Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  But then things fell apart. It was as if the anguish of the events since that Sunday night after Thanksgiving in Miami had finally become too much to bear. Hasselbeck put the Seahawks on top 19–14 on a 20-yard pass to Dino Hackett with 6:06 left in the game. Seattle was successful on the two-point conversion to put the lead at 21–14. The Redskins showed they still might have a little gas left in the tank when Rock Cartwright returned the kickoff to the Seattle 44. But on first down, Collins went deep down the right sideline for Moss and was intercepted by Marcus Trufant, who returned the interception 78 yards for a touchdown to give Seattle a 28–14 lead. Collins would throw another interception for a touchdown with twenty-seven seconds remaining. The final score was 35–14. That was deceptive. The Redskins had a fourth-quarter lead, but part of the problem in the four years since Gibbs returned was the inability of Williams’s defense to protect fourth quarter leads.

  It was the last game of Gibbs’s career. He had one year left on his contract but decided the time was right to retire again. Two days after the loss to the Seahawks, Gibbs resigned. Snyder had stayed up with him until 2:30 a.m. the night before he made his decision public trying to persuade him to return for the 2008 season.

  “You can never replace Joe Gibbs,” Snyder said.

  It was the one-year anniversary of his grandson Taylor, then just two years old, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He was being treated back home in North Carolina with spinal taps, pills, and shots, according to the Charlotte Observer, which reported that Taylor was in remission by the fifteenth day of the treatments, but to prevent a relapse, the treatments continued until Taylor, the son of J. D. Gibbs and his wife, Melissa, was five years old. Gibbs called his seven grandchildren his “grandbabies” and didn’t want them growing up without him. He felt guilty that he wasn’t around enough for his boys. Coy already had decided coaching was not for him and returned to the NASCAR team before the 2007 season. Pat was back in North Carolina. After the loss in Seattle, Gibbs returned home to talk to his family in Charlotte to help make his decision.

  “I felt like they needed me,” he said.

  The final month of the season allowed Gibbs to leave with his legacy intact. “I hate to leave something unfinished. I made an original commitment of five years. I felt bad about that,” he said. “Pro sports has been my life.”

  He is a good man but left the game with a heavy heart.

  “You kind of live in a little bit of fear of late night phone calls,” he said.

  TUNA SUBS

  Bill Parcells. Pete Carroll. Bill Belichick.

  Bill, Pete, and Bill were hardly Moe, Larry, and Curly. They are three heavyweight coaches. If they weren’t Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, either, at least Parcells and Belichick are Pro Football Hall of Fame–caliber coaches, and though Carroll has had only moderate success in the NFL, he dominated in college football. The one thing the three had in common: they worked for Patriots owner Robert Kraft. There isn’t an NFL owner who has had a more fascinating and dizzying ride with his coaches than Kraft.

  “When I go into any situation, I look for stability,” Kraft said. “In the NFL, more than any other business, you need stability, people who can trust one another. This is an up and down business.”

  Parcells had one of the biggest egos and biggest résumés. Carroll became an elite college coach, winning two national championships at Southern Cal after he left the Patriots, where he was way over his head in replacing Parcells. It was much harder following a legend in New England than creating a legacy at USC. Belichick, the sourpuss genius, guided Kraft’s Patriots to five Super Bowls, winning three, in his first twelve years with the team, but his accomplishments have been tarnished by the Spygate scandal.

  Kraft was in awe of Parcells, but they had an unmanageable working relationship. He thought Carroll was a prince but just didn’t win enough. Belichick took his passion for winning too far and embarrassed the organization by spying on opponents, but he won for Kraft and Kraft had his back. Ultimately, the owner has to be comfortable with the coach and the coach has to respect the owner to create a winning environment.

  Kraft purchased the Patriots in 1994, saving them from being moved by owner James Orthwein to his native St. Louis. Kraft owned Foxboro Stadium and refused Orthwein’s offer to buy his way out of the lease. Orthwein sold the team to Kraft instead. What Kraft got was a moribund franchise with an inadequate stadium and a lackluster record. “All you did was put your heart and soul into it, turned down $75 million, paid the highest price, a quarter of a billion dollars, your wife thinks you are absolutely nuts, the team has the worst record in the last five years, hadn’t sold out a season in thirty-four years, and played in an old dinky stadium,” he said.

  In this case, one man’s garbage was another man’s treasure. Kraft, from Brookline, Massachusetts, had been a Patriots season ticket holder since 1971, the year of the grand opening of not-so-grand Foxboro Stadium, the eyesore with the aluminum benches and lousy access roads in the middle of Nowhere, New England. The Patriots finally had their own home. The Boston Patriots were an American Football League original but were neglected orphans in a city infatuated with the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. They bounced from Nickerson Field, to Fenway Park, to Alumni Stadium, to Harvard Stadium.

  Kraft was a visionary when he purchased a ten-year option on the 300 acres of land next to Foxboro Stadium in 1985. In 1988, he paid $25 million to buy the stadium out of bankruptcy court from Billy Sullivan, the original Patriots owner. The Sullivan family took a financial beating promoting Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour in 1984. The Patriots’ lease on the stadium ran through 2001. That was a smart acquisition and eventually put Kraft in a position of power because he owned the stadium while Sullivan and then Victor Kiam and then Orthwein owned the team.

  By 1994, New England was in danger of losing the Patriots. Did anybody really care? Kraft might have been the only one who got misty-eyed about the prospect of the bunch of misfits playing halfway between Beantown and Providence heading to St. Louis. Boston was the only city in America where the professional football team was fourth in popularity. Even when the Pats somehow became the first team to win three road playoff games to advance to the Super Bowl, they were humiliated by the Bears 46–10 in Super Bowl XX, and then were immediately embroiled in a drug controversy.

  Sullivan, along with nine partners, paid the $250,000 entry fee to the AFL in 1960 for the Patriots. He sold the team to Kiam in 1988 for $83 million. Kiam then sold it to Orthwein in 1992 for $110 million. Two years later, Orthwein offered Kraft $75 million to buy out the final seven years of the Patriots’ lease at Foxboro Stadium so that he could pack up the team and move it to St. Louis, which had lost the Cardinals to Phoenix in 1988. It would have been a nice return on Kraft’s $25 million investment, but he said no thanks. Orthwein was the great-grandson of Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch and at one time owned 1.6 million shares in the company. Considering that Kraft subsequently transformed the Patriots into a model franchise with three Super Bowl championships and the first 16–0 regular season in NFL history, it’s easy to forget how close they came to becoming the St. Louis Stallions.

  Kraft refused Orthwein’s offer on the stadium lease and then offered him $172 million to buy the Patriots, which at the time was the most money ever spent on a sports franchise. Orthwein accepted, and Kraft had himself a bad football team to go along with a run-down stadium right off Route 1 in Foxborough.

  “I had to move fast, and I took on a lot of debt,” Kraft said. “I had a chance in the ’80s to buy it for a lot less money—half of what I paid for it. Then I took out the option on the land and controlled all the parking. I bought the stadium out of bankruptcy. I was working hard to get an edge to buy the team. Kiam had problems, and he brought in Orthwein. He was part of the Orthwein family, the Budweiser family, so he was moving it. Except he had to buy out my lease, and I wouldn’t let him do it. I decided to step up and pay a very high price.”

&nb
sp; It was hardly the deal of the century—just five years earlier, Jerry Jones had spent only $140 million to buy the Cowboys and the lease to Texas Stadium. That was America’s Team. The Patriots were Foxborough’s team. In the four years before Kraft bought the Patriots, they were a pitiful 14–50. Even so, the Patriots fans were excited to have local ownership. The day after the NFL approved Kraft’s purchase in January 1994, New England had one of those fabled winter nor’easters. It was a day when sitting in front of the fireplace is a more attractive option than driving out to the local ballpark to buy tickets to see a bad team. Even so, it was quite busy at the ticket office at Foxboro Stadium. An astounding 5,958 season ticket orders were processed, more than six times the Patriots’ one-day record. The previous record was the 979 tickets sold when Parcells was hired in 1993.

  Kraft began his business career working for the Rand-Whitney Group of Worcester, Massachusetts, a company that converted paper into packaging. It was owned by Jacob Hiatt, the father of Kraft’s wife, Myra. Kraft later bought the company. They had met in 1962 at a deli in Boston. She was a student at Brandeis, and he was at Columbia and in town for the Ivy League basketball game against Harvard. They made eye contact, and Kraft later showed up at the Brandeis campus to find her. They went out on a date, and Kraft is fond of saying she proposed that night. She was nineteen years old. They had a true love affair.

  I met with Robert and Myra in the summer of 2010, and we had dinner at a restaurant a few minutes from their home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Myra looked healthy and energetic. Her ovarian cancer had gone into remission, and she remained active in her philanthropic ventures. Even after finding out the next spring that the insidious cancer had returned, she insisted on keeping a commitment to travel to Israel. But Myra, who adored Robert, wasn’t supportive when her husband informed her that he was buying his favorite football team. “This young lady thought I was a little cuckoo,” Kraft said. “It was the first time in our marriage she questioned my business sense.”

  He tended to her every need at the restaurant. He ordered for her and made sure the food was cooked to her liking, not letting on how concerned he was about her health. They were married in June 1963, had four sons, and never tired of each other. They finished each other’s sentences. She was a wonderful lady and the love of his life. He always called her his sweetheart. She died on July 20, 2011, about one year after our dinner.

  In 2012, Forbes ranked the Patriots as the third most valuable franchise in the NFL and the sixth most valuable sports franchise in the world at $1.4 billion, so it turned out to be a pretty wise investment. The Patriots’ biggest asset when Kraft became the owner was the Jersey guy who owned two Super Bowl rings from his eight years as head coach of the New York Giants. “You need to get people to trust in your brand, and you look at having someone like Bill Parcells as being a plus and an asset,” Kraft said. “But you need a bond.”

  Parcells quit the Giants on May 15, 1991, leaving them in an awful bind with training camp just ten weeks away. When coaches leave, they usually make the decision within a week or two of the end of the season. But there were many factors at work with the complicated Parcells. His ally with the Giants was co-owner Tim Mara, the nephew of co-owner Wellington Mara. The Maras had an awful relationship, but Parcells managed to get along with both of them, though he was particularly close to Tim. Less than one month after the Giants beat the Bills in Super Bowl XXV, Tim Mara sold his 50 percent interest to New York businessman Robert Tisch, who had long wanted to own an NFL team. The price was $75 million, now one of the great bargains in sports. The Giants were valued at $1.3 billion in 2012 by Forbes, making them the fourth most valuable NFL franchise.

  Wellington Mara had right of first refusal on his nephew’s share but didn’t have the money to finance the purchase. For the first time since they were founded in 1925, the Giants were not 100 percent owned by the Mara family. Tim’s departure combined with Parcells’s health issues—he soon would have several heart procedures—led to Parcells stepping down in May.

  It didn’t take long for Parcells to regain the desire to coach. He turned down the Bucs after the 1991 season when a deal seemed imminent. Tampa called a news conference to announce Parcells’s hiring, but he changed his mind at the last minute. He then flirted with the Packers, who hired Mike Holmgren, and approached the Vikings, who hired Dennis Green, but ended up sitting out the 1992 season. The next year Orthwein offered him the chance to coach the Patriots and run the football operation. Parcells, his health under control and his competitive fire burning once again, found that very attractive. He had been the linebacker coach in New England in 1980 and enjoyed the area. He left New England after only one season when Ray Perkins hired him as the Giants’ defensive coordinator, but when he was ready to coach again in 1993, the Patriots were the best fit. He inherited a 1–15 team that would have been dropped down to the second division if the NFL operated like European soccer leagues. Parcells selected quarterback Drew Bledsoe with the first pick in his first draft and was in the playoffs in his second season, which was Kraft’s first season. Everything seemed great. Yet when a rookie owner who has just bought his hometown team inherits an iconic coach used to having his own way, it’s only a matter of time before the honeymoon period ends and the divorce proceedings begin. For Kraft and Parcells that took four years and one Super Bowl appearance.

  Even though he had long since made his peace with Parcells, some of the stories Kraft told during dinner gave him indigestion. Almost immediately after he purchased the team, Parcells all but flattened him trying to run a power sweep. Kraft said Parcells wanted to create a layer between the two that was completely unacceptable. He remembers the conversation vividly. It took place in the first week after the sale became official. Kraft said Parcells told him, “I think it would be good if you sold 1 percent of the team to Tim Mara.”

  What? Are you kidding me? “Why would I do that?” Kraft said. “He said he will be between us. He wanted someone in between us. So all of a sudden, my bubble and my dream started to get shattered. I said, ‘I don’t want anyone between us.’ ”

  Tim Mara was Parcells’s confidant. It wouldn’t have made any sense for Kraft to make him his only partner. The 1 percent share would have been worth less than $2 million and not even make a dent in Kraft’s financial obligations. There was no upside to adding Mara to the family business, especially since he had a contentious relationship with his uncle Wellington, a man Kraft deeply respected. Kraft didn’t need to be best friends with Parcells, but they needed to communicate. He didn’t need a liaison. He’s very approachable; he’s not a meddler but likes to be kept informed. Parcells already was running the football side of the business, and so there was no reason to make Mara a partner and insulate Parcells from him. He didn’t want Mara, just as he turned down other investors who wanted to buy into the team.

  Parcells denies that he wanted Kraft to make Mara a partner and claims he doesn’t recall that ever coming up. “That’s bullshit. Why would Tim Mara want to own a part of another team? His family owned the Giants,” Parcells said. A high-ranking league insider corroborated Kraft’s version and believes part of the motive for Tim Mara was to irritate his uncle Wellington.

  “I got to give Bob Tisch the credit,” Kraft said. “He said to me at the finance meeting when I was coming in for the interview, ‘Look, if you don’t need to have partners, don’t take partners.’ So I said, you know what, I’ll wait. I didn’t take in partners. It would be like hiring someone in between Bill and I to manage this relationship. I come in, I’m owning the team, I’m a hero in the town, I save it. I turned down the money [from Orthwein], I got a great coach. Then reality started to set in. I got a rude awakening right away.”

  Kraft delegates authority to the people who manage his businesses around the world. That was what he did with Parcells at first. It made sense. Rookie owner defers to Hall of Fame–caliber coach.

  “I loved it that Parcells was the head coach,” Kra
ft said. “They had a great quarterback they had drafted first overall, and they won their last four games of the year. I remember being in the elevator with my son Jonathan after that last game and saying, ‘We can’t let that team move.’ So it was pretty exciting. And having Parcells as the coach—we were lucky to have him. He brought instant credibility to the Patriots. My experience with him, inheriting him as a coach, was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. It taught me about the NFL and how things worked.”

  Kraft knew he was a lucky man even if Parcells was giving him a hard time. “The odds of being in your hometown, owning your hometown team; you got a greater chance of being a starting quarterback in the NFL than owning a team,” he said.

  Parcells was set in his ways and not interested in changing for an owner who until now was just a fan, who could have been “Robert from Brookline, long-time listener, first-time caller.” Parcells bailed on the Giants in part because half the team was sold. He later would leave the Jets after the death of owner Leon Hess, whom Parcells greatly admired, and his estate sold the team to Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson. Ownership was always an issue with Parcells. As Kraft became more comfortable, Parcells became more uncomfortable.

  “I was really excited about Parcells. I got a Super Bowl coach. I got one of the best in the business,” Kraft said. “But, of course, my image of him and what was reality, that was a lot different.”

  Kraft was eager to soak up all the knowledge that Parcells would impart. And the Tuna, a longtime nickname for Parcells, surely taught him a lesson. Kraft had his eyes opened wide. Quickly. Parcells irritated Kraft after the Patriots lost to Belichick and the Browns in the wild-card game after the 1994 season by proclaiming that he needed time to think over whether he would be back the next year. It was Parcells’s second year with the Patriots, his first with Kraft. “At the end of the first year, he says, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to coach anymore,’ ” Kraft said. “Every year we went through this.”