by Mark Bowden
“Some people use tricks more often than others, and some people do it better than others,” Bobby Bowden, Spurrier’s rival coach at FSU, said. “He will do anything to move the ball forward, and he’ll sometimes come up with things that make you ask, ‘Where’d he get that thing?’ or ‘How’d he think that one up?’ Especially in the passing game. It wasn’t so much that he came up with plays or formations I hadn’t seen before—it was his timing. Timing and execution. His timing was so good that unless you were really on your toes and at the top of your game he was going to get you.”
Steven Orr Spurrier was born in Florida in 1945 to Marjorie and John Graham Spurrier. He was the youngest of three children. His father, a Presbyterian minister, took sports nearly as seriously as he took God. He coached his two sons in Little League, where he was known to lecture against the old saw about winning being less important than how you play the game. The point of playing the game, he informed his players (and his sons absorbed the lesson), was to win.
In basketball, Spurrier averaged almost two thirds of the points scored by his high school team, led them to their local championship twice, and was selected for the All-State team in 1963, his senior year. That same year, he also played shortstop and pitched his team to a second state baseball championship, an accomplishment that Spurrier says is “the most fun I ever had as a player in any sport.” As quarterback, he gave his football team a comeback victory in their final game—the Exchange Bowl—overcoming a 21–0 halftime deficit with four touchdown passes. He was famous for drawing up plays in the huddle, a skill that his coaches at first didn’t appreciate. Ken Lyon, one of his old teammates, told two reporters who were writing a story about Spurrier for the Lakeland (Florida) Ledger that Spurrier got into trouble once at practice for fiddling with a play:
One of our coaches, Snake Evans, called everything to a halt and asked him, “What was that?” Steve said he thought it would be better if we did it this way. Coach Evans said, “You know, we’ve got a problem here. I thought I was the coach. Do you agree with me that I’m the coach? Well, if you can agree to that, then go back and run it my way. Otherwise, go get you a shower.”
When Spurrier did the same thing in a game, however, and scored a touchdown, no one complained.
“He’d just draw it out on the ground,” another teammate said.
Spurrier’s success in high school led him to the University of Florida, where, after three years of quarterbacking for the Gators, he won the Heisman Trophy. In Gainesville, they called him by his initials, SOS, because he led the team to so many come-from-behind victories in the fourth quarter. His other nickname was Steve Superior.
“Steve just had that drive,” said John Higbe, who snapped the ball to Spurrier in some of those games. “He seemed aloof even then—some people thought he was arrogant—but when you were with him in the huddle, no matter how bad things looked, you never felt like you were going to lose.”
In 1967, the San Francisco 49ers took Spurrier in the draft, but they already had a quarterback, John Brodie, who was the highest-paid football player of his time. For the next five seasons, Spurrier did a lot of watching, enjoyed a lot of golf, and saw playing time mostly as the team’s punter. He did well when he got the chance. In 1972, when Brodie was injured, Spurrier led the 49ers to a third consecutive Western Division championship, winning five of the team’s last six games. When Brodie retired and Spurrier finally took over, he separated his shoulder in a preseason game and sat out the whole season. After yet another disappointing season, he was taken by one of the league’s expansion teams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The Buccaneers consisted of rookies, washouts, has-beens, and might-have-beens, and they lost every game. “Hey, we set a record that year,” Spurrier said with mock pride. “The only oh-and-fourteen record in NFL history! I remember a speech our coach, John McKay, was giving us at one point during that season. He was emphasizing that games were lost in the trenches, by failing to block and tackle on the front lines. And as he was talking he noticed a lineman asleep in the back. He called his name, woke him up, and asked, ‘Where are most games lost?’ And the lineman says, ‘Right here in Tampa, sir.’”
“John McKay was the most caustic individual I ever met in my life,” Spurrier’s former teammate the wide receiver Barry Smith recalled. McKay was particularly tough on Spurrier, the biggest star on the roster. “I tell you this,” Smith said. “If there was one man in this world who was totally shocked by Steve’s later success as a coach it’s John McKay.”
Spurrier was released by McKay after one season. He was picked up by the Denver Broncos, who cut him, and then he landed with Don Shula’s Miami Dolphins just before the 1977 season was about to start. He and Jerri had three small children. The situation in Miami looked stable. They rented a house and sent the children off to school. Days after settling in, Spurrier phoned his wife with bad news. Shula had cut him.
They returned to Gainesville, where they had always kept a home for the off-season. Spurrier’s whole career had been in football, and at that point he didn’t have his college degree. He was offered work selling insurance and selling cars, prospects that he and Jerri found deeply unappealing. Their financial situation was deteriorating.
“I did not make much money as a pro football player—a little bit, not a lot,” Spurrier said. “I watched the Gators play and thought I needed to get a job. Coaching was something that seemed like fun and not a lot of work.”
Spurrier went on, “I’m not very good at working. We all need to do as a profession something that we find fun. I’d been around a lot of good coaches and sorry coaches in my career … or average coaches, I should say, not sorry … and I thought: By God, if he can do this for a living, so can I.”
Unfortunately, nobody was hiring. Just to break in, Spurrier agreed to help out with the Gator quarterbacks. Nearly twenty years later, in 1990, after coaching at Georgia Tech, at Duke, and for the Tampa Bay Bandits, of the ill-fated United States Football League, he returned to the University of Florida as head coach. He led the Gators to their first national championship, in 1996, and in his twelve-year tenure there Spurrier compiled one of the most successful records of any major college coach in history. He recently told Pat Summitt, the University of Tennessee’s celebrated women’s basketball coach, “You and I both know why we do this. We do it so we can play games our whole lives. This way, we don’t ever have to grow up.”
It isn’t easy playing for Spurrier. He does not always live up to the rules in his “Guidelines.” Number two reads: “After chewing out a player, say something positive to bring him back tomorrow.” Number four reads: “If you must criticize, do it to a player’s face, not downtown or to the media. End all criticism with something positive.”
“Sometimes he’s as biting with his players as McKay was to us,” his former teammate Lee McGriff said. “I know how much he hated it when McKay did it to him, but now he does it to players himself.”
Since quarterbacks are the focus of Spurrier’s attention, they feel his perfectionism the most. Bobby Sabelhaus, an All-American who set records as a high school quarterback in Maryland, and who was actively courted by many university football programs in 1995, says he still has nightmares about Coach Spurrier. He chose Florida not because Spurrier went out of his way to recruit him—“Of all the coaches who made pitches to me, he was the least appealing”—but because he knew Spurrier was a winner. His experience with Florida was a disaster that ultimately drove him out of football.
“Everything I did was wrong,” Sabelhaus said. “I was used to coaches yelling at me, but they would also sometimes pat you on the back. Not Spurrier. Even when I threw a touchdown pass in practice once, he said to me, ‘Are you just stupid or is it a lack of talent?’ I hadn’t run the play the exact way he wanted me to. I had an odd, sidearm throwing motion that had served me pretty well”—Sabelhaus had broken all records as a high school passer—“and Spurrier wanted me to change it to the way he threw the bal
l. I tried, but it threw me off so badly that I couldn’t throw accurately anymore. He was constantly berating me. I would wake up in the morning and spend the entire day dreading the after noon meeting. The other quarterbacks went through the same thing. Danny Wuerffel”—who would win the Heisman Trophy leading Florida to the national championship in 1996—“tried to help me. He encouraged me, and told me Spurrier had treated him the same way as a freshman. Wuerffel was the kind of guy who could take it. Not me.”
To those willing to endure Spurrier’s treatment, the payoff is the coach’s undying loyalty. When he joined the Redskins this year, Spurrier didn’t recruit the top names among available quarterback free agents; he signed Wuerffel and Matthews, neither of whom had translated his success at the University of Florida into a stellar NFL career. Both have been given a rare second chance with the Redskins, in part because of Spurrier’s loyalty to them, in part because he knows they have learned to run his plays the way he wants them run.
Spurrier is impatient with the tact that his position demands. By tradition, the head coach does not boast, speak ill of opponents, or complain. In the NFL, whatever he says is amplified a hundred thousand times, especially if he loses his cool or breaches the unwritten code. The more outrageous a comment can be made to seem—whatever its original intent—the more widely it is broadcast, dissected, criticized, and gleefully commented on by the sports media. A person in this position would be wise not to speak at all, but head coaches are constantly called on to give speeches and interviews, and to answer the goading questions of the press. Most head coaches talk a lot but say little. Spurrier is incautious and irreverent, and the media love him for it.
As head coach in Florida, he gave speeches all over the state to Gator booster clubs. They roared when he described his rival FSU as “Free Shoes University,” after a local shoestore gave FSU players free cleats, and when he lamented the destruction of books in a fire at Auburn University, because some of them “hadn’t even been colored yet.”
“Where I come from, talking a little smack is part of the game,” he said. “You dish it out, but you got to be able to take it, too. It’s all in the spirit of fun. A lot of it comes about because what I say gets misrepresented. Like taking over this job. Folks ask me how I expect us to do. Well, I expect to win my division. I didn’t predict that I would, but that’s what I expect of my football team. We may make it or we may not, but what am I supposed to expect? That we’ll lose?”
Spurrier reads everything that’s written about him, and says he remembers every word. “And if I don’t like it I call them and let them know about it,” he said. “They can criticize me, that’s fair, but when they start saying things that I didn’t say, that gets me going.”
A number of Florida writers have been the recipients of insulting notes from Spurrier. He called Gerald Ensley, of the Tallahassee Democrat, an “a-hole,” and said that Mark Bradley, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was “chickenshit.” In 1996, one of the big games on the Gators’ schedule was against the University of Tennessee Volunteers. The Knoxville News-Sentinel phoned the Orlando Sentinel’s Gator-beat reporter, Chris Harry, before the season started and asked if he would file four stories for them in advance of the big game, offering analysis from the Gainesville perspective. It’s a common practice on sports pages.
Harry filed the stories. Without his knowledge, the News-Sentinel was running them under the rubric “From the Enemy Camp,” illustrated with a pair of binoculars.
One morning, Harry’s phone rang, and he picked it up to hear Spurrier, his voice almost a whisper. “How much are they paying you?” the coach asked.
“What?”
“How much are they paying you, Chris Harry, to be a spy?”
“Everything I saw at the scrimmages was seen by thousands of other people!” Harry protested.
“Yeah, but they didn’t have to send their own people down here, did they? Because they had you.”
Spurrier said he was going to bar reporters from all future practices and scrimmages. The shutdown prompted a story in a Gainesville newspaper, which quoted Spurrier naming Harry as the culprit. According to Harry, the story, and Spurrier’s remarks, resulted in phoned death threats at his Gainesville home.
The Gators won the game easily. The next week, Spurrier reopened practices, and he slapped Harry on the back when he saw him.
“Hey, Chrissie, how you doin’?” the coach asked.
Harry felt less forgiving. He explained about the death threats, how alarmed he and his wife had been.
The coach was unapologetic.
“Well, you shouldn’t have done that story,” he said.
Spurrier’s contract with the Redskins will expire after the 2007 season, when he’s sixty-two. According to his longtime friend Norm Carlson, who is an assistant athletic director at the University of Florida, Spurrier has said for years that he plans to retire in his early sixties. When he announced his decision to step down as Florida coach earlier this year, he said he wanted to see “if my ballplays will work in the pros.” So far, his record is mediocre.
The Redskins were crushed in their second game, on September 16. In front of eighty-five thousand Washington fans and a national ABC Monday Night Football audience, the Philadelphia Eagles beat them, 37–7. Spurrier’s offense looked as lame and collegiate as his detractors had predicted. It scored no points (the touchdown came on a punt return) and managed to move the ball into the Eagles’ half of the field only once during the entire game—after an Eagles penalty handed the Redskins fifteen yards.
On the sidelines, Spurrier, wearing a white shirt, was in agony, head in hands, his face a mask of disappointment and frustration. After one blunder, he flapped his lips in such a genuine and original display of disgust that it made the TV program’s highlights reel, and was replayed over and over in slow motion the rest of the week.
The next two weeks weren’t much better. Midway through a third-week loss to the San Francisco 49ers, Spurrier benched Matthews for Wuerffel, but still the team failed to score more than one touchdown. Spurrier replaced Wuerffel the following week, against the Tennessee Titans, with the rookie Patrick Ramsey, and got a win and a surprising performance out of the young quarterback. Afterward, Spurrier expressed delight in the rookie’s play—Ramsey threw two touchdown passes and completed twenty of his thirty-four passes for 268 yards—and pronounced him the team’s new starting quarterback. The next week, though, Ramsey threw three interceptions, and the Redskins lost, 43–27. Spurrier said, “It’s a little frustrating. You think you have things set, and it doesn’t always work out.” He replaced Ramsey with Matthews for the team’s seventh game, against the Indianapolis Colts, and won with a meat-and-potatoes game plan that bore little resemblance to his usual trickery.
The team’s performance has been so ugly that Spurrier has started coming to work early and showing up on weekends. The season still has a long way to go, and the other three teams in the NFC East (the division Spurrier expects to win) have also struggled. The Eagles had opened up a two-game lead on them when this story went to press. The Redskins might surprise everybody, but it’s looking more and more doubtful.
Spurrier is patient, for now. His various lists of coaching maxims all include reminders that the journey is its own reward. Number sixteen: “The road is better than the end. The game, the competition, is more fun than the trophies.” But note that the road ends with a trophy. One of the reasons Spurrier “talks smack,” runs up the score when his team is winning, and taunts his opponents—whether over a chessboard, on the golf course, or before a football game—is to raise the stakes. Having something personal on the line enlivens the joust and sweetens the victory. Of course, when you play this way losing is more humiliating, too, but Spurrier accepts the bargain.
He was bewildered, and insulted, when, in the final minutes of the Monday-night Eagles blowout, Philadelphia’s head coach, Andy Reid, chose not to kick an easy field goal to add three more points. Earlier in t
he game, pepper spray from a fracas with police had drifted out of the stands, sending Reid and his team sprinting from the sidelines, gasping for air. After the Eagles gallantly declined to run up the score, Spurrier caught a whiff of something else from across the field.
It smelled like pity.
“I still don’t know why he did that,” Spurrier said.
ESSAYS
The Story Behind the Story
Atlantic, October 2009
If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26, the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report.
First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency.
But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the show’s cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that night’s show would be and I did not, I’d thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon.