Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  “In some respects,” Parcells says, “I thought I was playing myself defensively.”

  When time expired in the 20–13 contest, the conflicting emotions created by the matchup manifested at midfield in a heartfelt Giants reunion: Parcells, wearing a winter cap and jacket designed by Apex One, hugged Browns linebackers Pepper Johnson and Carl Banks. Then Parcells shook hands with Belichick, who placed his left hand on his former boss’s nape, leading to an embrace, while Johnson and Banks warmly greeted several of their ex-teammates on Parcells’s Patriots.

  About an hour later Bill Parcells slung an overnight bag over his right shoulder and walked toward the team bus. Although pleased with his team’s progress, he grimaced as he considered its flaws. Even before New England’s running deficiencies had contributed to its season-ending loss, Parcells realized that big changes were needed. He had never put much stock in Bledsoe’s passing records, which came with a league-high 27 interceptions. And Parcells hated his team’s rushing average of 2.8 yards per carry, among the lowest in NFL history. After having tailored New England’s scheme to his current personnel—the mark of a good coach—Bill Parcells planned to add players who better fit his own football philosophy.

  16

  Rookie minicamp opened at Foxboro Stadium in early May 1995 with an oppressive challenge: the 300-yard shuttle was a conditioning test of will as much as heart and lungs. Parcells instructed his new Patriots to line up at the goal line for a version of the exercise made even more hellacious because they were practicing in pads. The rookies began by sprinting to the 25-yard line, where they made an about-face and accelerated toward the goal line for one shuttle run of 50 yards.

  Following a three-minute respite, they repeated the pattern, running it a total of six times. As New England’s last lineman lumbered across the goal line, the rookies assumed this would put an end to the late-morning practice session. After a strenuous exercise like this, head coaches typically waited at least several hours before conducting any more physical activity. But as his players panted and trembled, Parcells blew his whistle to signal the start of a ninety-minute practice.

  Like his new teammates, Curtis Martin Jr., a third-round pick via Pittsburgh, was startled, but Parcells gave the players no time to commiserate. He oversaw a spirited session that left every running back except Martin sidelined by fatigue, with a few minutes to go before practice ended. His whistle dangling from neck, Parcells pointed to Martin and yelled to the offense, “Keep handing it off to him.”

  The square-shouldered runner gasped for air as he slumped toward the huddle after yet another run. Parcells shouted, “You ready to quit now?”

  Martin, sucking for air and sweating profusely, lifted his head.

  “Coach, I will crawl over to take the handoff before I quit.”

  Parcells’s scowl hid his admiration as the rookie took another handoff. Running from a dark, traumatic upbringing, Curtis Martin Jr. had come too far to quit.

  In 1972, Curtis Martin Sr. completed a four-year stint in the army. Returning to civilian life, the twenty-two-year-old met Rochella Dixon, twenty-five, in his hometown of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. After a brief romance the couple married and moved together to Pittsburgh, where Curtis Martin Jr. was born May 1, 1973. Martin Sr. maintained a marijuana habit that had begun when he was an eighteen-year-old who capitulated to peer pressure.

  A few years into a marriage under financial pressure, Martin Sr. became addicted to cocaine and alcohol. Worse, amid drunken rages and drug-fueled outbursts, Martin Sr. began to abuse his wife. Curtis Martin Jr. watched his father lock his mother in the bathroom, burn strands of her hair with a lighter, and poke her legs with lit cigarettes. One time he threw Rochella down a staircase, and in another episode he punched her in the face. The abuse ended in 1978 only because Curtis Martin Sr. abandoned his small family to focus on feeding his drug habit.

  Rochella Dixon was forced to raise their five-year-old alone. Mother and son moved to Homewood, where the sibling industrialists Andrew and Thomas Carnegie once resided during the 1880s. Nearly a century later it was one of Pittsburgh’s worst areas, known as “Deadwood.” Working two jobs, including full-time employment at AT&T, Dixon often didn’t return home until 10 p.m. She was unable to afford a babysitter, so she often left Curtis by himself in their apartment. Frightened and lonely, the five-year-old sat by a window for hours, watching street activity outside his two-story building. Some nights Curtis ate “syrup sandwiches,” pouring Aunt Jemima syrup on Wonder Bread.

  When Curtis turned seven Rochella tied a shoestring with the house key around his neck. She gave him responsibilities like taking the bus a short distance to pay the electric bill. Rochella’s mother, Eleanor Johnson, began to help care for Curtis, and in her daughter’s absence Johnson assumed a maternal role. She once wrote “Good luck to you” on a two-dollar bill, and gave it to Curtis. He would never spend the gift.

  At age ten, Curtis returned home one day to find his grandmother on the floor, dead, eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. She had been knifed in the chest during a robbery, her blood spattering the peas she’d been shelling. For the next several months, Curtis and Rochella lived in such fear that when one of them showered, the other stood guard.

  During the next half dozen years Rochella hopscotched from one menacing neighborhood to the next, desperate to keep Curtis Martin Jr. from meeting the deadly fate of too many people on Pittsburgh’s mean streets. As he grew up, more than a dozen of Curtis’s relatives and friends, several of them gang members, were murdered. Curtis acquired a sense of fatalism, and occasionally he came close to becoming part of Pittsburgh’s macabre statistics.

  At the end of one party a fight spilled into the street, leading to gunplay. In a chaotic scene pedestrians ran in every direction. Curtis sprinted across the street to a parked car, ducking behind it next to someone else. But his decision backfired. The other person crouching behind the car was a gunman busy unleashing a stream of bullets at the other shooter. Curtis didn’t know what to do. Run, and the gunman across the street might think he was the adversary. Stay, and he might get shot. Begging God to keep him alive, Martin decided to flee, dashing all the way home. “I don’t think,” he recalls, “I had ever run that fast before.” Over the next several days, Curtis started having nightmares about being murdered, waking in a cold sweat, shivering in fear.

  When Curtis reached the tenth grade, Rochella Dixon moved with him to Point Breeze, another hardscrabble area, though somewhat less deadly than their prior neighborhoods. Curtis registered at Taylor Allderdice, perhaps Pittsburgh’s best public high school. Most of his classmates lived in its middle-class neighborhood, Squirrel Hill, which included the city’s largest Jewish population. Point Breeze, where Curtis lived, was one of nine neighborhoods in western Pennsylvania that supplied a diverse student body to Allderdice High.

  Curtis wasn’t into sports like many boys his age. He had given up football after playing Pop Warner through the eighth grade. But his gym teacher, Mark Wittgartner, who doubled as the football coach, noticed the boy’s exceptional athleticism. For two years Curtis resisted pleas from Wittgartner to join the football team, the Allderdice Dragons, who played on an all-dirt field. The coach predicted that Curtis would win a college scholarship if he played, but Curtis’s first thought was, “Man, I don’t want to roll around in dirt.”

  Violence in Point Breeze didn’t abate just because Curtis traveled daily to a pristine campus miles away. Whenever her son headed out of the house to socialize, Rochella feared for his safety. So with Curtis entering his senior year, she implored him to try out for football, knowing that less idle time in the neighborhood would decrease her son’s odds of falling victim to violent crime. With his mom and his gym teacher on the same page, Curtis agreed. And during spring football practice, Curtis Martin Jr. showed more natural ability than anyone Wittgartner had ever coached. He possessed an unusual ability to elude pursuers through a combination of speed, jukes, and peripheral visio
n, gifts that dated to his boyhood spent staying one jump ahead of trouble.

  Curtis recalls, “I used to always imagine things in my mind. ‘I want this person to chase me, and that person to chase me, and then I am going to set it up so they run into each other.’ You know, maybe I used to watch too many cartoons, but those were the kinds of things that were always in my mind.”

  • • •

  On his first carry as a high school player in 1990, Curtis Martin dashed 80 yards for a touchdown. With a diamond-studded ring in his left ear, he ran with toughness that invited hard tackles, but more often defenders got used to seeing the green number 29 on the back of his white jersey. Sporting thick eyebrows, a mustache, and a short beard, Curtis sprinted like a man among boys. In memory of his grandmother Curtis tucked her two-dollar bill in his left sock before each game.

  In Curtis’s sole high school season he was named Pittsburgh’s player of the year, rushing for 1,705 yards and 7.4 yards per carry, while scoring 20 times. Despite offers from college powerhouses like Penn State and Tennessee, in the summer of 1991 Curtis accepted a scholarship from Pittsburgh, coached by Paul Hackett. The runner wanted to make it easier for family and friends to attend his games.

  Curtis Martin Jr.’s decision invited comparisons to Tony Dorsett, the greatest running back in Pittsburgh’s history. Dorsett had helped transform the school’s football program, bringing home a national title during his senior year in 1976 and winning the Heisman Trophy before embarking on an excellent pro career. Heightening the comparisons, Martin’s freshman roommate was safety Anthony Dorsett Jr., the ex-superstar’s son. But Martin didn’t feel any pressure. In a city obsessed with the Steelers, Martin had neither attended a football game nor watched one on TV.

  Since gridiron glory had come so easily in high school, Martin turned into a slacker. As an underclassman he paid little attention during team meetings, and often fell asleep. Martin’s poor habits and more talented competition in college brought consequences, including a serious foot injury that shelved his first year.

  Following the 1992 season, Hackett departed to coach quarterbacks for the Kansas City Chiefs, leading to the return of Johnny Majors, who had guided the program during the 1970s. Injuries dogged Martin, limiting him to four starts. He continued failing to meet expectations until his junior season in 1993, when he matured enough to end his lackadaisical ways. Behind a mediocre offensive line Martin rushed for 1,075 yards, scoring seven touchdowns in 10 games as the team struggled. He missed the final game with a sprained shoulder, and the Panthers finished 3-8.

  In Pitt’s opener for his senior season, Martin showed even more promise, amassing 251 rushing yards during a 30–28 loss to the Texas Longhorns. However, in the next game versus Ohio, Martin left early with a severe ankle injury that kept him out indefinitely. Late in the season, the runner deemed himself healthy enough to play, but the football program wouldn’t clear Martin, preferring that he maintain college eligibility by redshirting the rest of the year. Pitt’s staff at the time included three future NFL head coaches: wide-receivers coach Jon Gruden, linebackers coach Marvin Lewis, and quarterbacks coach Mike McCarthy.

  Martin, though, made a surprising decision to enter the 1995 NFL draft. Given his lukewarm feelings for football, the move seemed curious. He drew widespread criticism amid predictions that he would end up at the bottom of the draft. In evaluations sought by NFL teams, Pitt’s coaches panned Martin. They noted his lack of football passion, perhaps the most damning indictment of an NFL prospect. The five-eleven, 207-pounder was also described as being brittle and unwilling to perform with pain: he had managed to play in only five quarters his entire junior year.

  At Kansas City, Martin’s former coach Paul Hackett urged the Chiefs to remove Martin from their draft board. His suggestion meant the team wouldn’t consider his former player, even in the final round. But Martin’s abilities found a believer in Bobby Grier, New England’s lead scout, who gave the runner a high grade as an NFL talent. Parcells, intent on diversifying a pass-oriented offense, dispatched Maurice Carthon, his running-backs coach, to Pittsburgh for more intelligence on Martin. “Find out everything you can about this guy. Stay as long as you have to. When you come back, I want to know if he’s our guy or not.”

  From 1985 to 1991 Carthon had been a bruising fullback for Parcells’s Giants, a cog in the manhandling, ball-control offense. His punishing blocks while missing only 1 of 76 games created holes for top runners Ottis Anderson, Rodney Hampton, and Joe Morris. Carthon became the only person to play for Parcells and then join his coaching staff. He shared his boss’s hard-nosed demeanor, so Mo Carthon’s opinion, especially regarding runners, carried weight.

  During a face-to-face meeting with Martin, Carthon was struck by the runner’s tearful explanation of his injury-marred years. Carthon recalls, “That let me know football meant something to him.” After getting back to Foxborough, Carthon told Parcells, “This is our guy, but you’re going to be suspicious. He’s too good to be true.”

  Weeks later, Martin traveled to Patriots headquarters for a predraft session with the team, and Parcells met the twenty-one-year-old for the first time. At a workout Martin showed surprisingly soft hands, catching almost every pass thrown at him. Parcells was just as impressed with Martin’s humility and earnestness. Following the session, Parcells whispered to Carthon, “Is this guy for real?”

  Martin’s injury-prone college career kept most organizations from sharing Parcells’s enthusiasm. The Cowboys were among the few, assuring Martin that they would select him in the second round if he was available. For the 1995 NFL draft, Martin gathered with family and friends to watch his fate on TV. Moments before the forty-sixth pick, which Dallas owned in the second round, the group turned giddy in anticipation. But the Cowboys picked tailback Sherman Williams of Alabama.

  New England’s first selection, twenty-third overall, had been cornerback Ty Law via Michigan. The Pats chose linebacker Ted Johnson out of Colorado in the second round, fifty-seventh overall. By the third round, eight runners had been drafted while Martin remained without a team. Just before the Patriots made their third-round selection, Parcells telephoned the runner. “Son, would you like to be a New England Patriot?”

  Martin replied, “Umm, yes sir, I would.”

  Parcells halted Martin’s free fall, selecting him seventy-fourth overall.

  After receiving the first check from a rookie contract worth more than $300,000 annually, Martin hired a housekeeper to provide him with nutritious meals, seeing them as an investment in his profession. He worked at Patriots headquarters eleven hours a day, more than any other player. Martin spent much of that time undergoing a rigorous exercise regimen before taking respites in the cold pool and hot tub. Even on off days for players, he repeated the routine before heading home to relax. “A Spartan warrior,” Parcells recalls.

  Bill Parcells had coached hundreds of players from disadvantaged backgrounds, young black men who had been raised in the ghetto by single moms and overcame lottery-like odds to live their NFL dreams. Martin was different in one striking regard: he had circumvented Parcells’s requirement that a player love football. But the rookie made up for it with an insatiable desire to learn. “He was just like a puppy, lapping it up. ‘Just give me what you got. Just tell me what to do,’ ” Parcells recalls. “And when you know he’s taking it to the nth degree, that inspires you as a teacher, as a coach. You figure, ‘Hey, I’ve got to give this guy everything I have because he wants it, and he’s going to use it.’

  “That’s when you really have to exercise your own personal discipline, because he’s going to try so hard to please you. If I tell him twenty things the first day, he’s going to do all twenty and it’s going to be a mess.”

  So Parcells tutored Martin one subject at time, moving to the next only after the rookie showed progress. Parcells praised Martin’s instincts and vision, noting the uncanny, split-second maneuvers that enabled him to avoid tacklers. Nonetheless, Martin
needed considerable improvement to become Parcells’s ideal runner, one who used power as much as speed, and discipline as much as instinct.

  Parcells asked if Martin understood play structure: identifying the hole to run through, and recognizing the duties of blockers in creating it. Parcells warned Martin against committing a move merely because he hadn’t spotted a hole. Tailbacks who didn’t comprehend a play resorted to scampering. Undisciplined runners deviated after the first sign of trouble, and an early decision allowed tacklers time to minimize yardage. Conversely, a move as late as possible, and at the critical moment, hindered the defense.

  Parcells quizzed his rookie about the roles played by an offense’s kick-out guy and its puller. “Do you even know who these people are?” The kick-out guy blocked a targeted defender, often the first one beyond the point of attack, by sealing him from the inside and pushing him toward the sideline. That inside-out block created a lane for the ball carrier. The puller, a.k.a. the wraparound guy, sealed the other side of the hole. He wrapped around to obstruct inside pursuit. Depending on the running play, a blocker could be a kick-out guy or a puller. A tight end, for instance, might be assigned to kick out the linebacker.

  Although Parcells didn’t require a purely north–south runner, he demanded downfield-consciousness. Running laterally or, worse, backward, to avoid oncoming traffic angered Parcells. “You’ve already passed ’em once,” he explains. “Don’t bring ’em back into the game.” Doing so risked leaving the offense with, say, a second-and-11 situation instead of second-and-7. In a sport that often came down to field position, lost yards had a debilitating effect on the offense. “I always tried to tell Curtis, and all the backs I had, that there are a lot of good two- and three-yard runs,” Parcells says. “They might not look good to the people in the stands, but they’re good when it comes to helping your team win, because you’re making positive yards.”