by Mark Bowden
When the Miami Cadillac shop took off, he did what he had always done with success; he expanded, buying dealerships all over the state, moving into Japanese imports at a time when the industry way still laughing at the Honda, diversifying. Over the next four years, the underdog BramanMan became “Baron of Biscayne Boulevard.”
California Bob and Potter were bought out early on, and Smith, whose loan Norman promptly repaid, was doing time when Norman really began to hit his stride. True to the usual pattern, Norman’s former partners felt betrayed.
“He’s a gifted businessman,” Wilson would reflect years later. “I hold him in a minimum of high regard.”
But Norman had moved on to new heights. Once merely wealthy and well connected, he was now seriously rich. And true to his life’s pattern, Norman again was bored.
HE MOUNTED A BID for the U.S. Senate in ’80, hiring professional GOP handlers to build what, as it turns out, would have been an easy walk into Congress. But Norman withdrew unexpectedly at the last minute, discouraged, he says, by the thankless rigors of a politician’s life.
Instead, he eagerly accepted an appointment to Ronald Reagan’s administration. After serving as vice-chairman of Reagan’s Florida campaign and raising nearly $100,000 toward the effort, Norman was nominated by the president to head the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
It seemed perfect. Son of immigrants assumes top immigration post. Resident of a city besieged by immigration, legal and illegal, steps in to sort out the mess. The agency had been headless for nearly two years and had fallen badly behind the treacherous and shifting ground of immigration issues. Who better to reshape the troubled bureaucracy than BramanMan, a genuine Reagan-era superhero—the archetype really, the take-charge, self-made (twice-over) entrepreneurial genius?
And Norman entered swinging. The day he was nominated, he promised the Miami Herald, “I’m committed to a major reorganization of the agency. It needs change.” Looking past the little matter of Senate confirmation, Norm explained that he had already begun putting together a task force to plan the revolution. “I think you’re going to see changes made within ninety days,” he boasted. BramanMan was primed to kick bureaucratic butt.
Norm was so eager he wasn’t going to stand around waiting out the mere formality of Senate approval. He crashed INS headquarters in Washington one morning that fall with his administrative assistant and, to the shock and chagrin of the agency staffers, began ordering people around, demanding that the files be opened, computer banks be laid bare, et cetera, and working himself into a full entrepreneurial capitalist lather with the help, when (used to answering to the gentler voice of the U.S. government) they failed to respond as quickly and efficiently as employees of Norman Braman ought. Norman had plans, he explained, to hand a private contractor the job of fully computerizing the agency and to dump at least five hundred people from the Washington staff. Needless to say, the civil servants were appalled, what with Norman having no authorization—Coming in here like that … who the hell does this pompous two-bit car dealer think he is, anyway?—and in due course (about as long as it took for the door to begin its backward swing when Norm and his assistant triumphantly exited) the feral howl of the frightened bureaucrat echoed through high federal halls.
Rudy Giuliani, associate U.S. attorney general responsible for INS, was somewhat bemused by the teeth gnashing. To his way of thinking, it just confirmed why Norman was going to be such a good INS commissioner. He thought the agency needed to be pounced on by a tiger, and if they had to yank Braman’s tail now and then, it was a small price to pay. But, clearly, it was time to yank the tail. This business about a computer contract, though— Shit, Norman, there are former public officials running laps in minimum-security prisons all over America for things like that! And Rudy figured somebody ought to warn BramanMan that the seemingly somnolent rank and file of bureaucracy was a vicious beast when riled.
So Norman was invited to stop by Rudy’s stately fourth-floor office at Justice a few days later, where … well, the idea here was just to clue Norman in on things, a chat between friends in the administration, a little reminder that, in fact, he hadn’t yet been confirmed (although the FBI check, completed that summer, had pronounced Norman clean), and that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to start throwing his weight around and antagonizing people just yet, especially people he would need, not only to accomplish his sweeping agenda of change, but even to mail a postcard successfully from his exalted new—but still pending—office.
Norm exploded. The other men in the room, Giuliani and his deputy Jeff Harris, were astonished. The man was screaming.
“I was appointed to shake this agency up! Nobody’s gonna tell me how to do it! … You can’t tie my hands! … If I can’t do the job right, I’m not going to do it at all!”
Nobody had ever seen a man—a multimillionaire at that—so eager to assume an onerous, relatively low-profile fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year public job.
Then, abruptly, Norman changed course.
He withdrew.
He retreated to France. His publicist offered reporters, the same ones to whom Norm had been spouting his ambitious designs, a prepared statement with the following lame explanation: “My business is the sale and service of automobiles. With the current depressed market affecting our industry, I have concluded that… I cannot now assume a passive role in their operation.”
Right.
Some weeks before his withdrawal, a staff member on Strom Thurmond’s Judiciary Committee, acting on a telephoned tip (Norm had accumulated a few enemies down the road), produced the name, address, and telephone number of a man, a certain ex-husband of a Braman domestic employee, someone the FBI hadn’t encountered in its background check. It seems that back in 1973, Norman and Irma had conspired to arrange a false marriage for a beloved Peruvian maid in order to keep her in the country. Rudy happened to have a speaking engagement in Palm Beach not long afterward, and BramanMan was invited up for Chat II, wherein Norman was advised, just between friends in the administration, that it might look unseemly for the head of the immigration agency to have so cynically sidestepped immigration law.
Actually, Norman didn’t wait to be dropped. When he got word of the Justice Department’s and the Judiciary Committee’s concern over the sham marriage, he was fed up. First they faulted him for trying to get a head start on a difficult job; then they wanted to nitpick him with some minor episode that happened more than a decade ago, in which nobody got hurt and things worked out for the best? Come on! No wonder Washington was in such a mess. No wonder government had such a hard time recruiting real talent. Norman was more disgusted than disappointed. They didn’t deserve his help.
When the anger wore off, he was disappointed. His dream of public life, the next great Five-Year Leap, had fallen on its nose.
It was 1982. Norm would be turning the big five-o.
And what besides his $24 million did he have to show for it? What was he going to do with the rest of his remarkable life?
Bob Goodman, the political consultant Norman had hired to help build his aborted Senate campaign, remembers sitting and sipping fine wine with Norm at the villa in southern France that summer. There was no TV in the villa; Norman believed the tube was undermining the art of conversation. So after dinner was served and cleared, there would be long, slow hours on the porch, talking art, politics, business, whatever. Norman confessed his restlessness, and they kicked around a few ideas. One of them was to produce a television program that would give viewers a peek inside the homes and lives of the wealthy— Goodman even approached Louis Ruckeyser, the host of the popular PBS show “Wall Street Week,” about being the moderator. But Norman backed away from that, too—only to see Robin Leach develop a similar concept into the hit “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
Another of the ideas that Norman mentioned that night was football.
IT MADE SUCH a lovely story.
Norman Braman, the local boy made good, hearing tha
t the football team he had loved as a child was about to be packed off to Phoenix by that profligate spoiled-rich-kid owner Leonard Tose, who needed the cash quick to pay off his gambling debts, rode in at the last moment with a check for $65 million to save the franchise!
Good old Norm Braman, not the wheeler-dealer car baron Republican kingmaker of South Florida, but Norm, the son of Harry the barber, the skinny Jewish kid who once carried a water bucket for Eagles players during training camp in West Chester, the West Philly kid who climbed fences at Shibe Park to catch a glimpse of his heroes in action. The feature writers loved this stuff. Having gone off in the world to make his fortune, good ol’ Norm was now riding back in to save the day. In one interview he referred to himself as “a white knight.”
“A solid business deal deeply immersed in sentimentality,” he said.
And they ate it up. For a few glorious months, Norman basked in the warm glow of a grateful citizenry. Tose’s excesses were legend. He had used the team’s value to underwrite his high-rolling, mortgaging it to bankers who were only too eager to shoulder heavy liens on something as golden as a thriving sports franchise in one of the NFL’s biggest markets. Like the casino managers Tose would later sue for plying him with alcohol at their gaming tables, bankers kept the inveterate playboy flush with cash. Word among NFL owners (Norman was friends with Dolphins owner Joe Robbie) was that Tose’s franchise was about to go bust. Braman made a pass at Tose in late ’83, offering to buy the team, but Tose was unwilling to part with control, and Norm wasn’t about to bunk on a sinking vessel. When word leaked out that Tose was trying to sell the franchise to a group in Phoenix, the city of Philadelphia moved fast to sweeten the lease at Veterans Stadium and lock the Eagles in for the remainder of the century. When Norman came along to buy the club a few months later, the public still perceived him as the savior, although the only one he saved was Leonard Tose. What Norman got was an incredibly lucrative investment, something to absorb his considerable intellect and ego, and that ineffable something more he found so haunting.
Pro sports would satisfy his itch to be on stage. He liked being written about in the newspapers and noticed on radio and TV. The NFL was a relatively small but high-profile world in which he could publicly throw his weight around, a safe harbor for his grander ambitions.
And the new local hero wasn’t just going to keep the club in town; he was going to restore the luster of its storied past! Norman’s Eagles, after all, had been the juggernaut team of ’47, ’48, and ’49—two-time league champs. One of his first acts as owner was to invite the old team back to Philadelphia for a reunion weekend. The one-time water boy rubbed shoulders with his old heroes, now flabby, stooped, nearsighted, and gimpy. They presented him with a replica of their NFL championship ring, which Norm would wear from that day forth.
What joy! The glory days were coming back. Only this time, they were going to be his glory days. Norman, who had what it takes to succeed in the real world, was going to show these football people a thing or two about winning. After the discount wars in Lebanon, the muscular combat of national politics, the cutthroat world of auto dealing, how tough could football be? It was just a game!
This was going to be fun. Everybody could see Braman had the money, the desire, and the smarts. He was tough and idealistic. The players? They were gonna love him. He and Irma would invite them down to Indian Creek Island for dinner, expose them to things, fine wine, art, broaden the boys’ horizons—think how grateful they would be. And who better than Norman to dispense helpful, fatherly advice for handling their outsized paychecks? It was going to be one big, happy football family, with Norm as patriarch. It was going to be great. People were going to stop Norman Braman on the streets in Philadelphia just to shake his hand. He’d walk out on the field at Veterans Stadium to the thundering approval of tens of thousands. Norman was going to have a ball!
Enter James David “Buddy” Ryan.
4
BUDDY VERSUS THE GUY IN FRANCE
Larry Sullivant would never forget meeting Buddy Ryan. It was in 1957, on a sweltering high-school football field in Gainesville, Texas. The new coach, a squat little tyrant with a flattop buzz cut and a jawful of chaw, had been running the boys mercilessly. Thirst was considered weakness. And as if battling fatigue and dehydration weren’t enough, this new coach seemed intent on riding Larry in particular, calling him a slacker and a sissy— nobody called the high school’s star linebacker a sissy! So when a flying cleat opened a gash on the back of Larry’s hand, and crimson started displacing sweat and dirt down his wrist and forearm, what Larry felt mostly was relief: maybe a trip to the doctor—first aid and a breather at least.
He trotted hopefully toward the sidelines, brandishing the bloody hand.
“Mmmm, looks bad,” said Coach. “It’ll need doctorin’.”
So the man named Buddy scooped up a handful of dirt. He spat on the wound, then pressed on the dirt, smothering the bleeding.
“That’ll do you,” he said. “Now git back out there.”
Buddy’s methods didn’t always sit well with the boys’ parents, who, despite their enthusiasm for football, tended to draw the line at infection and serious injury, but it had the opposite effect on the boys. Exhausted, browbeaten, and often bullied by their new coach, they learned they could earn his respect. Buddy’s heartfelt scorn for those who couldn’t take it made the Gainesville team an elite.
Here was the essence of the Game, grasped intuitively by the twenty-six-year-old former army master sergeant embarking on his life’s work. He was entering the Pigskin Priesthood, the underground fraternity of coaches devoted to football for its own sake, as a pursuit of manly perfection. Buddy knew where football came from, not the official NFL history-book story of spoiled college brats out for a Sunday afternoon scrum, but from dirt-patch high-school fields like those in western Oklahoma and Texas where he grew up and got his coaching start. Out here, football wasn’t just a game, it was a cult. It was part initiation, part religion, a way for roughneck young men to vent their last wild gusts of pure testosterone meanness before settling for the tamer pastures of adulthood and civilization. If one of Buddy’s practices ended without injury, he’d line ‘em up and force them to run a violent gauntlet, letting them go only after somebody started to bleed. If it wasn’t ugly, it wasn’t football. The Game was a state of mind, a distinctively masculine state of mind. A team that didn’t fight to the last down, in Buddyspeak, “lay down and threw up its skirts.” Players who didn’t have what it takes, who didn’t get it, were nothing short of cowards—Buddy called them, of course, girls. Later, in the pros, weary veterans complained (never to Buddy’s face) that his grueling, bloody practice sessions were self-destructive—why risk injury and wear a team down before the season starts? What they didn’t get was that Buddy was less interested in practice as rehearsal than practice as boot camp, a rough winnowing, a chromosome check, a way of selecting young men who had the stomach for war. It would take Buddy nearly three decades to ascend to the pinnacle of the coaching ladder, but the basics were in place right at the start.
If the National Football League had become a club of rich, cigarsmoking capitalists who watched the game from Olympian heights in air-conditioned comfort while jiggling ice in their tumblers of gin, the Game remained what it had always been. It demanded total commitment and was rich enough in strategy, emotion, and meaning for certain men to make it their life. At the pro level, the Game demanded years of study and apprenticeship. It could arouse in the devoted all the primal passions of war, of primitive, controlled combat between reckless young men of skill and courage throwing their bodies in harm’s way, on a neatly proscribed battlefield, guided by grayheads filled with arcane knowledge of tactics, counterstrokes, and trickery. The Game’s violence was real, its victories hard won, its demands brutal and unyielding—there were no fakes on a pro football field. The Game was a brotherhood, a battleground, where the greatgrandsons of cowboys and slaves and coal miners and oil rig
gers and immigrant factory workers and farmers and soldiers proved in each new generation that they, too, possessed the grit that made America great. Out on the dusty flatlands of Oklahoma and Texas, or in the bottom counties of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and central Florida, places that stirred vague cultural memories of bloody charges, of Sherman’s march, segregation, and racist violence, a boy could still make his reputation for life, accomplish things for which he would be better known and remembered at home than for anything, good or bad, that he did the rest of his life.
The high priests of the Game weren’t the men in pinstripes up in the luxury boxes; they were the coaches. Coach ruled football completely, more completely than in any other sport. A player didn’t cross or question him, because Coach held all the cards. At the high-school level, out of the new crop of a hundred or so eager frosh who materialized every summer, weeks or even months before school opened, Coach decided which kid would be given a shot at playing quarterback (it helped a lot if your father or older brother had played there), which kids looked like linemen or linebackers, and which would go home disappointed. Coach decided whether you were first string or first cut, and every day of your football career from that day forward depended on his judgment.
And who was going to question him? In football, unlike baseball and even basketball, individual achievement is hard to measure. Except for the most visible ball-handling positions, quarterback, running back, and receiver, most football players get lost in the crowd during a game. With twenty-two men on the field at all times, unless they happen to make the tackle or interception on a given play, it is hard to tell whether a defensive lineman, linebacker, strong safety, or interior lineman makes a difference. It is impossible to watch them all. Even with millions tuned in, with slo-mo replays and expert commentary and analysis, the only ones who really know who played well or poorly over the course of a game are the men on the field and Coach—and the players’ opinions (as they quickly learned) don’t count.