“Do-everything guy. I would have loved to have him on my team. Real football player.”
MIKE NELMS, PUNT RETURNER
Washington Redskins (1980–84)
“Tough as they come. Great hands and hard to tackle.”
ROD SMITH, WIDE RECEIVER
Denver Broncos (1994–2007)
“Sneaky, productive, durable. Steady performer.”
JOE WASHINGTON, RUNNING BACK
San Diego Chargers (1976–77), Baltimore Colts (1978–80), Washington Redskins (1981–84), Atlanta Falcons (1985)
“Extremely smart, versatile back who could also catch and score. Super-elusive.”
LIONEL WASHINGTON, CORNERBACK
St. Louis Cardinals (1983–86), Los Angeles Raiders (1987–94), Denver Broncos (1995–96), Oakland Raiders (1997)
“Crafty, tall corner with good skills to disrupt wide receivers.”
JAMES WILDER, RUNNING BACK
Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1981–89), Washington Redskins (1990), Detroit Lions (1990)
“Powerful, bruising runner who could punish a defense.”
Note on Sources and Book Website
Over the course of six years, Bill Parcells gave me approximately ninety interviews, about a third in person and the rest over the telephone. Dozens of these sessions took place between 2008 and 2010, when Bill was a Miami Dolphins executive, but the bulk of Q&As occurred while he was retired from the National Football League. I strove to get inside Bill’s head so that Parcells would evince the intimate, personal voice of a memoir despite being written in the third person.
Our underlying goal was to chronicle the story of football over five decades, with mini-portraits of key characters, from Woody Hayes to Bill Walsh to Curtis Martin and more. For the sake of nuance and balance in the collaborative biography (or third-person memoir), I also interviewed more than one hundred people, including some of Bill Parcells’s detractors.
No book about an NFL coach can pretend to be authoritative without the previous contributions of writers and journalists. So, considering the scope of this project, I mined fifty-six books.
Michael MacCambridge’s America’s Game and David Harris’s The League offered the most breadth on NFL history. Parcells’s multiple first-person books laid a foundation for his life through 1999. Bill Gutmans’s Parcells painted the most comprehensive portrayal of Bill up until his Jets tenure, although being an unauthorized biography, it lacked his voice. Jerry Izenberg’s No Medals for Trying revealed the inner workings of Parcells’s Giants over a one-week period in November 1989. And Gerald Ezkenazi’s Gang Green gave an informative take on Jets history, including the Parcells era.
Two books were indispensable in helping explain the complicated relationship between Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells: David Halberstam’s Education of a Coach and Michael Holley’s Patriot Reign, which also delved into Big Bill’s divorce from New England’s owner Robert Kraft.
The beat reporters who covered the Giants, Patriots, Jets, Cowboys, and Dolphins during Parcells’s tenures at each of those franchises, between 1980 and 2010, provided the “first draft of history” for his NFL career.
Parcells aimed to retell the epic games involving Bill with vividness and immediacy while capturing their sights, sounds, and perhaps smells. So we relied on some of the footage brilliantly produced by NFL Films.
A detailed breakdown of sources, including the magazines, newspapers, video, and even audio recordings, is by itself the equivalent of a slim book. It can be found on the official Parcells website, parcellsbook.com. Bonus content, with exclusive material, is also available.
—NUNYO DEMASIO
Parcells Page 72
