Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  ALSO BY SETH DAVIS

  Equinunk, Tell Your Story: My Return to Summer Camp

  When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball

  Wooden: A Coach’s Life

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Seth Davis

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9780735222724 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735222731 (ebook)

  Version_1

  For my home team—

  Melissa, Zachary, Noah, Gabriel, and Clarence

  Contents

  Also by Seth Davis

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  URBAN MEYER

  “Foolish is the appropriate word.”

  TOM IZZO

  “I like smelling my neighbor’s cookout.”

  MIKE KRZYZEWSKI

  “I believe in ethnic pressure.”

  JIM HARBAUGH

  “People can work with the truth.”

  JIM BOEHEIM

  “It’s all about losing.”

  GENO AURIEMMA

  “Women take all the credit, trust me.”

  DOC RIVERS

  “You can get a great speech from a therapist.”

  BRAD STEVENS

  “All the good ones want to be coached.”

  DABO SWINNEY

  “God never says, ‘Oops.’”

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Introduction

  A man paces the sidelines, arms folded, jaw set, eyes ablaze. Wheels turn in his mind, stress rips up his gut. He stomps, he gesticulates, he barks orders, he bitches at referees. In preparation for this moment, he hires a staff, chooses his roster, devises game plans, studies video, makes substitutions, diagrams plays, perorates in the locker room, builds a culture.

  And his teams win. Not always, for even the greatest of coaching minds cannot avoid losses. Over time, however, his excellence shines through, not so much because of anything he himself does, but because of the mysterious process by which he is able to stir his players to reach their potential as individuals and as a unit, a team. It is a delicate task, requiring an ability to set standards and apply them, and to manage a diverse group of egos. A team begins as a collection of mes, hims, and yous. It is the job of the coach to figure out a way to get to Us.

  It is not easy to do, nor is it easily explained.

  During my quarter century as a journalist working for outlets like Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports, and The Athletic, I have had the privilege of observing from close range many of the greatest coaches in sports, particularly in football and basketball. I have been to their games, sat in on their meetings and practices, interviewed them at length in private settings. I’ve found many athletes intensely interesting. But when it comes to fascinating characters, there is nothing like highly successful coaches. They are a writer’s dream—multihued, paradoxical characters, by turns brilliant, driven, tortured, compulsive, and philosophical. By rule, seemingly, they are all at least a little bit weird. They are laser-focused yet absentminded. They are often gratified, but rarely do I get the sense that they are deeply, truly happy.

  My desire to demystify this vocation was what inspired me to write this book. The intent here is not to add to what is commonly referred to as the “cult of the coach.” There is already more than enough idolatry in our sporting culture. These are men, not gods, and they will be the first to tell you that much of their success is rooted in the good fortune to coach great players at great organizations or universities. My purpose is simply to examine these men in the hope of figuring out how they get to Us. I set out to trace their steps, all the way back to their early years, in hopes of developing an understanding of the forces that have formed their character and taught them the skills they apply to their craft. I didn’t want just to assess their leadership methods, though I did learn a lot about how they go about their jobs. I also wanted to know why they go about their jobs.

  You will find in these portraits a wide variety of life experiences and leadership philosophies. However, I have isolated four personal qualities that I believe to be the core requirements all great coaches must have in order to get a group of individuals to Us. They form what I call the PEAK profile:

  Persistence. We all know that great coaches are passionate and competitive. They burn with intensity. Many look for perceived slights or contrived conspiracies to provide extra motivation. But those forces are ephemeral. Persistence is the strain of character one leans upon during those quiet moments when self-doubt creeps in. It is both tested and manufactured during childhood and early-adulthood adversity. It is evinced in the day-to-day mundane routines, the unglamorous aspects that make up the bulk of the time spent on the job. Those tasks are performed in solitude when the fans are gone and the cameras are nowhere in sight. Yet they are vital. It takes persistence to get them done, and done right.

  What I learned is that if a coach lacks sufficient persistence, he will be unable to complete the critical task of finding growth opportunities out of adversity. If the setbacks do not enable him to mature and learn, he will ultimately fail. More important, he will be unable to persuade his players to cohere during the tough times. Persistence is the mortar that holds the bricks together when the high winds blow. Without it, the ethos of Us will collapse against the force of high-level competition.

  Empathy. It is important to understand the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy involves feeling sad for another person’s dire condition. Empathy requires feeling whatever that person is feeling. And so a great coach must find ways to learn about his players, taking time to acquire the critical information that will lead him to understand how the player’s mind, heart, and guts operate.

  If I were ranking the PEAK qualities in order of importance, empathy would come first. Like snowflakes, no two athletes are alike. The one thing that great coaches have most in common is the ability to discern the different ways to motivate each guy. Some players need a soft touch. Others need a firm kick. All have individual goals—and they are entitled to that—so a coach cannot get them to Us unless he can persuade them to act in a way that serves the team’s best interests as well as their own. Empathy is an indispensable trait in great leaders. There is no getting to Us without it.

  Authenticity. Some coaches scream a lot, berate their players, and are unable to get through a declarative sentence without profanity. Others are quiet, reserved, maybe a little pious. In the end, it doesn’t matter what they believe or how they behave. What matters is that they remain true to themselves and act accordingly.

  Tom Izzo and Dabo Swinney are as congenial as it gets. Jim Boeheim and Urban Meyer tend to be standoffish, and they can be real tools when they want to be. Jim Harbaugh is a raving maniac on the sideline. Brad Stevens barely has a pulse. What makes them great coaches is their refusal to be something they’re not. Players can spot a phony in an instant. Trust may be an important component in any team, but there is no trust without authenticity. The guys on the team must have full confidence that their c
oach will remain authentic, particularly in those critical moments when the team must function as a single unit or suffer defeat.

  Moreover, authenticity plays a part in every decision a coach makes, and that includes the type of system he wants to run. Far too often, our assessment of a coach’s performance centers on game strategy. It is more important for the coach to recognize his own strengths and weaknesses, and acknowledge that they often come from the same place. Only then can he build a system that best suits his skill set and personality profile. His players will execute their tasks as long as they know he will never deviate from his fundamental belief set. That authenticity must be on display every hour of every day.

  Knowledge. A surgeon may have a lot of personal qualities you admire, but you wouldn’t want her to operate on you unless she has the proper medical training. The same is true for coaches. Acquiring this knowledge takes time and passion. It is accrued during late, lonely nights spent poring over videos, not to mention a lifetime of reading books and articles, attending clinics, and picking the brains of mentors who came before.

  The acquisition of expertise is a lifetime pursuit. Knowledge without adaptability will eventually diminish a leader’s effectiveness. People change, games change, times change. Like authenticity, knowledge is an important step on the pathway to trust. We often think about trust as a synonym for integrity, but a player also needs to trust that a coach has the knowledge to justify his instructions. Good people with good intentions can give bad advice if they do not know enough about their craft. Thus it requires a level of knowledge for the coach to persuade his players to commit totally to what he is asking them to do. Without that commitment, there is no getting to Us.

  * * *

  • • •

  The point of this book is not to uncover every secret about why the teams these men coach win so much, though that will become evident enough as their stories unfurl. The real secret is that there are no secrets. There is no magic key that unlocks the door to winning. Rather, the ability to get to Us results from a lifetime of practice, the accumulation of a lot of small, important wins that accrue to the point where a coach can pass along his persistence, empathy, authenticity, and knowledge to his players. In examining some of the best coaches working in sports—who they are, where they came from, how and why they do their jobs so well, I trained my focus on one question above all, that of how they got to Us.

  For me, this journey, this inquiry, has been the capstone of my two and a half decades spent hanging around arenas and stadiums, searching for morsels of wisdom that might enrich my own life and enable me to do my job better. At heart, all of these men are united in their dedication to the art of excellence. I found a great deal to learn from them, and I hope you will, too.

  Urban Meyer

  “FOOLISH IS THE APPROPRIATE WORD.”

  The story has changed a little over the years, so let’s start with what we know.

  It was May 1982, and Urban Meyer was a senior shortstop playing for St. John High School in Ashtabula, Ohio. The team was trailing by one run against its rival, Harbor High, when Urban came to the plate in the last inning with two outs and two men on base. The pitcher had been throwing him curves and knuckleballs all game, which was smart considering Urban was one of the best power hitters in the state. When the count reached 2-2, Urban naturally expected another off-speed pitch, so he was caught off guard when the pitcher fired a fastball right down the middle. The ump rang him up. Game over.

  It was a pretty horrific transgression. This was blue-collar northeast Ohio, where men were men, losing was a failure, and striking out without swinging was out of the question. After the game, Urban walked over to the car of his buddy who had given him a ride to the game, tossed his baseball cleats into the backseat, and said, “Get these back to me tomorrow. I’m running home.”

  And so he did. It was a good eight miles.

  The friend who drove him, Dean Hood, who was a student at Harbor High, distinctly remembers Urban saying, “My father is making me run home.” Another childhood chum, Tom Penna, recalls driving by Urban as he ran and wanting to pick him up, but declining to do so because “we were too afraid. We didn’t want Bud to see us bring him home.” Bud was Urban’s dad’s nickname. His real name was Urban Jr. They were both named for a pope.

  Urban has told the story often over the years, and he has usually indicated that running home was Bud’s idea. In an interview with Sports Illustrated writer S.L. Price in 2009, Meyer, who at the time was the head football coach at the University of Florida, claimed that he ran as a result of an argument he and his dad were having. “We were getting into it and I just didn’t want to hear it,” Meyer said. “He said, ‘Go run home.’ And it wasn’t, like, across the street. [It was] about eight miles.”

  When Meyer published his book Above the Line in 2015, however, he claimed that running home was his idea. “I had to run. I had to do something,” he wrote. “I’d just stood there with the game on the line, star shortstop turned statue, as useless as a freighter stuck on the shoals of nearby Lake Erie.” He later added that “some people had the idea that my father, Bud Meyer, a tough guy who was old school even by old school standards, ordered me to run home as punishment for coming up small. . . . The run home had nothing to do with my father, though. It had completely to do with how much I hate to lose and how upset I was that I had let the team down.”

  When I visited Meyer in his office at the Woody Hayes Center on the campus of Ohio State in the spring of 2017, he stuck to his story. “My idea,” he said. When I read to him quotes from his friends in Ashtabula who thought it was Bud’s, he shook his head and said, “Yeah, they’re out of their minds. I don’t know where they got that.” He added, “I think part of it was I didn’t want to have to listen about that third strike in the car. I was pissed. I went home and hit for an hour. So [running] was my way of saying, I have to get the hell out of here and get this right.”

  “Did you fear your dad?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Everybody did. Still fear him to this day, and he’s been gone six years.”

  Could it be that as a result of that never-dying fear, Meyer is now shading the oft-told story to put his dad in a better light? Is his memory playing tricks on him? Or was he just misunderstood all these years? I like that we’ll never know for sure, because the mystery goes a long way toward explaining how Urban Meyer gets to Us. It lies in that sweet spot where a magic transference was made that day—from a father making his son do something hard to the son wanting to do something hard. That is the same thing Meyer does with the players on his football teams. That transference marks a special connection. If a coach can achieve that connection with all the players in his locker room, or at least enough of them, then he has something special.

  In his three decades coaching college football, during which time he has won three national championships as a head coach at two different schools, Meyer has proven to be one of the most masterful tacticians in the game’s history. His spread option offense has literally changed the way college football in America is played. Yet that only begins to explain his effectiveness as a coach. “He has a great ability to push buttons on people, whether it’s players or assistant coaches,” says Dan Mullen, who was an assistant with Meyer for seven years at three different schools and is now the head coach at Mississippi State. “There’s no one better when it comes to motivating you to want to give him your best.”

  You can see the seeds of Meyer’s PEAK profile taking root during that eight-mile run. You can also see the stirrings of the inner turmoil that would later threaten his career, not to mention his health. There’s no problem in wanting to run hard, long, and fast. The problems come when you don’t know how to stop.

  * * *

  • • •

  There’s another story about Bud that has likewise become part of the Urban legend. It happened a few months later, in the summer of 1982, when Urban was st
ruggling while playing rookie baseball in Bradenton, Florida. The Atlanta Braves had selected him in the 13th round of the 1982 Major League Baseball draft. At seventeen years old, he was the youngest player selected in the entire draft, and he was starting to realize how overmatched he was. One night, he took a nasty grounder to the face. His eye was swollen shut. The next day, a tearful Urban called home and told his father he wanted to quit.

  “That’s fine,” Bud said evenly. “Just know that you will not be welcome in this house. We don’t let any quitters in here.”

  At first, Urban thought he was kidding. Then Bud said, “Be sure to call your mother on Christmas. I’m sure she’ll want to hear from you.” And he hung up.

  Urban’s feelings were hurt badly that day, but that conversation marked the moment his coaching empathy was born. “I just shared that story with a player the other day. I use that all the time,” Meyer told me. “Every athlete I’ve ever coached reaches a point where he says, I’m out, this is too much. So I share that with them, and I share it with the parents. It helps because they look at me and say, ‘Wow, you know exactly what I’m going through.’”

  As the middle child between two academically proficient sisters, Urban was raised to believe that high achievement was a requirement, not an option. If one of Bud’s kids brought home an unacceptable grade, he would order them to run laps around the house. Urban showed promise in football and baseball, and eventually he set up his weights in the dining room. Bud gave out compliments even less frequently than he gave out hugs. But he never missed a game.

  “I didn’t get a whole lot of ‘I love you’ from my dad,” Urban says. “That generation wasn’t warm and fuzzy. But when I went out there to play shortstop, I knew right where he was, and that meant the world to me. It’s like that old saying. How do you spell love? T-I-M-E.”