Responding in a subsequent press conference, Kraft quipped, “I think our groceries are pretty good. They’re fresh.”
Despite their differences, Parcells considers his split from the Patriots the biggest regret of his career. He left a young team that had four players who were stars or budding stars at an offense’s critical positions: quarterback (Bledsoe), tailback (Martin), wideout (Glenn), and tight end (Coates). Plus in McGinest the Patriots had a top player for perhaps a defense’s most importance piece: pass rusher.
“I was reluctant to leave,” Parcells says of New England. “We made it to the Super Bowl. I had a really good young team, and we had a lot of good football in front of us. But for the owner and myself it was an untenable situation. I’m not saying I wasn’t part of the problem, because I was. But I wasn’t solely responsible. There are some things I did that I can look back on and say, ‘Hey, if I had to do it again, I would do it differently.’ And there are some things he did that I won’t forget either, that I don’t look at very kindly, that really precipitated the breakup.
“I wish it had worked out differently. I just didn’t feel like I had much recourse. I felt like it’d be better if I left, though I didn’t feel great about leaving, especially since this was a team I had worked hard to build up, because it was really rock bottom when I got there.”
Kraft sensed Belichick’s desire to fill Parcells’s shoes. The owner was fond of New England’s assistant head coach, but Kraft’s animosity toward Parcells tainted his view of Belichick as the team’s next leader. In a case of guilt by association, Kraft was unwilling to hire the person with the most experience under Parcells, presumably his closest assistant. After wrestling with the decision, Kraft and Myra took Belichick and his spouse, Debby, out to lunch to explain things.
“I had lost the trust with Parcells,” Kraft says, “and he and Bill [Belichick] were tied at the hip. They were together for so long. Could I trust him? I decided I couldn’t at the time. Everything in life is timing.”
Parcells and Belichick got along best when working for separate franchises, but Kraft was oblivious to the dynamic. Also, a perception existed in some NFL front offices that Parcells’s lieutenant was an excellent defensive coordinator and a subpar head coach. So Kraft decided on a clean break from his nemesis and targeted George Seifert, who in mid-January had surprisingly resigned as 49ers head coach with two Super Bowl titles.
To obtain Parcells’s services immediately, the Jets offered New England two second-round picks. But Kraft declined, insisting on the first overall selection. Tennessee upperclassman Peyton Manning, considered a once-in-a-generation quarterback, was a good possibility to enter the 1997 NFL draft. Kraft also wanted a slew of talented young Jets players, like defensive end Hugh Douglas, cornerback Aaron Glenn, and wideout Keyshawn Johnson. Parcells was strongly opposed to Leon Hess’s relinquishing the top overall pick to New England. With free agency’s start only a couple of weeks away, negotiations stalled, so the Jets switched to Plan B, as in Belichick, interviewing him for their head-coaching opening.
After being turned down by George Seifert, Kraft hired Seifert’s defensive coordinator, Pete Carroll, as the new Patriots head coach. Carroll’s only experience at the position had come in 1994 with the Jets, when he finished 6-10 before being dismissed, leading to Rich Kotite’s appointment. However, while introducing Carroll to Patriots Nation on February 3, 1997, Kraft described the ex-49ers coach as someone he could “relate to.”
Meanwhile, Jets team president Steve Gutman came up with a shrewd idea to circumvent Parcells’s contractual impediments, if not pressure Kraft to lower his demands. On February 4 the Jets named Bill Belichick head coach for one season, and Bill Parcells a “consultant” until February 8, 1998. Freed from the Patriots on that date, Parcells would take over as head coach and chief of football operations while Belichick ran the Jets defense with a guarantee of succeeding Parcells in a few years.
Naturally, Kraft attacked Gang Green’s contractual end-around, calling it a “transparent farce.” His strong objections prompted Tagliabue to step into the latest entanglement and place an embargo on Parcells’s services until a resolution could be reached. With key junctures in the off-season fast approaching, Belichick was allowed to exert his authority as a head coach. He immediately hired three of his ex-Browns underlings: Scott Pioli as pro personnel director, Eric Mangini as an entry-level defensive assistant, and a secretary, Linda Leoni. Belichick also contacted yet another of his former Browns employees, Mike Tannenbaum, to discuss a position negotiating player contracts.
Tagliabue ordered a meeting between the Patriots and Jets to be held in Manhattan at Skadden, Arps, a midtown law firm employed by the league. On Monday, February 10, representatives of both teams, including Kraft and Hess, gathered on the building’s forty-seventh floor. Hess’s presence was especially noteworthy given the eighty-two-year-old’s public distance regarding Jets matters. Tagliabue put the two sides in a penthouse conference room to agree on compensation that would allow Parcells to coach in 1997. After more than five hours of discussion, Kraft jotted down New England’s final offer on one side of a piece of paper, while Hess put Gang Green’s last proposal on the other side. Wide differences remained, resulting in a stalemate, so Kraft and Hess shook hands on allowing Tagliabue to make a binding decision.
The commissioner took only twenty minutes to arrive at his ruling: New England obtained Gang Green’s third- and fourth-round choices in April’s draft, a second-round pick in 1998, and a first-round selection in 1999. Also, Gang Green was required to pay $300,000 to a Patriots charity. Tagliabue believed that New England deserved significant compensation for relinquishing its rights to perhaps the NFL’s top coach, but he wanted to preserve Gang Green’s ability to draft players over the next few years. Presuming that Parcells lived up to his reputation, the Jets would be surrendering their most valuable picks when they were an improved team, at a time when New England was likely to be losing key veterans to the salary cap.
The resolution allowed Parcells to sign a six-year, $14.4 million contract, during which he would serve the first four years as head coach. Giving voice to the euphoria of Jets fans, the New York Daily News declared Parcells’s hiring the franchise’s “greatest triumph since Super Bowl III in 1969.” Parcells became the only person in NFL history to guide both the Giants and the Jets. After a six-day stint in the lead role, Belichick, who was named assistant head coach overseeing the defense, quipped about “stepping down with an undefeated record, untied and unscored upon.” His unique contract as Parcells’s heir apparent paid him the highest salary of any NFL assistant coach, averaging $750,000 annually.
On Tuesday, February 11, 1997, the Jets introduced Bill Parcells at Weeb Ewbank Hall, the team’s headquarters on the campus of Hofstra University. Hess made one of his rare appearances at a press conference. His colorful remarks indicated that the franchise would grant Parcells, its fourth head coach in five years, the unfettered authority he had craved in New England. “I just want to be the little boy that goes along with him and pushes the cart in the supermarket and lets him fill it up. He’s going to run the show, and it’s not going to be two or three cooks in the kitchen. It will be just him.”
Born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, in 1914, Leon Hess came from humble beginnings. In 1933, his Lithuanian father, Mores, an ex–kosher butcher who delivered oil around the state, filed for reorganizational bankruptcy. A recent graduate of Asbury Park High, Leon Hess, eighteen, ran the reconstituted company while occasionally digging for clams for extra income. “Everybody was broke in those days,” he recalled.
Leon used a small, 615-gallon truck to deliver home-heating oil in town. Despite his youth, Leon developed a reputation for toughness, shrewdness, and frugality. Most oil bids were typewritten submissions. To save on costs, Leon scrawled his company’s bids in black ink. Within five years his company was a major bidder on government fuel contracts in the state.
World War II prompted L
eon to join the army, where he exploited his background to become George Patton’s oil-supply officer in Europe, a critical role in the general’s mechanized Third Army. Leon Hess was discharged as a major, and received a Bronze Star before returning to civilian status, where he envisioned turning his business into a major integrated company similar to Shell’s. Hess soon began importing oil, and by 1957 his company was handling 38,000 barrels daily. He built three refineries, including one each in Texas and the Virgin Islands. In 1960 the company expanded into retail gasoline sales, starting with twenty-eight stations. Within years he would own more than five hundred stations, spurring a merger with the Amerada Corporation, one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil.
Hess became part owner of the Jets in 1964 as part of a four-man group spearheaded by entertainment impresario Sonny Werblin, purchasing the franchise out of receivership. Hess got involved largely as a favor to Werblin, one of his business partners in New Jersey’s Monmouth Park Racetrack. One of the original eight AFL teams that included the Patriots, the franchise had been called the New York Titans. Hess’s group renamed the team the Jets because it played near LaGuardia Airport at Shea Stadium.
Werblin and Hess held the biggest stakes, at roughly 25 percent each, and Werblin served as Jets president until 1968, when his partners bought his shares for nine times their original value. Don Lillis became team president but died two months later, causing another part-owner, Phil Iselin, to step in. Hess, who had increased his stake to a majority share of 33 percent, was named vice president.
On December 28, 1976, Iselin died of heart failure in his Jets office. Hess bought out Iselin’s widow to own half the team, and reluctantly took on the club’s presidency in February 1977. During seven years as Jets president, Hess quietly boosted his team shares to 100 percent. At the time Forbes estimated Hess’s net worth to be at least $320 million, enough for the former clam digger to host the shah of Iran in his Park Avenue apartment during trips to New York. But Hess kept a low profile, retaining a public-relations man to keep his name out of newspapers. As a boy, he said, his parents had repeatedly warned him to “let my actions speak for me.”
Hess stayed away from the league’s annual meetings until 1982, five years after taking control of the Jets. The first time Parcells met Hess was at one of the powwows in the mid-1980s, after an introduction from Giants owner Wellington Mara. The few times that Hess and Parcells had crossed paths at league meetings, they engaged in pleasant chitchat. Parcells admired Hess’s league-first ethos, also shared by old-school owners like Wellington Mara, Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney, and Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson.
Despite Hess’s apparent detachment from overseeing a bumbling franchise, he longed for a winner, and privately held strong convictions about the team. Since Iselin’s death Hess had been intent on extricating the Jets from an unpalatable lease at Shea Stadium. Hess detested his team’s secondary status to the Mets, for whom the stadium had been built in 1964. Dissatisfied with the city’s plans to upgrade it, Hess made Giants Stadium his franchise’s new home in 1984.
When Leon Hess stepped down as CEO of Amerada Hess in 1995, he was eighty-one. His worth had reportedly grown to $720 million, but that paled next to his desire to reward long-suffering Jets fans with a championship. After repeatedly turning down exorbitant offers from potential buyers, the octogenarian owner pounced at the first chance to land Bill Parcells.
In 1 BP, or one year Before Parcells, the Jets had more cash over cap than any other NFL team. In other words, the 1996 Jets spent the league’s highest amount on personnel, about $70 million in long-term contracts that Hess had green-lighted to improve the club. That splurge had resulted in one victory, so on the day he signed Parcells, Hess expressed fatigue with being embarrassed by Gang Green. He told Parcells, “You know, I’m not gonna be around much longer, so I want you to do everything you can right now.”
Parcells replied, “I understand that, Mr. Hess.”
During that conversation, Parcells revealed to Hess the first time he had heard of the oil magnate, more than forty years earlier while Duane “Bill” Parcells and his father gazed at seaplanes roaring above the Hackensack River. The Hess oil tanks across the river had spurred the kid to ask about the name. In the press conference announcing his new coach, Leon Hess offered a slice of autobiography that went back even farther. “I was born and brought up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Bill Parcells is in love with Sea Girt, New Jersey. They’re eight miles apart. Seventy years ago, as kids in the summertime, at low tide, we used to have a little shovel and we’d go and dig up clams and sell them.
“The big ones would go for clam chowder at the restaurants. The little ones went to clam bars. We were lucky to make fifty or seventy-five cents a day. Little did I think that seventy years later, eight miles away in Sea Girt, would be a Tuna. It’s all the same ocean. Little did I think the Good Lord would favor me and I would marry that Tuna.”
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Driving from Cleveland to Boston in January 1996, Mike Tannenbaum cruised the New York State Thruway on his way to his parents’ home. The Tulane Law graduate had just lost his job as a personnel assistant with Bill Belichick’s Browns because of the franchise’s move to Baltimore. Tannenbaum’s mother called his cell phone to check on his progress on the road, and to inform him that Tulane’s first student-loan bill had arrived in the mail.
Mike Tannenbaum said to himself sarcastically, “This is great. You’re twenty-seven years old. You’re moving back home to live with your parents. And you’re sixty thousand dollars in debt. Law school was a really good decision, Mike.”
That degree, though, was about to start reaping benefits. Not in his next job, an entry-level spot in the Saints personnel department with a salary of $20,000, but in the one after that. In late February of 1997, Bill Parcells, heeding a recommendation from Bill Belichick, called to offer Tannenbaum a position as director of player contract negotiations with an annual salary of $85,000. The move was part of a major restructuring, in which Parcells dismissed ten of Rich Kotite’s thirteen assistants and hired a slew of his own disciples. Beyond his coaches, Parcells brought in Carl Banks, his ex–Giants linebacker, as a player adviser in areas such as life skills. Mark Bavaro agreed to become a consultant to tight ends coach Pat Hodgson. And Matt Bahr, hero of the 1990 NFC Championship with five field goals, accepted a part-time role dispensing technique to Gang Green’s kickers.
Two front-office members from the previous regime who kept their jobs were personnel director Dick Haley and his son Todd, a scout. Despite Gang Green’s struggles over the years, Parcells valued Dick Haley, who was highly regarded around the league. From 1971 to 1990, Haley had served as the Steelers’ personnel director, playing a key role in building their 1970s dynasty of four Super Bowls. Pittsburgh’s 1974 draft class, among the best in NFL history, included four future Hall of Famers: linebacker Jack Lambert, center Mike Webster, and wideouts John Stallworth and Lynn Swann. In 1991 Dick Haley switched to the Jets, and four years later he helped Todd land an entry-level job in the organization as a scouting assistant.
Todd Haley, a former Steelers ball boy who used to watch game film alongside his dad, wanted to move into the coaching side of the game. When Parcells arrived, Todd made his case for an unfilled position as offensive assistant for quality control, opposite Eric Mangini, who held the defensive post. “Coach, I appreciate you keeping me on as a scout, but I want to coach, and I’ll take a pay cut to do it. I’ll do it for nothing, if I have to.” The lowest rung of an NFL coaching staff, the position paid substantially less than a scout’s salary of roughly $80,000. Won over by Todd’s passion, Parcells gave him the gig with a $40,000 salary plus a company car.
Parcells’s penchant for riding his coaches, especially the neophytes, was well-known around the league. “I give it to them the worst,” Parcells says, “because I want to get them where they want to go—just faster. It’s almost like coaching a player.” Nonetheless, Dick Haley supported the move, believin
g that his high-strung son would be a better fit as a coach.
After his first trip to Weeb Ewbank Hall, Bill Parcells was adamant about upgrading the team’s security. So he turned to Steve Yarnell, his former defensive lineman at Army, and the man he had asked to direct Big Blue’s security during the week of the 1991 Super Bowl in Tampa. Until then Yarnell had only attended Giants games in the stands. “Until you get down on the field,” Yarnell says, “you don’t realize how fast everybody is. It’s exciting.”
Yarnell knew plenty about excitement. After becoming an infantry officer, he graduated from the Army Ranger School, a sixty-one-day combat program designed to physically stress students just short of death. Then, for almost two decades, Yarnell worked as an FBI special agent focusing on terrorism. He provided security for high-level informants, and played a role in solving the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. “I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side,” Parcells says, chuckling.
Yarnell intended to improve team security for road games by coordinating with law-enforcement officials at various cities. But his first objective after being hired was retrofitting Jets headquarters with an access control system instead of having the franchise rely on Hofstra’s public-safety employees. “Bill used to kid me: ‘When are we getting the burning moat?’ ” recalls Yarnell. “He wanted the place impregnable if necessary. Bill was also concerned about his own safety. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a high-profile individual.”
Parcells says, “I wanted him to cultivate sources in law enforcement, and to get a protocol in place if an incident happened. I also wanted to be able to advise players about criminal violations, and matters like having guns registered. Those things can be problems.” An important aspect of the new job description also involved Yarnell’s researching draft prospects and disclosing any red flags. Few NFL clubs employed anyone full-time to oversee security, but within the next several years other teams would start emulating Parcells’s approach.
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