Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches

by Myers, Gary

  He found a way to control what goes in his mouth but not what comes out.

  That makes him a unique and valued member of the fraternity.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sean Payton walked into the cafeteria of the Saints’ headquarters in Metairie, Louisiana. It was December 2009, the first stop on my journey to go behind the scenes to illustrate the high-pressure world of NFL head coaches.

  I first got to know Payton when he was on Jim Fassel’s staff with the Giants and kept in touch with him when he spent three years working for Bill Parcells in Dallas. He had been disappointed at how things ended with the Giants after Fassel removed him as the play caller, but I remember telling him when he took the job with Dallas that working for Parcells and getting that on his résumé was the best thing he could do for his career.

  I traveled from New York to New Orleans two months before Payton won the Super Bowl and a little more than two years before he was suspended for the 2012 season by Roger Goodell for his role in the bounty scandal. But on this day the Saints were undefeated, and Payton was making a name for himself as the best of the young coaches in the NFL. He had just finished taping his weekly television show when he sat down to talk with me.

  “I’ve got about forty-five minutes,” he said. “Then I have a team meeting.”

  After ninety minutes went by like it was fifteen, I was thinking that every question would be my last, but Payton was in a talkative mood, which was a good thing. I actually was hoping Payton didn’t forget about his meeting. I could wait until it was over, I told him; I wasn’t flying home until the morning. He gave me another twenty minutes.

  I had intended to focus the Payton chapter on the role of the Saints in the rebirth of New Orleans and Payton being at the center of it. It’s one of the most heartwarming stories the NFL has seen in the Super Bowl era. Then a couple of months after the 2011 season the NFL revealed that it was investigating the Saints for their pay-for-performance bounty program, which was against league rules. Sweetheart, get me rewrite, as they used to say in the newspaper business. I had to start over. A couple of days before Goodell announced Payton’s suspension, I happened to be in the NFL office for a meeting with the commissioner. I was sitting in the reception area reading some e-mails on my phone when a man walking by called out to me. It was Payton, who was taking a brief break from his meeting with Goodell. Thirty minutes later, as Payton was getting set to leave the NFL office, Goodell told him I was in the reception area and offered to send him down a back elevator so that he could keep the visit private. “Too late,” Payton told him.

  I want to thank all the coaches and owners for their cooperation as I researched Coaching Confidential. They were giving of their time and their insights. It was fun to meet up with coaches whom I have known a long time and others I was getting to know better.

  A few months after Dan Snyder hired Mike Shanahan in Washington, I traveled to Ashburn, Virginia, to discuss John Elway and Dan Reeves and Al Davis with Shanahan. He showed a side I had never seen before: great storyteller, great sense of humor. Then Snyder, whom I have been friendly with since the day he bought the Redskins in 1999, invited me up to his office, where we talked about the six coaches he had gone through in his first eleven years owning the Redskins before he hoped he found stability with Shanahan.

  “You like peanuts?” Snyder asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What do you like to drink with them?”

  “Diet Coke,” I said.

  He walked across his huge office at Redskins Park and came back with an oversized bag of peanuts in the shell and a couple of sodas for us. He put a towel on the floor and encouraged me to join him in tossing the shells on the towel. If I did that at home, who knows what the better half of my marriage would do to me. But here was one of the richest men in sports turning his office into a ballpark.

  I drove down the New Jersey Turnpike and sat with Eagles coach Andy Reid as he opened up about the turmoil he went through when his sons were arrested in separate drug incidents in the Philadelphia area on the same day in 2007. He and his wife, Tammy, were on vacation in California at the time. He pointed out the spot where he often sleeps in his office, which Rex Ryan of the Jets also did when I visited him in his office.

  Ryan and Tom Landry are two of my all-time favorite coaches to write about. They are a bit different, however. I covered the Cowboys as my first big job in the newspaper business, and the man you saw on the sideline in the fedora with the frown on his face was not the man I got to know and admire. Ryan is just fun to be around, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and never flinches when I criticize him in the New York Daily News. Can’t they all be like Rex?

  The most scenic visit was at Dick Vermeil’s house in East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He told great stories as we sat on his deck with a beautiful view of the Pennsylvania countryside. After I spent a few hours with Vermeil, he insisted that I take home a party favor. He went to his private stock and handed me two bottles of wine with the Vermeil label.

  One white. One red.

  The day after the Saints beat the Colts in the Super Bowl in Miami, I was in Bill Parcells’s office at the Dolphins’ facility in Davie. He was running the Dolphins but not coaching them. He had a small office with a big television so that he could watch tapes of college players. The Colts had used the Dolphins’ facility during Super Bowl week, and Parcells made sure to visit the weight room so that he could spend time with Peyton Manning, one of his favorite players.

  I have known Parcells since he joined the Giants as defensive coordinator in 1981. Parcells was always entertaining in his press conferences. There were days covering the Giants and later the Jets when Parcells filled up every page of my notebook. He’s a charming guy when he feels like it, but he didn’t like it when I disagreed with him, which was too frequent, as far as he was concerned.

  When I wrote a column criticizing his decision to give up first- and third-round picks for Curtis Martin, I came home to find two messages from Parcells’s secretary on my answering machine. Bill, she said, really wanted to talk to me. Of course I returned his call. We spent thirty minutes sparring. It turned out he was right about Martin, but it doesn’t mean he was right about everything, and I was never afraid to write about it. I took it as a sign of respect that he would call to disagree. If he didn’t respect me, he wouldn’t care; at least that’s how I looked at it.

  I met with Tony Dungy in the coffee shop of the hotel he was staying in on Central Park South to talk about his coaching life. There isn’t a classier man who has ever made his living on an NFL sideline than Dungy. Once Tebow Mania overwhelmed the NFL during the 2011 season, I decided to wait until the off-season to interview Broncos coach John Fox, who was on that same Giants staff with Payton. Tebow was his starter going into 2012 training camp, Fox said, but you never know what’s going to happen in free agency, he cautioned. What happened was Peyton Manning. Fox agreed we needed to have a follow-up conversation to bring the story up to date.

  My most poignant meeting was with Patriots owner Robert Kraft. I wanted to speak to him about Parcells, Pete Carroll, and Bill Belichick, the three coaches he’s employed in New England. He invited me to meet him at his home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He buzzed me through so that I could drive past the front gate. I was caught by surprise when I rang the bell. There was a guard standing right inside the front door. Okay, Kraft is a wealthy, well-known figure; it made sense. On closer inspection, the guard was not real, just a statue. But a great deterrent nonetheless.

  He invited me to dinner and asked if I would mind if his beloved wife, Myra, joined us. We had met many times over the years, and I always enjoyed her company. The three of us went to a local restaurant, and not only was Kraft forthcoming about his relationship with all three of his coaches, it was heartwarming to see how much he cared for Myra and attended to her every need. There was no indication that she was in a fight for her life, battling cancer. She died almost exactly one year la
ter. I feel fortunate that I was able to spend those couple of hours with her.

  Of course, I want to thank Sean Desmond, my editor at Crown, who as usual was so supportive. We worked together on my first book, The Catch, which detailed the 1981 NFC championship game between the Cowboys and the 49ers. It was a sad ending to a great game for Sean’s Cowboys. I hope the Jimmy Johnson chapter chronicling the Herschel Walker trade makes up for it.

  I’ve dedicated this book to my incredible family—my wife, Allison; daughters, Michelle and Emily; and son, Andrew. Michelle, the nutritionist in the family, provided encouragement and a guide to healthy book-writing snacks; Emily, a terrific writer, always had great ideas; and Andrew, with his vast knowledge of sports, assisted with the research. Allison, a big football fan long before we met, was consistent in her message: Keep writing.

  And to Dad: You first got me hooked on the NFL when we went to the old Yankee Stadium and sat in end zone seats to watch the Giants beat the Eagles 7–6 in 1968, and you’re a still a big Giants fan today. Finally, I want to remember my mother, who passed away in the summer of 2010 just as I started writing Coaching Confidential. Mom, I miss you every day.