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Redskins Lose Their Guiding Force

Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, who built the NFL franchise into a three-time Super Bowl champion and was nearing completion of a monumental new stadium in suburban Maryland, died yesterday after suffering a heart attack at his home in Northwest Washington. He was 84.

Cooke, who had a long history of heart and respiratory problems, was pronounced dead at George Washington University Hospital at 12:09 p.m after collapsing in his library yesterday morning, said Robert Shesser, the chief of the hospital's emergency room, who was on duty at the time.

Shesser told reporters that Cooke did not respond to "state of the art" emergency medical treatment that included attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation, respiration and the application of drugs by D.C. fire department personnel and hospital physicians. Cooke's heart was not beating when paramedics arrived at his home, Shesser added.

With Cooke at the hospital were his wife, Marlene Ramallo Cooke; his son, John Kent Cooke; his daughter-in-law; and his grandson. Funeral arrangements were incomplete yesterday.

Redskins officials and Cooke aides said they expected little disruption in overall management of the team or the final phases of the $175 million, 78,600-seat stadium in Landover, just inside the Capital Beltway in Prince George's County.

John Kent Cooke, the team president, has told associates that he intends to keep the Redskins in the family and assume control of day-to-day operations. The younger Cooke, who has held wide-ranging authority over the team for the past several years, declined to comment yesterday and instructed his staff and all coaches to refrain from publicly discussing his father's death.

In a region whose public figures often tend toward the bland, the elder Cooke was anything but — a natty, silver-haired business mogul who suffered fools and uncooperative politicos badly. He was a contradictory figure, a big ego in a diminutive body, a dealmaker who got his way by bullying, cajoling and caressing — sometimes all at once.

As word of Cooke's death spread, there was an outpouring of testimonials from the White House and elected leaders across the Washington area, including local jurisdictions where Cooke had tried unsuccessfully for 10 years to find a new home for his beloved team.

That search, which ended two years ago with an agreement on the Landover site, was emblematic of Cooke. His exchanges with local leaders were oversized and dramatic — in public with then-Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, he was at his courtly best; in private with then-D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, he could be overbearing and at his chauvinistic worst.

"So long as I agreed with him, he was very pleasant," recalled former Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer. "There is no negotiating — it's his way only. 'I'm Jack Kent Cooke. This is the way its going to be.' "

Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Prince George's), who also negotiated with Cooke, recalled the owner's sizable ego.

Miller said he once declined an invitation to sit in Cooke's exclusive box in Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium but promised to look up at Cooke from his own end-zone seats.

"There's probably 40,000 people who look up at you," Miller recalled telling Cooke.

Cooke replied: "No, all 58,000 look up: I'm part of the show."

Wilder said yesterday it was sad that Cooke did not live long enough "to see his dream come to fruition" in Landover. "He used to kid with me a lot and say, 'Look, I'm not interested in a memorial stadium. I want to see something,' " Wilder said.

Virginia Gov. George Allen (R), whose father once coached the Redskins, described Cooke yesterday as an "extraordinary lion in the world of business and professional sports ... an unequaled competitor."

Joe Gibbs, who coached all three of Cooke's Super Bowl champion teams, yesterday credited Cooke with making him a professional head coach for the first time 16 years ago.

"I was 40 years old and no one took a chance on me," Gibbs said yesterday from Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, where the racing team he owns was competing in the Interstate Batteries 500. "That showed the kind of guts he had. He gambled and went with me, a nobody."

Before his health began to fail, Cooke was a regular at Redskin Park, the team's practice facility in Ashburn. He frequently drove his black BMW into his reserved parking spot, then, accompanied by his spaniel Coco, drove a golf cart down to the field area to watch the team practice.

He would sit through bitterly cold days and sweltering heat, commenting on virtually every play and every player. He would chide General Manager Charley Casserly for draft choices that displeased him and compliment him on high-performance players.

Once, when a coach asked, "What are your dreams, Mr. Cooke?" the owner snapped: "I don't dream. I do."

Cooke was fastidious in his dress. Even if he was working in his office, he wore his dress clothes — slacks and loafers and shirts. He almost never left home without a blazer and his signature wraparound sunglasses.

He ate a small breakfast, had hot tea for lunch, then usually dinner at home, the old Duke Ziebert's or the Palm in downtown Washington. He spent weekends with his Tennessee walking horses or watching one of his thoroughbreds run.

Before Duke Ziebert's closed in 1994, Cooke would spend lunchtime of his favorite days — the Mondays after a Redskins victory — at a prominent table there, soaking up the congratulations of a city.

In an era when more and more teams are owned by corporations and managed by faceless bureaucrats, Cooke was a living, breathing, prone-to-temper, effusive-in-his-praise patriarch of a family-run team. And said so himself.

"If there is anything more exciting, more invigorating, more tantalizing, more worrisome, more ebullient in the world than owning a franchise like the Washington Redskins, I wish someone would tell me what it is," Cooke said recently. "It is the best fun there is."

His health had deteriorated in recent months. He had suffered a heart attack in 1973 and had been bothered by breathing difficulties and angina pain. In early November, he fell ill while watching the Redskins-Arizona Cardinals game at RFK and was diagnosed with a degenerative arthritic condition.

Cooke, who suffered increasing arthritic pain in his hands in his final months, missed the final two games at RFK but vowed to be well enough for the opening of his new stadium in September. Despite his failing health, Cooke — who was involved in virtually all aspects of the stadium's design and construction — went to the Landover site most Sundays to check its progress.

Yesterday, when paramedics from the D.C. fire department's rapid response unit arrived at Cooke's mansion in the 2800 block of Rock Creek Drive, they were led into the library, where Cooke was lying on the floor unconscious, and a woman, evidently Marlene Cooke, was "kneeling next to him ... just saying his name," said paramedic Kenneth Hatch.

That woman and another, Cooke's household nurse, said Cooke had collapsed while working at his desk, Hatch said.

Cooke, who was in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, already was getting oxygen through a nasal cannula, a thin tube placed in his nose apparently by the nurse, according to Hatch. The paramedics began emergency procedures.

"He was not breathing, and he did not have a pulse at the time," Hatch said. A heart monitor showed Cooke was in "ventricular fibrillation," a rapid, disorganized rhythm that does not produce efficient pumping of blood and is typical in cardiac arrest.

Hatch administered an electrical shock to Cooke's chest with paddles, designed to get the heart's own natural electrical pacemaker back to a normal rhythm. "You try to shock [the heart] as quick as you can," Hatch said. "He did respond with "a very weak pulse rate, about 30" beats a minute — a rate too slow to get the heart pumping well, Hatch said.

By then, firefighters and other medical personnel with the ambulance had arrived, and they began "basic CPR," Hatch said. Meanwhile, an intravenous line was placed in Cooke's arm so they could administer a drug similar to adrenaline. Hatch placed a breathing tube down Cooke's windpipe and pumped oxygen by hand into his lungs.

As the team prepared Cooke to be taken to the ambulance, his heart went back to a rapid, chaotic rhythm, Hatch said. They shocked him again and "his heart went asystolic," Hatch said, meaning that equipment indicated a flat line with no activity, "no beating at all."

In the ambulance, the team continued emergency procedures, but Cooke's heartbeat never came back, Hatch said. They arrived at George Washington University Hospital at 11:37 a.m. Marlene Cooke was driven to the hospital by D.C. fire personnel, who followed behind the ambulance.

The fire department received the emergency call at 10:59 a.m., said Lt. William McLaughlin, chief supervisor of emergency medical services on duty yesterday.

The nurse who placed the emergency call said it was for an 84-year-old man but did not mention Cooke's name, another supervisor said. However, at the dispatch center, when a computer monitor showed the resident at that address was "Jack Cooke," those on duty realized they were responding to a call at the home of the Redskins owner.

During a 1992 interview, after announcing plans to build his new stadium in Alexandria, Cooke touched briefly on his own mortality, a subject he customarily avoided.

"I want to be buried in a burgundy and gold coffin," he said. "And when I'm gone, someone named Cooke is going to own the team. And when he's gone, someone else named Cooke is going to run the team."

Also that day, he had telephoned Gibbs and told him: "Joe, be honest with me, what are our prospects for this season?"

Gibbs said he felt good about the Redskins' chances of winning a second straight Super Bowl.

"Well, Joe," Cooke said, "you know what I want? Three in a row!"

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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