Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  Entering 1976, Parcells started playing pickup basketball with the Red Raiders, interactions that brought a thaw as the coordinator and his players got to know each other better. Off the court Parcells held one-on-one meetings with several players, discussing his defensive philosophy and, for the first time, seeking their input. In the rare instances that Parcells offered wiggle room at practice—say, skipping a drill—the beneficiaries were seniors. Soon players who had tuned out Parcells realized that the coordinator was a first-rate coach. Upperclassmen went out of their way to help new teammates acclimate to Parcells’s sharp edges. His zingers never stopped flying. When one underclassman cornerback kept getting burned, Parcells started calling him “Toast.” But by the start of the season, players were buying into Parcells’s style as much as his system. The defense showed promise as it began to shed its old habits. And its coordinator didn’t hesitate to take little-used offensive players and convert them into defenders, revealing a knack for putting athletes in situations that maximized their abilities.

  Texas Tech’s defense turned miserly as the Red Raiders won their first eight games to once again challenge for the Southwest Conference crown. Quarterback Rodney Allison was turning into a star as Texas Tech went 10-1, reaching as high as fifth in the national rankings. The Red Raiders tied for the Southwest Conference crown, garnering an invitation to the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl against seventh-ranked Nebraska. Texas Tech lost, 27–24, at the Houston Astrodome, but the resurgent Red Raiders still ended the season ranked thirteenth. Sloan was named conference Coach of the Year, while Allison captured MVP honors. The success affirmed Parcells’s methods, cementing a reversal in his relationship with players. By now, “he really had the players in the palm of his hand,” Sloan recalls. Despite the new dynamic, the unrelenting coach still struck fear in his players. When he stepped on the field or walked into a meeting room, the air seemed to get thicker.

  Romeo Crennel discovered one reason that Parcells was ornery at practice. Before the coaches left their offices for one session, Crennel spotted the defensive coordinator placing a pebble inside his right sneaker, sliding his foot in, and tightly tying the laces. Parcells used the pebble as a “training mechanism” for staying alert. “Whenever I stepped the wrong way, it reminded me, ‘Hey, be on top of this; pay attention,’ ” explains Parcells, who had started the peculiar habit at Florida State. “It was like having a little bell on your wrist: every fifteen seconds, it goes off.” After practice Parcells placed the small stone on his desk with the rest of the collection from the practice field. His choice of stone size depended on his mood.

  The assertive defensive coordinator was sometimes just as hard on fellow coaches at practice when they made mistakes. “Sometimes I had to try not to be afraid of him myself,” Sloan jokes. A head coach in assistant’s clothing, Parcells intended to accept the next offer for the top job.

  • • •

  During spring practice Parcells noticed a man sitting in the stands, scrutinizing the defense. His face was weather-beaten, and he wore a brown jacket emblazoned with a white “B.”

  Occasionally, when the opportunity presented itself, the man stepped forward to question Parcells about his schemes. After a few exchanges, he told Parcells in a bass-heavy drawl, “You know, you’re a pretty good coach.”

  Seeing the stranger at practice for several days, Parcells approached him to get his name and exchange pleasantries. Gordon Wood confirmed Parcells’s guess that he was a high school football coach.

  Parcells said, “I notice you’re here every day. Where are you coming from?”

  Wood responded, “Brownwood.”

  Parcells knew that the central Texas town was a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. “Are you staying in a hotel here?”

  “No, no. I just drive back and forth.”

  Parcells was flabbergasted to learn that Wood was one of the winningest coaches in the history of high school football, which was like a religion in the Lone Star State. By amassing more than three hundred victories while coaching in a sports coat and tie, Wood had become a Texas icon. Most of the wins came with the Brownwood Lions, a team he had transformed into a dynasty. Wood’s stature gave him friends like Bear Bryant and Lyndon Johnson. Once, when Bryant was asked why he quit Texas A&M for Alabama in 1958, he responded, “I had to leave Texas. As long as Gordon Wood was there, I could never be the best coach in the state.”

  Despite a secure legacy, Wood was willing to drive almost seven hours round-trip to sit in the white-hot sun for the slim chance of gleaning something useful from an obscure defensive coordinator. Parcells had prided himself on a relentless work ethic, but Wood’s actions provided an aha moment: succeeding at the highest levels in coaching required long-term zeal, although that went against human nature. “It was a revelation to me,” Parcells says. “I was just a young guy, and he’d already been an established, super coach. That’s what impressed me so much: he was still hustling.”

  Parcells struck up a friendship with the super coach, who had picked cotton as a child to support his family. Wood solicited the young coordinator’s ideas while Parcells picked the older man’s brain.

  By 1977, players liked Parcells enough to give him a nickname, Coach Pretty, for the careful way he combed his curly blond hair. Although the moniker was affectionate, the players were too intimidated to utter it in his presence, so Parcells didn’t find out about it until decades later. The Red Raiders won five of their first six games for another promising start, but quarterback Rodney Allison suffered a serious injury in the third game versus Texas A&M. The absence of the early candidate for the Heisman Trophy kept the Red Raiders from being a ranked team once again. Yet Texas Tech finished at 7-4, earning an invitation to the Florida Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida, a forerunner to the Citrus Bowl. There the Red Raiders were trounced, 40–7, by Florida.

  Sloan accepted his latest head-coaching offer, joining Mississippi for a return to the SEC. With change in the air, Sloan’s hard-nosed defensive coordinator was courted by the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for its head-coaching gig. This time Parcells didn’t need to talk to himself in order to figure out if he should take the gig. Despite what he knew were the special challenges of coaching at a service academy, this seemed like the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

  5

  At Air Force, two former Army colleagues were reunited with Parcells. Al Groh was hired as defensive coordinator from North Carolina, where he had been overseeing linebackers, including an underclassman named Lawrence Taylor starting to draw attention for his otherworldly athleticism, like once leaping to block a punt before landing on his neck and then rising unscathed. Ray Handley was already in place as an offensive assistant under Air Force’s previous head coach, Ben Martin. In addition to Ken Hatfield, lured from Florida to run the offense, Parcells brought on Tom Backhus as offensive line coach. Backhus had played for Woody Hayes during the late 1960s, culminating with a 1969 Rose Bowl victory over Southern California for the national championship. After hiring Backhus, Parcells wasted no time before insisting on a favor: he asked Backhus to arrange a meeting with Woody Hayes in Columbus, Ohio. Parcells was giddy when his new assistant quickly set up the appointment with one of the six great coaches he had studied since joining the profession.

  One morning early in 1978, Backhus and Parcells arrived at Ohio State’s main campus, where the rookie head coach found himself seated across from a legendary counterpart. For several hours, Wayne Woodrow Hayes described his philosophy regarding staff structure, practice setup, and maximizing talent. Hayes stressed the importance of the field-position game, and urged Parcells to take great pains in preparing his team for the elements whenever it was necessary. “If you’re gonna play in the Atlantic, you gotta train in the Atlantic!”

  Although the sixty-five-year-old was among the best tacticians in football history, he rarely delved into strategy during the conversation. He complained that sports journalists were generally “rotten bastards” and
“divisive.”

  The young coach sat spellbound by a peer who embodied success, power, and knowledge. “It was heaven,” Parcells recalls. “Heaven.”

  After joining Ohio State in 1951, Hayes had built the program into a football power, capturing national titles in 1954, 1957, and 1968. Parcells was struck by Hayes’s passion, even in his twenty-seventh season as Buckeyes coach.

  Most of his staff members were off campus handling recruiting duties, but Glen Mason, his new outside-linebackers coach, happened to be one of the few assistants around. Occasionally, Mason, who had played the position for Ohio State the previous season, stepped into the office, interrupting the conversation with a team matter for Hayes. One time when his assistant coach walked in, Hayes said excitedly, “Mason, you ought to listen to some of this.”

  The squat and square-jawed coach did some considerable listening, too. He asked Parcells several questions about his personal and professional background. Hayes showed patience and grace, in stark contrast to his off-campus image as someone whose occasional rages on the field revealed a dark side, and had even prompted game suspensions.

  Time flew by for both men, so the Ohio State coach suggested dinner at a restaurant roughly one mile away. Despite bitter-cold weather, Hayes decided to walk. Parcells worried about freezing, but his companion, wearing a red short-sleeve shirt and a matching tie, seemed oblivious to the temperature. Hayes was known for acts of self-flagellation: pacing the sidelines during a football game, he would occasionally bite into the heels of his hands until they bled. The habit was even more masochistic than Parcells’s pebble in his right shoe.

  Patrons stared at Hayes when he entered the restaurant, which featured a framed picture of him on the wall. Over dinner Parcells marveled at Hayes’s polymathic range as the older coach offered informed opinions on the economy, politics, war, and pop culture. “People thought he was a Neanderthal,” Parcells says. “But he was well-read, and politically astute.” Hayes particularly enjoyed military history that detailed battlefield tactics, and devoured biographies of American generals. Finding parallels between football and war, the amateur historian sprinkled his gridiron speeches with military terms and quotes from George Patton. Hayes even named a passing scheme after Curtis LeMay, the air force general who served in World War II.

  After a long day in Hayes’s presence Parcells hadn’t had his fill, so the young coach requested permission to return to campus the next morning for one last conversation before heading to the airport to catch his return flight to Colorado. Hayes obliged with another engaging discussion. Around noon, knowing his time was running out, Parcells said, “Coach Hayes, one of my last questions has to do with handling the media. Can you give me any advice on that?”

  Hayes paused for a long moment, the first time Parcells had seen him look stumped. Only months before his get-together with Parcells, Hayes had charged at an ABC cameraman who was recording the coach’s explosive reaction to a fumble, leading to probation by the Big Ten.

  The Ohio State coach finally replied to his visitor, “Young man, I think you should consult someone else on the matter.”

  Then Hayes quickly added, “It’s a war you can’t win, but you can win a few battles. So screw ’em when you can.”

  Hayes’s humility only added to the young coach’s reverence.

  Back at Colorado Springs, Parcells was eager to try reviving a program that had gone 10-32-2 over the previous four seasons. He was familiar with the constraints of coaching at a service academy, but he had also received indications from Air Force that his team’s course loads would decrease slightly during football season.

  The new job was a career achievement on many levels. Parcells’s salary of roughly $40,000 was easily an employment high. The family lived in a split-level home in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, with a deck that offered a bird’s-eye panorama of the city; in the morning, looking southwest gave a sublime view of Pikes Peak. His wife and three daughters enjoyed their new friends and scenic surroundings in northern Colorado Springs. The married couple had come a long way from a tiny basement apartment carved out of a dentist’s office in Hastings, Nebraska.

  The Parcells era at Air Force started on a high, with a 34–25 victory at Texas–El Paso. The Falcons’ next game, on September 16, was at Boston College’s Alumni Stadium. Tim Cohane, the sports journalist who had given Parcells a one-day writing tutorial on a West Point retreat, phoned the coach to ask for a favor. Cohane was teaching a journalism class at Boston College, and he wondered if Parcells could write something about his team to be shared in class. A couple of days before the game, Cohane received a letter from Parcells. The sardonic professor appreciated the humor.

  Before reading the note in class, Cohane told his students, “This is the guy who had one day of class with me, and this is what he remembered. It’s pretty good.”

  Parcells’s note read, “Dear Tim. You told me to be precise, direct, and to the point in all of my literary enterprises. My team is slow and friendly.”

  In front of an audience that included Charles and Don Parcells, the Falcons defeated the Eagles, 18–7, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, for a second straight victory, but Parcells’s team indeed turned out to be slow and friendly. Air Force lost five straight, and eight of its last nine, without showing any glimmers of hope. Its penultimate game was a 42–21 loss to Georgia Tech at Falcon Stadium, where in windy, snowy weather, Parcells watched Eddie Lee Ivery set an NCAA record by rushing for 356 yards. As the rookie head coach trudged off the wet field, he said to those around him, “This job is going to take a while.” But by the end of Air Force’s 3-8 season, which included two decisive losses against Army and Navy, Parcells felt disillusioned. Contrary to the administration’s pitch in hiring him, Air Force’s football players faced the same exacting academics and military training as other cadets. The confluence of those demands and the requirements of their hard-charging coach proved untenable.

  Parcells felt further demoralized several weeks after the season when Woody Hayes’s career ended in disgrace. At the Gator Bowl on December 29, Ohio State trailed 17–15 late when Buckeye freshman Art Schlichter gambled on a pass. Clemson defensive tackle Charlie Bauman intercepted it before being pushed out of bounds at Ohio State’s sideline. When the defensive lineman glared at the Buckeye coaches and players, Hayes stepped up, shoving his right forearm against Bauman’s throat. The sixty-five-year-old’s response triggered a skirmish that led to his ejection. The next day Hayes was dismissed by athletic director Hugh Hindman, his former player and assistant.

  “I was saddened when he punched the kid from Clemson,” Parcells says, “because I know what he did for so many players and so many kids. The thought that he would be remembered for that one incident upset me. He was such a good man.”

  Parcells was familiar with the legend’s progressive side: Hayes was among the first major college coaches to recruit black players. The early group included lineman Jim Parker, whose talents contributed to Hayes’s first national championship in 1954, before Parker went on to have a Hall of Fame career with the Baltimore Colts. Hayes also bucked convention by starting large numbers of African-American players and hiring black coaches. Deeply committed to academics, he taught classes that stressed vocabulary to freshman athletes. Hayes was well-regarded by faculty members, even some of those who criticized college sports. “He was what a coach is supposed to be,” Parcells says. “He was a disciplinarian; he was demanding. But he also had a great sense of values, and he imparted those to people. In the short time I was with him, I learned a lot.”

  Realizing that an institutional shift at Air Force was far-fetched, Parcells found himself yearning for another top coaching assignment. But unable to find any safe landing spots, he charged forward in an effort to overcome his program’s entrenched constraints. In late February of 1979, Parcells flew to California on a recruiting trip, which only reinforced his distaste for wooing high school kids. But on returning to Colorado, Parcells was s
urprised to receive a long-distance call from someone he barely knew: Ray Perkins, the new head coach of the New York Giants. Hired after being offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers for one season, Perkins was assembling a staff. He wanted to know if Parcells had any interest in flying east to discuss a crucial position: linebackers coach.

  “I would have walked,” Parcells says.

  Their conversation years earlier, and Parcells’s reputation for defensive acumen, had left an impression on Perkins. The new Giants leader sensed a kindred spirit who could help him resuscitate a moribund franchise.

  For ten years, from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the New York Giants had been perhaps pro football’s best team, capturing the hearts and minds of fans in the New York area and beyond. Season tickets were treated like heirlooms. Throngs of supporters traveled beyond the seventy-five-mile television blackout zone to watch games in motel rooms. Those glory years kicked off just after Parcells became an ardent fan in Hasbrouck Heights, and didn’t end until after the 1963 season when he turned his attention to coaching.

  The twelve-team NFL was divided into the Western Conference and Eastern Conference. During that decade-long heyday, the Giants won the Eastern Conference six times, and captured a championship in 1956 under Jim Lee Howell. Over that span no team produced a better regular-season winning percentage (.702), although the Browns, Colts, and Packers each captured two titles. After that, Giants fans had to suffer through fifteen years of putrid play, interrupted only by flashes of mediocrity. Making matters worse, the other New York team, the upstart New York Jets, stunned the Baltimore Colts to claim Super Bowl III in January of 1969. Seven months later, in a highly anticipated exhibition game, the Giants faced their metropolitan rivals for the first time. The stage for the preseason contest was the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut. Jets coach Weeb Ewbank declared that the winner would own “bragging rights for New York.” And fans of both clubs behaved as if it were Super Bowl IV. The segment of the NFL community that considered the Jets championship victory to be a fluke was certain its view would be confirmed with a loss against the mediocre Giants.