Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  Twilight descended, bringing on stadium lights and cool air. On the opening drive of the second half New York seemed to stall at its 46-yard line, with only a foot to go for a first down. During the regular season, the Giants had been perfect on six attempts of fourth-and-1, including one against Denver. But with the team still in Giants territory Parcells sent punter Sean Landeta onto the field to replace Phil Simms. New York also inserted a player with no role on the punt team: backup quarterback Jeff Rutledge.

  Landeta awaited the snap while Rutledge assumed a blocking position, standing to the right of center Bart Oates. Suddenly, however, the Giants shifted into a conventional offensive set as Rutledge moved quickly behind center while Lee Rouson and Maurice Carthon darted from opposite spots on the perimeter to crouch three yards behind Rutledge, becoming running backs.

  With the 30-second play clock ticking, Rutledge assessed Denver’s defense. He looked left and right as Denver’s defenders pranced about warily, but they assumed Big Blue was merely trying to draw an offsides penalty for an automatic first down. Denver’s inside linebackers didn’t clog the middle, which would have caused Rutledge to abandon the play. Instead, the quarterback let the clock wind down and subtly glanced at Parcells, who nodded.

  The moment, Parcells says, had called for Mickey Corcoran’s great lesson: provide just the right amount of information (what steps to take based on Denver’s defense) to put the athlete (Rutledge) in the best position to execute. In front of an international TV audience of 130 million–plus, Jeff Rutledge calmly instructed center Bart Oates to snap the ball. Clutching it to his chest, the quarterback dashed two yards behind right guard Chris Godfrey for a stunning first-down conversion. Parcells smiled tightly at the chicanery’s success. Exploiting the new life, Simms guided his team down the field before zipping a risky pass into double coverage. Like most of Simms’s throws that afternoon, the location was perfect. Mark Bavaro snagged the ball for a 13-yard touchdown, giving Big Blue a 16–10 lead, and momentum.

  Now Big Blue’s offense reverted to their ground-and-pound approach as Denver’s linebackers, concerned about Simms’s aggressive passing, treaded lightly. Late in the third quarter the Giants reached Denver’s 45. On second-and-6, Simms pitched left to Morris, who took several steps forward, drawing Denver’s safeties, before pulling up behind the line of scrimmage and turning to flip the ball to Simms for a flea flicker. The sandlot trick left wideout Bobby Johnson alone in the end zone, but Simms locked in on McConkey, also open, who caught the ball at the 20 before sprinting to the 3, where ex-teammate Mark Haynes’s low hit sent the former helicopter pilot head over heels at the 1. The 44-yard pass was Simms’s longest completion of the late afternoon.

  On the next play Morris took a pitch from Simms, and with Parcells’s warnings ringing in his ears, he clutched the football tightly while following right guard Chris Godfrey. Defenders tumbled like tipped-over dominos as Morris crossed the goal line unscathed. The touchdown gave New York a 26–10 lead with less than a minute left in the third quarter. Several Giants defensive players celebrated as if the game was over. Parcells, conscious of Elway’s fourth-quarter mojo, sprinted down the sideline, glaring at the perpetrators, and screaming at them to stay focused.

  “Let’s go!”

  Having settled down in the second half, the Big Blue Wrecking Crew continued to disrupt Elway’s rhythm, forcing a slew of misfires that included an Elvis Patterson interception. Lawrence Taylor says of the first half, “It was so hot, nobody could get their breath. In the second half, when the temperature cooled off, we came out and played in our kind of weather.” Simms, though, remained on fire, throwing with astonishing precision on a range of passes. He completed all 10 of his second-half throws to set one Super Bowl mark, while the Giants scored 30 points to set another.

  With about two minutes to play, and Gary Kubiak in for Elway, the public-address announcer declared Simms the game’s MVP. Taylor bear-hugged his quarterback, yelling, “We’re the best in the world, for one year.” Offensive linemen Bart Oates and Brad Benson doused Simms with a bucket of ice water, cooling him off for the first time all afternoon. Not far away, Carson removed his jersey and pads before borrowing a security officer’s yellow shirt to wear as his cover for the inevitable late-game ritual. Grabbing a Gatorade bucket, Carson slipped behind Parcells to unload it. This time he met no resistance. The head coach turned around and smiled as the orange liquid cascaded over him.

  A recording of “New York, New York,” by Parcells’s childhood neighbor Frank Sinatra, blared from the public-address system as several Giants players crooned along. Judy Parcells felt goose bumps remembering her husband’s brash prediction when he worked as a Colorado Springs real-estate agent. Since that moment in 1979, she had believed his assertion about one day leading a team to a Super Bowl championship. But the dreamy couple never imagined that it would be the first one in Giants history, and would come so soon after his football sabbatical.

  With less than a minute left in the game, Parcells, his arms akimbo, watched Denver’s final possession. He was flashing back to his 1964 coaching debut, Hastings’s home opener when his defense stifled the Colorado School of Mines, 24–0. “I can’t tell you why I thought about Hastings,” he says. “I was just thinking to myself: ‘My gosh, how things have changed. What a different landscape this is than when I first started.’ ” The symmetry concluded with a 39–20 victory in which Parcells’s much-maligned quarterback finished with the most accurate passing performance, 22 for 25 (or 88 percent), in Super Bowl history.

  Judy tried to spot her husband but failed to locate him for a couple minutes amid the throng of photographers and cameramen on the sidelines. Parcells whispered into the ears of some of his offensive linemen. Brad Benson, Brian Johnson, and Chris Godfrey hoisted Parcells atop their shoulders, enabling Judy to spot her husband raising his right arm in triumph. In one of the happiest moments of her life, and certainly of his, Judy Parcells began to bawl.

  Lingering acrimony between the team’s co-owners prompted Tim Mara to skip the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation in the Giants locker room. His uncle and nemesis, Wellington Mara, stood, smiling, at a makeshift podium in the Giants locker room, where Pete Rozelle handed him the trophy. Mara, whose late father, Timothy J. Mara, had acquired the club in 1925 for $500, passed the glistening prize to Parcells.

  “Bill, take it away.”

  Beaming, Parcells raised it high with both hands.

  “We buried all the ghosts today,” he declared. “They’re all gone.”

  The head coach, all but fired in 1983 while burying both his parents, added, “Bill Parcells is one of the luckiest guys in the world. I don’t know why God has blessed me this way.”

  In the cramped locker room, Parcells gathered his giddy players into a circle, and asked them to hush for an important message. Lawrence Taylor moved to Parcells’s left, as if taking his spot for the national anthem, while Mickey Corcoran, in a red cap, smiled from behind his ex-player.

  Parcells raised his right arm, pointing his index finger toward the ceiling.

  “One thing, fellas. Listen to me. For the rest of your lives men, nobody can ever tell you that you couldn’t do it, ’cause you did it.”

  The head coach turned around and walked away, looking more defiant than gleeful. He left his players hollering in approval as the celebration resumed.

  The Giants boarded a bus headed to the Westin hotel in Costa Mesa for a private celebration in the hotel ballroom. During the one-hour ride, Parcells observed the scenery while reflecting on each career stop on his road to football nirvana.

  The partygoers at Big Blue’s bash included celebrities, long-retired Giants, and friends whom Parcells hadn’t seen in decades. On a night full of emotion, Charlie Conerly, quarterback of the franchise’s previous championship team in 1956, wept while congratulating Parcells.

  “I’m so happy for Simms. Hell, I’m so happy for all of you.”

  Parcells embraced Conerly,
one of his heroes as a teenager growing up in Hasbrouck Heights.

  The large Parcells contingent also attended the shindig. Jill spent part of the evening with Tom Cruise, a Syracuse native and Giants fan, taking pictures with the actor whose starring role in Top Gun, released the previous year, had turned him into a household name. Alcohol flowed, but Parcells made sure to consume only a few beers, knowing he had to attend a press conference the next morning.

  Heading home the following afternoon, the Giants boarded a DC-10 plane with flight attendants dressed in Giants uniforms. In fresh blue paint on the exterior of the aircraft’s fuselage, a sign read, “Super Bowl XXI Champion New York Giants.”

  12

  Only two days later the additional euphoria in New York, which had celebrated the Mets winning the World Series in October, was disrupted by stunning news: Bill Parcells was contemplating a switch to another team. Two years remained on Parcells’s four-year contract with the Giants, worth about $300,000 annually, yet he was open to the idea of becoming Atlanta’s head coach and general manager for a substantially richer deal. The revelation startled the Giants faithful and enraged General Manager George Young.

  Big Blue’s resurrection had eased the strain between Young and Parcells that dated back to the GM’s double-dealing with Parcells’s job in 1983. The two men had worked effectively together despite their different mind-sets. Whereas Young’s demeanor was even-keeled and his approach to decisions maddeningly methodical, Parcells was more mercurial and intuitive. His focus was also short-term: on the next game, or practice, and certainly no more than the following season. “Because that’s what a coach is charged to do,” he says. “George’s view of the franchise was more longrange. I was in survival mode.”

  The differences were also complementary. Despite Parcells’s complaints about Young’s conservative bent, the GM’s tendency to avoid risk made the head coach rethink some rash ideas. The private, secretive duo shared a football outlook that emphasized tough defense and a powerful running game. Young believed that forcing a prospective player on a head coach was counterproductive, so the GM empowered Parcells in the draft process and avoided interfering in day-to-day decisions. Young agreed to almost all of Parcells’s requests involving the team’s roster, particularly entering the pivotal season of 1984. The two adhered to Bucko Kilroy’s typing system for evaluating talent, although Young placed more value on smallish players like Joe Morris. Both men relished athletes capable of thriving in the Northeast’s elements during football season. Working together, Parcells and Young had transformed the New York Giants into a championship team.

  However, even the mutually beneficial relationship and a new Super Bowl ring were not enough to erase what Parcells called “the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in sports,” that coaches are as expendable as their players. Big Blue’s first championship in three decades provided him with rare leverage in the cutthroat business of sports, and a chance at job security. Mindful of the sobering lessons of 1983, Parcells felt the need to exploit that edge. But didn’t Parcells realize that his actions would infuriate the Giants GM? “Well, I figured they might,” Parcells replies, “but my feeling about that was: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

  Parcells expounds: “Now, you have to understand that I’m a product of my environment. After one year as head coach the Giants were planning to get rid of me. I’d been in the job four years when we won the Super Bowl, and quite frankly I still didn’t know what they thought of me. They did extend my contract after my second year, but it wasn’t going to financially benefit me for the long, long term. So here was some interest from another team talking about things that would have a long-term effect on my life.”

  Following a 7-8-1 season, the Falcons had dismissed Parcells’s friend, Dan Henning, as head coach. Dick Vermeil and Terry Donahue had declined the club’s interest, so Rankin Smith Jr., team president and son of the owner, intended to land the “genius coach” by tripling Parcells’s salary in a five-year deal. However Parcells’s contract required permission from the Giants for official talks, and George Young emphatically refused to grant Atlanta that clearance. Parcells’s agent, Robert Fraley, maintained unofficial contact with the Falcons, but formal discussions meant more leverage in any discussions with the Giants. So Fraley reached out to Pete Rozelle, requesting that the commissioner intervene. Citing league rules, Rozelle declined. He contacted the two owners involved, Wellington Mara and Rankin Smith Sr., to squash the matter.

  Blocked from negotiating with Atlanta, Parcells refocused on preparing the Giants for the 1987 season. He found himself craving another Super Bowl title instead of basking in its aftermath. Parcells recalls his mind-set. “It was, ‘I’d really like to do this again, so everybody knows it wasn’t an accident.’ It’s kind of a funny thing. You actually want to win more than before.”

  Indiana coach Bobby Knight, winner of two national titles, had warned his friend about this insatiable feeling. Parcells already understood the short-lasting pleasure of winning regular-season games, but capturing the Lombardi Trophy allowed him to identify with Knight’s sentiments on winning his first NCAA Tournament in 1976. Even though Indiana also became the sole Division I school to finish the season undefeated, Knight’s gratification quickly evaporated. He had tried to explain to Parcells how the desire for a second title felt even keener than the desire for the first. Knight experienced misery for the next four years, yet winning the 1981 NCAA Tournament only led to an obsession for a third national title.

  “That feeling takes guys like Dick Vermeil and me and just drives us into the ground,” says Parcells, alluding to the former Eagles head coach who retired in 1983 citing burnout two seasons after guiding his team to the Super Bowl. “It’s a nonstop gratification-seeking thing. If you’re not achieving right now, you’re no good.”

  In March 1987, two months after Parcells’s first Super Bowl title, Knight ended another drought by winning his third NCAA Tournament at Indiana. Around that time, Parcells wrote a letter to his returning players. It stressed the challenges ahead, and insisted on attendance for the voluntary off-season program. The letter concluded: “Do you think they are going to cancel next season? The moment is over.”

  Although the NFL didn’t quite cancel the 1987 season, a labor dispute hindered Parcells’s pursuit of a second consecutive championship. Owners rejected demands by the players union for free agency and a guaranteed percentage of league revenue, and the impasse stretched beyond the season’s first two games. On September 22, a couple of days after Dallas dropped Big Blue to 0-2, NFL players voted to strike. Unlike the 1982 dispute, the league decided to use replacements.

  Some clubs had prepared for that worst-case scenario by making extensive plans to work with alternative personnel. The Redskins had scouted bubble players experienced in a one-back offense similar to Joe Gibbs’s. The team had made such extensive arrangements that it had a surplus of talented replacement players. The Giants had taken the opposite approach, wanting to maintain unity coming off the franchise’s first Super Bowl title. George Young’s contingency plan had been to acquire a semipro club based in Connecticut, but only two of Big Blue’s new players had NFL experience. The roster was composed mostly of castoffs from the United States Football League and Canadian Football League. So in only a matter of days the defending Super Bowl champions, a blend of veteran stars and young talent, turned into one of the league’s worst teams.

  Adjusting to their new players, Ron Erhardt and Bill Belichick had to drastically streamline their playbooks. To minimize confusion on Parcells’s staff, the names of the substitutes were taped onto their helmets. Players were told to bring their own nameplates to their locker-room stalls. Phil Simms’s replacement, Jim Crocicchia, brought one that said, “Scab QB,” while his backup, Michael Busch, used “Scab QB II.” In the same vein spectators at the games, a fraction of the normal number, gave their unrecognizable teams nicknames like Buffalo “Counterfeit Bills,” Los An
geles “Shams,” Oakland “Masque-Raiders,” San Francisco “Phony-Niners,” and Washington “ScabSkins.”

  Like other labor disputes with much less money at stake, the situation caused flare-ups between striking workers and their replacements. At picket lines some athletes stood in the path of vehicles carrying strikebreakers, attempting to prevent their entry into the stadiums. In Kansas City, Chiefs tight end Paul Coffman and linebacker Dino Hackett waved unloaded shotguns outside of Arrowhead Stadium, and yelled jokingly, “We’re looking for scabs.”

  At an elementary school not far from Big Blue’s headquarters, more than twenty Giants players on strike underwent daily morning workouts. Relatively few union members, no more than 15 percent, crossed picket lines, but notable among them were 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, Cowboys tailback Tony Dorsett, and Seahawks wideout Steve Largent. And after two replacement games, both Giants losses, Lawrence Taylor joined his unfamiliar teammates. As he explained to reporters, “The Giants are losing games, and I’m losing $60,000 a week.” Backup quarterbacks Jeff Hostetler and Jeff Rutledge, along with rookie safety Adrian White, joined Taylor ahead of an October 19 game in Buffalo.

  Such decisions fractured the unity of Giants regulars, but Taylor’s celebrity, and his well-known maverick streak, muted criticism. The only player to publicly castigate Taylor was reserve linebacker Robbie Jones, who said, “If you follow Lawrence Taylor, you burn in hell.” Told of the remark, Taylor retorted, “I’d rather spend eternity in hell than five minutes with Robbie Jones.”