by Mark Bowden
Richie first started noticing it when he went jogging. He ran with some of the other coaches every afternoon, and on one jog he could no longer see the guys beside him—it felt as though he were wearing blinders.
Playing on special teams with the Giants twelve years earlier, Richie had gone to the hospital with a mild concussion. The skull X ray had turned up a peculiarity, what the doctors dismissed (without any other symptoms) as an abnormal thickening of his skull near the pituitary gland. This, of course, prompted lots of jokes about Richie being especially thickheaded, but when this vision thing started the old joke started haunting him. The thick-skull notion was just a theory. Another possibility was a tumor.
When he was driving back to the Browns’ training camp after Cleveland played its exhibition opener that summer, Richie’s vision blurred. He stopped by Sam Rutigliano’s room in the dorm that night and mentioned it.
“You probably just need new glasses,” Sam said. But to be sure, he advised Richie to make an appointment with the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, the leading medical center in the area.
He went for tests on Wednesday morning. That afternoon, before Sam went out for practice, he got a call from Richie, from a phone booth.
“They found a mass, a tumor,” he told Rutigliano, just as matter-of-factly as a man calling his boss to say he’d gotten a flat tire on the way in. “They’re gonna take it out.”
Richie checked into the hospital that day. Sophisticated CAT scans revealed the “thickening” to be a tumor, grown now to about the size of a walnut, close to his pituitary gland. The doctors said Richie had probably been born with it, and that it was almost certainly benign—although the only way to be sure was to take it out and check. Left alone, it would continue to grow, and it would press harder and harder against Richie’s optic nerve (as it had begun to do) until he eventually lost his sight. The operation was risky. It involved a delicate procedure that had a long list of potentially disastrous, even fatal, consequences and would mean cutting into his brain by going up through his nose. “Hey,” said Richie, “at least you’ll have plenty of room to maneuver!”
He was unbelievably upbeat about the whole thing—although he was scared to death. Sam and his wife visited Richie at the clinic that night. Liz and Stella and the baby were still in Staten Island. The Rutiglianos sat by Richie’s bedside and prayed, and Richie kept on his stubbornly positive face.
“Don’t worry, Sam, I’m gonna be back, all right? I’m gonna be back.”
Liz flew in for the surgery. She thought the worst thing was having to listen while the doctors ticked off the dire probabilities—this much chance of blindness, this much chance of disfigurement, this much chance of paralysis, this much chance of death. Richie sat through the recitation unmoved. Football coaches were experts in a business that got no respect; every fan felt free to second-guess a football coach, and many felt sure they could do the job better, which, of course, they couldn’t. So expertise was one thing coaches learned to respect in others. Richie figured, if these guys were as good at their job as he was at his—hey, no sweat! Right? What more could you ask? Let’s kick off!
Liz was a wreck. Sam and his wife kept stopping by to sit at Richie’s bedside and pray with them, which was sweet and thoughtful, but a little portentous, too.
The operation took nine hours. The tumor, as the doctors had predicted, was benign.
Thirteen days later, wearing a Cleveland Indians batting helmet, Richie was back on the practice field. He was out there for the Monday night season opener, a 44-14 pounding by the Chargers. It was like nothing had ever happened. Boy, was Richie proud of that. In later years, he’d save that story for the in-depth profile interviews, the ones in which the reporter tries to get at what really makes Richie Kotite tick. Sure, a guy proves he has stones when he makes a pro football team and bangs heads with the big boys, but staring down a brain tumor, going to sleep for nine hours on the operating table with at least a decent chance of never waking up again, that shows stones of a different order. And you don’t spend twenty years around football fields without knowing what it takes to forge your own legend. The Indians’ batting helmet was Richie’s badge of honor. Back less than two weeks after facing down the Big C. What a man!
Actually, after thirteen days of no game film, no practice, no hanging out with the guys eating pizza and poring over game plans until all hours, thirteen days of sitting home through endless quiet summer days, looking for something on the TV, reading and rereading the sports page, hanging out with Liz, Stella, and the baby, my God, Richie was about to go nuts!
The worst thing was, at least for the first few weeks, Richie wasn’t allowed to drive. So Liz had to take him everywhere. In the passenger seat, he was impossible. It was like Liz had never driven before. She was coached every step of the way.
When a car passed her on the expressway, Richie would growl, “He just made you look like a jerk.”
“Like I care!” Liz would say.
As Richie rebounded to a full recovery, the Browns started to slide. Rutigliano would last for another season and a half in Cleveland, but the Browns were clearly headed into a down cycle when Richie got an opportunity to move back home. Joe Walton, who had helped coach Richie when he played for the Giants, had just been named head coach of the Jets. The first person he offered a job was his former backup tight end.
For Liz it was a homecoming. They bought a little Cape Cod with a swimming pool out back that adjoined the backyard of her parents’ house, the house where she had grown up. Richie would spend the next seven seasons with the Jets, while Liz sent Alexandra to the same schools she had attended. The Kotites felt settled. Liz lived in the lap of her family while Richie toiled in the temple. He was named offensive coordinator in ’85, although Walton continued to supervise game planning and call the plays on Sundays.
Which was fine with Richie. He was a Corporate Coach through and through. The new High Priests were highly paid executives in the sports-entertainment business, an international industry with an image to maintain. Like corporate men everywhere, they knew the value of networking, of getting along with others, of handling the press and public with professional charm, and (most important) of showing mutual respect within the walls of the temple. They even respected the guys up in the booth tinkling the ice in their gin, or, if they didn’t, they learned how to pretend real good, because it was easy enough to get axed for losing without thumbing your nose at the guy in the black hood.
Richie’s pro football journey had begun with refusing a fifteen-thousand-dollar offer from Sonny Werblin. Now he was just one step away from the high holy headset in the Jets’ organization. He’d gotten there not just by knowing the Game and building a reputation for success, but by cultivating goodwill with everyone he met within the temple (Buddy would call it kissing ass). You never knew, from year to year, which coaching legend would be out on the street, and which eager novitiate you met on the sidelines of the Senior Bowl would be the next to be anointed, wearing the headset, assembling his very own staff.
It was these things, even more than any coaching success, that led to Richie Kotite’s ascension.
GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Richie’s sudden elevation in Philadelphia, there was bound to be talk. Sports fans love intrigue as much as the next person, and for those under the impression that Buddy was really running the club, his firing and Richie’s hiring in the space of about seven hours was a palace coup. And the first thing to understand about a palace coup is that the official story, of course, ain’t it.
Rumors flew. The “real” story began to emerge in the days immediately after. Richie, see, had been in on this all along, plotting with Harry and Norman. Randall had been in on it, too. Randall was key. Randall provided the only real scrap of evidence. Ever since Norman had voluntarily renegotiated the quarterback’s contract in ’88, extending it five years and paying the quarterback millions, the owner had wedded his club’s ambitions to Randall’s remarkable (if erratic) ta
lents. To the conspiratorialists, of course, the plum contract had made Randall a rival prince, a player with too much power to suit Buddy. Buddy liked his players subservient and grateful, not rich, opinionated, and tenured. But all this would have stayed idle speculation if Randall hadn’t been saying some pretty odd things in the days before Buddy’s firing. After Buddy benched him for three plays in the Redskins play-off game, Randall told the Pack he had felt insulted and confused. Then the next day, cleaning out his locker, he had gone off on one of his unrehearsed riffs into some hound’s microcassette tape recorder: “We just hope Richie’s here next year, because I’m sure he’s going to get some offers as a head coach on other teams, too. He’s got a lot of experience, and changing offenses again would be tough on this team. Of course, I want to see Buddy come back. Buddy’s a good coach. I mean, Kotite’s a great coach.”
Buddy good … Richie great?
Granted, Randall was always saying pretty odd things, but, to those inclined to suspicion, there was something ominous here, it was as if he knew. And then there was the report—from somewhere, something somebody inaposition to know told somebody else, which was good enough for somebody inaposition to broadcast as the Real Truth to many thousands of listeners—that led one to believe that Norman, Harry, Richie, and Randall had been seen suspiciously lunching or dinnering together (accounts varied) in New York City, that Gomorrah, two days before the coup. A plot! After he got fired, Buddy performed the last of his weekly radio programs at a bar crowded with raucous supporters, and while Buddy wasn’t inaposition to know and wasn’t exactly gonna confirm anything … well, hell, it stands to reason when a guy like him gets canned after winning all them football games and going to the play-offs three times in three seasons, it don’t take no Phi Beta Kappa to figure out somethin’ kinda fishy’s been goin’ on! If Buddy believed there was a conspiracy, that was good enough for most folks, and … ponder the implications here. Hadn’t that Keith Jackson warned everybody about this? The Eagles had just fallen flat on their face in that Wild Card play-off game against the Redskins. The defense, of course (Buddy’s Boys), had been superb, but the offense, particularly Randall, hadn’t done squat (two field goals were it). Kotite, offensive coordinator; Randall, quarterback. Hadn’t Buddy gotten so fed up with Randall’s lackluster showing that he yanked him in the third quarter, put in his own boy McMahon? How long had they been plotting against him? You had to admire it, the neatness of the coup, complete with conspiracy, cunning, and betrayal. There was even Buddy’s shocked pirouette at the moment of the kill—”I’ve never been fired for winning before.”
Only one thing wrong with this version. None of it was true.
What was true was that Richie owed his job with the Eagles not to Buddy, but to Harry Gamble.
They had met back in ’77, when Harry was still coaching at the University of Pennsylvania. After messing around with the wishbone offense with only moderate success for a few years, Harry was looking for a way to jazz up his passing game. With Archie Manning at quarterback in the late seventies, the Saints had one of the NFL’s better passing games, so Harry made a trip to New Orleans that off-season for a few weeks of tutoring from receivers coach Sam Rutigliano and his young unpaid assistant, a helluva good guy named Richie Kotite.
Back in Philadelphia in the summer before the ’78 season, Harry got a surprise phone call.
“Howyadoin’, Harry?” came a gust of loud, upbeat Brooklynese. “It’s me, Richie. Richie Kotite. How’s the new system coming?”
Harry was pleasantly surprised. He told Richie that they had been working hard on the new passing game, but that he still had some questions.
As Harry’s mind started trying to frame the questions while he had his buddy from the pros on the phone, Richie volunteered, “Great! Would you like me to come down?”
“Oh, no, Richie, I couldn’t ask that.”
“Don’t be silly; we’re friends, right? I’m up here on vacation in Staten Island, you’re only … what? An hour and a half away?”
And Richie drove down—helluva guy!
Harry never forgot it. As his own career took its startling trajectory over the next thirteen years, he watched from a distance as Richie moved to Cleveland and then New York. When Norman demanded a change in his offense after the ’89 season (against Buddy’s wishes), Harry told his head coach, “Do you know who would be a helluva guy who could come in here and be offensive coordinator for us?”
Of course, Buddy knew who Richie Kotite was. Within the fraternity, everybody knows everybody else. But Richie had never coached with Buddy before, and if there’s one thing about coaches, they prefer to look out for the guys they’ve coached with before.
“I don’t know anything about the guy,” Buddy said.
“Well, I think he’s got a helluva feel for the game,” said Harry.
“Let me look into it,” Buddy said.
Days later, when Richie was hired, Harry read a quote from Buddy in the Inquirer that said former offensive coordinator Ted Plumb had recommended Kotite. Buddy also said Richie had been given a rave notice by Joe Namath. There was no mention of Harry. Harry just shrugged off the slight—wouldn’t look right for Buddy to admit that the Ivy League guy upstairs had had a good idea.
Richie had lost his job in New York as part of a clean sweep when Walton got canned after winning only four games in ’89. It came as a blow to the Kotites, who were now deeply rooted on Staten Island. Richie had been lucky. He knew coaches in the NFL who had picked up and moved more than twenty times over the years, and here he had been able to work for seven seasons in the pros just a short drive from the neighborhood where he grew up. His daughter, now thirteen, was looking forward to following her friends to nearby Notre Dame Academy. Still, Richie knew what he had to do. True monks go wherever they must go. He got a call from Joe Bugel, offensive coordinator for the Redskins, who was considering head coaching openings in Atlanta and Phoenix, so he and Liz were waiting to hear about that when Buddy’s secretary called and invited him down to Philadelphia.
The Eagles signed Richie to a one-year contract, so after what had just happened with the Jets, they didn’t even consider moving. Richie would stay at the Hilton Hotel in Mt. Laurel and come home for dinner after practice on Fridays—not for the whole night, mind you; Richie drove back to the hotel that night. Liz and Stella would come down for the home games on Sunday, and they would all go out to dinner afterward. Otherwise, Richie lived in the basement of the Vet, trying to develop rapport with Ran-doll, studying films, working up game plans, supervising offensive practices, and going home alone every night to the Hilton.
Richie had considerable freedom to run the Eagles’ offense. He was mostly left to develop game plans and pace his half of the squad in practice, but Buddy was often a pain in the ass during games. All the coaches were connected by intercom and carried on a running dialogue throughout the action. The ones in the booths up on the mezzanine relayed intelligence and suggestions down to the sidelines, asking questions, kicking around ideas. Buddy listened in on all this and usually didn’t have much to say unless there was a decision to be made. Buddy was good at making decisions. He made ‘em fast and he made ‘em often. He didn’t like to discuss ‘em, before or after; he just made ‘em. “Actions speak louder than words” was one of his favorite truisms. He wasn’t terribly sensitive about the artful twists and careful logic of Richie’s game plans either. He’d just weigh in when he wanted something done. It was annoying as hell.
“Run the damn ball,” he’d say, leaving the details to Richie.
Then “Run the damn ball again.”
Or when he did let Richie call a play, “What the fuck are you running that play for?”
Buddy sometimes would forget to inform Richie when he had made a decision. Richie would look up from his neatly color-coded, laminated play list to see running back Thomas Sanders brushing past to head out on the field.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
“Coach Ryan told me to go in,” Sanders would say.
Richie scowled. “Then get your ass in there.”
That would have happened because Sanders, a former Bear, was a guy Buddy had brought in. Richie had little success developing players he brought in. One big project in ’90 was Roger Vick, a running back Richie had fallen in love with and convinced the Jets to take with their number-one pick in the ’87 draft. Vick had never proved to be anything other than a lackluster running back, but Richie hadn’t given up on him. When New York waived Vick in ’90, Richie convinced the Eagles to sign him—even though Buddy felt he already had a surplus of backs. Vick would carry the ball just sixteen times that season, mostly because Buddy didn’t share Richie’s enthusiasm for the kid.
“What’s forty-three doing in there?” he’d ask, if he noticed Richie had slipped Vick in. “Twenty-five [Anthony Toney] and twenty-three [Heath Sherman] know this offense better than he does, git one a’ them [Buddy’s draft picks] in there.”
Richie would reluctantly wave Vick off the field. Vick was waived right off the team before long.
Despite these game-day squabbles over personnel and plays, Richie knew he had a mandate that transcended Buddy’s fiats. The club was paying him $99,000 that year to whip Buddy’s talented but undisciplined offense, led by their talented but undisciplined three-million-dollar-plus (per annum) quarterback, into a more consistent scoring machine. After the ’89 season, even Buddy had to admit that his approach to offense—just give Randall the ball, a couple of receivers, and a decent running back, and turn them loose—wasn’t going to cut it. Buddy’s Boys on defense were damn frustrated by the other half of the locker room. Randall always produced a play or two, either all by himself or with one of the Keiths (Jackson or Byars) that would be on the weekly highlights show, enough to bolster the quarterback’s fame and fortune, but come crunch time for the team, the offense would stall. Deep in his own territory, with the whole field in front of him, Randall was virtually unstoppable. But as they drove into enemy territory, and the room to maneuver shrank, it was harder and harder for Randall to produce. He was completing only about half of the passes he threw, and without his improvised scrambles (which got harder to do when the team moved within scoring range) the Eagles had no running game to speak of—subtract the team-leading 621 yards Randall had gained in ’89 and the Eagles were at the bottom of the NFL in rushing. That didn’t diminish Randall’s accomplishment, of course. He was the best running quarterback the game had ever seen. But it meant that when the team was in a tight spot, at third down and short yardage, or trying to batter its way into the end zone, other teams had only to key on Randall to stop the play.