Parcells

by Bill Parcells

  In the season opener at Jacksonville on September 10, Owens showed why employers tolerated his soap opera, at least temporarily. The Cowboys lost, 24–17, as Drew Bledsoe tossed three interceptions to undermine his team’s 10–0 lead, but despite having missed most of training camp, T.O. finished with a team-high six catches, including one touchdown, for 80 yards. Even more impressively, the sharp performance came in Owens’s first game since October 2005.

  Back at his condominium after a return flight, Parcells tried to get a few hours of shut-eye, but following several minutes of uneven sleep, he awoke to a blazing sensation in his throat. Choking on bile, Parcells hopped out of bed while trying not to disturb Kelly. He rushed to the bathroom to vomit, then swigged water and exhaled to calm himself.

  Parcells was unsurprised by the regurgitation; it had been taking place every football season since he joined the NFL. Instead of returning to bed, he checked his cell-phone voice mail. One message came from his ex-wife. “Please don’t let the loss affect your health.”

  The mid-sleep vomiting had been most frequent late in his Giants tenure, but Parcells had decided against mentioning it to a doctor, seeing the problem as an indication of stress—the cost of doing football business. “It wasn’t a disease,” he says. “It was just a condition.”

  That problem had often disrupted Judy’s sleep, particularly on Sunday nights. Their shut-eye returned to normal for a couple of years during Parcells’s first NFL retirement, but after the Patriots hired him in 1993, Judy started taking two tablets of Tylenol PM at bedtime. “I got a little smarter,” she says, chuckling, “because I was tired of not being able to sleep.”

  Although Parcells slept worse after losses, even his post-victory slumber remained choppy; he might stir after an hour, enthusiastic about a new idea for practice. Regardless, Parcells generally awoke by 5 a.m., preoccupied by play designs and depth charts.

  His sleep would be no different than usual on September 17, 2006, after the Cowboys captured their home opener, 27–10, versus Washington. Drew Bledsoe bounced back with two touchdowns, while Mike Zimmer’s defense allowed none. Early in the contest, Owens broke a finger, forcing him out of the game after three catches for 19 yards. The wideout underwent surgery a few days later, with team doctors expecting him to miss at least two games.

  The 1-1 Cowboys entered their bye week expecting an uneventful stretch. However, on the morning of September 17, Terrell Owens generated national news by overdosing on pain medication at his Dallas condo. His publicist called 911, and an ambulance rushed Owens to a hospital just four blocks away. Released within hours, T.O. denied reports of attempted suicide, but conflicting information from the wideout, the police, and his publicist fueled the media firestorm. Owens participated in practice the next morning, then held a press conference at Valley Ranch amid a carnival atmosphere.

  Parcells saw the incident as a narcissist’s cry for attention, so he never asked T.O. about it. “When you sign a player like that, you have to expect certain things to happen,” Parcells says. “Once I found out he was okay, that’s all I needed to know. As long as he’s fine, then I’m happy.”

  The silent treatment, which stood in such sharp contrast to the public’s fascination, bothered Owens. Despite his broken finger, T.O. returned to the starting lineup for Dallas’s next game at Tennessee. He helped the Cowboys triumph, 45–14, by catching five passes for 88 yards, while Terry Glenn snagged two touchdowns. The final period of the blowout prompted Tony Romo’s first NFL appearance at quarterback. Primarily the holder on field goal attempts, Romo spent Dallas’s final two drives strictly handing off, or running himself.

  Tony Romo had thrived during preseason: playing in 10 of 16 quarters, the Eastern Illinois product led the NFL with 833 passing yards, and although he hadn’t yet thrown a pass in a real game, Parcells aimed to give him some meaningful snaps. But Dallas’s leader wanted to manage Romo carefully to minimize the chances of damaging the undrafted quarterback’s confidence.

  “You plug a young guy in too early, and if he’s not ready you can destroy that player,” Parcells explains. “You don’t want to throw him to the wolves and have the wolves bite so hard that he loses his self-confidence—or the fans or the press get on him. If I had put in Romo in his first year and just let him play, he would have been out of football in a year and a half. He was just a gunslinger. He was indiscriminate. And he would do shit that you just can’t succeed doing. But after a year or two of practicing in the preseason, getting his [reps], you could see he had a real good chance to come along.”

  Romo’s first NFL pass came against the Houston Texans on October 15, another blowout by Dallas that he entered late: the play resulted in a 33-yard completion to wideout Sam Hurd. Romo’s only other attempt produced a 2-yard touchdown to Owens, putting the Cowboys up, 34–6, the final score. With Bledsoe committing maddening mistakes while being sacked too much because of his immobility, Romo’s talents weighed on Parcells’s mind.

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  With only one playoff appearance going into his fourth season with Jerry Jones, Bill Parcells seemed more intent than ever on improving the Cowboys. But close friends like Bobby Green, familiar with his maniacal approach at previous stops, voiced concerns about his health. Although Parcells sometimes conducted practice with bloodshot eyes, fatigue hardly slowed the sixty-four-year-old taskmaster. “He did not take his foot off the pedal,” says Todd Haley, the Cowboys’ passing game coordinator. “And I could see what effort that he put into it, from the off-season through the regular season, did to him.”

  Returning home in the early evenings, Parcells went from hard-charging, loud, and brusque to withdrawn, subdued, and taciturn. He typically brooded for much of the night, and declined to eat dinner. “Bill was a depressed, unhappy individual,” Mandart recalls. “That’s not the way to live your life.” One salutary pleasure at Valley Ranch came through an exercise regimen with Cowboys trainer Joe Juraszek. Every other day the pair underwent a workout that slightly boosted Parcells’s spirits and energy. In an effort to address his poor eating habits, Parcells even gave up candy and cookies. Although he no longer ate an entire box of Fig Newtons each day, Parcells maintained his lust for peanut butter, consuming it directly from the jar.

  Despite their inconsistency the 3-2 Cowboys played for first place in the NFC East against the 3-2 Giants at Texas Stadium. Trailing 12–7 just before halftime, Dallas had taken the ball to New York’s 4, with a chance for the lead. But Bledsoe tossed a weak pass intended for Terry Glenn in the left flat, where cornerback Sam Madison intercepted it. The miscue ended both Dallas’s promising opportunity and Parcells’s patience with his veteran quarterback. Such bad decisions, the head coach felt, were coming too frequently from a quarterback experienced enough to know better. So Parcells decided on the major change he’d put in motion since preseason: Tony Romo replaced Drew Bledsoe to start the second half.

  The backup quarterback attempted a pass on Dallas’s first offensive play, but it was tipped by Giants defensive end Michael Strahan, and ended up in the hands of linebacker Antonio Pierce. Exploiting the interception only three snaps later, Big Blue went ahead 19–7 on Eli Manning’s 13-yard toss to tight end Jeremy Shockey. Bledsoe stood on the sideline scowling as Tony Romo ended up with three interceptions, including one returned 96 yards for a touchdown that sealed the outcome.

  Big Blue’s 36–22 victory earned Coughlin’s team first place in the NFC East, while rendering Dallas a .500 club yet again. Despite the interceptions, Romo’s 14 of 25 passing, including two touchdowns, intrigued Cowboys Nation. In sharp contrast to Bledsoe, Romo scrambled adroitly to avoid pressure before zinging his passes.

  Watching the blowout at home in New Jersey, Jim Burt was surprised by his former coach’s body language. Burt noticed an unfamiliar lack of fire from Parcells on the sidelines, so the next morning he telephoned the Cowboys coach to express concerns about his well-being.

  “Bill, what’s wrong with you? You’re white as a g
host, you’re not moving [around on the sideline much]. What are you doing? What’s going on?” Burt made plans to visit Parcells at the Cowboys’ next game, against the Carolina Panthers at Bank of America Stadium.

  Parcells wasted no time naming Romo the starting quarterback for the October 29 contest on NBC Sunday Night Football, the network’s inaugural season of prime-time NFL telecasts. He told his players at Valley Ranch, “I don’t enjoy doing this to Drew, but you’ve got to rally around Tony.” On game day Jim Burt arrived at the stadium about an hour before the 8:15 p.m. kickoff and walked into the Cowboys locker room. In a role reversal, Jim Burt exhorted Parcells, and then delivered a pregame speech to his players before heading to the Cowboys’ sideline.

  Although Jerry Jones believed that his team’s best chances for making the playoffs lay with Drew Bledsoe, the owner supported his head coach’s quarterback decision. Jones’s assessment seemed accurate late in the first quarter when Romo tossed an interception that the Panthers parlayed into a 14–0 lead. But Romo led a dramatic turnaround in the second half while Jim Burt, wearing Cowboys gear, cheered and chest-bumped Parcells’s players. The young quarterback guided Dallas to 35 unanswered points, including a franchise-record 25 in the fourth quarter. In his brilliant starting debut, Romo connected frequently with Terrell Owens (9 catches for 107 yards) and Jason Witten (6 receptions for 80 yards).

  Moments after the 35–14 triumph, Parcells kissed players on the cheek, although T.O. received a pat instead. On the team plane, Parcells took a few phone calls from good friends like Tony La Russa, the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball manager, who congratulated Bill for the impressive comeback. In the next game, though, Dallas maintained its win-loss pattern, falling 22–19 at Washington in perhaps the most bizarre finish that either Joe Gibbs or Bill Parcells had ever experienced.

  The score was tied at 19 with only 35 seconds left when the Redskins’ Nick Novak missed a 49-yard field goal. Leading a hurry-up offense, Tony Romo completed three passes, including a 28-yarder to Jason Witten, positioning the Cowboys for their turn at a field-goal try with six seconds left. However, Mike Vanderjagt’s 35-yard attempt never had a chance—it was blocked by safety Troy Vincent. Safety Sean Taylor plucked the bouncing ball at Washington’s 26 before zigzagging through tacklers to reach Dallas’s 44. Time had run out, however, so the game was headed for overtime.

  Hold that thought. The Cowboys were called for a face-mask penalty against Taylor, tacking 15 yards on to the return. By rule, regulation play couldn’t end on a defensive penalty, so Washington got one more play. With no official time left, Nick Novak booted a 47-yard field goal that slipped inside the right upright as 90,250 spectators roared at the surreal finish. In a silver-lining performance, Tony Romo tossed two touchdowns without an interception while gaining 284 yards on 24-for-36 passing.

  Retired from coaching since late 1994, Bill Walsh enjoyed visiting Dallas in the fall, so he surprised Bill Parcells with a telephone call from his California home, requesting their first get-together. Parcells loved the idea, and arranged for Walsh to swing by Cowboys headquarters for some quality time. While leading the 49ers from 1979 to 1988, Bill Walsh had enjoyed a high-profile rivalry with Bill Parcells, one that produced some of the NFL’s most memorable games. Playoff showdowns between their teams occasionally led to Super Bowl titles. And in a sense, the rivalry continued decades beyond the Giants-49ers classics via their enormous coaching trees: by 2006, roughly three-fourths of NFL head coaches had ties to Walsh or Parcells; most of the rest were linked to Marty Schottenheimer.

  After Parcells had taken over the Giants in 1983, his main communication with Walsh amounted to exchanging trade proposals over the telephone. Despite being football adversaries, they considered each other natural trade partners, and were unhesitant to cut deals. Occasionally Walsh had irked Parcells by reneging on oral agreements after getting a better proposal within hours, but the two kept negotiating ploys to a minimum.

  During his special trip to Valley Ranch, Bill Walsh spent more than two hours with Parcells in Landry’s old office. Sitting across from each other, the football legends reflected and looked ahead. Their topics mainly dealt with the league, from its direction to new strategies on the gridiron. Parcells and his guest agreed that the NFL possessed a cyclical nature that made some of the new trends essentially retro. For several minutes, Walsh reminisced about key clashes between San Francisco and Big Blue in the stretch during the 1980s when both men led two powerful franchises that espoused diametric philosophies.

  Parcells recalls of the get-together, “That was a precious time for me.”

  While capturing two Lombardi Trophies in four years during the 1980s, Bill Walsh’s 49ers opened their postseasons with victories over Big Blue. But Parcells’s Giants crushed San Francisco, 49-3, on the way to his first Super Bowl title in 1987, and the rout helped define him as a coach.

  Walsh recalled to Parcells, “We were young and vibrant guys.” The remark spurred Parcells to retrieve a piece of literature he cherished and kept close by: General Douglas MacArthur’s “Youth Is Not a Period of Time,” also known as MacArthur’s “Creed on Youth.” Parcells removed it from his personal organizer in a section with his laminated preface of The Coaches. The sixty-five-year-old head coach read the poem to his seventy-four-year-old guest.

  “Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal.”

  Walsh sat riveted as Parcells paused for a moment before continuing with the poem’s final lines. “You will remain young,” he boomed, “as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of Nature and God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man’s soul.”

  The passage captivated Walsh, as Parcells had thought it would. So the Cowboys coach made his guest a copy. The poem, apparently an adaptation of Samuel Ullman’s “Youth,” gained popularity after MacArthur kept a framed copy on his office desk in Manila, Philippines, while serving as supreme commander of the Allied Forces after World War II. On MacArthur’s seventy-fifth birthday, January 26, 1955, he quoted from the poem during a dedication of his monument at Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park.

  Well acquainted with the workload of an NFL head coach, Bill Walsh volunteered to let Parcells return to his Cowboys duties. The two NFL legends shook hands firmly before Bill Walsh departed for Woodside, California.

  On November 10, several weeks after the get-together, Walsh made his battle with leukemia public. He’d been diagnosed with blood cancer in 2004, a decade after coaching his final game at Stanford. Walsh had kept his condition quiet, but he decided to disclose it in late 2006 through two sportswriters who had once covered his 49ers. Reading the newspaper coverage about Walsh’s illness, Parcells flashed back to their precious time at Valley Ranch, convinced that it related to his rival’s mortality. “I guess he knew he was dying, and just wanted to talk,” Parcells says somberly. “We shared a lot of competition together.”

  Bill Walsh would succumb to leukemia on July 30, 2007, at age seventy-five.

  After losing the heartbreaker in Washington, Tony Romo amassed a career-high 308 passing yards in a 27–10 road triumph versus the Cardinals, then outplayed Peyton Manning at Texas Stadium as the Colts suffered their first loss of the season, 21–14. Despite Romo’s emergence and Dallas’s latest impressive victory, Parcells went to sleep that night concerned about Mike Vanderjagt, who’d missed two medium-range field goals against his former team on his only attempts. During training camp the thirty-six-year-old had pulled his groin, causing him to miss most of preseason. He’d returned for the Cowboys’ exhibition finale, and uncharacteristically missed two gimmes. Having expected Vanderjagt to be worth three additiona
l victories, Parcells began to instead worry about him as a potential liability.

  Still, with the Cowboys improving to 6-4, Jerry Jones upgraded his expectations for reaching the postseason, and on Thanksgiving Day, Tony Romo removed any doubt about his ascendancy during a nationally televised game at Texas Stadium versus Tampa Bay. The undrafted quarterback led Dallas to a 38–10 triumph by tossing five touchdowns, tying a franchise record last reached by Troy Aikman. Several giddy fans placed a sign displaying Romo’s name in the arena’s Ring of Honor. Romo drew effusive praise from all corners, especially the team’s owner, but the person whose bold decision had led to the euphoria preached caution. Alluding to the Aikman comparisons, Parcells snapped at reporters, “We’ve got a ways to go here. So put away the anointing oil, okay?”

  In a surprise move, the next day Parcells released the player whom he himself had anointed to solve the team’s placekicking troubles. Mike Vanderjagt left the Cowboys after making only 13 of 18 field goals, the lowest success rate of his NFL career. To replace him for Dallas’s stretch drive, Parcells signed Martin Gramatica, thirty-one. Once a top kicker for Tampa Bay during the early 2000s, Gramatica had been released by Indianapolis in 2004 for decreased production. He’d sat out 2005 while recovering from abdominal surgery, and in 2006 Gramatica rejoined Indianapolis for three games, while Adam Vinatieri nursed a groin injury.

  Against Big Blue in his next game, Romo finally delivered a subpar performance with two interceptions and no touchdowns. However, the Cowboys still triumphed 23–20, on Martin Gramatica’s 46-yard field goal with one second left. The four-game streak gave the 8-4 Cowboys an upper hand in the NFC East, but it did little to reduce Parcells’s grumpiness or boost his energy. And his press conferences started to lack his typical verve and animation.