The Giants controlled the clock for 40:33, a Super Bowl record, compared to only 19:27 for Buffalo, yet they committed zero turnovers. O. J. Anderson gained 102 yards on 21 carries to earn Super Bowl MVP; the Florida native beat out Jeff Hostetler, who completed 20 of 32 passes for 222 yards, concluding the postseason without throwing an interception.
Thurman Thomas accumulated an impressive 135 rushing yards and 55 receiving yards, but part of the tailback’s production stemmed from Big Blue’s acquiescence. Belichick’s defense had permitted only 35 total points over three postseason games. By repeatedly dominating time of possession, Big Blue’s offense helped its defense become perhaps the best-rested unit in playoff history. And Belichick, already viewed as a future head coach, bolstered his reputation as a brilliant tactician. His game plan would end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
At the presentation of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, Tim Mara, the Giants co-owner, declared, “Bill Parcells is the best coach the Giants have ever had.” Standing in front of new NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and to the right of GM George Young, the triumphant head coach raised the Lombardi Trophy with his right hand, sweater sleeves rolled down, as photographers snapped pictures.
After accepting the trophy Parcells was whisked to a makeshift podium inside a tent for a media session. Will McDonough, a prominent football writer for the Boston Globe and a friend of Parcells since his first NFL job in 1980, stood a couple of feet away. As journalists hustled in and positioned themselves for the post–Super Bowl Q&A, Parcells leaned over to McDonough and said two words.
“Power football!”
Once the press conference started, Parcells expounded. “They call us predictable and conservative, but I know one thing, having coached this game a long time: power wins football games. Power wins football games. It’s not always the fanciest way, but it can win games.”
A reporter asked if the outcome vindicated Big Blue’s style of play. Parcells scoffed, “It’s always been vindicated. It’s that new stuff that has something to prove.”
Compared to new offensive trends like the run-and-shoot and no-huddle, Parcells’s grinding approach looked retro. Like Vince Lombardi decades before, Parcells relished big, powerful players on both sides of the ball. He favored bruising tailbacks running behind a massive offensive line. On defense, he concentrated on stuffing the run with beefy, athletic bodies. And whenever receivers caught passes, the head coach preferred them funneled to hulking linebackers who meted out punishment. Even his defensive backs weighed at least 200 pounds. In essence, Parcells wanted his big players to beat up the opponent’s smaller players. After Super Bowl XXV, Bills wideout Andre Reed, who had suffered bruises all over his body, conceded that no team had ever hit him so hard. Linebacker Shane Conlan expressed amazement at his face mask breaking as he tried to tackle O. J. Anderson.
Power epitomized Parcells’s mind-set in football, if not life. During the playoffs, speculation flared about his possible retirement, which he had occasionally broached, or his departure to another team as a GM and coach. One scenario reportedly involved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Parcells had one more year left on a contract averaging $800,000, and the Giants intended to offer him a richer extension. But given his flirtation with the Atlanta Falcons after Super Bowl XXI, the new reports were taken seriously. So during the post–Super Bowl Q&A, Parcells’s future with the Giants naturally came up.
He deflected the questions. “The last time we won one of these games, I was in the center of a little controversy. And it didn’t allow the team’s ownership or George Young to enjoy the victory the way they should have. They are going to be able to enjoy this one.”
Parcells returned to the Giants locker room, where players were pouring champagne on each other, shouting to be heard over the din. One of the first players to greet Parcells was Lawrence Taylor. As the coach and linebacker hugged, Taylor, caught up in the moment, kissed him on the lips. Later, Parcells’s security chief and ex–Army player, Steve Yarnell, pecked him on the cheek.
Pepper Johnson led a group of players to Jeff Hostetler’s locker. As the quarterback changed into his dress clothes, his teammates chanted, “You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t do it.”
Hostetler smiled at the sarcastic refrain.
When the locker room finally emptied a few hours later, Jim Steeg, an NFL executive whose duties included Super Bowl logistics, walked through one final time. To his astonishment Steeg found the Lombardi Trophy glistening on a table, surrounded by towels and champagne glasses. The special-events guru placed it in his car trunk before phoning George Young at his hotel to let him know that the NFL’s crown jewel had been left behind.
On the second and third floors of their hotel, the Giants’ giddy celebration continued into the night. Parcells awoke the next morning on less than an hour’s sleep to attend a follow-up press conference for the winning coach. He was asked to describe the feeling of triumphing in the only Super Bowl decided by a point. Grinning, Parcells responded, “Nothing beats winning. Nothing.”
He added, “It’s like all the Christmas mornings you’ve ever had wrapped into one.”
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Beyond Tom Coughlin’s departure for Boston College, Parcells found himself facing other key losses to his staff. After seven seasons overseeing running backs, Ray Handley, forty-six, informed the organization of his plans to attend law school at George Washington University. And even before the defense’s impressive postseason, Bill Belichick was considered a leading candidate for head coach of the Browns. Pundits and Giants fans viewed Belichick as heir apparent to Parcells, assuming the defensive coordinator stayed in New York for at least another year. But George Young showed no interest in having Belichick wait out his boss. Instead, the GM disparaged Belichick’s potential as a head coach to fellow executives around the league. Young’s doubts about Belichick’s leadership, particularly his communication skills, made it unlikely that Parcells’s lieutenant would ever rise to Big Blue’s top job.
Two weeks after Super Bowl XXV, Bill Belichick was interviewed by the Buccaneers and Browns. Tampa Bay needed a successor to Ray Perkins, whom they had dismissed late in the 1990 season while promoting his offensive coordinator Richard Williamson. After twelve seasons as a Giants assistant, one of the longest tenures in franchise history, Belichick accepted Cleveland’s offer. At thirty-eight, he became the NFL’s youngest head coach, seizing the distinction from the Raiders’ Art Shell, forty-four, who also happened to be the league’s only black head coach.
In late February, shortly after the loss of Belichick, the Giants also experienced a major shakeup in the team’s ownership. After more than a decade of acrimony between Wellington Mara and his nephew, Tim Mara sold the 50 percent share of the franchise held by him, his sister, and their mother. New co-owner Bob Tisch, billionaire boss of Loews Corporation, paid more than $70 million for half the team. Despite Parcells’s friendly relationship with Wellington Mara, the head coach was much closer to Wellington’s nephew, who was now suddenly gone.
The Giants planned to negotiate an extension of Parcells’s contract, possibly three years, for north of $1 million annually. Such an agreement would place him among the NFL’s highest-paid head coaches, in a class with Miami’s Don Shula and Washington’s Joe Gibbs. But with NFL owners scheduled to vote on approving Tisch’s co-ownership in mid-March, the Giants decided to put Parcells’s negotiations on hold.
Having contemplated quitting the previous two seasons, Parcells used the time to mull his aspiration of becoming a GM and head coach elsewhere. He consulted his friend Al Davis, who had once held the dual role. The Raiders boss told Parcells he would need a top scout and someone skilled at negotiating player contracts. Robert Fraley, Parcells’s Orlando-based agent, believed that Hugh Culverhouse, owner of the woebegone Tampa Bay Bucs, would make an exorbitant offer for Parcells that would include personnel authority. In the meantime, Fraley arranged for his client to audition as an NBC analyst, which could provide
him with interim employment.
Parcells compartmentalized, focusing on his duties as head coach by preparing for April’s draft. Before Parcells and Young left for the Indianapolis scouting combine, they discussed the staff, which Parcells realigned by adding two new coaches and promoting three. Each of his assistants received a two-year contract, a possible sign that Parcells intended to return.
Linebackers coach Al Groh, forty-six, inherited Belichick’s title of defensive coordinator, just as Parcells had envisioned when he hired Groh in 1989. The promotion helped stave off Belichick, who wanted Groh to join him in Cleveland. After being persuaded to delay law school, Ray Handley was named offensive coordinator. Groh and Handley maintained their duties while overseeing key parts of their units: linebackers and running backs. Handley’s predecessor, Ron Erhardt, fifty-nine, was elevated to assistant head coach, where he remained an offensive guru with added duties involving defense and special teams.
Parcells also hired Jim Fassel, forty-one, as quarterbacks coach, and Fred Bruney, fifty-nine, as secondary coach. Fassel had been head coach at the University of Utah, and before that, from 1979 to 1983, during John Elway’s stint at Stanford, Fassel coached the star quarterback on the same staff as Ray Handley. Bruney had been defensive coordinator for the Bucs. Parcells hired him to ease Al Groh’s burden by adding an experienced coach to Belichick’s former bailiwick, defensive backs.
Amid all the changes Parcells was making, his own future remained murky. After the NFL approved Tisch’s ownership stake in mid-March, the new co-owner mentioned the team’s plans to soon discuss reworking Parcells’s contract. But Parcells surprised the Giants by asking his boss, George Young, to hold off on any talks.
“I don’t really know what I want to do.”
The statement was curious, if not ominous, from the team’s point of view, but one undisclosed element involved Parcells’s health. A daily smoker, he publicly lamented his losing battle of the bulge and high cholesterol level. Similar issues that season had caused Broncos head coach Dan Reeves to undergo an angioplasty, a procedure that mechanically widens blood vessels to the heart that are getting clogged by fatty substances. Parcells had suffered from fainting spells and arrhythmia, an abnormal rhythm of the heartbeat, which he attributed to the stress of his job. Mike Ditka’s heart attack at age forty-nine during the 1988 season weighed on Parcells’s mind, so after Super Bowl XXV, Bill took a few months to assess his condition. He underwent cardiac stress tests, but when the results didn’t reveal anything alarming, doctors concluded that nothing significant was amiss.
However, Parcells, with a former athlete’s awareness of his own body, was convinced otherwise. During his daily workouts he occasionally became light-headed, and his heart pounded in an unusual manner. “It felt like it was going right through my chest,” he says.
In late April, Parcells participated in the NFL draft and conducted rookie minicamp soon after. But health still dominated his concerns along with subjects like his unresolved contract extension, a new team owner, and his goal of running a team one day. Nearly four months after the Super Bowl, Parcells still vacillated about remaining in New York.
During the second weekend in May he finally decided to quit. A few days later, just a week before veterans’ minicamp, he visited Young’s office to convey his decision without disclosing a specific reason. The stunning news broke in an article written by the Boston Globe’s Will McDonough. That same day, May 15, the team held a press conference. In trying to explain his decision to reporters, Parcells said several times, “I just felt it was time.”
He asserted that health didn’t factor into his decision, and described any such speculation as “ludicrous.” As proof Parcells cited his recent doctor’s visit, claiming a clean bill of health. With Parcells’s resignation, the Giants announced that Ray Handley would become Big Blue’s fourteenth head coach, only one season removed from overseeing running backs. Ron Erhardt had seemed like a natural option given his head coaching experience, but George Young identified with Handley’s cerebral nature.
Parcells says, “Far in advance of all this, I asked George: ‘You want me to encourage Belichick to stay here rather than go to Cleveland?’ He said, ‘No.’ Before that, I asked, ‘Do you want me to encourage Coughlin to stay here?’ He said, ‘No.’ He already had his mind made up about who the coach was going to be: Ray Handley.
“Later on, when that didn’t work out, he intimated to the media that had he known that I was going to step down, he would have named Coughlin the head coach. That’s not true. But you have to understand that George was a former schoolteacher. He was an intellectual, like Ray Handley. Ray was very bright. That’s who George wanted.”
In late May 1991, Parcells felt compelled to undergo another physical. This time, doctors were not so sanguine. Something might be wrong, they told Parcells, although they couldn’t pinpoint the problem. Their first recommendation involved the bad habit that Ida Parcells had long implored her son to end: smoking. Showing tremendous willpower, he never lit another cigarette for the rest of his life. Abstaining from nicotine, however, made no difference to the occasional dizzy spells, or explosive heart fluttering.
In late summer, Parcells joined NBC as an NFL analyst and studio host. He signed a three-year deal worth $750,000, and declared that coaching now lay in his rearview mirror. Parcells enjoyed his TV gig, and expressed a desire to become good at it, but reduced stress from the career switch didn’t improve his health issues. During broadcasts he endured abnormal heartbeats in the booth, so in early December, Parcells underwent yet another examination, this time by a cardiologist in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Michael Kesselbrenner solved the mystery: Parcells’s left anterior descending artery, better known as the widow maker, was experiencing blockage.
Coronary artery disease is still the leading cause of death in the United States. For single-vessel blockage, like Parcells’s, doctors prefer to avoid surgery. Kesselbrenner recommended angioplasty, the same procedure Reeves underwent. During the procedure, Kesselbrenner inserted a tube attached to a deflated balloon into Parcells’s artery. Then the tiny balloon was inflated, compressing the fatty deposits and widening the artery, before being withdrawn. A couple of days later, Parcells was running painlessly for the first time in recent memory. And with his health concerns set aside, Parcells found himself missing his old job.
By the end of the NFL regular season, ten coaches had been dismissed, the most in some dozen years. The casualties included Richard Williamson of the floundering franchise linked to Parcells’s future. And the Buccaneers were preparing an offer to show just how much they wanted him. On Monday, December 23, one day after Tampa Bay finished 3-13, owner Hugh Culverhouse flew in his private plane to Newark Airport before riding in a limousine to Teterboro Airport for a clandestine meeting with Bill Parcells.
The two discussed Parcells’s return to the NFL with total control of the Bucs. Culverhouse, seventy-two, felt a sense of urgency because Parcells had another suitor. Green Bay had fired head coach Lindy Infante after a 4-12 season, and Packers GM Ron Wolf had expressed interest in Parcells, his longtime friend. When Culverhouse broached the subject of Green Bay, Parcells stressed his desire to join the Bucs. So for several hours the two discussed what it would take.
During the following twenty-four hours, Parcells grilled Ray Perkins, recently removed from a 19-41 tenure in Tampa Bay. Even before meeting Culverhouse, Parcells had carefully researched the franchise, which had been a black hole for coaches since its inception in 1976, and one of the worst teams in league history. The Bucs were coming off nine consecutive losing seasons. Culverhouse was among the league’s most influential owners, serving on several of its executive committees, but the former tax attorney and real-estate investor was infamous for frugality that placed profitability before winning.
The day after meeting Culverhouse, Parcells listed thirty-eight requirements in order for him to become head coach and director of football operations. He sent the let
ter by overnight mail to Culverhouse, who phoned the free-agent coach to discuss each point. One key matter involved replacing GM Phil Krueger with someone more experienced and well-regarded: former Bears and Lions executive Jerry Vainisi, the younger brother of Jack, Green Bay’s GM under Lombardi.
In stark contrast to his reputation for penny-pinching, Culverhouse obliged Parcells on virtually every count, including a five-year, $6.5 million deal that would make Parcells the league’s highest-paid coach. Parcells’s attorney had approved the contract for his client’s signature, so Parcells told Culverhouse that he intended to ink it, but first needed to touch base with the other team that had expressed interest in him, the Green Bay Packers.
Two days later, on December 28, Culverhouse telephoned Parcells to coordinate the announcement of the team’s new hire, but to the owner’s surprise and dismay, Parcells no longer wanted to join Tampa Bay. Embarrassed, Culverhouse immediately called for a morning press conference at Bucs headquarters. ESPN broadcast it live, expecting Parcells to be announced as Tampa Bay’s new coach. Instead, Culverhouse informed the media of Parcells’s last-minute decision. “We feel like we’ve been jilted at the altar,” he said, waving the thirty-eight-point document, which included a budget for Parcells’s staff ($2.5 million), country-club membership, automobile use, and the types of weights (free versus cable) to be installed at the practice facility.
Hours later Parcells offered a more nuanced version of the development on NFL Live, the NBC pregame show where he worked on a crew that included Bob Costas, O. J. Simpson, and Will McDonough. Parcells conceded that both sides had agreed on the list, but the ex-coach added that he had never quite committed himself. “I thought it may be too big a job—too many hats to wear at this time in professional football. There was just something about it in the end that didn’t feel right.”
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