Collision Low Crossers

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Two

  BROTHERS

  What strange creatures brothers are!

  —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

  Mike Pettine came late to pro football. He had played high-school football for his father, Mike Pettine Sr., at Central Bucks West, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and Pettine was a strong enough quarterback and student that the finest schools recruited him. He chose the University of Virginia, where he played free safety and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1988. He earned good money underwriting life insurance and then supervising the hull-manufacturing division at a boat company. Although he was interested in both strategy and risk, Pettine was not a man who saw his life’s purpose in an actuarial table or at the bottom of a boat. At work, Pettine found his thoughts were always straying to football. So he took an entry-level football job as a graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh and then became a coach at a Pennsylvania high school. He married, had children, and bought a big house. He enjoyed coaching high school, but that felt like being on to something rather than in on the something. He spent his weekends breaking down game film just because he enjoyed it.

  In 2002, right after Pettine’s third child was born, an old acquaintance, the Baltimore Ravens offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh, told Pettine that the team had an opening in the video department. One thing, said Cavanaugh: the job paid very little. Without telling that part to his wife, “who never would have gone for it,” Pettine took the video job, opened a new bank account, and began secretly cashing out his 401(k) fund and depositing the retirement money in his checking account to maintain the balance. This felt like taking two risks in one.

  You can’t get more entry-level in NFL coaching than third video guy. During the day, Pettine filmed practices from the Trico camera tower high over the field and worked on the techy pick-and-shovel projects that had gotten him through the door. But in the evenings, he lingered. It was around this time that high-level football coaching began to rely on computer templates for making playbook drawings, studying scouting and practice film, and designing game plans. All that was fine by Pettine. When he talked about anything, if a computer was near, it was natural to him to illustrate his thoughts by calling up an image or a map or a clip of video. Word got around that there was a person at the facility who was both football and computer literate. Friends of Rex Ryan, in particular, were hearing about “this dude who knows how to do everything.”

  As for Ryan, it had to be admitted that he displayed an imposing range of inabilities. Spelling, punctuation, fixing stuff—the whole under-the-hood world was anathema to him. Ryan thought of himself as bad at anything with directions, and yet his enthusiasm was such that he’d open the box anyway, get to the end of the operation and find the damn swing set had been put together backward and there were twenty extra pieces spread around him. His old college-coaching colleague Sam Pittman had watched enough of this to reach the obvious conclusion: Ryan was not very handy. True, Ryan might not be a builder—he couldn’t put together a swing set you’d trust your kids on—but he could do other things. During a football game, he could see the whole field in flow—not just where the ball was but where all twenty-two players were and what they were doing. If the left guard sealed the nose tackle, Ryan could see that. If the right end got up too far, Ryan could see that. If the back side was clean, he could see that too. Other coaches told him they could pick up one or two such actions in real time; Ryan could see all three, and everything else besides. Years later, a psychological test revealed that Ryan was dyslexic. That helped explain why he couldn’t do another thing: spell. The test also suggested that Ryan had unusual abilities as a creative problem-solver—a great virtue in a football coach. But how it was that Ryan could look out at a big heaving smudge of men and see them stilled into ordered clarity—nothing could explain that. It was his gift alone.

  An effective coach was a person skilled at getting talented people to do things for him. After Ryan designed “the biggest kids’ fort in the world!” for his two sons to play on in their Maryland backyard, a round-trip airplane ticket from Illinois to Baltimore was purchased for Sam Pittman. Upon arrival, Pittman was presented with a three-level drawing made in Ryan’s hand. The two men went out to the yard, and while Pittman measured and sawed, Ryan was right there beside him telling stories about tornados, making work seem like fun.

  In Baltimore, Ryan became a football architect, and Mike Pettine his football engineer. The Ravens head coach at the time was Brian Billick, and Billick said that pretty quickly it was evident to him that Pettine would be “a brilliant coach.” Pettine had a naturally analytic mind, and on film, football glowed hyper-limpid and comprehensible to him. If in life he preferred to keep a Robert Mitchum–ish sort of distance, from the remove of a football moviegoer, he got in close and could understand the actions of fast-moving men in granular terms that told him not only what every player was doing but also what they were seeing and thinking. Most football coaches sought to correct imperfect results; Pettine tried to teach players to make smart decisions. Players, he knew, wanted coaches who could give them something that would help prolong their careers, make them more money.

  Pettine was organized, precise, and, like Ryan, very sure of himself. That was crucial when you hadn’t played pro football, hadn’t even coached college ball, and were making the jump from game planning for Friday night to working with Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs on Sunday afternoons. Coaches with the pedigree of Ryan and Pettine were always aware that it would take them longer to earn the trust of professionals than it would take former players. But this often made them better coaches than former players were because they were seeing their team as it was, not through the distorting prism of their own experiences.

  Pettine was asked to return for a second year in Baltimore and given a five-thousand-dollar raise. Life continued apace until the final week of the year, when his wife discovered that there was something peculiar going on with the family finances. She was very upset, convinced her husband was having an affair. Let me explain, he said, and he did his best. But what could he tell her—that she was losing him to football?

  After Ryan became the Ravens defensive coordinator, in 2005, he promoted Pettine to outside-linebackers coach, and the two began working on the defensive game plan together. By now they were all but inseparable. They appropriated inflections and casual language from each other, each man prefacing his thoughts with “To me,” each using convivial phrases like “Oh, my goodness” and “the funny thing is” the way teenagers leaned on “OMG!” On Tuesdays they worked straight through the night; on Mondays and Wednesdays, they’d knock off by midnight. Often, when it got late, Ryan would take his coat, get in his car, and leave the facility so that the assistant coaches and video guys would go home to their nonfootball lives. Then Ryan would circle back to the parking lot and resume work with Pettine. They were so deep in that everything else fell away. It was tiring, relentless work. The Ravens had excellent defensive players, like the linebacker Ray Lewis and the safety Ed Reed, and the coaches felt they were in competition with them and were determined that the scheme should be up to the players’ standards.

  New defensive concepts were always occurring to Ryan; he kept a pad and pencil by his bedside. Each fresh idea seemed to him miraculous, and he’d come bursting in on Pettine, waving a scrap of notepaper, crying, “It’s perfect!” Pettine would remain motionless, glowering at him. Still, it was an intrigued glower. Ryan would stride to the wall and draw his play up on the whiteboard, and then back and forth the two would go, Pettine probing, methodically pointing out flaws, Ryan reluctant to accept that there could be any flaws, indignant at the very idea—“No fucking way!” Now indignation would flame in Pettine, and after an outraged “But Rex!” he would supply logic in complete paragraphs, which had a stimulating effect. “Okay!” Ryan would say, as though they’d seen it the same way all along. “We could do this!” Back and forth some more they’d go, a blade and a stone, unti
l at last, almost casually, Pettine would say with a nod, “That works.” The two were engaged in what amounted to an ongoing creative dialogue about defensive strategy and were so comfortable in their process that Ryan came to feel that developing an idea with Pettine was part of having the idea.

  The fact that Ryan grew up with a twin brother is fundamental to his personality. Through early childhood, he and Rob were always together, and when they were assigned to separate classrooms as teenagers, each found it deeply painful to have the other out of view. They considered themselves closer than just brothers, had their own twin language. During a low moment, Ryan told his mother, “I’ll never be without a best friend. If Rob’s not around, I look in the mirror and see him.” In a sense, each was always the other fellow, and they grew up thinking about how it was for someone else. That was the very essence of a coach.

  Once Rob had his own flourishing career as a football coach, Ryan needed a surrogate twin. In Baltimore, that was how Ryan thought of Pettine. To Ryan, their shared passion for the game was the same, and it went as deep in Pettine as it did in him. Ryan thought maybe this came from having similarly demanding football-coach fathers. During games, when Ryan grew emotional and wanted to abandon the game plan they’d spent so many hours developing, Pettine would be the one to talk him out of it. These mollifications involved prodigious use of the words “mother” and “fucker.” “Are you guys okay?” others would ask, and Ryan would always reply not to worry, that this was just how they rolled, that “Pettine is me.”

  For other people around the Ravens facility, Pettine was a hard man to know, a quiet, self-effacing, intense figure—always vigilant, saying little, smoldering with attention to detail. After a practice, NFL position coaches watched film of what had just taken place and graded each player’s performance on every snap. When Pettine graded the practice reps of the Ravens outside linebackers, he wasn’t chary about expressing exasperation, as a group of Ravens linemen found when they got a look at Terrell Suggs’s sheet and discovered the Pro Bowl pass rusher had been rebuked for playing “dumb ass” football. Nobody talked that way to T-Sizzle.

  There was perhaps a lot going on inside with Pettine. His father had coached Central Bucks West to a 326-42-4 record across thirty-three seasons with a leadership style Pettine described by saying, “My dad only smiled on picture day.” Mike Pettine Sr. had fevered eyes that kept in constant heedful motion, a deep, booming voice, and minimal tolerance for imperfection in boys. He was the sort of distant, Roman figure who was feared in the moment but years later often thanked by grown men who, in retrospect, were grateful to him for demanding more of them than they would ever have required of themselves. Pettine Senior made practices so challenging that the games were easy. Everything depended upon the discipline of the player’s approach—whether or not he got a drink of water during a sweltering summer practice, whether or not a clipboard was broken over his helmet.

  As a small boy, Pettine began stuttering, and his mother, Joyce, took him to the doctor. The doctor asked if anybody was trying to make Pettine do something physical the boy was reluctant to do. Well, yes, said his mother. Mike wanted to do things left-handed and his father kept telling him, “It’s a right-handed world.” The doctor said Senior should cut it out. The stutter went away.

  It was more of the same when Pettine made the varsity football team and began playing for his father. To be absolutely sure that his son was treated impartially, Senior was partial to everybody else. One day at practice the entire team had to perform punishment up-down exercises until all of the eighty boys could do no more. There were only three players still rising and sprawling when Pettine reached his limit, whereupon he confronted a familiar shoe and heard, “Get up, you mama’s boy.” The day finally came when Pettine said, “Fuck this,” and walked off the practice field and across the parking lot, stripping off a piece of equipment every ten yards as he went. He was down to his shorts when the senior he was competing with to be the starting quarterback tackled him from behind and told him, “You’re not leaving.” Pettine became the starter, and a Division I scholarship candidate. Bright and self-assured, Pettine argued every night at dinner with his father about what had happened at practice that day until Joyce banned football talk from the house. After that, on the drive home from practice, Senior would pull off the road into the elementary-school parking lot and father and son would have it out until the anger was spent.

  Later, when Pettine was coaching Pennsylvania high-school football, his team opposed Senior’s five times and never beat them. When asked whom she was pulling for, Joyce said her husband; she still had to live with him.

  As a high-school coach, Pettine had been by turns stern, vocal—“I got after guys”—and funny. You couldn’t berate professionals, though, and Pettine mostly adjusted. The adult environment suited him better in terms of both the football—his ideas and expectations had run ahead of what the teenagers he coached could handle—and the camaraderie among men. Pettine was large and laconic; he shaved his skull and wore a mustache and goatee. The affect and the mien were intimidating, and people who met Pettine prepared themselves for “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Gradually they’d discover that Pettine was kind and generous, if indirect in his demonstrations. He found ways out of the moment to let people know him. While Ryan’s charisma was all body, heart, and passion, Pettine’s had to do with standards and distance. You wanted him to think well of you. This was true for football players, and also for women, who fell hard for Pettine.

  If you have a father like Pettine’s, you can either feel destroyed by him or you can take the best from him. Clearly with Pettine it was the latter, but life is a matter of degrees. Pettine decided that he didn’t regret anything about his upbringing. It had made him who he was. But he also thought that maybe he should regret it, that the people who told him he had too hard an exterior might be right. No Jets coach had more of his children’s art on the office wall than Pettine. (No other coach had a copy of the Warren Report or a book by Howard Stern’s sidekick at the facility either.) Nonetheless, if you caught him at the wrong time, he’d raise his eyes and meet yours with a still, forbidding gaze that resembled the winter in Berlin. “Sometimes I pass in there and see his face and just get out,” Smitty told me one day after I thought I’d offended Pettine but wasn’t sure what I’d done. “An hour later he’s laughing and smiling. He doesn’t eat breakfast!”

  Ryan’s reaction to all this was to go right at it. He’d tell anyone within Pettine’s hearing, “Pettine was the high-school coach you don’t want your kid to have!” Every year at the beginning of a Ravens defensive meeting, Ryan made sure to screen for the Ravens players a scene from Pettine’s high-school playing days: Pettine, running for the first-down marker, was blown up by a tackler near the sidelines, and there was his father, telling him he was “a mama’s boy,” stepping right over him, and calling the next play while standing astraddle his son. The Ravens players would exclaim in amazement as Ryan rewound the film, and Pettine himself didn’t mind so much, because nobody better to have as your big football brother than Rex Ryan—who knew all about edgy football-coach fathers.

  Ryan was the son of the defensive-coaching pioneer Buddy Ryan. In professional football, a team’s offense and defense commonly exist in separate but neighboring regions, and, because they practice against each other every day, the two groups are competitive with each other. Buddy Ryan took this familiar tension to an extreme. His defensive innovations, most notably the 46 defense, were variegated riffs on all-out aggression, and the hatred he encouraged his defensive players to feel for the opposition carried over to the offense of their own team. When he became a head coach, nothing about this appeared to change. The impression Buddy gave offensive players and coaches was that he regarded them with contempt. In January 1994, when Buddy was defensive coordinator of the Houston Oilers, he punched the team’s offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, on the sideline during a game. Of that infamous day, Buddy told me, “All
I did was say Dumbass Charlie—because all year we’re throwing interceptions right before the half. He came at me. You come at me, you’re gonna get poked.” The Oilers, at that moment, were ahead 14–0 in what would turn out to be their eleventh consecutive victory. They lost in the first round of the playoffs. It wasn’t that Buddy couldn’t help himself; he didn’t care to.

  Rex Ryan didn’t grow up in Oklahoma, but Oklahoma formed him. His people were Merle Haggard characters, hard-dirt farmers and housepainters, and Ryan absorbed the forbearance of those who stayed, those who didn’t put a mattress on the car roof and flee the Dust Bowl for California. Buddy spent his boyhood on an impoverished farm in Tillman County priming the pump, milking the cows, smelling the whiskey breath on his father, “Roarin’ ” Red Ryan. Most weekends, Red set up a boxing ring, and his four sons would have to fight, starting with the youngest against the third-youngest and on up to Buddy. Buddy could whip them all. Then came the show. Everyone would watch as Red kicked the hell out of Buddy. Perhaps as a result, Buddy proceeded through life like someone determined to show his father he was tough enough.