Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  After deciding to earn money in a saner way, Parcells took a part-time job managing Pizza Hut, a new restaurant near campus. The original Pizza Hut soon moved to a new location across the street from Wichita State’s campus. Unlike its current incarnations, this was a full-service restaurant with a menu that included beer, pasta, salad, and sandwiches. Since the establishment kept staff to a minimum, Parcells became a jack-of-all-trades: bartender, cook, host, waiter. The restaurant did a brisk business, and its young manager impressed his bosses with his business savvy and strong work ethic.

  Coming off two impressive seasons guiding the Shockers, Hank Foldberg was lured away by Texas A&M and replaced by Marcelino “Chelo” Huerta. The new coach put Parcells on the first unit in his junior season and named him co-captain. On the gridiron, Bill behaved like a coach himself, giving teammates pointers while exhorting them. However, an avalanche of injuries contributed to Wichita’s going 3-7 and winless in their conference. The team’s struggles made Parcells cantankerous for most of the season, but he still found ways to have a good time.

  Wichita’s football players often boxed for fun, using a makeshift ring in the women’s basketball gym. In these sparring sessions Parcells was known for a quick left hook that made teammates reluctant to go against him. But his dance moves outside the ring gained even more notoriety. The Shockers kept a phonograph in the trainer’s room, which abutted the locker room, and players often listened to their favorite songs while changing. Just before spring practice in 1961, Bill put on a 45 rpm record of “The Twist.” He had learned the dance in Oradell while on summer break following his first year at Colgate. As the catchy music blared he introduced the Twist to his teammates, saying, “Chubby Checker does this at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City.”

  “Of course, a lot of us Midwesterners, we hadn’t even seen it,” recalls Ron Turner, Wichita’s former end, selected by Philadelphia late in the 1962 NFL draft. “It’s kind of hard to imagine him doing the Twist there in his jockstrap in the locker room, but he was quite the dancer. He was a little overweight, but he was well-coordinated and a really good athlete.”

  • • •

  Now an upperclassman, Bill Parcells was considering following in his father’s footsteps by attending law school, but the physical education major also felt a powerful tug toward athletics. Mickey Corcoran was an exemplar of coaching as a livelihood, and Parcells wanted to remain active in sports. “I’d always liked the life,” Parcells says. “I used to bitch about practice, but the truth is I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself without it once my classes let out.”

  Meanwhile, Bill was having a stellar senior season as the Shockers went 7-2 and captured a share of the Missouri Valley championship. Parcells was among the top players on a team ranked second in the nation in total offense. His most impressive game occurred in Wichita’s season finale, on November 30, 1963, versus conference rival Tulsa. Parcells led the Shockers to an upset victory, 26–15, against a team that included quarterback Jerry Rhome and wideout Howard Twilley, who would become one of the best tandems in college football history before going on to noteworthy NFL careers.

  Parcells harassed Rhome all afternoon, finishing the day with four sacks and twenty tackles, many near the line of scrimmage, while smothering Tulsa’s running game. It was among the best defensive performances in Division I that season. “You can hit someone hard on every play,” says Len Clark, a former Wichita defensive tackle, “but there’s a difference between hitting someone hard and punishing them. Bill punished Tulsa that day.”

  After the season Parcells was named to the College All-Star team, a group of the nation’s top seniors scheduled to face the defending NFL champions. He also earned an invitation to the Blue-Gray Classic, which showcased seniors, often NFL prospects, whose teams failed to make a bowl game. Amid the accolades, the Detroit Lions selected Bill Parcells as an offensive tackle in the seventh round of the 1964 NFL draft. The event lasted twenty rounds, making Parcells today’s equivalent of a late third-round choice. The NFL consisted of only fourteen teams, and Parcells was the eighty-ninth player selected out of 280 prospects.

  That year’s draft was unusually flush with talent. A record eleven future Hall of Famers were selected, including Florida A&M wideout Bob Hayes, who went to the Cowboys one spot ahead of Parcells. Two future Hall of Famers were chosen after Parcells: Cleveland picked Morgan State tailback Leroy Kelly in the eighth round. And because of a five-year naval commitment, Heisman-winning quarterback Roger Staubach wasn’t selected until the tenth round (128th overall).

  Four Shockers were drafted, including quarterback Henry Schichtle, Parcells’s fellow co-captain, who rewrote Wichita’s passing records before going to the Giants in the sixth round. “I was sick,” Parcells says, half-jokingly. “That was my team. I kept thinking, ‘Why couldn’t it be me?’ ”

  December 3, 1963, a local newspaper in Wichita published a story headlined “Five Shockers Picked in National Grid Draft.” The article came with a photograph of each Shocker: Parcells—shown from the waist up—had curly blond hair and grinned in his number 70 jersey. The other teammates were receiver Bob Long (fourth round, Packers) and tackles David Klein (fifth round, Browns) and Steve Barilla (twentieth round, Lions). Long would become a key player on Lombardi’s Packers who made pro football history by winning three straight championships, including the first two Super Bowls, in 1967 and 1968.

  A month after being drafted, Parcells decided against playing in the Blue-Gray Classic in Montgomery, Alabama, since it fell too close to Christmas. Instead, he focused on the second annual Challenge Bowl: the National All-Stars versus the Texas All-Stars on January 4, 1964, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The game featured the best players from Southwestern states, particularly Texas, versus top seniors in the rest of the nation. Parcells describes the Southwest Challenge Bowl as being “kind of a second-class all-star game.” But among Parcells’s teammates was Ohio State fullback Matt Snell, who would go on to play a key role in the Jets’ iconic 16–7 victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Parcells considers Snell to be that game’s true MVP, not quarterback Joe Namath, for amassing 121 rushing yards on 30 carries in the ball-control offense of the Jets.

  Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders coached the National All-Stars; the Texas contingent was guided by Frank “Pop” Ivy of the Houston Oilers in an event that used AFL coaches because of sponsorship by the upstart league. As an avid Giants fan, Parcells knew little about the AFL, which was in its fourth year of existence. But at practice for the National All-Stars, Parcells was fascinated by his first exposure to a pro coach. With his dark, slicked-back hair, Al Davis stalked the field and barked instructions with a gravitas that belied his slender physique. His distinct voice combined an adopted Southern accent with his native tongue of Brooklynese. Parcells clung to every word while scrutinizing Davis’s mannerisms.

  Earlier that year, Davis, who grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, had been lured from the Los Angeles Chargers. The thirty-three-year-old was the youngest person in the history of professional sports to simultaneously hold the positions of coach and general manager. Davis’s Raiders leapfrogged to a 10-4 season after their previous record of 1-13, earning him the AFL’s award for Coach of the Year.

  During a Wednesday practice, five days before the 1964 Challenge Bowl, Bill Parcells broke his right hand. The linebacker didn’t seek treatment until the next day, when it swelled “like a baseball under my goddamn skin.” Parcells had assumed that he had broken a bone, but the team doctor discovered he had fractured four. Parcells was a starting linebacker, so Davis needed to know his status; without Parcells, Davis would need to fly in another player as soon as possible.

  Davis walked into the trainer’s room where Parcells’s arm was being set in a cast, and asked, “You gonna play, or not?”

  The doctor interjected, “I wouldn’t play if I were you.”

  Parcells replied firmly, “Oh, I’m playing.”

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nbsp; Davis smiled tightly, pleased by his linebacker’s resolve. Parcells, twenty-two, viewed the Challenge Bowl as the coda to his college career, and couldn’t imagine missing it just because of a few broken bones. He was also motivated by income: $800 for each member of the winning team, and $600 to the losers. Players who sat out weren’t paid. It was good money, especially for a recent college graduate whose wife was pregnant with their second child. Besides, Parcells, who’d wed Judy in 1962, wanted to spend as much time as possible around Davis. After an intense practice, the Raiders coach stopped at the team hotel lobby to relax, plopping into a free seat next to Parcells. The moment gave Parcells the opportunity to talk football with Davis for almost an hour. “From then on,” Parcells recalls, “I was hooked on him.”

  Parcells played with typical ferocity for virtually the entire game while wearing the cast. Matt Snell rushed for four touchdowns as the National All-Stars won, 66–14, at Buccaneer Stadium. Afterward Al Davis slipped an extra hundred dollars into Parcells’s pocket.

  Before graduating from college in the spring, Bill Parcells gave Pizza Hut notice that he was quitting with an eye to coaching. Dean Pryor, Wichita’s backfield coach, had been named head coach of Hastings, a tiny college in south-central Nebraska. Pryor had told Parcells that if he didn’t make Detroit’s NFL roster, he should join Hastings’s four-man staff as a defensive assistant. It already included Don Boyette, Parcells’s ex-teammate at center, as an offensive assistant. The salary was meager at $3,000, and the seasonal job involved only six months of work. But as Pryor pointed out, the gig provided the start to a coaching career one notch above high school. Parcells was delighted to have the opportunity in his pocket.

  Impressed with Parcells as an employee, Pizza Hut tried to reverse his decision to leave. Dick Hassur drove in from Topeka, where he had opened its first franchise in 1959, and promised Parcells an annual salary of $15,000, plus the lucrative possibility of owning a franchise within five years, which could lead to a princely income of $100,000. Flattered by the offer, Parcells told Hassur that although he enjoyed working at Pizza Hut, football was his passion. And assuming he didn’t make the NFL as a player, Parcells planned to leave for Hastings. “It’s funny how life turns out,” Parcells says. “I probably would have been a millionaire by the time I was thirty. Who knows?”

  Bill Parcells reported to the Detroit Lions training camp in the summer of 1964, hoping to make the team as a guard. The Lions, a good club during the early 1960s, were coming off a 5-8-1 season with extenuating circumstances: Detroit’s star defensive tackle Alex Karras and Packers halfback Paul Hornung had been suspended indefinitely for placing bets on NFL teams. The league also fined five of Karras’s teammates $2,000 each for betting on games in which they didn’t play. The gambling controversy cast a pall over a team that in 1962 had gone 11-3, including a Thanksgiving rout of the title-bound Packers.

  After several practices, Parcells believed that he was making a solid showing, but with time running out on Dean Pryor’s offer, Bill needed a candid breakdown of his chances. “I had to survive,” Parcells says. “I needed to know what I was going to do.” Parcells explained his situation to George Wilson, Detroit’s head coach, who told him to wait until the final preseason game, more than a month away. Bill phoned Judy in Wichita to convey Wilson’s equivocal response. The rookie decided to remain with the Lions for a few more practices. But on July 22, Parcells bolted camp after a morning session, two weeks before Detroit’s first preseason game against the Redskins. He was allowed to keep the $2,000 signing bonus from his $10,000 contract.

  Looking back, Parcells describes himself as being “just average” for an NFL prospect. Although he was versatile, smart, and tough at six-three and 240 pounds, most NFL players were a notch above him. “I wasn’t overly big, and certainly not overly fast,” Parcells says. “I was just kind of an in-between guy who played several positions. But when it got down to doing something specific consistently well, I just didn’t have enough ability.” As a seventh-round pick of the 1964 draft, Parcells was a sure bet to make the AFL, where his former teammate, Miller Farr, flourished after going undrafted by the NFL. However, the upstart league was still years away from its heyday. After long discussions with family and friends, Parcells determined that chasing a pro career was too risky financially. Except for stars and top draft picks, NFL salaries weren’t yet astronomical. “I shouldn’t say ‘security’ when talking about coaching,” Parcells says about his decision, “but that’s what it was.”

  Before reconnecting with Judy and their toddler, Suzy, in Wichita, Parcells phoned Dean Pryor to accept the coaching job at Hastings. Packing would be simple: the school couldn’t afford to pay its football assistants beyond the season, so Bill and Judy would leave most of their belongings behind, where they lived, near her parents. “Contract labor,” Parcells jokes. He was heading into the hinterlands of college coaching, where perhaps the town’s most successful businessman owned a car and tractor dealership. “I think it was a dead heat,” Parcells says, “as to whether he sold more cars or tractors.”

  Hastings College, a liberal arts school, had about one thousand undergraduates, and the nearby town had a population of roughly twenty-five thousand. Parcells needed to make a big adjustment not just to his new career but to an environment where, in the fall, pheasant hunting seemed to generate as much excitement as football. Invited to participate in that other popular sport for the first time, Parcells joined Dean Pryor and a local boy as they waded through a creek that reached Parcells’s thighs. Pryor and the kid rousted some nearby pheasant for Bill, whose first shot struck one, sending it fluttering to the ground. Pryor encouraged him to finish the job, but Bill didn’t have the stomach for it. So the boy wrung the pheasant’s neck while Parcells watched in disgust.

  It was the last time he agreed to go pheasant hunting.

  Back on campus, the twenty-three-year-old coach embraced his new job, learning how to organize drills and formulate strategies to help players develop. “It was like a kindergarten in coaching,” Parcells says. “You’re learning how to do it.” Only a few weeks removed from NFL training camp, Parcells was intense and hands-on. If he was displeased with his unit, he took a defender’s spot on the field while Pryor ran the play again. Without pads or helmet, Parcells manhandled offensive players as he showed the defensive unit the way he wanted them to execute. “He’d just rip them apart,” recalls Terry Petersen, a defensive back under Parcells.

  Taking a breather wasn’t permitted during or between drills. After one scrimmage play a defender came up hurting though uninjured—a crucial difference to Parcells. When the player asked to take a break, Parcells screamed, “Get this guy off the field! Get that equipment off him and put it on somebody that can go!” That fire-and-brimstone approach galvanized his players, who recognized the unusual fervor in a temporary coach. By noon, if Parcells decided that his practice plans for the day weren’t sharp enough, he’d skip lunch to iron out the details. Dean Pryor was delighted by his new hire.

  Hastings football consisted of some thirty players, including the twelve-man junior varsity, which Parcells oversaw. Pryor’s third assistant was Dr. Lynn Farrell, the school’s athletic director, who helped out with the football team until the basketball season, when he transformed into the hoops head coach. “It was a very different era,” Parcells recalls. “Everybody did everything.” The all-for-one ethos spurred Parcells to cut grass on the gridiron, construct lockers, clean equipment, and operate the Ditto machine, a forerunner to the photocopier. After practices, Parcells washed the team’s uniforms with Cold Power. “I was a coach and I loved it,” Parcells says. “I couldn’t get enough.”

  Eager to increase his knowledge of the game, Parcells spent substantial time studying college football’s heavyweights. “There were six of them,” he says, “who were, like, it.” Like most followers of the sport, Parcells was particularly enamored of Ohio State’s Woody Hayes and Alabama’s Paul “Bear” Bryant. “A bigg
er-than-life guy,” Parcells recalls of Bryant. “It’s hard for me to describe who that would be like today. There’s no one like that.” The neophyte also scrutinized John McKay (Southern California), Ara Parseghian (Notre Dame), Darrell Royal (Texas), and Bo Schembechler (Miami University in Ohio before he became legendary at Michigan). Parcells even researched Bud Wilkinson’s career after the Oklahoma icon retired in 1964 at age forty-seven. “He was the king,” Parcells declares.

  Parcells had entered high school as Wilkinson became football royalty with 47 consecutive victories, an iconic mark set from 1953 to 1957 that has never been seriously threatened. Wilkinson’s record during seventeen seasons at Oklahoma is embedded in Parcells’s memory—145-29-4—the same way that Joe DiMaggio’s streak remains alive for baseball fans. Bill Parcells, the man who would coin the phrase “You are what your record says you are,” says of Wilkinson’s .826 winning percentage, “That’s all you needed to know.”

  Charles Burnham Wilkinson was also known for a 3-4 defense, often dubbed the Oklahoma defense because it was his signature. Parcells studied Wilkinson’s version of the hurry-up offense, designed to “just wear your ass out.”

  “There wasn’t any Internet; there wasn’t any television,” Parcells says of Wilkinson’s tenure, which included three national titles and thirteen consecutive conference championships. “And for me, all the way in New Jersey, to hear about this Oklahoma coach, it was a testament to his greatness.”

  Judy Parcells became a stay-at-home mom while pregnant with her second child. Knowing their budget was tight and their stay only temporary, the family rented a tiny apartment on the bottom floor of a dental office one mile from the school. The rent was $62.50. “Obviously, we weren’t eating steak and shrimp at the time,” Judy says.

  The painted cinder-block walls made it difficult to hang pictures, and the only two window wells were near the ceiling, making it difficult to glimpse the outside. The mattress took up most of the bedroom, Suzy’s crib occupied what little space remained, and the low ceiling forced Parcells to stoop in order to reach the bed. “It was like living in a tomb,” he says. Despite their spartan existence, Judy considers the experience in Hastings as a high point in their marriage. “We didn’t have two cents to our name, but I’ve often said to him that it was probably our best time together,” says Judy. “We were young, and didn’t know any better. Life was simple then. He probably wouldn’t see it that way—as our best time. I’m sure he wouldn’t. But I would go back to those days.”