Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Swinney is not one to choose a message and let it drop. He must hammer it over and over again, putting it on signs, inserting it into playbooks, dropping it into presentations and conversations. So when a really big moment comes, like when his team faced a seven-point deficit to Alabama during halftime of the 2017 BCS National Championship Game, he knows just where to turn.

  “Jay, you love Deshaun, right?” he asked Jay Guillermo, the team’s starting center.

  “Yessir,” Guillermo replied.

  “Deshaun,” he said, “you love when [senior running back] Wayne Gallman lines up behind you, right?”

  “Yessir.”

  Swinney called out a few more of his players, and then he drove the point home. “Guys, we know we’re good enough to win this game,” he said. “We got this far because we love each other. Let’s just go out there and finish it.”

  That is not a message we are accustomed to hearing from the macho men who coach Vince Lombardi’s game, but in this case it was fitting. Clemson came back to beat the Crimson Tide with a dramatic final drive to win, 35–31. Though I would like to say the victory happened because of Swinney’s stirring words, that is not really true. Locker room speeches are way overrated. Whatever emotions are generated when a coach says “win one for the Gipper” usually wear off after a couple of plays. A coach’s words only work when they are of a piece with the thousands he has spoken during the course of the season. There is a reason why Swinney hammers his guys with such numbing repetition. Each time he invokes a life lesson or turns a clever phrase, he is lighting one tiny pixel that, when placed alongside the thousands of others, projects a clear and colorful message onto a big screen. In other words, Clemson doesn’t win games because of Swinney’s eloquence so much as because of his persistence. He uses words to get to Us.

  Swinney is a man of faith, and he brings to his program the spirit of the tent revival, under which he preaches the gospel of football. His clarity, alas, has been hard-won. When he was in high school, his life was ripped apart, throwing his family into emotional disarray and financial hardship. The adversity gave him the foundation for his PEAK profile, and while it made his journey to Us winding and painful, it also provided him with important tools he would need to become a championship football coach. Many people who have endured such private pain feel ashamed and try to keep it private, but that is not Swinney’s way. He processes the difficult events of his family’s past the same way he deals with everything else.

  He talks about it.

  * * *

  • • •

  The persistence, he gets from his mama.

  Carol McGraw was born the youngest of four children in 1944, in Clanton, Alabama. She was a robust, plump, healthy ten-pound baby, but she contracted polio shortly before her second birthday. Saddled by paralysis and high fevers, Carol was admitted to a university hospital in Birmingham and placed into isolation. She survived the fevers, but for several months she needed an iron lung to help her breathe. She was later moved to the Crippled Children’s Clinic and Hospital, where she went about the long, arduous process of rehabilitating her withered muscles and damaged nerves.

  When Carol was six years old, her doctors noticed that her spine was starting to curve. It was a bad case of scoliosis, no doubt caused by the polio. She spent an entire year in a head-to-toe body cast, followed by another year in a shorter one. She also had two spinal fusion surgeries during that span. Once she graduated from the casts, the doctors gave her a big, clunky metal brace, which she was not allowed to remove, not even to bathe. The brace came off a year later, after which she was pushed around the hospital in a wheelchair.

  Teachers gave Carol school lessons by her bedside. When she grew strong enough, they wheeled her down to the hall to a makeshift classroom. Her right arm was so weak that she had to use her left hand to hold it up so she could write on the chalkboard.

  The only thing that rivaled her physical pain was the psychological trauma of her isolation. Aside from occasional visits to her home in Alabaster, Carol spent virtually her entire childhood cut off from family and friends. “Basically, I didn’t know my own siblings,” she says. “It was a very rough ordeal.”

  Carol was finally well enough to leave the hospital just before her thirteenth birthday. After a year of homeschooling, she entered her local public high school as a ninth grader. The doctors told her mother that Carol needed to stay as active as possible, so she signed her up for dance classes. One day, Carol saw another girl twirling her baton and decided she wanted to learn how. It took her a while, but eventually, using the same arm she used to lift with assistance from her other hand because it was so weak, she became a lead majorette in the school’s marching band. The Birmingham News’s Sunday magazine put her photograph on its cover and published an article about the lovely majorette who survived polio and grew up to twirl a mean baton.

  Looking at her today, you’d never know that Carol’s spine remains severely curved, bending grotesquely toward her right shoulder as it travels upward from her lower back. “If you could see the X-ray of my spine now, it would take your breath away. It’s absolutely terrifying,” she says. As rough as her ordeal was, it also formed her character—stiffened her spine, so to speak. “It made me a survivor,” she says. “No matter what happens to me, I always think I can adapt.”

  She would need every bit of that persistence in order to survive the rough ordeals to come. When she wavered, she relied on her youngest son, the future football coach, to pull her through. Says Carol, “It frightens me sometimes to see how he’s so much like me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  On the night Clemson lost the 2016 championship game to Alabama, Swinney returned to his hotel room around 2 a.m. He had a few hours before his early flight, but he was too wired to sleep. So he hopped into bed and flipped on the TV . . . just in time to see a replay of the game getting ready to kick off.

  Many coaches who suffer such a painful loss would never want to watch the game again, much less a few hours after its conclusion. Swinney sat there and watched it all the way through. He second-guessed himself a few times, winced at a few mistakes that could have altered the outcome. Mostly, though, he was in awe of his players’ effort and competitiveness, and he felt gratitude for the opportunity to coach a game of that magnitude. Even though his Tigers lost, he believed they had gotten to Us. When the replay ended, he packed his bag and left the room. No regrets.

  “It definitely hurts to lose, don’t get me wrong, but I try to teach our team not to let one moment make us lose sight of all the good,” Swinney told me. “I live by the belief that God never says, ‘Oops.’ My life has given me a clear perspective on what real problems are.”

  He has certainly had his fair share of those, but fortunately he was well equipped to handle them. From the very beginning, Swinney excelled at everything he tried. As a grade schooler growing up in Pelham, Alabama, he was one of those gifted students who could memorize and process information with ease. He loved to acquire knowledge. Not only was he smart, but he was conscientious. Carol remembers him doing his first-grade homework over again because he didn’t get it quite right the first time.

  Socially, things flowed just as smoothly. Dabo was funny and outgoing and always had lots of friends. His teachers adored him. “He won everything in school. He was Mr. This, Mr. That,” Carol says. “He was exactly the same way he is now—very outgoing, very organized, very driven. Everyone loved Dabo.”

  And he was great at sports, “always just a little bit better than everyone else,” as his older brother, Tracy, puts it. He played basketball, football, and baseball. Dabo loved the camaraderie that came with being on a team. He was always tagging along to Tracy’s Little League practices. When Tracy went off to play football and baseball for Marion Military Institute, Dabo would visit him before games and slap high fives with the players as they took the field. The locker roo
m felt like home.

  Tracy and Dabo have a younger brother, Tripp. When he was sixteen years old, he was in a horrific car accident in which he was thrown from the passenger seat through the windshield. Tripp spent two weeks in a coma. When he awoke, he had near-total memory loss. He eventually recovered his memory, but he was never quite right after that.

  Dabo had tons of friends, but one was special. Her name was Kathleen Bassett, and she was a year younger. They first clicked when they were barely out of kindergarten, and later became boyfriend and girlfriend in junior high. Dabo and Kathleen were the sweethearts of Pelham High School—he the star athlete, she the adorable cheerleader. Aside from a brief “break” in college, they have always been together. When they tied the knot in 1994, Dabo said he felt like he was marrying his sister.

  To outsiders, the Swinneys looked like the perfect family. Beneath the surface, however, the picture was very different. If the Swinneys’ neighbors and friends could have seen an X-ray of what was really happening inside that house, it would have taken their breath away.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ervil Swinney was a good man. Doted on his wife. Coached his boys in Little League. Owned a pair of appliance businesses in town. And like just about every red-blooded male in that state who didn’t root for Auburn, he worshipped the Crimson Tide. His three sons loved nothing more than to watch Bear Bryant’s TV show with him on Sunday mornings during the fall. For Tracy, Dabo, and Tripp, football was their religion, and their dad was their preacher.

  Things started to change in the mid-1980s, when Ervil’s businesses faltered. He grew fearful that he could not provide the type of lifestyle he thought his family needed, and his debts were only getting larger. Rather than being frank with his family, making hard choices, and figuring a way out of the mess, Ervil withdrew and succumbed to his personal weakness—beer. He drank it like it was water, and it made him mean. He started hanging out with other men in town who loved to drink as much as he did. Then he’d stumble home in the middle of the night and pitch a fit. When he was really worked up, he would throw things around the house. Sometimes, when Carol would confront him, the boys would have to hold Ervil back so he couldn’t hurt her.

  By the time Ervil’s drinking got really bad, Tracy was almost through with college. Tripp had also left for the University of Montevallo, where he himself struggled with alcohol. So Dabo was the only boy at home as his father lost his businesses and plunged deeper into his addiction. At his worst, Ervil would go on benders that kept him away from home for days at a time. “It was scary every time the phone would ring,” Carol says. “We wouldn’t know where he was. I would just wait and hope that he would come back.” Problem was, when he did come back, he’d sometimes toss lamps, punch walls, and break windows. One time he threw a Christmas tree clear across the living room. Carol would have no choice but to grab Dabo and drive away. Sometimes they spent the night in a motel. Sometimes they slept in the car.

  It was an awful and humiliating way for a boy to spend his adolescence. “I saw things that kids shouldn’t see,” Dabo says. “Police showing up at your house, running out of the house at night, knocking on neighbors’ doors, jumping in a car with your mom. It was bad. My dad would give you the shirt off his back, but when he drank it just took over and cost him everything.”

  Dabo leaned hard on Kathleen in those days. She came from a “normal” family, and she offered some stability. That helped him stay focused on school and sports. “He was so busy. He went from football to basketball to baseball year round,” Kathleen says. “He was an honor student, he had tons of friends, he was close to his coaches. So he didn’t have time to dwell on anything. If he had been a loner, it would have been a lot harder.”

  Finally, Carol had enough. She decided to leave Ervil. When she broke the news to Dabo, he cried in the high school gymnasium. Carol had always been a stay-at-home mom while Ervil ran his businesses, but she managed to find work behind the counter at a Birmingham department store for $8 an hour. At first, they rented an apartment in town, but after about six months they fell behind on payments and were evicted. Carol stayed at her mother’s house in Birmingham for a while, and Dabo crashed at his friends’ houses a few weeks at a time, but for the duration of his senior year, they were essentially homeless.

  Through it all, Dabo found the strength to persist, soldiering off to school, pulling down excellent grades, and trying to build a life for himself. He was embarrassed, hurt, angry, confused—all those things. But he was never defeated. “So many times he’d say, ‘Mama, don’t worry. We’ll be okay. It’s gonna work out,’” Carol says. “I always knew he was different. He always had that little personality and that little attitude. From the time he was born, he was a fighter.”

  * * *

  • • •

  His dream was to be a pediatrician. He was interested in science, he knew he was smart enough, and he liked the idea of helping kids feel better. So he enrolled at the University of Alabama as a pre-med biology major. As a freshman, Swinney was happy in school and did well in his classes, but for the first time in his life, he was not on a team. And it was killing him.

  In the fall of 1988, Swinney was sitting in Bryant–Denny Stadium and watching an Alabama football game with Kathleen, who was in the midst of her senior year at Pelham High. She noticed that something was bugging him. Finally, he turned to Kathleen and told her he wanted to try out for the team. It was too late to join for that season, but the walk-on coordinator told Swinney that he could come on board in the spring.

  First, however, Swinney had to complete a rigorous two-month conditioning program. Some forty Crimson Tide wannabes were put through their paces under the eye of Alabama’s merciless strength coach, Rich Wingo. One of Wingo’s favorite “drills” entailed bringing the players into a practice gym on the lower level of the basketball arena, cranking up the heat, and forcing everyone to run sprints around garbage cans until they puked. One of Swinney’s best friends from high school, Norm Saia, also tried out, and he remembers Wingo getting so ticked off at Swinney one day that he spent the entire afternoon personally running him through torturous exercises. “Dabo had to be carried off the field,” Saia says, “but he didn’t quit.”

  Only about a half dozen players survived, and Swinney and Saia were among them. “I wasn’t a walk-on, I was a crawl-on,” Swinney says. He was thrilled when he got in for a few plays during the spring game the following April. He practiced with the varsity over the summer and was excited to begin his second year at Alabama, especially since Kathleen would be enrolling as a freshman.

  When he went to Coleman Coliseum to sign up for fall classes, however, he got some awful news. His paperwork had not been properly processed for him to receive the Pell Grant money he needed to reenroll as a sophomore. He tried to explain that his finances were disorganized because of his father’s problems, but that did not change his situation. If he didn’t come up with half of his $1,100 tuition for the semester, his class schedule would be canceled. Meanwhile, he also owed his landlord $400 in back rent.

  Swinney had made a little money over the summer cleaning gutters with his buddies back in Pelham, but he didn’t have anywhere near that kind of dough. He was devastated. He went back to his apartment, called his mom, and told her what was happening. The two of them cried on the phone together. Swinney sank to the floor and prayed. Resigning himself to the situation, he figured he would go back to Pelham, take some classes at a local college, try to make some money, and hopefully get back to Tuscaloosa in the spring. But there would be no football for him that fall, despite all the hard work he had put in.

  He went to get the mail, like he always did. He was shuffling through the envelopes when he came across one with the Discover Card logo on it. Curious, he opened the envelope to find two blank checks and a letter addressed to him. The letter congratulated him on being a Discover Card member, and it informed him that
he could start drawing money right away. He read the letter a few times and figured it was a hoax, but he dialed the phone number anyway.

  The woman who answered told him that yes, this was a privilege Discover was extending to its new cardholders. Swinney told her he didn’t have a card. She asked him to hold, and a few minutes later came back to say that he had in fact been sent a card a few months before but it was returned. “If you give me your address, we’ll send you another one,” she said. “In the meantime, you can use those checks to draw on your account.”

  “You’re telling me I can take these right now and use them like it’s a checking account?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Up until your credit limit.”

  “What’s my credit limit?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  Swinney let out a holler. It was a bona fide miracle. He broke out in tears all over again. The woman on the line thought he was certifiable. Swinney called his mother back, not twenty minutes after they had just hung up in such despair, to share the glorious news. He went back to Coleman Coliseum, wrote the check to the school registrar, and then went to his landlord’s office and handed him the other one. “I was a thousand bucks in debt,” he says, “but I was good.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Swinney was still a young man, but he had lived long enough to see the benefits of having a sound PEAK profile in place. Sure, he had had some lousy things happen to him, but as long as he persisted, things had a way of getting just a little bit better. Watching his family unravel gave him a deep sense of empathy for people who struggle with addiction or other problems. He may have been the poor son of an alcoholic father, but his mom taught him to be proud of who he was, which fortified his authenticity. And he was learning some hard truths that very few people his age have to face. That knowledge about what people were like and how to handle setbacks was far more important than anything he would ever learn about the technical aspects of football.