Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  In preparation for all these communication opportunities, Swinney is constantly taking notes. He carries a pen and index cards in his pockets at all times, which he uses to jot down observations and ideas. He frequently invites motivational speakers to address his team and help him hammer home his messages. After he introduces the guest, he will take a seat near the front and take notes during the entire presentation. Then he uses those notes to follow up on what the speaker talked about.

  Swinney says he has kept every notebook he ever filled, dating back to his playing days at Alabama. He keeps some in his office, and others in a bunch of boxes at his house. He flips through old notebooks frequently. They bring back happy memories, and they also remind him of small details he may have forgotten along the way.

  On top of all the scribbling and hoarding he has done over the years, Swinney has assembled a thick binder that serves as a guide to every aspect of the program. The manual is the result of many years spent jotting and organizing. He still uses the same hole puncher he started with two decades ago. The sections are separated by tabs that cover a comprehensive range of topics: personnel, game-day preparation, recruiting, strength and conditioning, operations, tickets, security, academics, maintenance, travel, administration, and everything in between. There are sections devoted to Swinney’s philosophies as well as concepts related to offense, defense, and special teams. No detail is too small to be included.

  Every summer, Swinney holes up with his entire staff for five long days, where they read through every single page of the manual and set their plans for the season. He wants the wide receivers coach to know what the janitors do. The secretaries should understand media policy. Everyone needs to study the elements of NCAA compliance. Swinney calls these his “All In” meetings. The manual’s cover has a picture of a pointing Uncle Sam alongside the words I Want You To Be All In. “That book is a living, breathing thing, man,” he says. “We go through it page by page and have such a spirited discussion. I really think it’s not fair to hold people accountable to something and not explain very specifically what it is they’re supposed to do.”

  His management style benefited from his experience in the business world. Swinney has figured out how to run a huge operation like Clemson football in a way that allows him to be detail-obsessed without becoming a micromanager. He understands the value of hiring good people and empowering them to do their jobs.

  Armed with all of this knowledge, Swinney transformed Clemson football, year by year, class by class, acronym by acronym. It went from being a program that was overly reliant on a handful of flashy skill players to one that was able to slog it out in the trenches with the best of them. That was embodied on October 4, 2015, when the Tigers won an all-time classic at Notre Dame in a downpour, 24–22. When it was over, Swinney stood on the field, mud-splattered, and barked into a television reporter’s live microphone, “What I told ’em tonight was, ‘Listen, we give ya scholarships, we give ya stipends and meals and a place to live. We give ya nice uniforms. I can’t give ya guts and I can’t give ya heart.’ Tonight it was B.Y.O.G.—Bring Your Own Guts!”

  * * *

  • • •

  As Swinney’s public profile began to grow, he was forced to decide whether he should share his family’s painful history. The question first arose when he was a wide receiver at Alabama and a local reporter approached him. “We had tried to hide it for so long, and I didn’t want to do that anymore,” he says. He decided to tell it all. Ervil was not happy. “Sometimes the truth hurts, but me and my dad pushed through that,” Swinney says. “It allowed us to have some conversations that we hadn’t really been comfortable having.”

  From that day forward, Swinney has encouraged his family to be just as forthcoming. Says Carol, “For a long time, I didn’t want anyone to know because I was protecting my children. So it can become a very lonely world. Now that it’s all out in the open, it’s probably easier to deal with. I mean, it is what it is.” Then she adds with a hearty laugh, “Hey, Seth, I’ve heard a lot worse!”

  It helped that Ervil managed over time to shake his addiction. The impetus was a severe heart attack he suffered shortly before Dabo was hired at Clemson. His doctor told him that if he didn’t give up drinking and smoking, he was going to die soon.

  So he quit. Just like that. No hypnosis, no medicine, no Alcoholics Anonymous, no twelve steps, no nothing. He just stopped drinking and smoking and never started again. Dabo marveled at the old man’s persistence. Unfortunately, Tripp was unable to harvest that same discipline. As Dabo moved up the coaching ladder and Tracy became a well-respected policeman in Pelham, Tripp drifted from place to place, job to job, even from wife to wife. Tripp married in the early 1990s and had three sons, but he later got divorced and remarried three more times. Having been awarded the right to collect social security disability because of his car accident, Tripp has shuttled between homes in Alabama and Georgia. Dabo paid for him to go to rehab a couple of times, but over the years their communication has been sporadic.

  In 2003, Kathleen’s older sister, Lisa, was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. During the course of her treatments, Lisa learned that she had the BRCA gene, which dramatically increases a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer. That led Kathleen to get tested, and when she discovered she had the gene, she elected to have a double mastectomy as well. Lisa was given a clean bill of health, but the cancer returned in 2012, this time in her lungs and brain. She had brain surgery and battled for two years, eventually withering to eighty-five pounds. Lisa died in April 2014 at the age of forty-nine. Dabo spoke at her funeral.

  While Swinney’s Christian faith has inspired him to persist despite all the lousy things that have happened, it also imbues him with a desire to keep things joyful. This is a rather uncommon notion in the football world, and in the coaching profession in general. Most coaches barely take time to acknowledge their wins, much less enjoy them, but not Dabo. He’d rather break into goofy dances in the locker room, or lift up ESPN sideline reporter Jeannine Edwards after that bowl game win over LSU. Before the start of the 2015 season, he promised Clemson fans that if their team made the playoff, he would throw the biggest pizza party that town had ever seen. Sure enough, when the Tigers qualified, some 30,000 people gathered in Memorial Stadium and chowed down. “I don’t know what happened at the other three schools, but I doubt it was like this,” he boasted through a booming sound system. He tries to strike that same work-and-play balance inside his program, scheduling a family night every Wednesday for his coaches. On those nights, he patrols the halls popping his cheeks, kissing babies, and altogether spreading good cheer.

  Swinney goes to similar lengths to make sure his own family feels like a priority. Even during the hubbub of the season, he meets Kathleen almost every day for a run at 12:30. As their three sons progressed as high school football players, he rearranged his practice and meeting schedules so he could attend their games.

  When I interviewed Swinney in Clemson a few weeks before his team’s appearance in the 2016 College Football Playoff semifinal, I asked him if he felt sorry for all those coaches who believe that sustained focus, and sometimes sustained misery, is an important part of the job. It was a thinly veiled reference to Nick Saban, Alabama’s famously dyspeptic (and virtually unbeatable) coach, so I assumed he wouldn’t take the bait. But he did. “Yeah, I do, because I think life is so short. It’s just the blink of an eye, and we’re gone,” he said. “When people put winning up top, they become miserable. Even when they win, it’s a relief. We’re never gonna be like that here. We’re always gonna have fun.”

  He continued, “I’m always giving [my players] perspective on life, because I don’t want the game to be too big. What’s the worst that can happen? You lose a ball game? Hey, let’s just put everything into it, and when you look at the man in the mirror, as long as you did your best, you can live with whatever result you got. Som
etimes you don’t win, and that’s okay, you know? The season always starts tomorrow.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Though he is usually one to encourage his guys to flush the past, Swinney wanted them to take one last look into the rearview mirror following their loss to Alabama in the 2016 championship game. So when he met with his team in February, he showed them about a half dozen unforced errors from the game, the kinds of little mistakes that can add up to a loss. Most of the ones he showed were committed by Deshaun Watson. A fumbled exchange with the center. A bad throw to a wide-open receiver because he didn’t have his feet set properly. Besides sending a strong message that Swinney intended to hold everyone accountable, including the star quarterback, he hoped that watching them commit those mistakes would make his players more optimistic about the road they could see through the windshield.

  “We know we’re good enough,” he told them. “As long as we don’t lose to Clemson, we have a chance to have a special season.” To reinforce the message, Swinney had the posters that listed Clemson’s opponents and were hung all around the practice facility altered so that every opponent’s name read Clemson.

  Three months after that team meeting, Swinney had a chance to take in a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field as a guest of Cubs manager Joe Maddon. He had never met Maddon before, so he was surprised when he got word that Maddon wanted to visit with him during a rain delay. As they spoke in Maddon’s office, he was taken with the words that were printed on the T-shirt Maddon was wearing: Try not to suck. Swinney made a note of it.

  In preparation for the approaching season, Swinney came up with yet another motivational tactic, which he called the “vision board.” He asked each player to complete the sentence “We will get to Tampa this year if I will . . .” The players wrote their answers and placed them on the board, which hung in the front of the team meeting room. Throughout the season, Swinney regularly checked in with the players to see if they were living up to their promises.

  Clemson won its first few games out of the gate, but Watson did not look sharp. He had come into the season as one of the faces of the sport, and the sports media was homing in on all the flaws that could potentially trip up the Tigers’ season. Swinney could tell Watson wasn’t carrying his usual ebullience, so he called his quarterback into his office for a good, long talk.

  As they sat and spoke, Swinney reminded Watson of all the good things he had done for Clemson. Somehow, Watson had lost his perspective, and Swinney wanted to get him back to feeling the love. “I could tell it was a good release for him,” Swinney says. “He started having fun again.”

  That set the stage for a pivotal game on October 29 at Florida State. The previous day, Swinney did what he always does the night before a game, which is to put on a coat and tie and speak to the team without any other coaches around. “That’s my time with the team,” he says. “It gives me a chance to bring ’em all together, tie everything up in a knot, and put ’em to bed in the right frame of mind.” That was especially important that evening because Clemson had not won in Tallahassee in ten years.

  So after talking again about the importance of love, the need to pay attention to all the little things, the desire to maintain the culture they had worked so hard to build, Swinney started to remove his jacket and tie. Then he unbuttoned his dress shirt and revealed what he was wearing underneath: the same T-shirt Maddon had worn that day at Wrigley Field, with the words Try not to suck on the front. The players whooped it up, and the next day they edged Florida State, 37–34.

  The Tigers almost blew their chances on November 12, when they lost at home, 43–42, to unranked Pittsburgh. Fortunately, some of the other top teams in the country also lost that day, so their hopes to make the College Football Playoff were still alive. But they could not afford another slip-up. Swinney was concerned about how his team would respond to the setback until he met with his leadership group on Monday to start preparing for their next opponent, Wake Forest. He was blown away by what his leaders had to say. They were angry, but they weren’t pointing fingers. There was a high degree of ownership and accountability. He walked out of that meeting and told his assistants, “Boys, Wake Forest is in trouble.”

  Indeed, the Tigers easily dispatched the Demon Deacons, 35–13. Then they won their final regular season games, defeated Virginia Tech in the ACC championship game, throttled Ohio State 31–0 in the College Football Playoff semifinal, and earned their date with Alabama. By the time Watson led his offense onto the field facing a three-point deficit with 2:07 to play, he was ready to meet the moment. Like all the players, Watson had conducted his own Jon Gordon exercise the previous summer, landing upon the word legendary. So when he came into the huddle, he knew the exact right thing to say. “All right, boys,” he said. “Let’s go be legendary.”

  Watson put together a drive for the ages, leading the team all the way down to the two-yard line. With one precious second on the clock, he rolled to his right and fired a touchdown pass to Hunter Renfrow to clinch the victory. It was a fitting climax to Dabo Swinney’s career, the star quarterback teaming up with the former walk-on to beat his father’s favorite team, not to mention his own alma mater. The path to Us is never a straight line, but in Swinney’s case it was especially circuitous, and it was authentically his own. In the end, his persistence paid off. All those tangents had came full circle.

  * * *

  • • •

  Alas, Ervil Swinney was not with his son to celebrate his extraordinary triumph. In early 2015, Ervil’s lung cancer returned in a bad way. Dabo persuaded him to move into his house in Clemson so he could get his treatments at Greenville Hospital. Not only did that decision provide Ervil with access to first-rate medical care, but it also gave him and Dabo the chance to enjoy long, leisurely talks. Those precious hours would not have happened if Ervil hadn’t fallen ill.

  The treatments lasted for several months, after which Ervil returned to his job and wife back in Alabama. He seemed to be doing just fine, all things considered. Then one day in early August, a buddy walked into Ervil’s store and found him slumped in his chair. “Just quit breathing,” Dabo says. Dabo still has some of his dad’s voice mails saved on his cell phone. Once in a while, he will touch the screen just so he can hear Ervil’s voice. Just checking in, don’t worry about me, everything’s fine.

  If there’s one thing that bugs Dabo about the way his life story is told, it’s the propensity of the narrator to cast Ervil as a villain. That violates Dabo’s sense of empathy. “My dad was such a great man. He quit drinking, he quit smoking, he survived cancer. His relationship with my mom towards the end was great,” Dabo says. “He had some rough patches along the journey, but who doesn’t? What matters is that he finished his race in a great way.”

  His brother Tripp remains a different, more complicated story. One week before Clemson played Alabama in the 2015 College Football Championship, Tripp was arrested in Florida for aggravated stalking. The incident involved Tripp’s fourth wife, who told police that he violated a restraining order by continuing to harass her online and in person. That forced Dabo to address yet again his family’s private troubles in public fashion—and at the worst possible time. “Part of what’s disappointing is I have to get sucked into his world because of who I am and what my job is,” Dabo told me months later. “I understand that comes with the territory. I love Tripp, but I don’t always like him. Life is about choices, and he’s made a lot of bad ones.”

  In the months after the loss to Alabama, Dabo had only occasional contact with Tripp. It remains a touchy subject. During the course of our conversations, Dabo was happy to provide me with phone numbers so I could interview friends, colleagues, and members of his family, but he was adamant that he did not want me to call Tripp. “That is not something that he is prepared to handle,” he said.

  Despite his family’s battles with alcohol, Swinney is no teetotaler. He enjoys his r
ed wine, and he especially enjoys the company of people who were with him before he was rich and famous. Woody McCorvey, his old receivers coach at Alabama, is Clemson’s associate athletic director for football administration, although Swinney refers to him more accurately as “my national security adviser.” Danny Pearman, who served on the staff with Swinney at Alabama, is Clemson’s special teams coordinator and tight ends coach. Three other former Alabama teammates have staff positions, and when Swinney holds his annual summer camp for local youngsters, he welcomes in dozens of former players and teammates, as well as his old high school crew from Pelham. “It’s amazing how he never changes,” says Saia, his childhood friend. “I was just at his camp and he was introducing a bunch of his guys. He’s rattling off all these dates and statistics real quick, and I’m thinking, God almighty, how does he remember all that? We stay at his lake house a lot, and I just keep thinking, Same old Dabo, cutting up like we were still in high school. He’s just a great person to be friends with.”

  When I spoke with Swinney just before the start of the 2017 season, he was in his usual upbeat state of mind, even though he knew he was going to have to replace many of the key starters from his championship team, starting with his quarterback. “My word this year is appreciation,” he told me. “I just want to have a deep appreciation for the journey because at the end of the day, that’s what you love the most. I want my players to have that, I want my staff to have that. Let’s don’t wait until it’s over to appreciate things. The moment we won that game was great, but the best part was the journey getting there.”