Every morning during horse-racing season, Parcells visited the Oklahoma Training Track, known as the barns. He relished standing near a guardrail watching the ponies gallop, often gathering intelligence from longtime friends who happened to be Hall of Fame trainers: D. Wayne Lukas, Shug McGaughey, and Nick Zito. “This is one of my favorite places to be, period. Out here in the morning,” Parcells says early one day, observing horses go by. “Now, there’s some sadness out here, too. One summer, I saw a horse right in front of this pole drop dead: heart attack. But I like it here more than almost anywhere.”
Lukas, galloping on a horse, parked it next to Parcells for a wide-ranging conversation about topics from ex-wives to Thoroughbreds. Parcells asked about one of the trainer’s horses. “Where’s my Sweet Sugar?”
Lukas replied, “Oh, he’s coming. He’s on the way.”
After several minutes, Nick Zito also stopped by to chat. The retired coach surprised his friend with conviction about a horse whose promise the trainer thought had been under wraps: “I’m betting that horse with both fists.”
Zito responded, “Who told you about that horse?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seriously. What did you hear?”
“Nobody told me anything.”
“Now, tell the truth.”
“I watched the horse! You think I can’t tell fast when I see fast?”
“You won’t help me out here.”
“I don’t know nothing.”
“I’m going to put you on trial.”
“On my mother’s grave, nobody told me.”
“Okay, if you say that, then forget I asked.”
For the third and perhaps final time, Bill Parcells was transitioning into life away from football. Without a secretary, he took on mundane tasks like heading to Kinko’s for photocopies, but everyday life didn’t allow him to escape celebrity. Parcells couldn’t go for long in public without someone asking for an autograph or cell phone photograph, sometimes during dinner at a restaurant; despite the intrusiveness of the requests, Parcells generally obliged. Strangers often walked up to his home to gawk, while others slowly drove by, scrutinizing the property. Although such behavior disturbed Kelly Mandart, her boyfriend, the licensed owner of a firearm, reacted with nonchalance.
During his Cowboys tenure, Bill Parcells saw his daughters perhaps once per year. Now that he had more free time as a retiree, Parcells aimed to redeem himself as best he could for the biggest regret of his personal life: being an absentee father. “I try to be a benevolent person; I try to help people,” says Parcells, known to many beneficiaries for his discreet charity. “But there are some things I’m not proud of. I could have been a better father. My kids are all productive members of society, and I taught them core values, but I wasn’t there for them when it counted. As a result, my relationship with my children is okay, but it’s not like that of a super-tight family.
“I feel a little guilty about the things that I just didn’t do—simple things. When I could have been there, many times I wasn’t. It was always something at my job that kept me away, but it didn’t keep other coaches away. So my family saw that other guys with the same job I had would do things that I wouldn’t. I didn’t pay enough attention to my children’s individuality. I was not as good a husband as I could have been. A lot of coaches did both of those things very well. I just didn’t. That’s my biggest regret.”
Parcells’s conspicuous absences began with the birth of his first child, Suzy, in October 1962 at a Wichita hospital: the Shockers’ junior linebacker was in Cincinnati for a game on Saturday, October 6. Before Parcells’s team lost to the Bearcats, 27–15, Judy telephoned her husband of eight months with the news that she had just given birth to a healthy girl.
Parcells returned to town with the Shockers in the early morning, intent on seeing his newborn right away. To help him overcome nursery access limitations, the team doctor drew a map of the hospital. Parcells used it to sneak into the maternity ward at 4:30 a.m., when he pressed a card against a window to identify himself, and a nurse obliged him by wheeling out Suzy Parcells to meet her proud daddy.
However, after Suzy was joined by sisters Dallas and Jill, Parcells rarely went out of his way for the girls. When Dallas attended elementary school he declined her request to appear at a father-daughter dance, which she found upsetting because he was around at the time. To blunt the pain from such rejections, and try to prevent any emotional scars, Judy constantly covered for her husband. She mainly blamed his job as a college coach, emphasizing the long hours. “I used to make excuses for him all the time when our kids were little,” Judy says, “because they’d be crying about him not doing this or that.”
After the girls grew old enough to understand the demands of their father’s job, they still remained baffled by his obsessiveness. Dallas was a teenager in 1980, during Parcells’s first NFL season as New England’s linebackers coach. One fall Saturday afternoon, Parcells packed up his suitcase, preparing to join the Patriots at a nearby hotel because the team was scheduled to play at Foxboro Stadium the next day. Dallas heard her father’s voice in the family room. She was surprised to walk in and find him alone, sitting in a recliner and talking out loud. Dallas watched her father for about two minutes before being noticed.
Snapping out of his trance, Parcells said, “What’s the problem?”
Dallas replied, “You were talking to yourself, Dad.”
“Oh yeah, I was just running through some plays.”
Dallas played on her high school softball and tennis teams, but Parcells’s attendance was so rare that she remembers the two times he showed up. One was at a softball game where, with Parcells watching, Dallas played poorly, trying hard to impress. “It was a big deal for him to be there,” she says. In 1980, Suzy graduated from Air Academy High in Colorado Springs. Judy and her parents flew west for the ceremonies, but Parcells decided against coming along because of the distance and Patriots minicamp.
Parcells did attend two of the girls’ high school graduations. In Dallas’s case, however, he soured her mood by making a snide comment about her appearance. After the criticism, he gave Dallas a rare hug, slightly ameliorating the damage. “I don’t think I was an overly warm parent,” Parcells concedes. “I think my kids knew that I loved them, but …”
His voice trails off.
Early in his Giants tenure, instead of heading home to spend time with his family, Parcells often decompressed by drinking beers at Manny’s restaurant in Moonachie, New Jersey. He began feeling regretful on the mornings after, remembering his father’s warning against alcoholism. So to de-stress, Parcells took to drinking more moderately.
During summer afternoons, he occasionally drove two hours from Giants headquarters to the Jersey Shore. He enjoyed sitting on a boardwalk bench, watching the waves while still thinking football, sometimes dozing for a couple hours. He gave his staff the phone number at a nearby pay phone in case of an emergency. Parcells’s appearances at the Jersey Shore during the NFL season surprised cops patrolling the boardwalk, who would often stop to talk. He ended up hiring one of them, Michael Murphy, for Giants security, based largely on an hour-long conversation.
Occasionally Parcells changed into his bathing suit and jumped into the Atlantic Ocean for a swim, bringing back fond memories of family outings as a child. Afterward, feeling rejuvenated, the Giants coach often returned to the Meadowlands, putting in a few more hours at work, instead of going home to spend time with his children. Like many of his players, Suzy, Dallas, and Jill feared incurring his wrath by saying or doing the wrong thing, so they gave Parcells his space while growing inured to his detachment. “It was uncomfortable being alone with him,” Jill says, “because he didn’t really know us that well. We just didn’t have much to talk about.”
Much of the time and energy Parcells spent with his children involved discipline or hounding them about their grades. Judy used her children’s fear of her husband to get them back in line whene
ver they misbehaved. So in that way, at least, even when Parcells failed to show up, his presence still loomed large.
Nonetheless, he missed all of his daughters’ college graduations. When Suzy obtained an Idaho State degree in 1984, her father used distance as the reason. But in 1988, he failed to attend Dallas’s commencement at East Carolina University, a short flight from New Jersey. Only a few months after Big Blue captured the 1991 Super Bowl, Jill graduated from Gettysburg College, and although Parcells had announced his retirement weeks before the ceremonies in Pennsylvania, his track record prompted Jill’s skepticism about his showing up. Parcells confirmed her low expectations, in a decision she describes as “hurtful.”
Suzy explains, “He had always stressed education. He drilled that into our heads forever. And then he didn’t go to any of our college graduations.”
With Judy’s constant assurances, though, Parcells’s children ultimately knew that he loved them. Asked if he had preferred to have a son, Parcells dismisses the notion. He stresses that all he ever wanted was healthy offspring. But Judy says, “I don’t think he knew what to do with girls.” She laughs.
John Lucas, who worked with Parcells in Dallas, had been an NBA head coach from 1992 to 1996 and from 2001 to 2003. Like Parcells, Lucas had mentored many of his players, a father-figure role that only increased after he retired to establish rehabilitation programs. A former drug addict, Lucas also gained renown as a professional life coach. In Parcells he saw a coach who was peerless in taking a paternal role with his players. When Parcells discovered that one of the Cowboys receivers was spread thin financially despite a multimillion-dollar salary, he got involved in a way more typical of a financial planner. The head coach designed a budget to drastically reduce the player’s monthly expenses, which had totaled $36,000 because of payments for a new home and luxury cars.
“If somebody was having family trouble or money issues, he knew about it,” says Lucas. “How he dealt with it was so different from most coaches. Bill had a gift. The curse involved sacrificing his own family relationships, but the blessing went to the hundreds of people he helped. It’s so ironic. I would tell his daughters today, ‘He was a father of the masses.’ ”
During the late 1990s, this irony was brought home to Suzy while she was watching a TV special about her father. After hearing a former NFL player describe Parcells’s strong parental influence on him, she wept.
Former defensive end Leonard Marshall sums up the familiar sentiment. “In a way, Bill fathered dozens of Giants players, and a good number of us turned out to be pretty good eggs ourselves.” Even former players who weren’t Parcells Guys cite his influence beyond football. The ex–Patriots linebacker Chris Slade says, “When it’s all said and done, people are going to look back and say, ‘Parcells meant a lot to me, and I didn’t even realize it until later on in life.’ That’s going to be his biggest legacy.
“He was a passionate guy. He cared about his players, and you learned probably more from Parcells than you learned from your father. I still sometimes hear his sayings in my head. I apply them to my everyday life, running my business, or even raising my children.”
Suzy was twenty-seven when she gave birth to her first child, Kyle. As she raised him, memories of Parcells’s neglect triggered anger. “A lot of stuff surfaced because of the way I parented my children,” explains Suzy, whose daughter, Kendall, came later. “It made me realize how much I missed out on from my dad as a child.”
Suzy waited until her late thirties to confront Parcells about the issue. When her father visited her home in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1999 as he and Judy were headed for divorce, Suzy felt compelled to scold him for his inattentiveness. He responded by conceding fault. “Yes, I know I should have done things differently. Yes, I know I wasn’t the best father. I should have been there for you, and I wasn’t. But I can’t change that now.”
In time Parcells had similar conversations with his other daughters, all of which proved cathartic. Dallas, who had her only child, Mia, in 2005 after several miscarriages, stresses that her relationship with Parcells has significantly improved during his NFL retirement.
Jill appreciates certain aspects of having grown up as the daughter of a famous NFL coach, perks like Giants season tickets and substantial help with purchasing an apartment in lower Manhattan. “In many ways we were fortunate as kids,” she says, “especially me, because I was there during the good days. And my parents were very generous with us.”
But Jill still envies the relationships some of her friends have with their fathers. She adds about Parcells, “He’s done a lot of disappointing things, but he’s my dad. You try to put them in the past.”
After Parcells retired from the Cowboys, his daughters were among his first sleepover guests at Saratoga Springs during the summer. He also spent quality time with his grandchildren: taking Kyle, seventeen, golfing and Kendall, thirteen, to ride horses with D. Wayne Lukas at the barns. And, of course, they all watched the races from Parcells’s box.
During one long conversation with Jill, Parcells put his extraordinary memory to good use. “How are your girlfriends Amy and Stephanie? How’s Robin? How many kids does she have now?” The questions stunned his youngest daughter.
Jill explains, “I don’t think my dad had ever asked me how my girlfriends were. I was so excited to find out that he cared about something other than my job, or how much money I had in the bank. He was getting personal, which he’d never really been before.”
Parcells adds of his new, late-life approach, “I wish I had done more. I could have been more of a caring father. I didn’t take enough time to get to know them. What’s done is done. You can’t go back. I just try to do what I can now, as best I can.”
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While enjoying retirement, Bill Parcells maintained his mentoring role, which extended beyond football. On July 17, 2007, Nets head coach Lawrence Frank visited him in Saratoga Springs. Frank had originally met Parcells as a student manager for Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers. From 1989 to 1992, Frank chauffeured Parcells during the coach’s visits each March to Bloomington while he was in the area for the Indianapolis combine. As a gesture of appreciation, Parcells gave Frank an open invitation to Giants training camp. The Indiana University student showed up one summer with his buddy and future NBA agent Andrew Miller. After graduating in 1992, Frank joined Marquette’s basketball team as an assistant. His zeal helped spur his swift rise in the profession.
Frank earned the Nets’ top job in 2004, and three years later he contacted Parcells, asking for time to discuss being a head coach. Parcells obliged with an invitation to Saratoga Springs, thrilling the thirty-six-year-old. Throughout the years Parcells had entertained similar requests from NBA coaches like John Calipari, Mike Fratello, and Jeff Van Gundy, and had given considerable time to disciples of his pal Bobby Knight.
At the get-together in Saratoga Springs, Frank impressed Parcells with his passion, a requirement for maintaining such access. Raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, Frank also connected with Parcells by affirming the timeless greatness of Bischoff’s ice-cream parlor, located in his hometown. The Jersey-bred coaches smiled at each other knowingly as they described their favorite flavors.
The sit-down at a restaurant stretched for a few hours. Near the end of it, Parcells gave Frank permission to call anytime for more guidance, and volunteered to watch some Nets games to enhance his feedback. “He’s one of the most generous people in sharing insight that I’ve ever met,” says Frank, who decorated the Nets locker room with Parcells’s sayings. “It’s not like we go back a long way. That just shows you the generosity of the guy’s spirit.”
The rookie NBA head coach was joining the ranks of Parcells acolytes who regularly used him as a soundboard. The inquiries from NFL coaches spiked in late July, near the start of training camps. Perhaps the most frequent caller in the summer of 2007 was Todd Haley, who’d been hired as offensive coordinator of the Arizona Cardinals. Familiar voices included not just young d
isciples like Haley and Sean Payton but also veterans like Chiefs defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel and new Giants quarterbacks coach Chris Palmer. Personnel executives like Mike Tannenbaum also regularly dialed the NFL oracle.
Sean Payton made a special request, imploring Parcells to spend time at Saints training camp in Jackson, Mississippi, as an extra pair of eyes. Payton remembered that each Cowboys season, Parcells had recruited an outsider with a high football IQ to help evaluate the team’s players. His close friend Ron Wolf, who had retired as Packers GM in 2001, had played the role multiple times. Parcells declined Payton’s request in order to avoid slighting another disciple with much longer ties. Tom Coughlin had also sought his mentor’s presence at Giants camp.
Todd Haley’s switch from Dallas to the Cardinals’ staff only added to the team’s strong connections to Parcells. They included running-backs coach Maurice Carthon and offensive quality control assistant Dedric Ward, a former Jets and Cowboys wideout under Parcells. Even Cardinals head coach Ken Whisenhunt was indirectly linked to Parcells, having been Gang Green’s special-teams coordinator under Al Groh in 2000. Sensitive about playing favorites, Parcells limited his help to telephone conversations and rare get-togethers in Saratoga Springs.
A major change in the NFL’s media policy illustrated Parcells’s influence. For most of his head-coaching career, Parcells had banned his assistants from speaking to reporters, seeking to mute self-promotion and eliminate contradictory public viewpoints. Sean Payton, who would coach for three years in Dallas virtually without being quoted, was the latest acolyte to follow suit with his own team. Greg Aiello, the NFL’s public relations chief, concluded that too many head coaches had instituted Parcells’s approach, creating an access problem around the league. So to enter the 2007 season, the NFL required media availability of assistant coaches at least once per week.
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