Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  That preseason game on August 17, 1969, had been enough of a draw for Army’s defensive coordinator, Bill Parcells, to drive from West Point to Connecticut. As a college coach, he hadn’t been keeping track of the Giants nearly as closely as he had during childhood. “I was on my own gypsy trail,” he says, “on the Greyhound tour of college coaching. But if you followed football at all, you knew that coaches came and went with the Giants, and so did the general managers.”

  Having switched his allegiance to the Jets after spending time observing their training camps as an Army coach, Parcells was pleased that Gang Green led 17–0 to enter the second quarter. Wellington Mara, the Giants president and co-owner, reportedly tried phoning in a play from the coaches’ booth. But no one answered on the sidelines in a game in which Joe Namath threw three touchdown passes and the Giants lost, 37–14.

  By the end of preseason, Giants coach Allie Sherman was fired.

  Giants Stadium was unveiled in 1976 in East Rutherford, a ten-minute drive from Bill Parcells’s hometown of Hasbrouck Heights. But New Jersey’s first major-league sports venue was no salve for long-suffering fans. Perhaps the franchise’s lowest point occurred on November 19, 1978, when the Giants, uncharacteristically in the playoff hunt at 5-6, hosted the Philadelphia Eagles.

  During the game’s waning moments, the Giants held the ball and the lead, 17–12. With 31 seconds left to play, Eagles defensive back Herman Edwards congratulated tailback Doug Kotar at the line of scrimmage. The Giants eschewed the routine fall-down, a precursor of the knee, that would have run out the clock. Instead, quarterback Joe Pisarcik bungled a handoff to fullback Larry Csonka, causing the ball to jar loose. Edwards scooped up a serendipitous bounce for the Eagles and scampered 26 yards into the end zone. Big Blue fans dubbed the ignominious moment “The Fumble,” while the Eagles faithful called it the “Miracle of the Meadowlands.”

  For his role in the surreal loss, Pisarcik needed a police escort to retrieve his car. Offensive coordinator Bob Gibson, who had instructed Pisarcik to hand off the ball, was fired after the game and never coached again. Fans organized bonfires to get rid of their season tickets, and Wellington Mara was burned in effigy. Those spectators who kept their tickets used them to enter Giants Stadium and throw lemons on the field. A plane overhead flew a banner that read “15 Years of Lousy Football—We’ve Had Enough.”

  In the six seasons before Perkins courted Parcells in 1979, Big Blue went 23-62-1. The Giants hadn’t made the playoffs since 1963, while producing only two winning records. Off the field, co-owners Wellington Mara and Tim Mara, Wellington’s nephew, underwent the most infamous family feud in sports. Despite a string of feeble drafts, the animosity prevented agreement on virtually anything, even a general manager. The disarray in the once-proud franchise prompted the league’s involvement, leading to the arrival of former Baltimore Colts executive George Young on Valentine’s Day 1979. The forty-nine-year-old GM was balding and spoke in a high-pitched voice that belied his rotund size. He boiled down his choice of a new head coach to Ray Perkins and Dan Reeves. But Young was more comfortable with Perkins, who had played for Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, when Young was a Colts executive and assistant coach.

  • • •

  For Bill Parcells’s interview, the Giants arranged a reservation at the Sheraton in Hasbrouck Heights, a location that allowed Parcells to spend time with family and friends before his big talk with Perkins. During the interview, Perkins expounded on his plans for the defense. He wanted to revamp the 4-3 scheme that the Giants had used for decades, replacing it with a flexible 3-4, featuring a strong linebacking corps trained by Parcells.

  Perkins never mentioned Parcells’s ties to the area, but Big Blue’s head coach was familiar enough with his candidate’s background to be aware of the storybook twist: Parcells, who had last lived in the Northeast in 1969, was finally coming home to a plum gig with the Giants.

  As the discussion drew to a close, Perkins asked, “So what do you think?”

  Parcells responded, “When do we start?”

  The head coach and his new linebackers guru shook hands.

  After accepting Perkins’s offer, Parcells placed a long-distance call to Judy conveying his excitement. Her tone of voice was neutral, though his tin ear didn’t detect it. Parcells flew back to Colorado, where he announced his departure. The decision to bolt Air Force after one season generated criticism in the local papers. Nonetheless, the program followed Parcells’s recommendation to hire his offensive coordinator, Ken Hatfield, as his replacement; Al Groh would also stay on, as Hatfield’s defensive coordinator.

  Reunited with Judy, Parcells saw how unhappy she was with making yet another move. Over the past fifteen years, she had been a trouper, traversing the country with her husband while he took on seven football jobs: Parcells had been a Bronco (Hastings), Shocker (Wichita State), Black Knight (West Point), Seminole (Florida State), Commodore (Vanderbilt), Red Raider (Texas Tech), and Falcon (Air Force). In almost every case, he had left the family behind while Judy dealt with the logistics, which included packing and finding new schools for her daughters. But this time, after Bill Parcells’s best job offer yet, she was balking.

  He tried to sway her: “Honey, I can’t not take this job. I don’t know when I’m going to get another pro offer. You know how they talk about opportunity knocking? Well, in my case, it’s kicking down the damn door.”

  Judy responded “Bill, I just don’t know if I can move again.”

  Another complication was that the economy in the Denver area had slumped, which made selling the house challenging. But within a few days, in late February 1979, Parcells put it on the market and boarded a Jersey-bound flight so he could join Perkins’s staff for March minicamp. On the plane, Parcells recognized one of the passengers: Bill Belichick, who had been hired by Perkins from the Broncos to oversee special teams. For the twenty-seven-year-old, it was a step up from Denver, where he had been an assistant special-teams coach and defensive aide. The new colleagues expressed exuberance about joining Perkins. Parcells added that he was particularly glad to be leaving Air Force.

  After arriving in New Jersey, Parcells and Belichick checked into the Sheraton, where they both planned to stay for the next few months. Parcells was the fourth assistant named to Perkins’s staff after Ernie Adams (special offensive assistant), Ralph Hawkins (defensive coordinator), and Pat Hodgson (receivers coach). The head coach and his other assistants were already at the Hasbrouck Heights hotel, preparing for their first minicamp. Belichick, who aspired to become a defensive coach, asked Perkins about helping with the linebackers. The head coach responded that the decision was up to the new linebackers coach, Bill Parcells, who gladly obliged Belichick’s request.

  The staff turned to the daunting task of transforming the culture of a team inured to losing. “It was like F Troop there,” Adams recalls, “absolutely out of control.” Perkins oversaw long, grueling practices that evoked Bear Bryant; unlike the Crimson Tide legend, Perkins was merciful enough to permit water, but he showed Bryant’s disregard for injuries that didn’t involve broken bones or hospital stays.

  Parcells was just as tough as Perkins, though more likely to smile. The former Air Force coach seemed at home among his new Giants colleagues. By day, Parcells was blissfully consumed with helping coordinator Ralph Hawkins install a 3-4 defense while preparing for April’s draft. But Parcells’s exuberance evaporated when he returned to his hotel room at night and called Judy for an update on her mind-set and the prospects for selling the house. Neither situation had changed. Judy reiterated her stance against moving east, noting that the girls were ensconced in Colorado Springs. Suzy and Dallas were attending Air Academy High, one of the state’s top schools, and Jill went to Air Academy Junior High School at the base.

  Before her children became teenagers, Judy had mostly enjoyed the itinerant lifestyle of a coach’s wife, living in the Midwest (Kansas and Nebraska), Northeast (New York), and South (Florida, Tennessee, Texas
), then the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado. She says of the first several relocations: “During those years, there was always something exciting. And I couldn’t wait for the next move.”

  Judy had never been outside the Midwest until 1966, when the couple left Wichita for West Point. She had marveled at the spectacular panorama of the campus’s barracks, massive buildings, and cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. And she loved the patriotic display of the cadet parades, marching-band music blending into the roar of military planes in formation just above. Before the latest move, Judy had relished the flat country that surrounded Lubbock, Texas, for its reminders of Kansas prairies back home. But after settling in Colorado Springs, she hadn’t expected the next move for at least a few years. The thrill of zigzagging the nation while Parcells chased his football dreams had dissipated. The older girls, Suzy and Dallas, didn’t want to relocate and leave their friends yet again. Suzy, the eldest, would be a high school senior in the fall. More fundamentally, however, Judy suspected her husband of infidelity.

  “It was a bad time,” she says. “So why should I pack up and go through that headache all over again? It was just going to be the same old thing once I moved to New Jersey.”

  Parcells concedes the point. “Most of those problems at home were my fault; I take the blame for that.”

  Judy had been compliant throughout her marriage; her decision to take a stand came during a wave of feminism sweeping the nation. Her stance helped Parcells grasp the gravity of the situation, and forced him to make the toughest decision of his life: either remain with the New York Giants and likely trigger the dissolution of his family, or walk away from the NFL opportunity knocking after fifteen years of toiling.

  The next morning Parcells walked into Perkins’s office, explained his predicament, and resigned. Perkins responded by saying, “Listen, I’m sorry for both of us, but I understand. Let me ask you this: Do you think you can stay through the minicamp for our veterans we’ve got coming up?”

  “Sure.”

  Parcells phoned Judy afterward and said, “I’m coming home.”

  “What?!”

  She was stunned—and delighted. That phone conversation was brief, as Parcells explained to Judy that he needed to stay on another couple of months, but that she should pick him up from the airport the day after veterans minicamp ended in late May. Reflecting on his friend’s decision to quit coaching for family, Bobby Knight says, “I frankly think it took a helluva lot of guts to do what he did. A lot of guys talk about doing what he did, but they never do it. I’ve felt in life like I was at that point, but I never took the step that Parcells did.”

  Parcells counters, “There was nothing heroic about it. But I figured I owed Judy one. She had been on the same Greyhound, seeing-America-the-hard-way tour I’d been on. Sometimes somebody hands you your dream and you’ve got to hand it right back.”

  The career ramifications, however, weighed on Parcells. Quitting a plum rookie assistant position in the NFL after less than four months seemed like career suicide, and during his final days with the Giants, Parcells was at his crabbiest. Before one practice, offensive lineman Brad Benson lumbered into the training room for treatment. Parcells came in moments later and plopped into the whirlpool. When another defensive player asked Parcells for specifics about the upcoming workout, the departing coach snapped, “How the hell do I know? I have as much say around here as a fart in a hurricane.”

  Bill Parcells asked Bill Belichick to drive him to the airport for his flight to Colorado. Parcells’s resignation had been so abrupt that some defensive players were unaware of the development until they returned for training camp in August. “Just as quickly as he came, he left,” defensive end George Martin recalls. “I didn’t know what the whole situation was about.”

  Parcells checked out of the Sheraton, and although the half-hour drive to Newark International Airport was mostly silent, Parcells expressed his regrets about leaving. He told Belichick how much his family enjoyed Colorado, and explained their reluctance to join him in yet another move. When the two coaches reached Continental’s terminal, Belichick asked Parcells if he had his plane ticket. Parcells confirmed that he did, but what he thought to himself was, “Yeah, I’ve got my ticket out of the business.”

  After takeoff Parcells plugged in headphones and selected a country music station. Then the Giants assistant—the former Giants assistant—wept quietly during the four-hour flight. “I was leaving a place where I really wanted to stay,” Parcells recalls. “I had to do what I had to do, but I really wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”

  Parcells couldn’t fathom a professional life that didn’t include football. Although Judy was thrilled about his decision, her feelings were tempered by a new concern: for the first time in their relationship, no one was bringing in a weekly paycheck. Soon after she met him at the airport, Judy asked, “What in the world are we going to do for money?”

  It was June 1979, and the Parcells family had enough savings to last through October; with a penurious approach, the money might stretch until the New Year. Parcells believed that taking a job in sales might generate the least culture shock. He was used to selling things, most recently a new defensive scheme to veteran stars like Harry Carson. Now the former coach would try to find something else to peddle. Exploiting some connections with Air Force, Parcells went on a calling spree. And after a tip he applied for a job with Gates Land, a land-development company that sold property in master-planned communities. Parcells told its president, David Sunderland, that his family wanted to stay in one place and that the company’s long-term prospects were appealing. Sunderland was sold, and Parcells got the job.

  “He didn’t sit around with a long face, saying he wished he was back on the football field,” Sunderland recalls. “He wasn’t in a blue funk. He was focused and energetic and committed to results.”

  Cheyenne Hills went on to become the city’s first master-planned community before the term “new urbanism” was coined in the early 1980s. Cheyenne Mountain, as it’s known now, has tens of thousands of residents, including some who bought property from a full-throttle salesman named Bill Parcells.

  Judy sought gainful employment, too, for the first time. “That was pretty scary, no one in the family having a job,” she says. “So I had to go out and get one right away.” After searching the classified section of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, she parlayed her experience as a receptionist at Wichita’s athletic department, where she had first met Parcells, into a job as a legal secretary.

  Before Bill Parcells chose his family over football, his internal clock had been regulated by the sport. He automatically woke before dawn, leaving the house early to fully engage in the minutiae of preparation. Even after a twelve-hour workday, football dominated his mind. Anything unrelated to the sport, including his children, was considered a distraction, as the week’s rhythm culminated on Saturdays, win or lose. Parcells grew accustomed to, perhaps even reliant on, the fluctuations of the football season. Following a respite in the off-season, the whole cycle began anew.

  After a jarring start in his new reality—“at first he was lost,” Judy remembers—Parcells found his footing. His mornings free, he ate breakfast with his wife and daughters for the first time. And on weekends, Parcells took the family on recreational activities in the mountains. Despite having cut his umbilical cord to football, Parcells seemed to thrive during the first few months of his new world. But in late July, the start of NFL training camp, he began suffering withdrawal pangs. “Reading the sports pages every morning,” Parcells recalls, “was like getting knifed.”

  Within a month he took a tiny step back toward the NFL. He obtained a job with Al Davis’s Raiders writing scouting reports on their AFC West rivals, which he could do by attending Broncos home games. Parcells bought a pair of season tickets for end-zone seats at Mile High Stadium, where he and Judy tailgated outside before kickoff. But Judy was unaware that her husband’s note-taking was part of an N
FL dalliance. Parcells found the job stimulating, especially after his experience at Giants minicamp. “It kept me interested,” he says of the part-time gig. “I started thinking more about pro football, understanding it better.”

  But one game per week wasn’t enough for an ex-coach whose genetic markers might as well have been yard markers. So on Saturday afternoons, Parcells attended Air Force home games with Judy. Parcells was uneasy about returning to Falcon Stadium, but the desire to watch his old team trumped any discomfiture. At worst, “maybe somebody would give me the Forgotten but Not Gone Award,” he says.

  Under the pretext of earning extra income, Parcells became a color commentator for radio station KRDO-AM, which broadcast local high school football, Denver’s Game of the Week. On Friday nights Parcells showed up at the press box in Garry Berry Stadium wearing an overcoat with a flask in his pocket. He didn’t always drink the coffee served to media members. His partner, play-by-play announcer Jeff Thomas, was a prominent local broadcaster. Parcells’s self-described style was “blathering idiot.” With the side jobs, Parcells’s annual earnings increased to about $45,000, more than even the Giants salary he had relinquished. Yet he grew more despondent. “I turned into a damn yuppie,” he says. “I was dying. I was dying to coach.”

  At home Parcells put on a happy face, but after seventeen years of marriage, Judy didn’t need to be told that her husband disliked his new life. The telltale sign was that he became increasingly temperamental. One Sunday afternoon, the couple was watching an NFL game on TV. As the announcers described the action, Judy blurted, “This is beginning to drive me nuts.”