by Mark Bowden
To Buddy this was all a crock. He was a football coach, plain and simple. He answered to no higher calling than winning. He wasn’t molding young men; he was looking for football players, mean, fast, strong, smart ones. Did he care that Jerome Brown had been apprehended by the law once or twice in college for toting serious automatic weaponry? Did he care that paternity suits were piling up in local courtrooms in New Jersey naming his players? Did he care that his married players were flying bimbos all over the country to rendezvous with them at hotels when the team was on the road? Buddy’s measure of his players began and ended on the gridiron. In his experience, certain off-field excesses often went along with greatness. And if success was important enough to obscure a man’s flaws, no collection of virtues was sufficient to offset failure. Failure was the worst character flaw.
Take the case of Dabby Dawson. A short, solid running back from Wichita, Kansas, Dawson was one of the scores of talented football players overlooked in the ’90 draft. At the University of Wyoming, he had shattered school records. He was a well-spoken, polite, determined kid, who, after playing schoolboy football with future Lions allpro Barry Sanders, had prepped for two years in junior college before getting his chance to enroll at Wyoming. Dawson knew he had almost no chance of sticking with the Eagles that summer, but he was out there in the broiling August heat, giving it his all.
He lasted only two days. In a routine seven-on-seven drill, Dawson and quarterback Jim McMahon bungled a handoff, and the next thing the running back knew he was being led off the field by Eagles personnel director Joe Woolley. Ordinarily, when players in training camp are cut from the team, Woolley (in team parlance, “the Turk,” bearer of the broad, curved sword) knocks on their door early in the morning, and they are gone before the team suits up for practice. While it makes for more than a few sleepless nights among the rookies in the dorm, the procedure is swift and humane. But in Dawson’s case, Buddy wanted to make an example. So he had him led right off the practice field in his pads.
“That got our attention,” said Fred Barnett, a rookie draft pick on the field that day. “We’d never seen a coach do that before, humiliate a guy like that.”
After practice, Buddy had this chuckling explanation for the Pack: “We had to git rid of number thirty-nine; he’s lackin’ in some stomach muscles. This stuff is contagious. We have to git him out before it rubs off on other guys.”
In other words, Dawson was a coward.
“He ran the ball like a hen—you know, two steps and then squat,” explained Woolley, getting in the spirit. “Didn’t want to run into people.”
The kid never got this or any other explanation. By the time practice was over, Dawson was at Philadelphia International waiting for a flight back to Wichita, wondering what went wrong. He was crushed. On the play before he was given the boot, he hadn’t even gotten the ball. The way he saw it, he had never even had a chance!
Maybe they were right about Dawson, thought Harry. After all, both Buddy and Joe were time-tested experts at judging talent. But why publicly embarrass the young man? And then gloat about it to the Pack? It was unseemly, and neither Norman nor Harry liked it. Stories like that traveled fast in the NFL and tarnished the image of the team and the league. Harry complained to Buddy about it, but the coach wasn’t backing down. Dabby Dawson had failed Buddy’s test, and that alone made the kid not just inadequate, but somehow despicable.
“I didn’t want him around here anymore,” Buddy said. “Because he made me sick, and he made the other people around here sick.”
To Buddy, it was simple truth. He disdained the euphemisms commonly employed by coaches—”He’s a good kid, just got caught up in the numbers game.” That was the kind of line handed out by the Corporate Coach.
“They make me want to vomit,” Buddy said.
Buddy’s measure of a football player had nothing to do with decency or honesty or any other of the conventional virtues. Niceness was particularly disdained. Football players weren’t supposed to be nice. “I’ve got two nice kids at home,” he once said, referring to the younger two of his three sons, “but I wouldn’t want ‘em playing for me.” Once, after a spring session with a new crop of hopeful rookies, Buddy was pulled aside by a young player and then came walking off the field shaking his head, laughing to himself with disbelief.
“Handed out Eagles caps to ‘em all today,” he explained. “Kid just wanted to thank me for the hat.”
Something about this tickled him so much he had to turn away and take a deep breath to stop laughing.
“What a nice kid,” he said, not in an approving tone, but expressing mild scorn, even sadness, as if to say, Kid don’t have a prayer.
Harry endured it. He even endured Buddy’s overt contempt. He knew that the coach had his Pack and most of the public convinced that he, Harry Gamble, was a certifiable football ignoramus, toady for the Guy in France. But Harry was patient and humble to a fault. He could tolerate Buddy’s abuse, he could even accept the whole dynamic of Us versus Them, so long as it paid dividends on the field. It wasn’t exactly a bargain with the devil, but sometimes that’s what it felt like. Harry felt honor-bound, if not to Buddy himself, then to their agreement. He was even willing to put his own hide on the line to save Buddy’s. Which happened about once a year.
One of the worst times was when the Players Association went on strike in ’87, and the League decided to make a travesty of the Game by insisting on playing out the schedule without the players. They would try to lure players to break ranks and cross the picket lines and, failing that, hastily recruit NFL wanna-bes off the streets to play. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so pathetic. Buddy’s immediate response was to tell his boys either to stay or walk, but to stick together.
It was good advice, the advice of a coach working hard to assemble a team and mindful of how the stresses of an extended labor action might tear it apart. It was also advice guaranteed to make the players’ strike against the Eagles 100 percent effective, because anyone close to an NFL locker room knew that a vast majority of players supported the strike—which challenged the detested free-agency system, the League’s way of preventing players from selling their talents to the highest bidder. The League’s whole strategy was to undermine team unity. They were counting on individual players’ (a selfish lot used to living week to week on a relatively large paycheck) breaking ranks. Buddy’s advice made that a lot more difficult for Norman’s team, because breaking ranks for an Eagle now meant betraying, not some loose coalition of pro players trying to forge a union, but their own friends and teammates and, more important, Coach. Buddy’s advice effectively signed on his entire roster for the duration. Of course, he hadn’t asked for Harry’s and Norman’s guidance on this matter, and by the time the guys upstairs found out, their team, down to the last man, was on the picket line.
And what could Norman do? He’d propped the fat Okie on such a high pedestal it was near impossible to get him off. And Buddy’s move just made him more popular in a union town like Philadelphia, where striking players holding out for the chance to push their sixfigure contracts into seven figures were joined by throngs of meaty Teamsters, pipe fitters, and roofers, men who wouldn’t make in their lifetimes what some of the players were making in one season.
Buddy didn’t stop there. Abruptly teamless, the club began hastily assembling forty young men willing to brave the picket lines in order to wear Eagles uniforms for a game against the ersatz Bears five days hence. While Joe Woolley and Harry’s assistant, George Azar, were rounding up bodies from the shards of that summer’s training camp, Norman was predicting a long strike.
“If we gave the players the right to select the team they desired to play for, the balance we have created over the years in making football the number-one sport in the United States would absolutely be jeopardized,” he told the Pack. “So, much as I hate to say it, the issue of free agency is something that we’re not prepared to surrender on.”
Breakin
g the strike meant fielding scab teams every Sunday and, even if it really wasn’t particularly good football, insisting that it was to the suckers still watching. The League figured most fans couldn’t tell the difference anyway. The idea was to package the junker like a Rolls (right up a car dealer’s alley, right?).
“Our strike players are individuals who have extensive backgrounds in football,” Norm announced. “A number of them, or all of them, were in camp, either our camp or someone else’s camp—we’ll have a good product.”
Buddy, to his credit, refused to play used-car salesman.
“We might have the worst bunch of guys together we’ve ever seen,” he said in his mandated weekly telephone hookup with the visiting team’s Pack, in this case Buddy’s old Chicago group. Yukking it up with his old pals, Buddy couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know what anybody else has, but I’d trade mine with anybody’s, sight unseen.”
Out in the parking lot before Sunday’s game, Norman was appalled. The savior of Philadelphia’s franchise, the white knight, had to run a gauntlet of abuse to enter the stadium. He later compared the scene outside the Vet to “hooliganism and mobsterism.”
“The only thing missing today in Philadelphia was the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. The ingratitude of this city! The effrontery!
Buddy’s team lost 35-3, and meeting afterward with the Pack at the obligatory postgame press conference, his tongue was firmly in cheek: “I think that, no question about it, we got soundly outcoached in every phase of the game,” he said, with a wink. “The Bears staff did a super job, and Ditka, they outcoached the heck out of us. Our guys tried hard. They gave it great effort. It’s just we couldn’t make any plays on defense, and our offense had trouble making plays,” which just about covered it.
The scab team lost to Dallas the following week, and after they dropped their third and final game against Green Bay, Norman paid a visit to the locker room. He kicked a stool, interrupting a postgame prayer session, apologized to the strike players for Buddy’s attitude, and, at least according to some of the soon-to-be ex-Eagles in attendance, referred to the next St. Vince as an “asshole.” Norm denied calling Buddy a bad name, but was pissed enough to write out in longhand a diatribe against the local Pack and his onetime hometown. Cooler heads (Harry and Irma) prevailed on him to tone it down.
As angry as Norman was at Buddy when the strike fizzled (it was a big victory for the owners) the coach’s behavior had endeared him to his players and Philly fans. In the first months after taking over the team, Buddy had bruised a lot of player egos. Reverend Reggie, for instance, considered the new coach arrogant and even a little stupid. But after the strike, players warmly embraced the squat tyrant. He had stood by them at personal risk through the ordeal. Norman, of course, had accomplished just the opposite. The strike hastened a process Buddy already had under way: the Eagles had become his team, and no one else’s.
Still, he wasn’t finished. When the Eagles finished that season with seven wins and eight losses (three of them courtesy of the strike games), and fell short of the postseason play-offs for the sixth straight year, Buddy preempted any effort to assign blame by opening his annual postmortem press conference with some theater.
Calling Woolley to the podium, with the cameras rolling and the Pack hanging on every word, he presented the team’s laconic personnel director with two ridiculously oversized brass rings.
“We went to a lot of expense, the coaching staff and equipment people and trainers all went together, and put in a lot of money and bought Joe and George [Azar] a couple of scab rings for all they did for us to get that scab personnel.”
In other words: Y’all don’t blame me.
Woolley, a big, easygoing Arkansan with a healthy sense of humor and acres of self-confidence, shrugged the whole thing off, and if he had been the only target of Buddy’s darts the whole thing would have ended there. But by singling out Azar, Buddy had indirectly insulted Harry.
George Azar had been Harry’s shadow for more than twenty years. Harry had hired him in ’65 when he was coaching at Lafayette, taken George with him to Penn, and, after being named Eagles general manager, brought George in as his assistant. He was a short, muscular man (he had been a state wrestling champion as a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, schoolboy) with a graying crew cut, and nobody was quite sure what George’s role was with the Eagles, other than, as the club’s media guide put it, to “assist Harry in numerous club matters.” George was ostensibly charged with some scouting responsibilities, but the scouts chuckled when asked about it. George was like a wagon hitched to Harry’s rear bumper. A shot at George was a shot at Harry.
And Harry was furious. Most people never saw Harry lose his temper. His manner was so genial and upbeat, it was hard to picture him mad. But cross Harry, and you confronted the unholy wrath of the righteous. The smile vanished, and that soft face hardened. Without the twinkle, Harry’s gray eyes were like steel bearings. The effect was dramatic.
“Why would you do something like that?” he asked Buddy.
“It was just a joke.”
“I don’t get it,” said Harry. “It’s such poor judgment… to humiliate people and point fingers … it reflects badly on the organization.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I never thought it would be taken seriously,” Buddy protested.
When Norman found out, he said, “That’s it.” He was going to fire Buddy once and for all.
But Harry talked him out of it. No one was madder at Buddy about the incident than Harry. It was, he felt, unprofessional, cruel, and just plain lousy. He had told Buddy so to his face. And, yes, Harry didn’t like Buddy Ryan. But as crude as Buddy’s methods were, he got results. Harry was convinced that, without the strike-game losses, the Eagles might have squeaked into the play-offs. In just two years, Buddy had used the draft to acquire Seth Joyner, Clyde Simmons, Keith Byars, Cris Carter, and Jerome Brown (future all-pros), as well as productive starters Anthony Toney, Byron Evans, and Dave Alexander. The team was moving in the right direction. Harry could see the players’ newfound respect for Buddy. Something was happening with this group. Dumping the head coach now could be disastrous.
“Look, if Buddy doesn’t have a winning season in ’88, then kick us both out,” Harry said.
Norman considered that option quietly for a moment. “No way I would do that to you, Harry.”
So Buddy stayed and didn’t change one bit. But to an extent he didn’t fully understand, the strike year had clarified the terms of his tenure. So long as the team continued to improve, Norman would wait. But if the team stumbled or stalled, it was going to give him pleasure to show the pompous little smart-ass the door.
The Eagles won the NFC East division the next year with ten wins and six losses and lost a fog-bound play-off game against Ditka and the real Bears. In ’89, Buddy won eleven games and lost only five, but again lost in the first round of the play-offs. In ’90, the final tally was ten wins and six losses, and the Eagles faced another play-off game, this time against the Redskins. And this time, while no one except Norman knew it for sure, the Eagles would be playing for Buddy’s job.
BUDDY HAD STARTED OFF ’90 badly. At the end of a third-straight winning season, and with one year remaining on his contract, the coach announced he’d like to renegotiate. He had reason to think his position was strong. Always a firm adherent of the MEAT principle (Maximize Earnings at All Times), Buddy’s wide, four-eyed mug had become ubiquitous in Philadelphia. He endorsed products, everything from diet food to caps to cars, had his own weekly in-season TV show, a radio call-in show, and a 900 number. His paid public appearances were much in demand. He even charged the kid who came by once a week to interview him for the ghostwritten “Coach’s Corner” column in the weekly fan magazine, Eagles Digest. There hadn’t been so much excitement about the Eagles since Vermeil’s heydey a decade earlier. In four seasons, Buddy hadn’t delivered on his Super Bowl boasts, but everybody believed it was only a matter of time. Buddy felt secu
re enough to put the squeeze on BramanMan.
He told the Pack that he might not honor the remaining year of his contract unless it was extended.
Norman summoned the coach upstairs. When he means business, Norman moves in close, eyeball to eyeball, and speaks bluntly.
“I read your remarks,” he told Buddy. “I might have before, but now I promise you, I’m not even going to talk to you about your contract until it’s up. And let me give you some advice. I’ve learned this all through my business career and I know it’s accurate: Never shit where you eat. And that’s precisely what you’ve done. We’ll talk about your future here after this season is over, and not before.”
Buddy was all aw shucks about it, and the matter of a contract extension was never mentioned again.
Then came the Keith Jackson episode.
