Smitty had gone home to Texas to sell his old condo there and gain some cash for his fallow bank account. When he got to Lubbock, he learned that his brother had been laid off from his telecommunications job. So Smitty kept the house and told his brother to move in rent-free.
One of the ideas that Tannenbaum had borrowed from the world of business was an off-season team self-improvement day. Each of the upstairs and downstairs football people arranged to spend time shadowing another professional whose activities might broaden his perspective on his own job. In June, for their day, Ryan and Pettine flew down to Charlotte to talk shop with the former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs, and I went with them.
Gibbs had won the Super Bowl three times, including the one that came after the last NFL work stoppage in 1987. In each case he prevailed with a different, modestly talented quarterback. Always, Gibbs said, he wanted to simplify the game for his side while making it appear complicated to the opposition. Thus, like the contemporary Patriots, Gibbs’s Redskins tended to run a limited number of plays out of a large range of formations. The red zone, which he called “the red area,” was crucial to him, so he created new plays for his best players, taught them at Thursday’s practice, reviewed them at Friday’s practice, and then reviewed them one more time at the Saturday walk-through. The new plays had the added benefit of making the players excited; something was being invented just for them. Gibbs’s cardinal rules were to avoid red-zone sacks and red-zone turnovers. To accomplish this, Gibbs tended to use extra pass protection near the goal line and told his quarterbacks to throw the ball away if their two initial passing options were covered. In this respect, he said, perhaps the most effective player he ever coached was Mark Rypien. Rypien didn’t have the highest IQ and was by no means an extraordinary athlete, but the quarterback absorbed meeting information so well that he was rarely sacked, and he played efficient football. Like Doug Williams and Joe Theismann, the other quarterbacks with whom Gibbs won Super Bowls, Rypien was battle-tested and hardnosed. Gibbs counseled Ryan to do whatever he could to make life easier for his own still modestly experienced quarterback, Sanchez.
How should Ryan interact with the offense he asked Gibbs. Ryan was a defensive guy; he was of the other world. Gibbs said he had always attended special-teams meetings, sitting in the front row to show the players how important this part of the game was to the head coach. As for defense, about which he said he knew roughly as much as Ryan knew about offense, Gibbs met weekly with the defensive staff. “Make what you’re not feel important,” he urged Ryan.
Back at the facility, when everybody got together and described their self-improvement days, not a few mentioned meetings with seasoned golf coaches. The explanations for the utility of these consultations were of such persuasive invention that it took everyone else a while to realize they’d gone out and taken a golf lesson.
Smitty, in an effort to lose weight, had been bicycling between Pettine’s condo and the facility. Getting daily exercise made him an exception among the coaches. Except for Sutt, recovering from knee surgery but otherwise a committed runner, they were all always in danger of weight gain. “Coaching, it puts on the pounds,” said O’Neil, looking at his softening middle. That former athletes working in an athletic setting should forgo activity seemed surprising. The older tennis players still competed, after all, as did the golfers. I’d expected perhaps some excellent off-season lunchtime games of touch football. But the coaches looked at me incredulously when I mentioned this. Football to them meant hitting, and without it there was no point. To have put so much into something for so long and then never do it again seemed poignant, but it also seemed like life.
For the public, the long-term effects of head injuries were a pressing concern, a source of much civic debate. Among people I knew, even those who didn’t closely follow football, the subject made for frequent impassioned conversations. Was it acceptable to enjoy something that brutalized the minds and bodies of young men? That impoverished kids became young millionaires by giving their bodies over to a game that might cripple them seemed both wonderful and macabre to people. Here there was no such discussion. The subject of concussions never came up except in the context of regulations. The coaches were aware that they were supposed to have an uneasy relationship to hitting, but to them, physical intimidation was not only how you won at football, it was the point. “It’s a violent game played by physical people,” DT often reminded me. To play the game well, you couldn’t be preoccupied with the risks of injury. The same seemed to hold for coaching. You had to be in some form of denial. Dave Duerson, the former Bears defensive back whom Carrier succeeded as Chicago’s starting safety, had committed suicide in February, a death that was blamed on trauma-induced brain disease. Carrier himself had incurred several concussions as a player. When I asked Carrier about Duerson, Carrier quietly demurred. At the annual officials’ meeting, senior supervisory officiating representatives from the league paid a call on Florham Park to describe (with video) the rule changes for the upcoming season, and all the major changes they presented sought to limit player injury by penalizing big hits. Listening to the officials, the coaches had worried less about concussions than about their rough sport’s physical integrity. “They’re taking all the fun out of the game,” said Devlin, who’d just had surgery on both hips. “I wouldn’t play in this day and age.” Sutton didn’t think much of incremental rule changes either, and neither did DT. To them, legislating acceptable degrees of hitting was mostly a fool’s errand; better tackling instruction and better equipment was the more prudent course. But they offered these opinions only because I asked. Safety regulations were, in the end, the province of the league’s medical and legal experts—somebody else’s job. At the facility, where the staff’s responsibility was to prepare a winning football team, even the rules-change meeting felt like a potentially complicating diversion from the mission—complicating perhaps in ways that the coaches just didn’t want to address. “That’s an hour and ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back,” DT lamented.
Thinking about the rule-change meeting, I concluded that during this particularly aberrant off-season, there was already an abundance of change for the coaches, and the prospect of more was simply too much for them to take. Already they were losing moments of preparation they considered critical, and it was no solace that it was the same for the other thirty-one teams. Football coaches were people who thrived on custom and routine; who, as Sutton said, felt lost without a schedule. If Pettine told me once that NFL coaches were “creatures of habit,” he said it forty times. This point in the year, late spring and early summer, was ordinarily stopwatch season, when NFL teams celebrated the end of the long off-season conditioning programs by hosting mini-camps where they taught and walked through plays, ran them in live practices, reviewed the film, and had meetings. It was at this juncture that you began to know what you had and, more to the point, what you didn’t have.
Instead, out on the practice fields the goalposts had been taken down, and there was only a stray blocking sled. Alone out there against the clear summer sky, the sled seemed magnified in a way that brought to mind a famous Nebraska symbol: the solitary plow standing on the prairie as an image of lonely effort and a certain kind of stoicism.
The long green expanse of empty side-by-side practice fields affected the football men. Those gorgeous football prairies were planted with a rich green bluegrass blend, durable, deep-rooted grass strains that could withstand the punishments of heat and heavy cleated feet. They were meticulously well cared for by Blake Hoerr, the Jets’ tanned director of fields and grounds, whose horticulture degree had included a subspecialty in turf science. Hoerr barbered the grass with the same care that the late country singer George Jones had treated his hair, getting it trimmed every day. You’d see the coaches looking out at the grass and at the single, large two-hundred-year-old swamp oak that stood in their midst, and their frustration was palpable. They felt taunted by the landscape.
Nobody admired the oak tree more than Mike Devlin, the tight-ends coach. One day when we were outside getting some fresh air, he began talking about it. “I look at that tree every day,” he said. “It’s almost a perfect tree, isn’t it?” I said it certainly was. “Tree of life,” he declared. He liked it, he said, when the air smelled of warm grass, because it meant training camp was coming, and soon enough falling leaves, a chill in the air, football games. He then said suddenly that he knew that the defense was critical of the offense for its multiple shifts and motions and personnel groups. “We’ll try anything,” he explained. “Same theory as the defense. You can’t possibly prepare for all of their pressures.” You had to try everything, Devlin said, because it was so difficult to win and everything was riding on wins. It all came down to sixteen weeks, and if you didn’t win, you might not feed your kids. “That’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it?” I said. Devlin said he didn’t much dwell on how precarious the football life was. Some things you couldn’t control. He’d been with the Jets since 2006, three years before Ryan arrived as head coach. He felt fortunate that Ryan had kept him on. Most first-time head coaches had a list going back years of fellow coaches they wanted to hire. “My whole focus in life is not to lose my mind,” Devlin said. “I’m a steady Eddie.” Devlin’s cell-phone ringtone was his college fight song; he and his family still lived in a home near the old Jets facility on Long Island. In traffic, Devlin said, despite the fact that he regularly traveled the densely packed highways between Long Island and Florham Park, he’d beeped his horn in frustration only once. He couldn’t control the traffic pattern, so why get upset about it? He saw crazy things out there—cars jumping the median on the George Washington Bridge—but nobody could tempt him to try such moves. He just watched the flow and tried to understand it. During football games, Devlin said, he might lose his cool—“because I have a hand in it.” And after losses, he admitted, the traffic sometimes nearly got to him. There was too much time to think, and in those moments an idle mind was not a healthy mind.
As Devlin talked about anxiety, it was suddenly possible to move beyond the thrum of his voice to the empty, beautifully groomed fields in front of us and imagine the underlying images of all the scenes that had taken place on them, all the many carefully plotted plays from hundreds of bygone practices, a pentimento reflecting the resilient yet invisibly traced presence of the football past. I could see contrail-like patterns covering the field, lines like those in time-lapse photographs of traffic at night—hundreds and hundreds of interesting lines. It was a dynamic void.
Inside the facility, Schottenheimer was also thinking about the anxiety of the halted moment, missing the sounds of practice, the chattered cadences, the trash-talking, the thud of collision, the clamor of coachly correction. “I love and need this,” the offensive coordinator said. He said he’d been pondering his inability to have a life outside football. The defensive coaches, he’d noticed, were better at getting everything done and leaving the building in the evening. One reason Schotty couldn’t limit himself, he said, was that he felt so acutely the uncertainty of his world. He lived to soothe the low tremor of perpetual anxiety that says, I can do better, that says, I can do more, that says, I love doing this and they might let me go. As Schotty admitted, “It’s the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately of this that excites me.”
The present lockout anxiety supplanted the normal anxiety for the coaches, a problem that was winningly expressed by the Jets young college-scouting coordinator Dan Zbojovsky: “This uncertainty is different from the usual uncertainty because it’s outside the uncertain framework of what we do.”
Later Sutton and I discussed that same topic, that all coaches want security but they’re also so inured to the volatility of their world that they—or Sutton, anyway—scarcely noticed that there was anything volatile about it until they were forcibly becalmed, as they were now. Sutton and his wife, Debbie, had just been to the doctor for their annual medical checkups. Debbie proved to have high blood pressure and now had to watch what she ate. Sutton had no health constraints, which he said made his wife a little irritated. “You have the stressful job and you’re the one who gets to eat sweets,” she’d said, to which Sutt replied that he didn’t think the job was stressful. Demanding, maybe, but not stressful.
Six
THE GAME FACE IS ON
You’re awake for them even while they sleep.
—Kenneth Koch, “To Breath”
Not too long ago, football players and coaches took seasonal jobs in the late winter, spring, and early summer. Matt Cavanaugh worked for a Pittsburgh bank. A-Lynn, the running-backs coach, helped the City of Denver find ways for city bus drivers, who sit all day, to avoid potbellies and back conditions. Then, as football became a year-round occupation, with mini-camps and organized team activities filling the once-idle months, the period from late June through the first part of July became vacation time for NFL coaches. The duration varied from team to team. Some coaches gave their staffs as little as two summer weeks off. Ryan, however, believed that the members of his workforce would do better during the 120-hour weeks of training camp and the season to follow if they were rested and refreshed, so he sent everyone away for a June and July leave that lasted close to five weeks.
In normal years, Ryan rented an enormous beach house on a portion of the Outer Banks of North Carolina that was accessible only if one drove for miles along the sand at low tide. He extended an open invitation to the other Jets coaches and their families to come for a stay, play games like corn-hole toss and washers—a version of horseshoes—take the sun, drink beer, talk football. Coaches Ryan knew from other points in his life, like Wink Martindale and Sam Pittman, were also welcome. Ryan paid for everything. All he asked was that each family choose one night to prepare dinner for everyone.
Ryan enjoyed traveling, preferably in groups. For years he had been talking with other coaches about visiting Spain to join in the traditional running of the bulls through the city streets of Pamplona. The coach loved bulls. This year, though, the lockout had thrown all such planning asunder. As soon as the collective-bargaining agreement was resolved, the signing of the free agents would begin, so there was no way to commit to a lease. Instead, Ryan headed off to suitably tranquil European locales with his Oklahoma in-laws. He would recover afterward, he joked, in Hawaii.
Smitty was gone to Texas. His father, a hard-liver, had suffered a stroke, after which the father’s girlfriend had announced, “I ain’t lookin’ after you,” so Smitty was handling things. Smitty’s father did not like to be handled. “This is the hardest thing in my life” was the sort of communication coming out of Lubbock.
Devlin was mostly spending time off the highways and with his family on Long Island, but he did travel to Pennsylvania to give a free football camp for kids who lived in a part of coal country where there was no more coal. He also received league dispensation to attend Jets tight end Dustin Keller’s wedding. In the church, a referee’s whistle blew and down the aisle trotted Keller’s Rottweiler puppy, Achilles, a small box in his mouth. It took Devlin a moment to realize that Achilles was the ring bearer. “Could have gone either way whether the dog would eat the ring” was Dev’s recap.
Defensive lineman Mike DeVito got married the year before and had planned to go on a honeymoon this summer, but the coaches had heard he’d backed out because of the lockout. DeVito told his wife they’d enjoyed a lot of quality time together and in these uncertain months, he needed to train. This all sounded like DeVito. Although DeVito was now an established pro, he’d come into the league as an undrafted free agent from the University of Maine, and in spirit that was what he remained, such a conscientious, worried player that he regularly consulted with DT in case the defensive-backs coach had happened to notice anything about DeVito’s interior-line play that DeVito could improve. When the players received grade sheets for their practice reps, nobody took a minus harder than DeVito.
Players like DeVito and Ryan’s old Ravens nose
tackle Kelly Gregg, another formidable lineman likewise driven by insecurity, were the true “program players” because they were quietly better than solid at what they did, and they were affordable. In the NFL, successful franchises paid good players less than their worth to subsidize the team’s best players. If you had enough A and B players making C money, you won.
Pettine had an assortment of vacation plans, including taking the children on a trip to Florida. He was also going to a Phillies game at home in Pennsylvania, and he invited me along. We met up at his parents’ house on a quiet road in Doylestown, where his family subjected him to some family. “Michael rarely smiles,” his mother, Joyce, said, looking up from her puzzle. Pettine’s daughter, Megan, visiting her grandparents from Maryland, chimed in from the couch, teasing her father about being “a dark guy.” Then Senior cleared his throat from out in the kitchen. Senior had the sort of voice that naturally carried across practice fields and it did not adjust for the interior life. “You know, I was only a high-school coach,” he said, “but I watch these NFL guys and it makes you wonder.” Pettine said we had to go or we’d hit the rush-hour traffic.
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