Don’t forget that back in the 1960s, when Coryell led the football Aztecs of San Diego State, the cooperative efforts of thousands of San Diegans laid the foundation to his burgeoning career here.

Per landslide-level approval by local voters, public money built San Diego Stadium on time and on budget.

In effect, San Diego bought low on the NFL and Major League Baseball.

Move forward to recent years. Fittingly, to end a 35-year stalemate that denied Coryell’s induction into the Canton shrine, it took a cooperative, common-sense effort.

What had devolved into Tower of Babel-level of dysfunction — Hall of Fame voters advancing Coryell to the finalist stage seven times, only for him to be rejected because rules stipulated that his contributions to football could not be taken into account — finally gave way to a solution.

Foremost among those who brokered critical rule changes was new Hall president Jim Porter, a husband, father of four daughters and the publisher and CEO of the Canton Repository newspaper.

“I give Porter a lot of credit,” Clark Judge, a Hall voter for 13 years, said Friday. “He always says he wants to get things right. He’s getting it there.”

Kudos go also to Hall voters such as Judge, a former NFL/Chargers reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune; and colleagues Rick Gossselin (Dallas), Jeff Legwold (Denver), Ron Borges (Boston) and Ira Kauffman (Tampa), among many others.

They suggested Porter prevail upon Hall executives to combine the “coaches” category with the “contributors” category. To more than offset that coming reduction in inductees, they suggested increasing the enshrinement rate of seniors — those who’d been denied election for 25-plus years.

Done and done, Porter ultimately answered.

Mercifully, the solution nixed the yearly ritual that had become as ridiculous as running Fouts into a stacked defense.

Here’s how it went at voters’ meetings: Advocates spoke for Coryell. Skeptics pointed out none of his Cardinals or Chargers teams reached the Super Bowl, noting also his 3-6 playoff record. Pro-Coryell voters lauded his indisputable football-enhancing innovations and a coaching tree whose branches included Super Bowl winners such as head men Joe Gibbs and John Madden and assistants such as Norv Turner, Mike Martz and Ernie Zampese.

None of that mattered, they were told, correctly. Because he wasn’t nominated as a contributor. Nor could he be.

When the categories were combined, Coryell advanced as smoothly as Kellen Winslow running an F-post route and gathering a Fouts spiral.

And, if not for changes wrought by Porter and others, would the Coryell enshrinement happen Saturday?

“No, no way, — nope,” Judge said.

The head-butting is over. Don Coryell got his bust.