In broadcasting, however, Parcells lacked the comfort level he had shown as a coach dominating Q&As and captivating observers. Several months into the part-time TV job and a weekly radio show, Parcells suffered from both ennui and coaching withdrawal. Such feelings came as no surprise to his spouse of almost four decades.
“Some guys like to do little things around the house. He never had any interest in that,” says Judy, who notes Parcells’s limited hobbies and aversion to traveling by plane. “And he was never really home all that much. He didn’t know what to do with himself when he was, unless there was some sports to watch on TV. What else was he going to do but go back to the NFL?”
Late in the 2001 season, Tampa Bay patriarch Malcolm Glazer gave staff lawyer Nathan Whitaker a confidential assignment: prepare biographical sketches of potential replacements for Tony Dungy. Atop the Buccaneers’ wish list was ESPN’s guest analyst Bill Parcells, who had jilted the team’s previous owner a decade earlier. Despite occasionally crossing paths with Dungy at the team’s fitness center and exchanging small talk, Whitaker couldn’t disclose the information.
In 1997, only one season after being hired, Dungy had guided the Bucs to their second playoff victory in franchise history. His 1999 team reached the NFC Championship, losing to Chicago, 20–6. Dungy’s turnaround brilliance, based largely on his defensive concepts involving safeties in deep coverage, the Cover 2, made him the best coach in team annals. But the following postseason, an opening-round setback at Philadelphia, 21–3, troubled the Glazer family, whose club that year had fielded nine Pro Bowlers. Critics deemed Dungy’s offense, consistently among the NFL’s worst, too conservative.
Despite being viewed as Super Bowl contenders going into the 2001 season, the Bucs won only three of their first seven games. So even as Dungy’s team reversed course, speculation intensified that he would be replaced by Bill Parcells, who had once unsuccessfully wooed him as a Giants assistant. Malcolm Glazer, whose sons Bryan and Joel ran the team’s daily operations, avoided comment.
During the first two weeks of January, amid all the Parcells-replacing-Dungy scuttlebutt, Chargers GM John Butler tried persuading Parcells to coach in San Diego. Although the former Jets boss listened to San Diego’s pitch, he couldn’t fathom leading an NFL team so far away from his home bases of Florida and New Jersey. The Chargers then decided to pursue Marty Schottenheimer, who’d been dismissed by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder.
Dungy first heard the rumors through a heads-up from someone with strong ties to Parcells: Lions offensive coordinator Maurice Carthon, who had departed Gang Green at the same time as Parcells. Perhaps feeling empathy for one of the NFL’s only black head coaches, Carthon quietly offered Dungy some intel: a few coaches linked to Parcells were ready to join him in Tampa Bay for the 2002 season. After another coaching friend made similar remarks, Dungy called Joel Glazer about the rumor that he was a Dead Coach Walking.
“I asked the guy,” Dungy says, “and he told me point-blank, ‘No, there’s nothing to it.’ So I just accepted him at his word and moved on.”
But on Friday, January 11, five days after Dungy buried his mother, a flurry of reports surfaced that he would be dismissed if his 9-7 team lost Saturday’s wild-card affair, and that an agreement with Parcells was in place. Andy Reid’s Eagles trounced Tampa Bay, 31–9, at Veterans Stadium, once again knocking out the Bucs in the wild-card round. Afterward, Keyshawn Johnson wept in the locker room, torn between his closeness to Parcells and his fondness for Dungy.
On Monday, January 14, GM Rich McKay stunned Dungy with a phone call conveying that he was being dismissed by the Glazers. Dungy says now, “I never realized the gossip was legit until the day I got fired.” The next day Mike Tannenbaum flew to Tampa Bay to interview for the Bucs’s GM job after receiving permission from Gang Green, and the Glazers officially acknowledged having talks with Parcells. Tampa Bay reassigned Rich McKay, its respected personnel executive, to team president, and on January 17 he publicly expressed confidence that Parcells would accept a four-year deal worth $17 million.
Meanwhile, Jets GM Terry Bradway suspected that his organization’s coaches were being contacted about joining Tampa Bay without formal approval. Despite its residual ties to Parcells, Gang Green complained to the league office, and the NFL sent letters to the Bucs and Parcells, warning them that their actions were being monitored. Parcells denied recruiting employed coaches to join Tampa Bay, protesting that as someone unaffiliated with any team his communication with former colleagues shouldn’t be construed as violating NFL policies. However, Parcells quietly reached an unofficial agreement with the Bucs ahead of an announcement, its date to be mutually determined.
Confronting the issue head-on, the Jets gave Mike Tannenbaum a specific deadline to make a decision on his offer from the Bucs: Friday, January 18, at 5 p.m. Mr. T used almost all the allotted time, and late Thursday afternoon he surprised league insiders by declining Tampa Bay’s offer. Only a couple of hours later Parcells shocked the Glazers by informing them that he was no longer interested in joining the Bucs. His explanation echoed the one he’d given the Bucs more than a decade earlier, when he reversed his verbal agreement with Hugh Culverhouse: ostensibly lacking the energy to coach at age sixty, he didn’t want to regret the move after a season or two in Tampa.
Despite Parcells’s penchant for reversals, almost no one had seen this one coming.
While the Glazers shifted their attention to Raiders head coach Jon Gruden, Parcells’s actions spurred criticism, particularly given Tony Dungy’s ouster. Agent Leigh Steinberg says now, “If you’re part of the football fraternity, you’re not supposed to do certain things. There’s a code. But there’s a swashbuckling nature to Parcells. He’ll do what he wants, when he wants.” Tony Dungy, though, refused to join Parcells’s castigators. Dungy and Parcells would remain friendly over the years, chatting more than ever whenever they crossed paths at league events, but the topic of Parcells’s flirtation with the Bucs and Dungy’s intertwined dismissal never came up.
“To this day, I don’t know whether they were courting him or he was trying to get my job,” Dungy says. “If the Bucs came after him, I don’t think he had any obligation to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to talk to you until you fire your coach.’ But if he went after my job, I might feel differently. It’s like this: If my wife has an affair, I might not know how it got started, but I will know who could have stopped it. And [in Tampa Bay], that was the owner.”
The contenders for the Hall of Fame’s class of 2002 lacked the strength of those from the previous year, bolstering Parcells’s second chance at football immortality. But this time he faced criticism from some voters for leaving the Bucs at the altar. Each candidate traditionally had an official advocate on the selection committee. On February 2 in New Orleans, Vinny DiTrani of the Bergen Record made the presentation for Parcells. The sportswriter, closer to Parcells than most in the media, tried his best to convince his fellow voters that the ex-coach would stay retired, adding that he was more certain of this than he had been in 2001. Will McDonough concurred; after having rebuffed Tampa Bay, Parcells was less ambiguous during their conversations.
Such support proved helpful as Parcells survived the first cut from 14 to 11, and then made it to the final round of six players and one coach. Having made it to the penultimate step, Parcells needed 80 percent approval. At this stage, finalists typically won selection, but this time enough committee members blocked Parcells while approving coach George Allen as a senior candidate voted upon separately. Allen had never captured a Super Bowl and owned a postseason record of 2-7. Former offensive guard Bob Kuechenberg, considered a relatively weak finalist, also fell short of final approval.
The Hall of Fame Class of 2002 consisted of George Allen, tight end David Casper, defensive lineman Dan Hampton, quarterback Jim Kelly, and wideout John Stallworth. Parcells, who heard the news on his car radio in New Jersey, was disappointed for the second straight year. His omission was apparently
a backlash from his flirtation with Tampa Bay, plus lingering suspicion by a bloc of voters, apparently from the West Coast, that he intended to coach again after boosting his value through enshrinement. Following the selection process, Ira Miller of the San Francisco Chronicle, an unabashed skeptic of Parcells’s candidacy, told the New York Daily News, “A year of two from now, if he stays out, I’ll look at him again, and I may feel differently, and may be convinced.”
• • •
Judy Goss and Bill Parcells had gotten married as college sweethearts on March 3, 1962. While Parcells pursued a college coaching career that required frequent relocations, Judy knew that she was not the only woman attracted to her husband’s blue eyes, curly blond hair, and Cheshire-cat smile. She also suspected that he was accommodating them. When Parcells was coaching linebackers at Florida State during the early 1970s, Judy discovered incriminating evidence of an affair for the first time. Called out on it, Parcells promised to change his behavior. As a housewife with an expanding brood, Judy felt she had little choice except to offer her husband a mulligan. “I had three little kids; Jill was a year old,” she says. “What was I going to do?”
More than a decade later, after the Giants made Parcells successor to Ray Perkins in 1983, Judy still found it difficult to endure groupies who chased NFL head coaches. The home-wreckers unabashedly engaged her husband at public spots such as restaurants, particularly as he transformed Big Blue into champions. Parcells took “mystery vacations” by himself, Judy recalls, during the annual six-week break before training camp. Once Parcells told her he would be away for a few days at a golf tournament, but when Judy’s skepticism prompted her to check on it, the organizer informed her that the event was still weeks away. “It made me feel sick,” she recalls. She felt worse when Parcells blamed her for being paranoid and stirring up trouble.
During Parcells’s final season with the Patriots, Judy and her husband agreed to build a home in Seagirt, New Jersey, so that they could live by the beach. The couple moved into the new beachside home just before Parcells joined the Jets in February 1997, causing him to rent a condominium on Long Island.
Almost every night after leaving Jets headquarters, Parcells patronized B. K. Sweeney’s, not far from his condo. He usually arrived by himself between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m. to have dinner, most often with a friend. Kelly Mandart, a waitress and manager at the steakhouse, frequently served Parcells. Only a casual football fan, she knew the level of his celebrity from co-workers and patrons. Mandart informed her husband of two years, Terry Scarlatos, about her special customer. The New York City cop and fan of the legendary coach reacted with excitement, and when Scarlatos visited his wife at the restaurant, Parcells thrilled the officer with small talk.
During Judy’s sporadic stays on Long Island she sometimes joined Parcells at B. K. Sweeney’s. On Thursdays Mickey Corcoran drove from Jersey to dine with Parcells. By generally arriving several minutes before his friends, Parcells provided a window for the steakhouse employees to engage him in a running dialogue. Mandart and Parcells got to know and like each other, especially in 1998 when Judy rarely showed up.
On Thanksgiving week Mandart spent several days in Pennsylvania visiting her father-in-law. When she returned to work, Parcells asked her, “Where were you? I missed you.” Mandart confessed to having similar feelings, and in that moment the two became aware of just how much they enjoyed each other’s company. Parcells started giving Mandart Jets tickets, which she would pass on to her brothers; Terry Scarlatos’s police shift, stretching until midnight, prevented him from attending the games.
By late 1998, the friendship between the famous coach, fifty-seven, and his chatty waitress, twenty-nine, had turned into a romance. The unlikely couple attempted to be discreet by patronizing far-flung restaurants on the island. “She wasn’t divorced for some of that time,” Parcells says of Mandart, “and neither was I. So I’m not proud of that.”
As his extramarital relationship with Mandart deepened, Parcells asked his wife not to visit Garden City anymore. “I’m just making us both unhappy.” Judy grudgingly heeded the request, given the deteriorated state of their marriage. Although Parcells still phoned her almost daily at Sea Girt to check in, he stopped making his weekend visits. Judy assumed that her husband was involved in an affair meaningful enough that he was effectively initiating a separation.
By December 1998, Judy had learned of Kelly’s identity after Dallas got the scoop from a friend in the know. Parcells’s daughters tried to lift their mother’s spirits while researching Mandart. The three adult children found it particularly baffling that their father, having stressed education and financial independence throughout their lives, would end up with someone who had chosen not to attend college. In one undercover mission, Jill visited the restaurant and ordered from the bar while Parcells was working at Jets headquarters. Mandart remained oblivious that her customer was Parcells’s youngest daughter.
“He would probably fall off a chair,” Jill says, “if he knew how much we had figured out.”
Judy Parcells’s divorce from her husband of almost forty years produced headlines on January 30, 2002, just two days before Bill Parcells spurned Tampa Bay. But the ex-spouses and their children considered the marriage’s dissolution inevitable, if not anticlimactic. Bill Parcells had been essentially separated from his wife for the past few years, mostly living with his new girlfriend while running the Jets. Nonetheless, Parcells and Judy both felt sadness about the official end of their marriage. Their communication, though, remained unchanged. “Nothing really seemed different,” recalls Judy, who doesn’t blame football for their split, “because he was never around anyway.”
During their separation Parcells had telephoned his wife almost daily to touch base. To Kelly Mandart’s chagrin, he maintained the habit even after the divorce, citing the need to discuss his three children. But Parcells lacked a close relationship with Suzy, Dallas, and Jill, so his idiosyncratic bond with Judy went beyond their mutual interest in the kids.
The day before news outlets reported their breakup, the new divorcees met for lunch at a popular restaurant in Sea Girt. “I have feelings for Judy,” explains Parcells, who was a twenty-one-year-old junior at Wichita when he got married. “I want her to be well, so I try to ensure that if there’s something she needs, I’m there for her.” Neither Parcells nor Judy truly wanted a divorce. Despite marital issues that had originated during his peripatetic college career, Parcells had ruled against ever ending their union. Perhaps the most serious threat came in 1979, when Judy declined to move from Colorado for Parcells’s first NFL opportunity.
Over the decades Judy had periodically contemplated dissolving her marital ties, but she loved Parcells too deeply to follow through. In late 2001, though, Judy felt compelled to file for divorce as he intensified his romance with Mandart. While the affair was not his first, Parcells kept his wife at arm’s length more than ever before. “He wasn’t going to give up his other life,” she recalls, choking up before she pauses, wipes away a tear, and apologizes. “So, you know, I had no choice.”
Parcells no longer tried to dissuade her, yet he insisted that she would have to be the one to initiate a divorce. When Judy finally took the step, Parcells considered it the most disappointing development of his late-adult life. “I was never happy about that,” he says. In early December 2001, Parcells agreed to relinquish their seaside home to Judy. A judge in Monmouth County, New Jersey, granted the divorce on January 16, 2002, after Judy stated that her husband had grown “cold and distant” while not “communicating meaningfully.” But such a description could have been made years, if not decades, earlier.
Parcells accepts the fault for his failed marriage. “I could have done way better there,” he says. “I had a good wife; she was a good woman. I was just irresponsible in some ways. I was messing around and doing things wrong. It got to a point where it was aggravating to everybody. It was just time. But when you make a commitment, for better or for worse,
you try to make things last.”
He adds about straying outside the marriage, “It just got out of control. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to her. She got sick of it, and I don’t blame her. I take all the responsibility.”
Their oldest daughter, Suzy, expounds. “The divorce probably came thirty years too late. My mother truly loved my dad, and he just hurt her over and over and over. Of course when we were kids, we didn’t know all this. My mother kept it well hidden. Because we’d move so much, things would be okay for a while. Finally, it got to the point where my mom was going to go out of her mind. She just couldn’t cope.”
Unlike their parents, Suzy, Dallas, and Jill were thrilled by the divorce. “We were excited,” Jill says. “We didn’t have the ideal childhood, and they didn’t have the ideal marriage. It was too long in coming, but if my dad had his choice, he would still be married to this day, just kind of living his own life.”
During May 2002, Kelly Mandart and Bill Parcells moved into a new home in Manhasset, Long Island. Mandart soon filed for her divorce as the couple, no longer hiding their relationship, planned a future together. Expanding his duties on ESPN, Parcells inked a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal for a full-time role on Sunday NFL Countdown, the network’s flagship pregame show. The contract’s fine print indicated that his coaching career still lacked closure: despite barring him from appearances on other networks, ESPN permitted an escape clause for a return to the sidelines.
While Parcells hadn’t quite done his colorful persona justice during four guest appearances on Countdown, ESPN honchos valued his credibility and insight, so the show’s crowded studio of six analysts notwithstanding, the network created a spot for Parcells. His full-time debut took place at Giants Stadium, when the NFL regular season opened on Thursday, September 5, with Big Blue hosting the 49ers.
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