by Mark Bowden
“Care to comment, Mr. Braman?” a hound asked.
“I’m disappointed, the players are disappointed, the coaches, and, of course, the fans,” the owner said, grimacing. “It’s a kick in the ass.”
As for the coach’s status?
“Nothing’s changed,” Norman said. He would pick the moment.
At about the same time, across the dark hallway, Buddy was making his way toward a podium through an aisle clogged with reporters. There was a buzz in the air like the mood in an arena before a prizefight. Buddy’s five-year deal with the Eagles was up. There had been no Super Bowl trips, not even close. And few in Philly were unaware of the ill will Buddy had so brazenly sown upstairs. The scent of the crusty blowhard’s blood was in the air.
Ryan’s round face was obscured by the microphones.
“It’s hard to win a ball game when you don’t block anybody,” he said, speaking in a calm, measured tone. Full of feisty brag in victory, Buddy was mellow in defeat; he reacted more with disgust than anger.
His decision to insert Jimbo was just an act of desperation. “I thought a different pitcher might get us something going,” he said.
“Buddy, what are your plans now?” boomed a voice from the back of the room, trying to coax comment on his status.
“I want to meet with the squad at eleven o’clock tomorrow, and then I’ll start looking at Plan B people, getting that ready,” Buddy said, refusing to concede any doubt about his rehiring.
So the Pack bored in harder: “Are you as optimistic that you will be back here next season as you were a few weeks ago?”
“Yeah. You’re not?” Buddy grinned knowingly. The room erupted in laughter.
“The thinking is that throughout the season we’ve been hearing you had to win to stay,” said another reporter, picking up the ball.
“I don’t know who thought that, but a lot of people don’t realize it’s a tough thing to even get to these play-offs.”
“We saw Norman talking to you as you came to the locker room. What did he say?”
“He said, I believe it was something like this, ‘Sorry, Coach. Tough loss.’ The only place that Norman and I don’t get along is in the newspapers.”
“Buddy, if everything can be worked out, do you want to come back?”
“Oh, you know I do. I built this team. Why would I want to let somebody else come in and take all the bows?”
On Sunday morning, Norman had breakfast with Harry.
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” he told the club president. “I’ve told you before, get rid of him, and I’ve let you talk me out of it. This time, I’m not going to let you talk me out of it.”
Norman then went to New York. He went to the Whitney Museum to see a Robert Rauschenberg show that featured a painting loaned from his collection. Then he went to the William Doyle Gallery to look at some porcelain that was coming up for auction. He and Irma had dinner that night with Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and his wife, Marion, who had been their guest at the game on Saturday. On Monday morning Norman had NFL business on his schedule.
While at the league’s New York offices, Norman took a call from Robert Fraley, Buddy’s agent.
“When are we going to get started on Buddy’s new contract?” Fraley asked.
“The truth is, before that starts I have to make up my mind whether I want Buddy back.”
Norman promised to give Fraley an answer fast.
He took Amtrak back to Philly that evening and dined with Harry and with the team’s public relations director, Ron Howard. He asked Ron to prepare for him, overnight, a survey of recent head coach hirings in the NFL, looking at which teams promoted coaches from their own staff and which went outside the organization to hire a new coach and then contrasting their records. He told them to summon the Pack for a four o’clock press conference.
That night he had a long conversation on the phone with Jack Kemp, who was skiing in Vail. Kemp told him the transition would probably go better for his team if he promoted an assistant coach, which meant Norman would have to decide on either offensive coordinator Richie Kotite, who had been with the team only one year, or Jeff Fisher, the young former Bears defensive back and punt returner whom Buddy had brought in as his defensive assistant. Norman made up his mind that night to hire Fisher. Buddy had built a primarily defensive team, and the transition would go more smoothly, he thought, by elevating the defensive assistant.
When he came to work at nine on Tuesday morning, Norman dropped his coat and briefcase in his office and chatted briefly with Harry. Howard’s hasty survey showed no advantage to hiring an outsider or promoting a new head coach. Norman explained his preference for Fisher. Harry asked him to reconsider.
“Keep an open mind about Richie Kotite,” Harry said. He urged Norman to interview both Jeff and Richie before making up his mind. Harry said he thought Richie ought to get more consideration.
“I’ll take care of Buddy for you,” Harry told him.
“No way,” said Norman. “I’ll take care of Buddy myself.”
He rode the elevator downstairs, walked into Buddy’s office, pulled the door shut, and slumped into one of the chairs across from the coach’s desk.
“I’ve decided, without any prodding from anyone, that I’m not going to extend your contract,” he said.
“Why?” asked the coach. To Norman, Buddy looked stupefied.
“You aren’t the type of person I want to have around here,” the owner said.
Norman chose not to elaborate. He said the team seemed stuck. They needed someone who could take them to the Next Level.
“Well, it’s your football team, you can do whatever you want to,” said Buddy sadly. “‘Course, I believe that I can take a team to the Super Bowl. I’ve been to three of them with three different teams.”
“You know, Buddy, your record should speak for itself,” Norman advised. He then added a threat. “You had better get your act together. You have to learn to be part of an organization. You can start today. If you go out of here with some class, I think you can get another job in this league. I hope you can get a job. If you go out of here with no class, I don’t think anybody will touch you.”
And that was that. Norman went back upstairs, feeling immensely relieved, happier than he had felt since the day he bought the team. Buddy’s agent, Fraley, was on the phone within minutes. Norman expected the agent to launch into a defense of Buddy, but instead Fraley suggested that Norman consider Howard Schnellenberger, another client, as a possible replacement. Norman said no thanks.
Word spread immediately through the coaches’ suite and then out the telephone lines to the rest of the city. Some of the veteran assistants, anticipating the usual wholesale bloodletting that follows the ousting of a High Priest, began cleaning out their desks. Lew Carpenter, the white-haired, gimpy receivers coach, had his belongings in a box when he stepped into Richie Kotite’s office.
“I enjoyed working with you,” he said.
Richie told him to hold on. Harry had by then told both him and Fisher that they were being considered for the top job.
Buddy called his own press conference later that morning, before clearing out his desk and leaving for good. There was a good crowd, but on such short notice, hardly a full turnout.
“I’m a little bit disappointed,” Buddy said. “The crowd is not as big as it was when they hired me five years ago, but I guess this’ll have to do. I just wanted to thank Norman Braman for giving me the opportunity to coach a pro football team, to do a good job, I believe that we’re a lot better team than what we had when I came here, and that’s about all there is to it. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to finish out, but I think that everybody is proud of the Eagles”.
“What reason did he give you?”
“Reason? That he didn’t think we’d go on to the next level, whatever that is.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Well, really, I was. You know, I’ve been fired before
, but usually it’s for losing. I’ve never been fired for winning before.”
“Are you angry?”
“Hey, I got a great opportunity. I think I did a great job, and hopefully I’ll go somewhere else and do a great job. In this business, you don’t feel sorry for Buddy Ryan. I knew what this business was like when I got into it.”
“If you had it all to do over again, would you have done anything differently?”
“No. Well, I wouldn’t have drafted a couple of guys … but everything else, you’ve got to be yourself, I think. Otherwise people will see through you and you’re a phony.”
“Would you change anything about your relationship to Norman?”
“I don’t think we had that many problems. You’d have to check with him.”
If Buddy was, for once, determined to be magnanimous and discreet, Norman on the subject of Buddy Ryan was like a boil waiting to be lanced. Buddy had shaken his faith in St.Vince’s credo. Sitting behind his clean glass desk upstairs the next morning, he let five years of frustration rip.
“Buddy disproves the saying, ‘Winning is everything.’ He places an individual on a border. He comes as close probably as George Allen did in taking the fun out of winning. Read the obit on George Allen in last week’s New York Times. The man was miserable to be around, a tyrant! And Allen was a little more polished than Ryan…. Sitting in my seat, you get to that point of really saying to yourself, Is winning worth it? Is winning worth it? Or winning at what price? At the price of ridiculing your opponents, at the price of ridiculing decent people, and the price of being just a big asshole, of not acknowledging the support of other individuals who help you win? I won, but it’s always somebody else’s fault when I don’t win? … I mean, if I had a Super Bowl coach, maybe I could live with it, his mouth, the remarks, his not shaking hands with the opposing coach … who needs all that crap?”
Of course, none of this feeling had come through at the press conference the previous afternoon, when Norman named his new head coach. He said he expected a new level of harmony between front office and coaching suite. He said he expected a new measure of discipline and class on the field. And he said he expected his new coach to take the Eagles to the Next Level.
That night, Norman did something he hadn’t done in the five years he had owned his own football team. He went out to dinner with his head coach, the newest High Priest of the Pigskin, Richie Kotite.
5
COACH UPTIGHT
Bald, tan Richie Kotite, the crown of his head framed by a faded pink eyeshade, stands on the gridiron, cigar jutting strenuously from his clenched teeth, surveying the crowded practice field like General MacArthur in the prow of a landing craft. He is a wildebeest of a man; he looks assembled from spare parts: short thick torso mounted on long skinny legs with broad shoulders and long powerful arms. With the pink visor—which allows his dome to go brown as the rest of his face—aviator sunglasses propped on a liberal Levantine schnoz, the cigar (a Cuban big enough for an Al Capp cartoon), softening belly, outsized limbs and colossal trilbys, the effect is solid but lubberly.
It’s the first day of Eagles voluntary camp, two weeks of workouts without pads on the green fenced-in field off the parking lot outside the Vet. On the grass, leaning with youthful ease into limbering exercises, are more than eighty young men, warming up to the serious business of trying out for the ’92 Philadelphia Eagles. Veterans, draftees, and free agents are all out there together, presumably equals at this starting gate, but actually not. There’s a core group of forty or so established veterans who will make the team. The rest are all competing for about six or seven roster spots, and even that competition is already stacked in favor of Richie’s draft picks. This year he’s selected two hotshot running backs, Siran Stacy of Alabama and Notre Dame’s Tony Brooks, who now warm up alongside Norman’s latest milliondollar free-agent acquisition, Herschel Walker. Randall Cunningham is readying for his comeback, jogging up and down with a shiny black brace on his surgically rebuilt left knee. Buddy’s Boys are back, too— Reverend Reggie, Seth Joyner, Clyde Simmons, Andre Waters, Wes Hopkins, Byron Evans, Eric Allen, Mike Golic, Mike Pitts, and Ben Smith, although Ben is still standing around on his bum knee. Most of them had taken off the first two days of workouts, still grieving—it was just days ago they buried Jerome. Someone has traced number 99 in lime on a corner of the practice field.
It is a sunny hot morning in early July. The nearby skyline of Center City trembles in a bright thermal haze, but the green, silverwinged helmets and numbered jerseys already herald the approach of autumn. Just beyond the north fence, some of the big rigs that roar past on 1-676 lean happily on their horns to hurry on the season.
Richie enjoys the truckers’ salutes, but that’s about as close as he wants fans to get. Richie doesn’t like to be watched. When he’s working in his office, he keeps the door shut. One of his first public acts as the Eagles’ head coach last year was to close off the Eagles’ practices to the public and Pack. Buddy’s practices had been social events. Avid Eagles fans were free to wander up and down the sidelines, gaping, cheering, snapping pictures, shouting encouragement. Buddy would stand, legs apart, belly forward, rim of his cap pulled down to the top of his glasses, silently twirling his whistle at the precise center of his world, oblivious to the commotion. Richie is, in contrast, a study in anxiety. He paces and shouts and sticks his head in huddles and watches the sidelines like a wary mother hen, annoyed even when the boys pulling water jugs get too close to the action. Out at West Chester University, during the team’s official monthlong training camp, a thousand fans or more show up for every practice, morning and afternoon, camped out on blankets and folding chairs, trying to catch glimpses of their favorite players, getting familiar with the top draft picks, and sizing up the free agents trying desperately to impress. Club executives escort groups of season ticket holders and corporate sponsors right down to the sidelines for these sessions, so they can hear the players swear and grunt and see the blood, sweat, and spit fly. It had become such a beloved tradition that, much as Richie hated it (“I found one asshole standing right next to me in the huddle one day,” he’d say, with disgust), he had no choice in the matter—how would it look for Norman, whose boyhood water bucket—carrying episode in West Chester was now legend, to wall off his team from the masses? But these two weeks of voluntary camp and the rest of the season up in Philly were Richie’s call, and he kept them closed to the public.
People hadn’t minded so much in ’91. They just nosed up to the fences, which were only about ten yards from the field. But this year Richie has ordered a green tarp draped around the perimeter, and while he works out his troops in private, there is angry milling outside the fence.
“Hey, Kotite,” bellows one of the disappointed, a familiar rude male rumbling, voice of the riled Philly fan, “Buddy let us in!”
Richie rips the cigar from his teeth like he’s been waiting all week for this moment. In his angriest coach’s bellow, he thunders back, “I don’t give a shit what Buddy did!”
“Asshole!” the fan shoots back.
Richie takes a couple steps toward the fence now, making eye contact with the retreating heckler through an opening in the tarp. Waving his cigar angrily, he shouts, “Get the fuck out of here if you don’t like it!”
Then he turns to a writer standing near the gate, and says, “Don’t print that.”
Defining boundaries has been a problem for Richie ever since becoming head coach. It is a rule of human behavior that those with the least power flex it most, and Richie wields his with gusto. A pro football team is an organization about the size of a typical Wal-Mart. A head coach can tyrannize a roster of about fifty players, about two dozen assistant coaches, trainers, film technicians, equipment managers, and office help, but that’s it. Although his true sphere of influence is actually quite small, public adoration, press clippings, and weekly performances before millions can make an NFL head coach seem (in his own mind, anyway) like a maj
or public figure, a great man. Hence this tendency Richie has of giving orders to people not on the payroll.
He’s actually a nice guy, an aggressively nice guy, if he likes you. He’s honest and loyal to a fault. And even though his mind is racing a mile a minute about football, twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year, Richie remembers his friends and keeps his promises. He’s adamant about that. His preferred method of social interaction is the telephone. He carries a folding cellular one in his pocket at all times, even on the practice field: it’s his lone, static-filled link to the larger world beyond the tarp-draped fence. It wasn’t always like this. As an assistant coach, Richie had more time for people. His internal rhythm was about ten beats slower.
But right from the first hours of his elevation, Richie began to change. The pressures of the job inflated some traits and deflated others. The cigar, which he used to light up by himself back in his office, was suddenly with him always, a prop. Richie immediately struck a deal with a Cadillac outlet, and the coach’s parking space just outside the front entrance at the Vet, which had long sported Buddy’s four-wheel-drive Bronco Rancher, now displayed a gleaming luxury cruiser. Always a busy, solitary man, Richie grew paranoid and brusque. Buddy, whom he had served loyally for a year, became the author of everything wrong with the Eagles. In conversation, Richie was suddenly opinionated to the extreme, announcing his take on things in that preemptive way the insecure have of assuming agreement. “We think alike, right?” he’d say, then press on without pausing for response—interested now in audience, not dialogue.
