Doris Ward was a Phi Beta Kappa homecoming queen and debate champion from Ardmore; she was sitting on a sorority-house porch at Oklahoma A&M when Buddy was introduced to her. Buddy had been on the bloody front lines in Korea and was now playing football like he was still in combat. He hadn’t, however, managed to accumulate any college credits yet. Doris soon came to consider Buddy a fine dancer, a fine street fighter, and better than fine company. As for him, once they began dating, Buddy happened to become academic All-America.
Buddy coached high-school, then college, and finally professional football. His basic training approach to football players was the same with teenagers in Gainesville, Texas, as it was with pros in Chicago and Philadelphia: First, humiliate your own, then rehabilitate them so they can humiliate others. Buddy had contempt for sensitivity in men; he liked players who could handle being called pussy or slob or dumbass or worm while he was making them hit until they bled. Those who could handle it, he was usually there for. Many of them would then go through life telling people, “Buddy Ryan made me a football player.”
These testimonials tended to come from defensive players. Quarterbacks, Buddy referred to as pompous bastards, and he meant it; his antipathy for offensive players had the feeling of class rage. He explained his aversion to me this way: “Defensive players are my kind of guy. Guys who spit on the floor and say, ‘How much are you gonna pay me?’ Offensive player says, ‘Please let me play for you, sir.’ ”
As is the case for most innovators, Buddy’s best-known idea was an expression of self. He arrived in Chicago in 1978 to coach the Bears defense and after some evaluation concluded, ”We don’t have any players.” So he devised the 46, which massed as many as nine defenders at the line of scrimmage. Then, went his thinking, “Depending upon how you line up, we’re always one more than you got. You don’t know who’s coming. Might be two. Might be more.” You could see what his intentions were, all the taunting elements looming close, probing opponents for weakness and fear. What offensive coordinators like Bill Walsh eventually devised in response was a long spread of receivers who’d run concise patterns—in effect, thrown running plays. In the opinion of coaching authority Bill Curry, Buddy’s lasting contribution was the creation of the football auteur: “Because of Buddy Ryan, football evolved into my quarterback versus your defensive coordinator.”
Plot a coaching lifer’s career on graph paper, connect the dots, and you’ll get the outline of the country. Football coaches are like war correspondents: they can’t stay away from the action. As a result, every night all over America, sleeping badly on office couches, are overweight middle-aged men with broken marriages. Some people question why football coaches put in such hours, but with men like the Ryans and the Pettines, a game plan is their creative work. Coaches say that even on the best professional teams, only 10 percent of the time do all eleven players perform their roles as scripted. But you always aimed for better.
Back in 1962, while Buddy was somewhere out in the middle of America recruiting players for the University of Buffalo, he telephoned in to Doris to ask how the late fall storm season was back in Oklahoma. In that way he learned he had three-day-old twin boys to go along with their older brother, Jim. Doris eventually divorced Buddy, not because she didn’t like him—they remained good friends—but because she was spending her life raising their three children without help or company.
Leaving the twins with her mother in Ardmore, Doris went to the University of Chicago’s school of social sciences and got a doctorate in education. She took a job at the University of Toronto, and that’s mainly where Rex and Rob Ryan grew up. Ryan believes his parents’ divorce didn’t affect him much because he was cushioned by his friendship with his twin, but it’s true that he and Rob got into a little more trouble than most boys. Doris was concerned enough about them as teenagers that she sent them to live with Buddy in Minnesota, which Rob later decided probably saved their lives.
When Buddy moved on to the Chicago Bears, the twins got jobs with the team: washing practice clothes, painting the goalposts. At training camp, they became favorites of Bears running back Walter Payton, who used their window to sneak out of the dorm at night. Later, Rex Ryan named his first son Payton. Ryan liked football players and admired their courage. To him, courage meant that something scared you, but you went ahead and did it anyway. He felt that way himself running down the high-school field on the kickoff team.
The brothers gravitated to defense because it fit the images they had of themselves: underestimated blue-collar hell-raisers. As defensive ends at Adlai Stevenson High, the twins were tall and skinny and, in Ryan’s opinion, “mean as shit. We’d post a guy up and the other guy would wipe him out from behind.” Their interests were mainly sports, women, and fighting—and their skill at these pursuits tempered life’s difficulties for them. Ryan was a varsity catcher with batting power and fading vision—a problem when he lost a contact lens. “In one game, this guy’s pumping fastballs by everybody. I had two strikes. I’m like, ‘Time!’ I tell Rob, ‘I can hit this guy, but I need a contact lens.’ Rob gives me one. Two-run homer! Dad had cancer. He was in Sloan-Kettering. We weren’t gonna trouble him over a contact. But it’s tough playing catcher with one contact. Rob had two. I borrowed the left. All the guy had was a fastball.”
There weren’t many college options for indifferent high-school students who wanted to play defensive line and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. Buddy knew the coach at Southwestern Oklahoma State, in Weatherford, and so the twins were admitted to the school and off they went, a nine-hundred-mile drive. The land around Weatherford was flat and dusty, the tumbleweeds as high as a linebacker’s eye, and from a sixth-floor dorm-room window, the horizon was so long and uninflected the brothers had the feeling they could just about see Chicago. Coming from a childhood mostly spent in vibrant, cosmopolitan cities, the Ryans were horrified—and lonely. It helped immensely when they became friends with a fellow football player who’d been an All-State wide receiver up north in Bartlesville. Jeff Weeks wore small shoes and had the Cherokee blood, so the Ryans called him Little Foot. The thing about Weeks was that you could call him anything and he’d just shrug and say something affable in the half drawl, half twang that made him sound as though he were from Little Dixie—southern Oklahoma.
Weeks’s father had cut meat as a chief petty officer in the navy, and Weeks had a blunt, open face and the conviction that his family was special because they’d stuck it out through the Depression in Oklahoma. To this day, Ryan can’t quite explain what it was about Weeks that made the twins so close to him other than the shared experience of being young and on their own. Anything the Ryans were up for, Weeks was up for. The twins’ many fights were Weeks’s fights too. Road trip to Stillwater? Weeks was in—and by the way, what’s going on in Stillwater? “It’s almost like we’re triplets!” Rex would say. Or, as Doris put it more dryly, “He’s my fourth son whether I like it or not.”
Ryan marveled at Weeks’s uncanny success with women, the thrilling mystery of why great beauties had always fallen for his friend. Even Buddy Ryan remarked on this. “Never could figure it out. Women love him,” the old coach said. “He’s supposed to be good-looking, according to women.” That Weeks was so open to the enthusiasms of others was part of it, but beneath the sheepish grin, there was in Weeks an integrity about pain. Suffering is a huge part of football, and more than most in the game, Weeks had experienced and thought about the condition. Once at the Jets facility, Weeks, at Ryan’s urging, told of dating a woman long ago who danced as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Weeks said he’d begun to worry that she was two-timing him and so he had placed a baby monitor in her bedroom and then waited outside with the other monitor to learn the truth. “Don’t ever listen to something like that,” he warned me. “It’ll hurt you too much.”
That Ryan was a brawler overshadowed the interest he always took in other people, and even now when he talked about his college friends and girlfriends, they were pres
ented as characters in stories: the One with the Yellow Eyes; the Player to Be Named Later. As they had in high school, he and Rob went through college with their one wallet, carried by Rob, and their one car key, held by Rex. Ryan met the woman who would become his wife, Michelle “Micki” Goeringer, and on the first couple of dates, it was just the two of them. Then it was “Rob’s not doing anything tonight. Rob’s coming.” After that, for two or three more dates, Ryan and Micki were in the front of the car, and Rob was in the back. Finally, it was Rex and Rob in front, Micki in the back. She didn’t mind; it was like driving around listening to the Car Talk brothers diagnosing football problems. When Ryan required an engagement ring, he and Rob went shopping. Two pieces of jewelry were in contention, and Rob pulled out the wallet and they went for the bigger one. “It set us back two hundred and eighty dollars,” Rob recalled. “It looked like a wheelbarrow in the pawnshop!” Said Ryan, “Eventually, I upgraded.”
Jeff Weeks remembers the Ryans studying only one subject. They were obsessed with football to the point where they held their own mock draft with each other. Out on the field one day, Ryan had a revelation. His best quality as a player was that he knew what it took to succeed. Opponents hated lining up against him and Rob because the brothers were pests, swarming nuisances who by the fourth quarter wore out the will of bigger opponents. Ryan thought he could get others to play like that.
Buddy was by then the head coach of the Eagles. In Chicago, he’d described the twins to the press by saying, “I’ve got two nice kids at home but I wouldn’t want ’em playing for me.” What he did want for them were lives more stable than his had been, and he lined up postgraduation jobs for them with a Philadelphia food-service company. They said, “But Dad, we want to coach!” So it was that on graduation night, the three Ryans holed up in a Weatherford motel, and as Buddy drew up blitzes like Schoolyard and Buddy-Go, this thought passed through Rob’s mind: He’s teaching us the family secrets, which he invented. Buddy used an easel to explain the pressures and coverages. Then he erased the diagrams and the twins flawlessly explained them back to him. As they did, Buddy had the sense that in that little motel room, he was meeting his children for the first time.
Mike Smith had an empathetic nature, and usually this served as one of his assets as a coach. Smitty was inquisitive about people, wanted to understand them. It helped him immensely that nobody had ever questioned his toughness on a football field. He grew up first on a Texas ranch and then in Lubbock, where his was the rare local father who wouldn’t let his son play football. Smitty was small and so good at baseball that in high school the New York Yankees began scouting him. Boone Smith didn’t want his son to get hurt. Smitty’s mother was the one who gave football her blessing. As a hundred-and-eighty-pound high-school linebacker, Smitty cut through running backs like a band saw. He played college ball at Texas Tech, where his roommate was the future Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker. Smitty’s potential professional baseball career ended in a Red Raider football uniform when his left hand became caught in his own face mask as he fell forward. When the hand hit the ground, it bent back over the wrist, kept bending and bending until it snapped. “Sprained wrist!” was the team doctor’s diagnosis. So Smitty kept playing.
The untreated break was so severe the bone began to die, which resulted in Smitty needing grafts. Then Smitty broke an ankle and played four games with pain that had him almost fainting on the field. Before games, he’d join the line for injections; of what, he wasn’t quite sure. He took bigger injections after he hurt a knee, and even bigger ones after a torn elbow ligament. The wrist was so sufficiently mangled that Smitty couldn’t swing a baseball bat very well anymore, but through four seasons as a starter, he missed only one college football game, and on his old Texas Tech film, he can be seen, an undersized linebacker, flattening future NFL stars like Adrian Peterson, Philip Rivers, and Eli Manning.
There were no Combine invitations for Smitty. He watched the 2005 draft sitting on a toolbox in his father’s garage, and Smitty stayed with the socket wrenches until the seventh and final round, when at last he heard his name. A Baltimore Ravens scout named Ron Marciniak was retiring from the team, and as thanks for his fifteen years of service to the organization, Ozzie Newsome allowed Marciniak to make the seventh-round choice. Marciniak had seen film of a Texas Tech linebacker who seemed to tremble with hostility as he played. After Marciniak drafted Smitty, it got back to Smitty that the scout had told Newsome, “He’s the kind of player, he doesn’t look like much, but once you let him on your field, you’ll never be able to cut him.” Smitty kept that in mind.
The Ravens at the time had six past or future Pros Bowlers playing linebacker. On Smitty’s first day in Baltimore, one of those linebackers, Terrell Suggs, looked Smitty over. Suggs was a relentless pass rusher and nearly as unyielding a character. After he’d suffered a painful Lisfranc (metatarsal-displacement) injury to the midsection of his foot, Suggs had reported, “This Anne Frank injury be killing me!” Now, to Smitty, Suggs said, “They’re drafting a white linebacker? This team’s really going to shit.” Ray Lewis wouldn’t even talk to Smitty. Ryan called every Raven rookie by the name of his college, and one day he told Texas Tech to cover Oklahoma—Oklahoma being the first-round draft choice Mark Clayton, a receiver so speedy he was a challenge for a defensive back, let alone a linebacker. Smitty shut him out. Smitty played every defensive snap at training camp, and Ryan and Pettine began switching him from position to position. Smitty hadn’t studied the playbook for all these roles, of course, so before each play, from the sideline, Pettine mouthed his assignment to him. One day in nine-on-seven running drills, Smitty hit fullback Ovie Mughelli so hard he de-cleated him, knocking him into the air and back into another player, who also fell down. “Okay!” Ray Lewis said to Smitty, breaking his silence. “You’re one of us now.”
Before the fourth and last preseason game, traditionally an NFL contest in which only rookies and veteran backups see time on the field, Ryan told the players that almost all of them wouldn’t make the team, but if they had pride, they should stand up and show what they were made of—everybody in the NFL would be watching. Smitty thought, I really want to play for this guy. Ryan’s system, with that array of responsibilities for a smart linebacker, made sense to Smitty, and so did the Ravens surly approach. Like many nice people, Smitty carried around a fair amount of private aggression. On a football field, Smitty wanted to hit people and hurt them. “I was a prick out there,” he said. “I wasn’t like that anywhere else in life.” After that last preseason game, Newsome cut a veteran to keep Smitty.
Midway through Smitty’s second season, in 2006, Ray Lewis injured his back, and Smitty started his first NFL game, against the Tennessee Titans. The Titans center was Kevin Mawae, an excellent player with a reputation around the league for cheap shots. Because Mawae was so talented, the late hits seemed especially unforgivable to the Ravens, and, taking note of the huge cross he habitually wore around his neck, they referred to Mawae as the Dirty Christian. On the first play of the game, a run blitz for Smitty was called. What happened next became a favorite Ryan and Pettine story. “You gotta see it!” Ryan exulted the first time he told me about it. In short order, Smitty was collected from his office down the hall and we all trooped into Pettine’s office. Pettine clicked into his computer archive, cued up the footage, hit Play, and began narrating. Smitty was wearing number 51. “Fifty-one should be wider,” Pettine announced as the ball was snapped. “Not so athletic,” he noted as Smitty ran toward the ball carrier. The sudden arrival in the video frame of Mawae was to Pettine indication that Smitty had “showed blitz too early.” Smitty neared the ball carrier as Mawae closed in from slightly behind him. Smitty never saw Mawae, as the center went low and cut Smitty’s legs out from under him. “You think Ray Lewis misses that tackle?!” Pettine asked. Meanwhile, Smitty’s extended right arm hit the ground, and it was planted rigid at an angle as the full weight of Smitty’s body followed, driving into the lim
b. It looked like an airplane landing on the point of one wing, and you could almost see the instant ruin of muscle, socket, and tendon. Somehow, with one arm, Smitty did help make the tackle. Then he was up on his feet, running around, getting ready for the next play, with the dislocated arm sagging weirdly to his side. “I couldn’t get it back in!” Smitty said. “The way to get it back in,” Pettine told him, “is to pull it out more. It’s elastic.” (Later, when Smitty described the pain he was in, he made it sound like a coal mine on fire, an underground blaze that burns hotter and hotter.) The teams lined up again. “My last NFL play!” Smitty said. A Titans back went in motion and Smitty, covering him, in effect became the cornerback. The throw went elsewhere, and Smitty came off the field. “Ray would have intercepted that!” Pettine said, and they all laughed. I wanted to know why Smitty had played on with an arm that had nearly been removed from his body, and he said, “I was thinking, I can’t let Rex down. That’s what all the guys felt. It’s very rare. He’s like our dad. We don’t want to let our dad down. Everybody in Baltimore misses him. Guys in Baltimore who left Rex didn’t play as well after leaving him. Rex is the guy you drink beer with on Saturday nights by choice, he’s the guy you go fishing at the lake with, he’s the guy you’ve always known, the forever guy. The hardest thing besides not being able to play football is not to be able to be a part of that defense and play for Rex.”
During the year, I spent more time with Pettine and Smitty than any other Jets, and that was the closest I heard Smitty come to complaining about his bad fortune. In 2011, he was only twenty-nine; he could have been a Bart Scott—and had a Bart Scott contract—but there was never any indication from Smitty that until recently he had been a promising NFL linebacker. He was all about his new role.
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