Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 696 is a conversation with Larry Csonka, the NFL Hall of Fame fullback who anchored the only perfect, undefeated season in NFL history with the early-1970s Miami Dolphins, then spent roughly twenty years as an outdoor television host, most famously on North to Alaska. We talk about the undefeated season and Coach Don Shula, his decades of hunting and fishing across Alaska, and the new book that finally ties both halves of his life together, football and the outdoors, into one story.
Listen now: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube · or press play in the player above.
Larry Csonka is an NFL Hall of Fame fullback who starred for the Miami Dolphins during their early-1970s dynasty, including the only perfect, undefeated season in NFL history. After football he spent roughly twenty years as an outdoor television host, best known for North to Alaska on ESPN, and he is now an author who has written a book covering both his football career and his life in the outdoors.
North to Alaska was Larry's outdoor television show, which aired on ESPN and ran as part of about twenty years of outdoor TV he produced. He filmed hunting and fishing adventures across Alaska, much of it alongside his longtime partner who worked on the series with him, chasing big game like moose and the best fishing the state has to offer.
Csonka's book is intentionally more than a football book. The undefeated season and his career under Coach Don Shula form the heart of it, including inside team stories he promised Shula he would not reveal until they were both out of football, but it also covers his upbringing in the country, his lifelong pull toward the outdoors, and his twenty years of outdoor television in Alaska.
Larry won back-to-back Super Bowls with the Miami Dolphins in the early 1970s under Coach Don Shula and was a centerpiece of the 1972 team that completed the only perfect, undefeated season in NFL history.
Csonka says his longtime partner had been encouraging him for years to put his story down, but the moment that truly lined it up was when Coach Don Shula passed away. With his word to Shula no longer a barrier, he felt it was the right time to tell the full story, both the football and the outdoors, and to do it right, the way Shula always demanded.
Tom Rowland Podcast Episode 696 with Larry Csonka is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and iHeartRadio. The video version is embedded at the top of this page.
A lot of people know Larry Csonka the football legend. The reason I wanted him on this show is that so many of you remember Larry Csonka the outdoorsman, the guy hosting North to Alaska on ESPN. He grew up in the country dreaming about the outdoors, just like I did, and he turned that dream into twenty years of hunting and fishing television. Getting to talk to a Hall of Famer about both the perfect season and chasing moose in Alaska, in the same conversation, was a genuine privilege.
Press play in the player above to hear the whole thing.
Larry was at the center of the 1972 Dolphins, the only team to ever finish a season undefeated, and he does not just recite the record. He talks about Coach Don Shula, the standard Shula held everyone to, and the inside team stories he kept to himself for decades. He gave Shula his word he would not reveal certain things until they were both out of football, and he explains why now is finally the time. Listen to that part of the episode.
This is the side of Larry that fits this show perfectly. He hosted North to Alaska and produced roughly two decades of outdoor television, filming hunting and fishing adventures across the state alongside his longtime partner. He talks about growing up in the country, the lifelong pull toward wild places, and the search for the biggest fish and the biggest game. It is a whole second career most football fans never knew about. Hear him tell it in the player above.
Larry is honest about why the book happened when it did. His partner had been after him for years to put it all down, but the thing that truly lined the ball up, as he puts it, was Coach Shula passing away. That freed him to tell stories he had promised to keep. He talks about wanting it to be more than a football book and finding the right collaborator who cared about the outdoor side as much as the gridiron. Listen to that section of the conversation.
One line from this conversation stuck with me: Larry says he liked Shula because Shula was like the outdoors. He connects the discipline and the standard Shula demanded, if it is worth doing, it is worth doing right, to how he approached his outdoor career and his book. The throughline from the locker room to the Alaska wilderness is the heart of what makes Larry's story special. Press play in the player above.
Listen to the full conversation: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · or watch in the player at the top of this page.
What I take away from Larry is that the second act can be just as rich as the first. He won everything there is to win in football and then went and built an entirely separate life in the outdoors that meant just as much to him.
The Shula material is gold for any football fan, but the part that hits home for me is the kid from the country who kept chasing wild places his whole life and never stopped. That is a story everyone who listens to this show will understand.
Press play in the player above, or grab Episode 696 on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Larry Csonka · Miami Dolphins · Coach Don Shula · North to Alaska · ESPN · Jim Kiick · 1972 Undefeated Season · Alaska
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Larry Csonka is an NFL Hall of Fame fullback who starred for the Miami Dolphins during their early-1970s dynasty, winning back-to-back Super Bowls and anchoring the 1972 team that completed the only perfect, undefeated season in NFL history under Coach Don Shula. After football, he became a fixture of outdoor television, spending roughly twenty years hosting and producing hunting and fishing programming, most famously North to Alaska on ESPN. He is also an author whose book brings together both halves of his life, the football career and his lifelong passion for the outdoors.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 696 with Larry Csonka, NFL Hall of Famer, longtime host of North to Alaska, and author of the memoir Head On. This transcript has been lightly cleaned up from the original audio for readability.
Larry Csonka: I'm Larry Csonka, and this is the Tom Rowland podcast, and we're ready to go.
Tom Rowland: Larry, how are you?
Larry Csonka: To be quite honest, writing a book was a strange thing to come back around to. Back in 1972, Jim Kiick and I, my running mate with the Miami Dolphins, got together with Dave Anderson and put out a book, but Dave actually wrote that one. So my recollection of writing a book was really having Dave write it, and it sold a lot of copies and did real well. So when Audrey started after me about a memoir, I remembered what happened back in '72 and thought, well, that won't be tough. But if you're going to write a book and see it through and do it correctly, in Coach Shula's words, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, it takes a solid year of hard work. I'm about ten or ten and a half months in now. So to answer your question, I'm doing fine, but I'm looking forward to getting over the mountain.
Tom Rowland: Well, I got a copy, and I was able to read it before this. Even this morning I was reading the very last part of it. Very good. The first thing I thought was just congratulating you on a life well lived so far. You've crammed a lot into anyone's life, and it's much more than football in this book, which is what appeals to this audience. Of course we have plenty of football fans and plenty of Miami Dolphins fans because of everything I've done in the Florida Keys, and that's where a large portion of this audience is, the Florida Keys, Miami, South Florida. So they're obviously familiar with you. But this is also an outdoors, hunting and fishing podcast, and so many of the audience will remember your show, North to Alaska, on ESPN. So we've got a lot to talk about. One of the things I wanted to ask right away: why was it important for you to write this book when someone reached out to you about it? If you're going to do something right, there needs to be a reason you're interested in seeing it through for ten months. That's a lot of hard work and dedication. What was your driving reason to write this book?
Larry Csonka: To be quite honest, age was the number one factor, and I kept fighting that. Audrey, my life partner, we've been together twenty five or thirty years now, and did a lot of the Alaska series together, she's been after me for the last five years to put it all down, because the background of growing up in the country and aspiring to get to Alaska and finally getting there is pretty interesting. But I think the real thing that lined the ball up and got us kicking off was when Coach Shula passed. I started telling Audrey about all the stories where he and I had reached an understanding not to talk about certain things that came up while I played until one of us had passed away, or until we'd both fully retired from the NFL. When he passed, it was kind of a wake-up call. That's when Audrey turned to me and said, well, what do you think now? And I said, it's time to do it. So we launched on it. It's not a task to be taken lightly. When you reach seventy, seventy-five years old and you've lived most of your life already, particularly your active life, you want to sit down and give it some thought, it's not something you throw down quickly. We did an outline. We didn't want to make just a football book. We wanted to cover the outdoors too. You know, as you've been in this business yourself, twenty years of outdoor TV is a lot, and if you get to go where you want to go and do what you want to do, that's a success, particularly if you can do it for twenty years. So we tried to lay all that out in the book. Certainly the undefeated season and the football career is the pivotal point, the heart of the book if you will, but at the same time we previewed my interest in the outdoors and how I grew up in the country much like yourself, loving the outdoors, aspiring to catch the biggest fish, the biggest game, the biggest moose, and having done a lot of that, then figuring out how to cram it all into a few chapters and see if it would fly.
Tom Rowland: You did a nice job with it. Did you have some sort of writing mentor or coach who helped you with this, or did you just kind of start?
Larry Csonka: Several, yeah. We weren't happy with one or two of the first writers we tried, and frankly we went through two, three, four of them before we finally found someone who was just as interested in the outdoor side of it as the football side. Don't get me wrong, the football side is a lot of fun, a great recollection, and there's a lot of inside stuff that happened between Coach Shula and the team that I'd given him my word I would never reveal until we were both fully retired, or out of football, or whatever. This was the time to reveal those things, and we put them in the book. He once told me, when he first got to Miami and became the new head coach, he stood in front of the team and said: anytime you address me in a meeting or in front of this team, in a gathering with other team members present, you refer to me as Coach and you observe me as the boss, I want that respect. But he said, if you have something personal on your plate and you want to get it off your chest, you make an appointment, come into my office, and when the door closes, it's just me and you. Say what's on your mind, it's man to man, and that information stays inside the office. I'll tell you what, the first time I walked in there, I shut the door, turned around, and he said, what's on your mind? I said, I don't like you very much. He sat down, kind of laughed, looked at me, and said, well, at least we have something in common, I don't like you very much either. I said, why don't you trade me? He said, I've looked into that, but I can't get enough for you. What a start. But the relationship blossomed right from there because there were no illusions. It was cold, hard facts, like the outdoors. I liked that about Shula, he was like the outdoors in my opinion. He was what he was and never varied, and over the years of being coached by him and playing for him, we learned it wasn't a scam, it wasn't a sham. What he said and how he outlined it, he was for real. And I liked that.
Tom Rowland: In your book you talk about how, when he first came around, the team wasn't very good, and in just a few short years you turned into legendary. I thought it was interesting how you documented that relationship, and it wasn't just you, a lot of people were having a hard time with the coach. It seemed like you had this disciplinarian come in, and everybody was used to doing their own thing, you're professional athletes, you should be able to take care of yourself, and he's putting in weight limits and other things. That was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me, because I've watched a lot of football in my life, and just how much the game has changed between when you were starting in the NFL and today, not only the pay, but the size of the athletes. Coach Shula wanted you at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, and you were happy at two forty-five. There was this ten-pound difference. But you were a massive fullback at the time.
Larry Csonka: Yes, and that's why I went into his office and told him I didn't like him, I pretty much wanted to be traded over it. He said, well, I can't get enough for you, so we're stuck with each other. Before he came to Miami he'd been at Baltimore, where he had a reputation as a passing coach, he was a defensive back when he played, was very much into the passing game, saw that as the future of the NFL, and certainly that's where it's at today with all the rule changes. He decided I was going to be the running back, but he wanted me down to what he deemed a necessary weight. Well, who gave him a magic wand to decide that, body fat relationships come into this thing too. I went into his office and said, you're so exacting about details on all these other things, and yet you arbitrarily pick a weight for a running back without considering body fat content or size or speed, it's not all relevant. He thought about that, and he never said I was right, but he went and found a weight and body-fat specialist, put all sixty of us in a pool at training camp in a flotation device to determine body fat, and discovered I had the third-lowest body-fat-to-muscle ratio on the team, outside of two of our two-hundred-eighty-pound defensive backs. So he said, you're right, the only time he ever said that to me. He said, I've thought about it, and instead of two thirty-five, I'll give you two pounds, up to two thirty-seven. That's when I realized it was hopeless. I either got down to the weight he dictated, or I didn't and faced a fine. It was easier to just do it than to argue about it.
Tom Rowland: Looking back on it now, after writing this memoir, do you see it differently, knowing the result was the only perfect, undefeated season in NFL history? How do you look back at all of the ways he coached, and the disagreements you may have had with him, against that result?
Larry Csonka: He was right. Is there any other answer you can come up with? What he was after was perfection. He said our pursuit is towards perfection, he never said we had to win them all. Perfection for him was getting to the Super Bowl and winning it, because when he came to us, he was the guy who couldn't win the big one. He'd lost a couple of Super Bowls, a couple of conference championships, and had fallen by the wayside, people were starting to tag him as the coach who can't win the big one. So instead of shriveling up from that or trying to cover it up, he addressed it head on. That's why I named the book Head On, because he turned our attention not towards winning, but towards performing to perfection, paying attention to each individual game. Right after we lost Super Bowl VI, he got us all in a room, shut the door, threw everybody out except the assistant coaches and the players, and said, we just got our tails kicked, Dallas just paneled us. But instead of making excuses, we're going to use that as a centerpiece. We're going to think about that each week going through the season. As hard as we'd worked to get where we were, we were going to work harder, and keep in mind that we thought we had that game won before we had it won, so we've got to pay attention to each game as we go and not break that trend. His exact words were: we're going to treat every game as though it were the Super Bowl. He never once said anything about a perfect season, he said we're going to be that serious about every game. Right after he said that, Jim Kiick looked at me, we were all beat up from being manhandled by Dallas in that Super Bowl, and all I remember is Bob Lilly picking me up by my Adam's apple. Not a nice man on a football field, I can tell you that. Kiick looked at me, thought about everything we'd already been through in three years, just winked, and said, buckle up. And that's what we did. Shula never said we were going to try to win them all, what he said was we were going to pay attention to each game like a Super Bowl, and he was trying to get us into a mold of being that serious about every single one. To go seventeen games in a row and not drop one is almost impossible.
Tom Rowland: As it's proven to be, nobody's done it since.
Larry Csonka: No. Perfection was only attainable once for us. We came close a couple of other times, but close doesn't cut it, you're either on top of the mountain, or if you're that far off, you might as well be in a different universe.
Tom Rowland: One of the things I noticed in the book, I was born in 1968, a bit younger than you, I remembered the USFL, but I didn't realize you had played such a pivotal role in it. What's your recollection of that time? Is it a positive place in your career, or where does it sit with you?
Larry Csonka: After I got done playing, I had an opportunity to go with Fred Bullard, the owner of the Jacksonville Bulls, a new USFL expansion franchise. I was with them for two or three years, working in the front office, I started off in personnel as a contact for NFL players, since I was still fresh out of the league and had a lot of contacts of guys jumping over to the USFL. As time went on I ended up, for a little over a year, as the general manager for Mr. Bullard, who brought football to Jacksonville. I believe, and I can support this with facts, that Jacksonville was far and away the most successful franchise in the USFL. We came very close to filling the stadium, we had fifty-five to sixty thousand people show up for a home game, and that was a good feeling. Jacksonville was ready for a professional team, and we demonstrated that through the USFL.
Tom Rowland: That's super cool. And where along the line did the television show come into your career?
Larry Csonka: Right around '95 and '96, I think. I'd gone through a divorce and met Audrey Bradshaw, and we started seeing each other regularly. We talked about how we both loved to fish, and I started thinking about Alaska, I'd dreamed about getting there since childhood, and we started to get into the outdoor TV thing. A number of people who had shows back then invited me on as a guest. I sat down with Curt Gowdy one time, and Curt told me I belonged in this business, that I had the wherewithal to host a show. That was a great compliment, and I took him up on it and used a lot of his contacts to get things started. Audrey and I decided to give it a go in Alaska, and if there's any one person who loves Alaska more than me, it's her. She tackled it with a great amount of enthusiasm, and we landed the show. You know what it's like producing an outdoor show, you've been doing it twenty years, you know the ups and downs. You need a good, healthy sponsor. We started out with Stihl, the chainsaw people, I put the story of how that happened in the book, and later NAPA, the National Automotive Parts Association, came to us and bought out the whole thing. That's when we went solid Alaska and did a good number of shows a year for the remaining sixteen years.
Tom Rowland: Wow. What a great business.
Larry Csonka: Isn't it?
Tom Rowland: It really is, and I'm very fortunate to have been in it. I had a somewhat similar path, I imagine a lot of people who end up in outdoor television have a similar story. You're either a guest on someone else's show, or in my case, I had an opportunity to compete in the Great Outdoor Games, which they held in Lake Placid, New York, back in the year 2000. It was a big deal, they had the timber sports thing, the dogs, and fly fishing. I was fortunate enough to get in, do well, and actually win, which gave me the opportunity to be on a lot of other shows. Before that I'd been on one show, Shaw Grigsby's One More Cast, and Shaw told me something similar to what you heard from Curt Gowdy, that I was good at this, that I could do it. I didn't pay it much mind for a couple of years, since I had young kids at home and was spending too much time away, but then I thought, well, maybe we could do this. It was very naive, but Shaw Grigsby was the first person I called, and he said, take my crew and go film a pilot. I was so green I didn't even know what a pilot was. It turned out pretty well, even though when we submitted the show to the first network, they said it wasn't good enough and sent us back to try again.
Larry Csonka: They told you that, and you went back and did it again, you didn't get upset and walk away. If it took more work, you were willing, because you knew in your heart that's what you wanted to do.
Tom Rowland: Absolutely. I did know it. Through being on Shaw's show and then through the Great Outdoor Games, I saw all this production going on, you're not only seeing what people see on television, you're seeing all the organization, the cameramen, the assistants, the scheduling. I found the whole thing fascinating, and we're supposed to go out there and catch a fish in the middle of all of it, which was the real challenge. That seemed like it should be the easiest part, and I still think it is the easiest part, there's so much more going on around it.
Larry Csonka: I can address the tough part. The tough part when you do it in Alaska is finding a cameraman who'll sleep out in a tent and isn't afraid of bears.
Tom Rowland: Where do you find those guys? Your stories about the show, especially the caribou hunt that went bad, were serious. You had some genuinely life-threatening situations, and that one sounded extremely close to being the last show you and Audrey ever did.
Larry Csonka: That was about the longest twenty-four-hour period I've ever experienced in my entire life.
Tom Rowland: Walk us through that a little, if you don't mind, I know it's written in the book and people will want to get it and read the full description. But for anyone who's been to Alaska, you're explaining how it was a nice day and then the weather starts to change. If you've been there, you know that weather can change for thirty seconds, or it can change for the next three months. You knew it was turning bad, and I guess the guide wanted to keep going, or was reassuring you, or made a bad call, but either way you ended up in a situation where the weather changed very quickly on you.
Larry Csonka: It did. The weather got rough, and we had trouble bringing the game we'd harvested back in on the inflatable rafts to get it up and into the boat, so we were a little late getting out. We were out around the middle of the Aleutian Islands, and we came around a point trying to get out to the ocean and back into a bay on the other side. It was blowing hard, and the captain thought we could make it, but it turned out we couldn't. Once we lost the cover of the bay and went around the mountain at the end of the peninsula, the north wind just grabbed us, and we went out to sea and spent seventeen or eighteen hours fighting wave to wave on the Aleutian Ocean, literally living moment to moment for most of that time. It's a kind of situation we shouldn't have gotten into, we should have played it safe and stayed back, but we went out to take a look, went one step too far, and couldn't get back. It was just a short hundred-yard stretch where we went a little too far and couldn't turn around, and by the time we tried, the waves were too big to fight, so we had to go with it. We went with it for the next nineteen hours and almost capsized several times. But through the grace of God, we made it, it's one of those things.
Tom Rowland: That's nothing to play with, especially for so many people who listen to this podcast in Florida or other tropical environments, we all know about rough weather and how much trouble you can get into. But combine that with very cold water temperatures, and that's genuinely dangerous. I'm so glad you made it, and it sure did make for a good story in the book.
Tom Rowland: One of the things that was really cool in your book is how you documented growing up as basically a farm boy. You made some comparisons between football and pushing cows out of the way, a person wasn't as big a deal to you. I enjoyed that, and it read like it was just a natural thing that you loved to hunt and fish. But I wondered, and maybe I missed it in the book, did you have a mentor who helped you learn to hunt and fish when you were young, someone who instilled that passion?
Larry Csonka: Not really. My father and my uncles all liked to fish, and I'd been out with them in a boat on Lake Erie and other places. But of all the siblings, I had three who were four or five years older, and two who were four or five years younger, I was the middle child, born around the time my dad came back from the Second World War. Because of moving to the farm and so on, there weren't any other children born for a number of years, so I grew up in about an eight-year gap without other kids around. I didn't have a brother or younger sibling who was always there, so I was on my own, out in the woods a lot, discovering where the fish and the game were by wandering around, our little twenty-acre tract sat between two huge four- or five-hundred-acre dairy farms, so I grew up with over a thousand acres of open ground around me. From five to eleven or twelve years old I fished the ponds, having learned from my father, my uncles, and my older brother how to bait a hook, and I just took it from there on my own. I developed a rapport with the small critters on the farm, birds, owls, hawks, raccoons, possums, and I had a pet in each category at one time or another, much to the chagrin of my father and uncles who liked to plant gardens. I figured your background was probably pretty similar from what you've said about your own childhood. It just channeled me towards hunting and fishing in the outdoors, and I liked that. Not that I didn't enjoy the football field, the lights, all the excitement, that was fun, but to relax and have a good time, I always preferred the country. How about yourself?
Tom Rowland: Very similar. Like you, my birth order set things up that way, I'm the youngest in my family, with two older sisters six and eight years older than me. That left me on my own during my roaming-around years while they were starting high school and driving. There was plenty of woods around, but my dad was very instrumental in taking me fishing, even though it wasn't the kind of fishing I do now professionally, mostly largemouth bass and bluegill. He loved fishing for bluegill. We fished with crickets a lot, bobbers and crickets, and eventually graduated to lures, beetle spins and little panfish lures. One of my favorite memories is doing yard work with him on a Saturday, and he'd say, how about we knock off early and dig some worms and go fishing? To this day, when I think about digging worms and going fishing, it still sounds like the best afternoon I could ever have.
Larry Csonka: Exactly the way I grew up. My grandfather showed me how to run a hose over the manure pile at the edge of the barn to bring the worms up to the surface at night. You'd go out with a flashlight, pick up all your worms, and the next day go fishing in the pond with a simple J-hook and a nightcrawler, trying to catch a bluegill, just what you're describing. That's the same way I grew up, and there was such a thrill at seven or eight years old getting your own cane pole, your own line, going down with the worms you'd worked for the night before, threading it all up, throwing it out, and watching the bobber go down before pulling in a bluegill. It suited me to a tee, I couldn't have asked for a better feeling.
Tom Rowland: It was very similar for me. Later in my professional career I'd fish a mullet or a pinfish under a cork, and I'd get that same feeling when a tarpon pulled that cork down. I love fly fishing too, but there's something about watching a cork go down when you grew up like that. It's very similar to nymph fishing with an indicator going under. I like that pull-down. Up in Alaska recently we were using long rods with a cork way out there, and a salmon would pull it under, and I just thought, that's cool. It takes you right back to your roots.
Larry Csonka: Yeah, I like halibut fishing the same way, they're bottom feeders, and you throw that out and bounce the plug on the bottom. The biggest one I ever caught was about three hundred and fifty pounds, out of Port Protection, eighty, eighty-five inches long. We put it back because trying to eat one that size is like trying to eat a mule. What a thrill to catch it, though. We were just getting our rigging set up outside the bay, hadn't even gotten to where we planned to really fish yet, and that turned out to be the biggest halibut I've ever caught, right outside the bay. That's the same feeling I had back at the farm pond, what you were just describing.
Tom Rowland: One of my favorite parts of the whole book, and this is also very similar to my own upbringing, we always had Outdoor Life around the house. He may be the last surviving subscriber of that magazine. There was a photo of a grizzly bear going through somebody's camp with people in the background, and you talked about how much that magazine meant to you, how many times you read it over and over. That's actually how I got into fly fishing, reading stories in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream about fly fishing in Yellowstone National Park, and just dreaming about it as a kid. That's how I started my own guiding career, in Yellowstone. Do you still have a copy of that magazine?
Larry Csonka: This was back in the middle-to-late fifties, and my mother knew I just loved to fish and hunt and be out with the critters. We didn't have grizzly bears at all in the area I grew up in, very rarely you'd even see a black bear. She knew I liked that wild side of things, and the article covered Kodiak Island in Alaska. That's where I wanted to go from that point on. It took thirty-five or forty years, but it came to pass.
Tom Rowland: When you finally decided it was time to go to Alaska, was that tied to the show, or had you been up there before?
Larry Csonka: I'd managed to get up there once or twice, I went to visit the troops, and we had to change planes in Alaska on the way to Southeast Asia. When I came back from that, I really started aspiring to get there for good. Then when the TV show got going, that gave me the opportunity to channel toward doing an outdoor series in Alaska, and that finally came to pass.
Tom Rowland: Alaska is a very big place.
Larry Csonka: I honed in by having Audrey Bradshaw with me as my partner, and she picked the areas, doing a series over five, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen days at a time. She laid all that out, and with her expertise she got very good at it, and it paid off in spades. Sometimes you hit on something, we had a guide who'd grown up as a third brother in his family, the one who did all the cooking because they ran a little boat livery in Florida. We brought him on and had him cook over the campfire wherever we were camped, showing how we prepared the different fish and game. The ratings surged in double digits every time we featured him and her uncle. What started as just an idea ended up becoming an actual part of the show, and it really took off once we added that cooking segment, it worked out for the positive.
Tom Rowland: That's fantastic. And I could tell from that one story alone that you know outdoor TV, because pitching a show is one thing, and hosting it is another. We had a show on ESPN not long after that, the biggest platform you could possibly have. The way you described pitching, producing, and hosting it, and then being on the hook for twenty-six episodes, it's one thing to think you can produce a show, and another to do it in Alaska where the weather is a serious factor. You've got the cameraman, the wildlife, all these variables, and you're still obligated to deliver twenty-six episodes. This wasn't just some production company doing it for you, you clearly took pride in having pitched, produced, and hosted it yourself.
Larry Csonka: The first thing I learned, when I pitched it the first time to the folks at Stihl, the chainsaw people, was to put together a proposal with a figure at the bottom based on what we thought we could do traveling around Alaska under the best- and worst-case scenarios, averaged out. They looked at it and said, well, that's a lot of money. I had it all laid out in a little portfolio, and I put it in front of the Stihl CEO in a meeting, head on. His assistants opened their copies and started looking through the booklets while he just sat there looking at me. When I finished, he leaned forward and said, Mister Csonka, what makes you think you can sell Stihl chainsaws to people better than we can? It just so happened that I'd been up in Alaska six or eight months before, way out in the backcountry at a logging facility running twenty-four-seven. The lumberjacks would come in with their chainsaws, put them up on the maintenance dock, go get eight hours of sleep, then come back, get their saws, and head back into the woods. Those lumberjacks got paid by the board foot, not by the hour or the day, they got paid by how much they produced with those saws, and fifteen of them were Stihls. The big boys who have to get paid by the board foot use Stihl. He hadn't even opened the pamphlet in front of him. He leaned back, sat in dead silence for about thirty seconds, the longest thirty seconds I've ever sat through in a meeting room, and said, we'll buy it. That's when I wished I could pull it back and ask for more, since he clearly hadn't even needed to see the numbers.
Tom Rowland: I know, you do a good job of pitching. And then you've told them you're going to do this and this and this, and now you have to actually do all of it. Do you have memories of specific shows, or things that were especially challenging production-wise, that you wanted to happen on camera, whether hunting or fishing?
Larry Csonka: You try to plan things, and you're lucky if that works out forty percent of the time. What matters is having a crew that can capture what's happening when it's a total surprise, cameramen who'll run into the bushes, climb a tree, or lay around the tent to film a mama grizzly eating our breakfast. They have to be as into it as you are. They want to be out there in a tent on top of a mountain in Kodiak just as much as you do, and once you get a crew like that, people who enjoy being out there, enjoy the sporting side of it, and know what has to be captured on film, that's when it starts to gel. It's the difference between a cameraman picking up his camera and getting ready after a fish jumps, and one who's already anticipated it and has the camera up and rolling.
Tom Rowland: And sometimes it takes a couple of years to go through a few people to find that. Looking through a camera lens or binoculars for eight hours a day can make somebody who's never been seasick a day in their life get seasick very quickly. The good ones see it like an artistic photographer would, and they just don't miss.
Tom Rowland: In your book you talk about those same kinds of people on the football field, certain characteristics that let certain guys gel as a team. I'm sure you saw plenty of parallels between your football career and building and leading a television crew.
Larry Csonka: Teamwork. You get paid to do a job, but the best ones feel an obligation to be the best. In the field, if a bear came into camp and someone hollered bear, most of the guides and everyone else would retreat to safety, the trees, the creek, wherever. Not that they wouldn't in a truly dire situation, but you could tell which guys were the ones you wanted with you, because they ran to get their camera first. I'd watch to see who showed up first with the camera in hand. It's like football, you watch on the sidelines who rushes back in bounds, and that tells you where their heart's at. I'm not saying it's about being reckless, but a guy willing to risk missing a shot instead of fleeing shows you who to push toward the action, because that's usually where they already are anyway. The camera guys I ended up with, after the first two or three years, stayed with me the rest of the tenure, because they were those kinds of guys, they'd already anticipated it. And if a fish is out of the water in the wild, you shouldn't be the one standing there, you should be up on the bank looking down, ready to snap the shot. My cameramen loved it when I'd give them time off to fish themselves, and if one of them got a big fish on, they'd make another camera guy go grab a camera and film it, because we wanted footage of that fish too. When you've got people working with you like that, people who think of getting the shot almost before they think of themselves, you've got genuine, fourteen-karat people you want to keep around.
Tom Rowland: That's great. In your heyday, after the undefeated season, you started getting all kinds of acting opportunities, hanging out at Elvis Presley's house, living in Manhattan for a while. I was wondering, when you're riding that wave of success and getting those opportunities, where along the line did you say, I've got to get out of here and go back to the woods? Was that something you scheduled in to keep your sanity, or how did you balance that time?
Larry Csonka: I played in the NFL from the time I started until I got out, or was fired, or retired, whatever you want to call it, probably twelve or thirteen years, and I was much better off financially than when I'd started. I got to be friends with a number of people because of football's popularity, met Burt Reynolds, Dinah Shore, and appeared on shows with people like Johnny Carson. I thought maybe I'd try acting, Burt was after me quite a bit to give it a shot, but I realized once I actually tried it that I'm just not a good actor. I wasn't particularly great at it, and more than that, it never gave me the feeling that I was doing what I really wanted to do. Getting to know those people, Dinah Shore, Burt Reynolds, great folks, don't get me wrong. But that's when I turned back toward getting involved in Alaska and really started thinking, maybe we can do our own show. I went to some folks, Stihl bought in, and we did that for a few years. Then four or five years in, NAPA stepped in, bought the whole thing out, and gave us a full twenty-six-episode deal. What a great feeling that was compared to when I was just guessing, laying that portfolio down in front of the Stihl CEO. Once NAPA took it over and bankrolled it, we went full tilt, a larger budget, the ability to take all the camera guys with us and do seven or eight episodes in a row in different locations. That's what, when I try to answer your question, is really why I never got pulled into acting, I looked at the ratings, and they were out of sight, mainly because of Alaska and mainly because of the people we had on the show.
Tom Rowland: That's awesome. As we draw this to a close for today, I'd love to have you back on the show at some point, we're going to get a fishing trip together, and I'm going to take you somewhere special that you'll really enjoy. But for today, the book is out right now and people can go get it. I don't usually finish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book in two days, but I read this one in almost two sittings. Before we wrap up, could you leave us with one or two pieces of advice based on what you've learned across this incredible life, football, farm life, the outdoors, and production?
Larry Csonka: Having lived my life, I'd say if I could go back and do it again, I'd exercise more patience with everyone until I really understood what it was that I wanted. Learning patience, particularly with people and relationships, is something that comes with age, like the Shula story. We go down the wrong road so many times before we realize we should have taken the other one.
Tom Rowland: That's fantastic. From someone who's achieved true excellence on the football field and true excellence in production, what's your definition of excellence?
Larry Csonka: It's one thing to go in and pitch a program, there's a great deal of rectifying that happens between the original pitch and what you finally come up with, but you have to learn that patience, and learn how to upgrade as you go along. In a word: sacrifice. We have to be willing to sacrifice, and by doing that, we're able to outlast the other team. In other words, don't just go through the motions, don't act like you're sincere without actually being sincere.
Tom Rowland: I love it. That's some very wise advice, and I really appreciate you coming on here. I hope to have you on again, and hopefully we can make that fishing trip happen. Everyone should definitely check out his book, Head On. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, leave a rating and review, and we'll be back next week with another amazing guest, like Larry Csonka.
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