Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  This, anyway, was the Richie most people saw. He remained the relentlessly upbeat character who had this jocular way of calling grown men “kid,” who would never cut a player from his roster without sitting down with him to commiserate—”You’re looking at a guy who was cut four times! Four times!” He took time to phone patients facing brain surgery (as he had thirteen years before) to offer advice and his own robust style of encouragement: “You let the doctors handle their part, but you have a job to do, too … you have to fight it, get on with your life … survive!” Away from the pressures of his job, Richie was as decent and nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet. Only now, as a certified High Priest of the Pigskin, Richie was nearly impossible to get out from under. Not that he complained. No way. Richie was doing exactly what he’d always wanted—at least since he stopped playing football himself. Most people didn’t know or didn’t remember that Richie had been a player, a tight end and special teams demon for the Giants and Steelers. His old aggressiveness and athleticism were obscured now by the bald head, the glasses, the rounder contours of middle age. The former boxer and tight end now looked almost bookish, especially on his TV show, where he sat on a stool looking roundshouldered and uncomfortable, glasses reflecting the stage lights, head defensively scrunched into his shoulders. Around reporters, Richie (not without reason) looked like he expected at any moment to get bonked on the head from behind. The Pack, annoyed at being locked out of practices, promptly dubbed him “Coach Uptight,” and the name stuck.

  Once he was anointed, the take-charge tough-guy side of his character was unchained. The full-throated bullhorn of a voice he once reserved for the practice field (the players had nicknamed him “Horn”) became more and more his natural tone of voice. The Brooklyn accent had always been there, but now emerged the full-blown Brooklyn Slouch, a way of carrying himself with his shoulders hunched and his head cocked, exaggerated hand gestures to accompany the guttural streetwise palaver—the whole urban tough-guy shtick. Richie’s standard posture at a press conference was combative. By the set of his shoulders, the belligerent look on his face, his thrusting hand gestures, he came across like an unrepentant school bully— Yeah, that’s what I did, so what? Now, when he called you “kid,” it sometimes came off in an impatient, patronizing way that not everybody appreciated. When he punctuated his sentences with a rhetorical “Okay?” or “All right?” or “Am I right?” as he always had, the effect was now sometimes like a quick left jab to the nose, keeping you off balance, setting you up. He would be charming one day, growly the next. At his best, he would stop and chat with strangers, kid around with the Pack, or telephone an old friend out of the blue just to say hello. At his worst, he had begun to transmogrify into a self-important bore, a man who now moved so fast there wasn’t time for him to really talk to anybody, who formed snap judgments about others (whom he tended to see as either wholly friends or wholly enemies), who could be darkly critical of people behind their backs, who bullied those who worked for him (and even some who didn’t, like blowing up at the crew that produced his weekly TV show), profanely chewing out reporters who dared criticize or lampoon him—and all the while promising everybody, unsolicited, with loud authority, “Richie Kotite’s not going to change!” and “I’m still gonna be the same old Richie!” Only nobody could remember his thinking that “being Richie” had ever been such a big deal before.

  LIZ CORKUM WAS always impressed by how hard the guy worked to just be Richie. She was a teenage sophomore at Wagner College on Staten Island when she met him. Growing up as a happily sheltered only child, a good Catholic girl, a cheerleader and Catholic Youth Organization trooper, Liz discovered in Richie a remnant of the college life she thought she’d find when she started school in ’70. Instead of proms and mixers and pep rallies, she found herself surrounded by hippies and radical feminists. She didn’t like it.

  She met Richie at a campus bar. He was a tall, dark, muscular graduate student who drove a nice car, wore his hair short and neat, and dressed nicely—and he played for the New York Giants! Liz liked the fact that he was about ten years older than she was, because she felt about ten years older than her contemporaries. His personality, politics, and values had survived the sixties unscathed—my God, it was as if the guy had been in a time capsule for a decade!

  Some of this was not so good. Along with Richie’s gracious, oldfashioned manners, he was as unambiguously male as a silverback gorilla. When he was driving, for instance, nobody was allowed to pass him on the road. It was as if his car were his team, and the other cars were all the other teams, and anybody who butted in front or sped past in the outside lane tapped a savage competitive reflex. Another thing: Richie was a friendly guy, but he was almost pathologically brusque. He was always preoccupied and in a hurry. Conversations with Richie of more than ten or fifteen seconds were rare and difficult. Once you got past the pleasantries—he was good at those—he was ready to move on. Richie was like a fast-moving rig on a long interstate run. If you were interested in him, he wasn’t about to slow down; you had to find a way to grab on as he motored past.

  Liz grabbed on. There would be time to work on all these things, and besides, Liz admired Richie’s determination to be his own man. It was tough being a silverback in the Age of Aquarius.

  Within a month of meeting her, Richie mentioned marriage.

  “I’ve never really given it a lot of thought before, but since I met you, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said.

  Liz’s first thought was sarcastic—Does he plan to ask me what I think about it?—but she liked the idea. She would make him wait until she earned her degree, and she was enough influenced by the bra burners that she had no intention of becoming a full-time housewife for some superjock, but Liz had no objections to being swept off her feet.

  Richie loved to tell people he was from Brooklyn, and he had the whole Slouch down, the loose but burly sidewalk strut and familiar hey-yo-I’m-talkin’-to-you growl of the tough city kid. But Richie’s Brooklyn wasn’t the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of yore; he grew up in fashionable Bay Ridge, a park-rimmed shoulder of carefully landscaped suburbia fronting on the Narrows north of Fort Hamilton, spreading out like a slice of the American dream to the northeast as you pass over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Richie’s view of Brooklyn streets was from the window of the bus that took him to private school. His father, Eddie, son of a Lebanese immigrant, had carved a lucrative niche for himself in the booming world of advertising in postwar New York. He and his wife, Alice, whose parents had immigrated from Syria, were well off enough to buy a winter home in Miami and to enable Eddie, an avid sportsman, to own a few racehorses and even sponsor some heavyweight fighters.

  Richie was born in ’42, his sister, Barbara, a few years later, and they formed a close-knit family. Long after they had outgrown it, Eddie still called them by the pet names he had given them as babies. To him, Richie was still “Mummy,” even when he had grown to a strapping six-three and weighed well over two hundred pounds. Once, when he took his brother-in-law out to watch Richie’s football practice at Wagner, the boy’s uncle complained when Eddie kept using the pet name.

  “Why do you keep calling him that; you’re embarrassing him.”

  “Look, Uncle Charlie,” said Richie, looking down on both men. “I like him to call me Mummy, okay?”

  The father insisted that Richie call him Eddie, not Dad. He wanted to be his son’s best friend. Richie had been a shy, overweight boy until Allie Ridgeway, a trainer Eddie had hired to work with some of his fighters, began teaching his boss’s son to box.

  As his body grew tall and firm, and his boxing skills improved, Richie’s confidence swelled. The discipline he learned in the gym, along with his growing stature and bulk, turned chubby, unhappy Dick Kotite into a prep-school sports star. He was a good athlete, not a great one. He excelled because he worked at it. Winning meant more to Richie than anyone else. To his old schoolmates, the enduring memory of him is that of a lean, tawny kid wi
th a smile on his face and a ball in his hands. Years before it became fashionable, Richie would run with weights around his ankles to improve his speed, and on Friday nights, when his friends went on dates or to dances, Richie would ride the subway up to his father’s office on Madison Avenue, and Eddie would take him to more boxing lessons, first with trainers at the New York Athletic Club, then to the famous Stillman’s Gym.

  Wagner offered Richie a football scholarship, but he had his sights set higher. He enrolled as a freshman at the University of Miami. He planned to try out as a walk-on for the school’s Division I football team that summer.

  To stay in shape (and maybe catch a coach’s eye), Richie entered a campus invitational boxing tournament and fought the first formal matches of his life. He had been sparring for years without actually having a fight, and he surprised even himself by knocking out four opponents straight to win the title Heavyweight Champion of the university. Eddie, who attended every bout, was thrilled, but he knew enough about fighting to know that his Mummy would never be more than an amateur. Richie, then nineteen, got a chance that summer to spar with real heavyweights, even with young Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali). Richie would later recall that Clay “hit me about five times before I had a chance to react.”

  When he failed to make Miami’s football team, Richie reconsidered the scholarship back up on Staten Island. He transferred to Wagner in time to play football in ’62, and over the next three years became a standout tight end, winning Little All-American honors and attracting pro scouts—which didn’t happen often at the small private school. In ’65, Richie was drafted by both the AFL Jets (during that league’s red shirt draft for longshot players to round out their practice squads) and the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings (eighteenth round).

  The Jets, who had just signed Joe Namath to a then-amazing $427,000 contract, offered Richie $15,000. Eddie was escorted by head coach Weeb Ewbank upstairs to see the big boss, Sonny Werblin, who felt Richie from little Wagner College down the way ought to be sufficiently in awe of so generous an offer to sign that day. Eddie said they had promised Jim Finks, the Vikings’ general manager, that they would at least meet with him in Minnesota before Richie signed with the Jets. Werblin was theatrically aghast. He told Eddie he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The kid was going to turn down $15,000?

  “I don’t know what Richie is worth,” Eddie argued, “but a promise is a promise.”

  Eddie didn’t like the way Werblin was talking to him. Who did this guy think he was? Did he take him for some kind of rube? Eddie was a successful businessman and sportsman in New York City, a promoter, a dealer—he was somebody—he sure as hell wasn’t going to let his son get buffaloed by some two-bit upstart football league. It was insulting. He and Sonny exchanged some hot words and Eddie split.

  Father and son flew out to Minneapolis together. Eddie liked Jim Finks right away. Even though the Vikings only offered $10,000, they took the deal. Now all Richie had to do was make the team. Eddie stayed at a motel near training camp, and he would come out to the practice field every day to watch. He would chat up anybody on the fringes of the facility who would talk, scrounging for clues about how the coaches felt about his son. He got all excited one day when the caterer told him he had overheard Norm Van Brocklin and the other coaches saying nice things about his Mummy.

  But Richie blew out his Achilles tendon, and he was history. In those days, a club could just drop a player if he got hurt, which happened a lot. Back at the motel room, nursing his sore tendon, Richie was inconsolable.

  “What did I do wrong, Eddie?” he kept saying. “What did I do wrong?”

  But he wouldn’t give up. As a low-round draft pick who didn’t make it, the best Richie could hope for was to become what about half of all pro football players are, a grunt, a hardworking, low-profile battler who enters every summer training camp easily expendable and hangs on by working twice or three times as hard as everybody else, mastering the unglamorous parts of the game and impressing coaches with his attitude and intelligence. If he made it, he could expect to earn just a moderate middle-class wage from week to week (the average salary of an NFL player in ’70, after the first collective-bargaining agreement, was $23,200; which means the grunts were making well below $20,000). Richie wasn’t above playing any angle. One day, when former Giants defensive back Emlen Tunnell, then an assistant coach, heaped praise on Richie’s expensive suede jacket, the kid took it off and handed it to him without hesitation.

  Richie got cut four times, and every time he got mad, not at the coaches or the team that cut him, but at himself. He would tell Eddie, “I’m going to learn from this. I’m going to make it next year.” It was no coincidence that many future coaches came from the ranks of the grunts. They were the guys working hardest, the ones playing for neither money nor fame, but for love. They were the ones who woke up one morning at age thirty to find that their life had become the Game.

  Richie’s playing career lasted seven years, most of it sitting on the bench and hustling downfield on kickoffs and punts with special teams. He got a chance to play some tight end regularly in ’71, when Giants starter Bobby Tucker was injured. He caught ten passes for 146 yards and scored two touchdowns, but as soon as Tucker was well, Richie was back on the bench. He felt disappointed and frustrated. “I know I can start in this league!” he would complain to Eddie and Liz, but he wouldn’t get another chance. He hung through the ’72 season with a dislocated shoulder, determined to complete the five years needed to qualify for an NFL pension. He was thirty years old when that season ended, and he had long since known football was going to be his life. His master’s thesis at Wagner concerned the impact of TV on development of the NFL. He and Liz were married the following summer, after she graduated from Wagner with her English degree.

  Both she and Richie expected he would be trying out for the Giants again that summer, when Joe Morrison, the Giants’ running back/wide receiver, was offered the head coaching job at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and invited Richie to be his assistant. So when the Kotites got back from their honeymoon, Richie went to see Wellington Mara, the Giants’ owner, and retired as a player. Liz found a job as publications editor in the university’s PR office, and the two diehard New Yorkers headed south.

  They didn’t like it. Some of the women Liz worked with were openly suspicious of Richie’s dark complexion.

  “What is Richie?” one asked, after Richie had stopped in Liz’s office soon after they moved down.

  “What do you mean?” Liz asked.

  “What is he? What’s his race?”

  “Well, he’s Arab.”

  “Is that like being a mulatto?” the woman asked.

  It made Liz feel uncomfortable.

  For Richie, the problem was working with kids. It was hard to make them take football seriously. He was dealing with hotshot highschool all-stars who had better things to do than listen to some coach tell them they had to work hard at something that had always come so blessedly natural. And Richie wasn’t the kind to nurture a relationship or spend a lot of time getting to know anybody. He had been to the mountaintop; he was a pro! And now he was supposed to teach and motivate these children?

  What he hated most was recruiting, and it was a big part of the job. In the off-season he’d spend months traveling the rural backroads to meet with high-school wonders Tennessee was trying to recruit. Richie’s way was to walk in, lay the deal out in about thirty seconds, and conclude, “You want to come or not?” Any hesitancy or posturing was enough to send Richie right back out the door— Who needs this? Of course, this technique wasn’t going to be terribly effective with the most-sought-after kids, who had piles of recruiting letters and obsequious college suitors waiting in line. Richie was appalled to learn he was expected to woo these teenagers. Imagine it. You sit down in a tiny living room with, like, four dozen trophies and plaques and game balls on the shelves and on the walls alongside the framed portraits of Jesus and Martin
Luther King, Jr., and JFK, and the parents are crowded around the eighteen-year-old kid on the plastic-covered sofa with his shoe box full of recruiting letters, all of them hanging on every word … and waiting, waiting for just one thing, for you to pucker up and kiss his tight little high-school all-American ass. Richie couldn’t bring himself to do it. He could barely understand most of these people, with their slow, down-home, cornbread drawl, and they sho-nuff had trouble with his Brooklynese.

  Who needs this?

  He stuck it out for four years before resigning and volunteering as an unpaid assistant with the Saints under Hank Stram. One year later, when Stram was fired after New Orleans went 3—11 in ’77, Richie followed fellow Brooklynite Sam Rutigliano (who had been Stram’s receivers coach) north to Cleveland. Rutigliano had just been named the Browns’ head coach, and he hired Richie to coach his receivers.

  Liz hadn’t followed Richie to New Orleans. She was pregnant when he left, and she wanted to be with her mother in New York to have the baby, a daughter, whom they named Alexandra. She rejoined Richie in Cleveland after almost a year of living apart.

  It hardly mattered. By now, Richie was a full-fledged football monk. He lived at the training facility seven days a week, putting in thirteen-, fourteen-hour days. He handed Liz his paycheck every week, and all he asked for back was a little golf money (he’d sneak out sometimes at four in the morning to play by himself at sunrise and be back at the training center in time for an 8:00 a.m. start). Liz and her mom, Stella, had become inseparable. They lived back on Staten Island half of the year and spent the other half in a suburban house near the Browns’ training complex. The house had a room for Stella. All the normal chores and burdens of family life—the mortgage, raising the kid, shopping, banking, the church, friends, the neighborhood, the schools—fell to Liz. Richie’s part of the deal was … well, just to be Richie. His life was football, football, football. When he started complaining on the phone to Liz in the summer of ’81 about his vision, she assumed it was from watching so much game film.