Bringing the Heat

by Mark Bowden

  Just as Buddy’s defense reflected his personality, Richie’s way of trying to move the ball mirrored his hidebound style. Richie’s system hit Randall Cunningham like a bucket of cold water. Over a series of meetings that began in the spring of ’90 and lasted through the summer, Richie, the former grunt from the Giants special teams squad, toiled to hammer home the ABCs of his humdrum ethic to one of the game’s flightiest and most flamboyant players (who, mind you, after piloting his team to eleven wins in the previous season and making his third trip to the Pro Bowl, who had just posed for the Sports Illustrated cover that proclaimed him the “Weapon of the Nineties,” saw no pressing reason to reinvent himself in the first place):

  You win by being fundamentally sound, by having a full understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish on every play, and by being disciplined…. You talk about the great teams that have ever played offensive football—go way back to the Packers—they had a handful of runs and passes. They didn’t fool anybody. They said, “Hey, here we come, you stop us.” Am I right? … The point is that we’re trying to establish a group of plays, runs, passes, play action passes, screens, and draws that we’re going to be able to put our stamp on from week to week, and we’re going to run ‘em and run ‘em and run ‘em until we get better and better and better….

  Randall moped around all summer whining about the change— “I knew the old system inside and out. Now I have to learn a new system.” It was more than just the work involved that troubled him. Ted Plumb had started letting Randall call a lot of his own plays on the field in ’89, a point of pride with the young black quarterback who was sensitive about the standard phrase uttered in his praise: “the greatest athlete ever to play quarterback.” This, of course, not only fell short of recognizing him as the greatest quarterback, but included a whiff of the old racist stereotype: Why that colored boy, he can sure run and throw the ball, but he’s too dumb to call plays. Richie came flat out, day one, and said, “I’m calling the plays.” Period. Randall was a cog— albeit an important one—in a machine designed by Richie Kotite.

  Randall went on whining into the season as the Eagles lost their first two games. The quarterback ducked any blame for the slow start, complaining that the new system prevented him from “making things happen,” that it trapped him in the pocket, took away his genius for improvisation—until the results started speaking even more loudly for themselves. With newcomers Fred Barnett and Calvin Williams catching deep passes and the Keiths catching shorter ones, with Heath Sherman and Anthony Toney taking turns pounding out one-hundred-yard rushing totals, by midseason the Eagles’ offense was outperforming the defense. Randall would finish ’90 with the best numbers of his career. Several organizations voted him the league’s most valuable player. He threw for thirty touchdowns, completed just under 60 percent of his passes, and was starting quarterback in the Pro Bowl. Midway through the season, he found it impossible to stay mad at the bald guy who called him “kid” and who called all the plays and who kept insisting that he needed to concentrate harder on his mechanics.

  Not even Randall could argue with results. Grudgingly, the relationship between perfectionist coach and proud quarterback thawed. It got so they could even kid each other. In the thirteenth game of the season, a game the Eagles lost in a squeaker against Miami, Randall trotted off the field after a failed third-down play to confront a furious Rich Kotite on the sidelines.

  “What did you call!” Richie demanded. He had signaled in a play called, in part, fifteen-B-choice-right.

  “Fifteen-B-choice-left,” Randall said.

  “I wanted choice-right!” Richie bellowed, his nose almost touching the quarterback’s face mask.

  Randall, frustrated and angry, feeling incapable of argument, just screamed back in his coach’s face, “Aaaaaaaargh!!” Then he went to the bench, took off his helmet, and sat moping by himself.

  Richie let a few minutes pass before walking over. He bent down to Randall with his face up close so that the quarterback could hear him above the din in Joe Robbie Stadium and asked with a show of serious concern, “Did we forget to brush our teeth this morning?”

  ON THE MORNING that Buddy was fired, Richie had driven to work feeling down. That was unusual. But could you blame him? His team had just watched their season wash away in one big loss against the Redskins. Richie’s offense, which had seemed to pick up speed as the season progressed, had flopped badly in the big game, and he felt responsible. Rumors were swirling about Buddy’s future, and that meant his future, too. Richie had just been through this the year before with the Jets. There was a depressing aura of déjà vu about the whole thing.

  Richie knew he was under consideration for a head coaching job in Cleveland, where his friend Bud Carson had gotten fired midway through the season. But that was a long shot. Liz was frazzled. Richie planned to spend a few hours in the office and then drive home to Staten Island at midday—take a few days off, hunker in, and wait to see what happened. He knew he would land on his feet, no matter what happened, but he hated the uncertainty.

  Making matters worse, his alarm didn’t go off on time, so he woke up in his Hilton Hotel room at seven-fifteen instead of his usual six o’clock. He had promised Tom Brookshier (the former Eagles defensive back) that he would answer a few questions on the telephone at eight-thirty for Brookshier’s and Angelo Cataldi’s comically barbed morning sports-talk radio program (which Richie hated—imagine, poking fun at football). Now he knew, what with rush-hour traffic over the Walt Whitman Bridge, he would never make it to the office by eight-thirty. He also knew Brookshier would ring the hotel if he couldn’t find Richie at the office. There was nothing he could do but eat breakfast and sit around waiting for the call.

  So he was already in a bad mood when he got to the office, late. It was about a quarter after nine. He dropped his imitation-pigskin-covered briefcase (pimpled just like an official NFL football) on his desk, wandered out to draw himself a cup of coffee, and was startled from behind by Norman Braman. Buddy stepped out of his office at the same moment.

  “Hi, Richie,” the owner said, shaking his hand warmly. Then he walked into the head coach’s office with Buddy and pulled the door shut.

  Richie stood in the hall with the steaming coffee cup in his hand, staring at the closed door. He walked back into his office, shut the door, and phoned Liz.

  “It’s going to happen today,” he told her. “Can you believe it?” In his voice was the deep chagrin of one who always expects the best, confronting the worst. “Twice in one year!”

  But there was still hope. Sometimes head coaches get fired and the staff stays, he told Liz. That’s not the usual, but it happens. It crossed Richie’s mind that he might be considered for the head coaching job himself—Cleveland’s interest in him had been in all the papers—but there was no indication that was so. Far more likely was that he would be out of a job. He didn’t want to say that to Liz, though.

  “They’ll probably want to keep some continuity with the systems,” he said. “There’s at least a chance they’ll keep me.”

  As word spread, the buttons on all the phones lit up with incoming calls. The other coaches huddled in the hall. Richie kept the door to his office closed. He was sitting there smoking a cigar and wondering what to do next when there was a knock on his door. It was Harry.

  “Mr. Braman would like to talk to you upstairs in about ten minutes,” he said.

  “Okay. Why?”

  Harry explained that both he and Jeff were being considered for the top job. “Norman’s going to make a decision today, after he talks to you both. What time is it now?”

  “It’s ten after eleven,” said Richie.

  “Okay, come on up in about ten minutes, okay?”

  He called Liz and told her that.

  Richie hung up the phone at about the time he was supposed to head upstairs, but before he left, the line from upstairs lit. Harry again.

  “Look, Richie, listen. Could you come up in ab
out an hour and a half?” he asked. “Jeff’s up here right now.”

  What torture! He relit his cigar and started to pace in his long, narrow office. He ignored the phone. Jeff had been closer to Buddy than just about anyone on the staff. Buddy had brought him over from the Bears and was grooming him. But, then, nobody could argue that Richie hadn’t done great things with Randall and the offense in ’90. He had been toiling in the temple now for damn near two decades! For a real football man, there was no choice here at all! But who knew what Norman would do? Jeff was only thirty-two years old, and he’d never coached anywhere but with Buddy in Philadelphia … but, on the other hand, Richie remembered reading about Braman’s interest in that Davy Shula when Shula was … what? Twenty-fucking-six years old? That didn’t bode well. At forty-eight, Richie was a much more solid investment than Jeff, some might say more suitable for the job, and there was his longtime friendship with Harry; that had to help. You had to figure that in the Eagles’ organization right now, being allies with Harry would carry a lot more weight than being Buddy’s protégé. Then again, there were other ways of sizing it up….

  This went on until Harry called down about an hour later and invited Richie up. Richie rode the elevator to the fourth floor, and Harry walked him into Norman’s office.

  The owner did most of the talking. He said some complimentary things about the organization, about how much Buddy had been able to accomplish, about how much Richie had done over the last season. But he also talked about some of the things he didn’t like—the lack of discipline, Buddy’s Bad-Boy image, the favoritism Buddy showed certain players (most notably Jerome Brown), the disdain for other coaches in the league, the way Buddy talked about players (and owners) in the press, and so on. And it didn’t take Norman long to see that, in Richie, he had found a kindred soul. Richie had kept his thoughts to himself all season because Buddy was his boss and he took loyalty seriously, but there had been lots of things about the team that Richie hadn’t liked one bit. They were a lot of the same things that Braman didn’t like—the way Buddy would insult kids trying to make the team, the way Buddy never gave anybody on the staff upstairs any credit, the way Buddy treated the other coaches around the league (members of the blessed Brotherhood!), all the theatrical bullshit (his defense players had taken to wearing black shoes, hanging black towels from the waists of their silver pants). Jerome was the worst. Jerome would drive ninety miles per hour across the parking lot on his way to practice and ignore and razz assistant coaches on the practice fields, guys just trying to do their jobs. Jerome once had told defensive line coach Dale Haupt “Fuck off,” and Buddy just shrugged and laughed about it… that Jerome.

  Why, in training camp that last summer, Richie had nearly gotten in a fistfight with Jerome. The lineman was clowning around, sticking his head in the offensive huddle, when Richie barked at him, “Get your fat ass on your own side of the ball!”

  Jerome charged toward Richie, “What you say to me?”

  “Listen, you fat bag of pus,” bellowed Richie, who squared off to teach the big lineman a thing or two about the manly arts. Teammates piled in and pulled off Jerome before blows were exchanged, but Richie never forgot the lack of respect—or the fact that Buddy did nothing about it.

  “Oh, that’s just Jerome,” he said. Buddy thought it was kind of funny, actually.

  So Norman didn’t have to scratch hard to discover that what he had, sitting right there in his office, was someone who understood exactly his concerns about the team—Win, lose, or draw, you have to act with class—a perfect broad-shouldered, polite, righteous, respectful, articulate specimen of the modern NFL Corporate Coach.

  “Listen, Richie, I want you to go downstairs,” said Norman. “I want you to stay in the building.”

  The Pack had begun to assemble in force in the hallways underneath the Vet by the time Richie got downstairs. He ducked into the coaching suite before he could be cornered, closed the door to his office, relit his cigar, and began pacing through another excruciating hour and a half.

  Harry finally called down, “Can you come up, Richie? Mr. Braman would like to see you again.”

  He slipped once more past the Pack, who were heading upstairs now for the announced press conference, rode the elevator, and stuck his head in Harry’s office. No one was there. Harry’s secretary told him to go on in and wait, so Richie sat down on a chair opposite Harry’s desk. Then Harry came lumbering in with Norman on his heels.

  “Richie, I’m going to go with you as the head coach,” said Norman.

  Richie let out a huge sigh of relief, letting his shoulders sag so dramatically that Harry and Norman laughed.

  There was a brief preliminary discussion of contract terms— Richie would earn $250,000 in his first year, close to $300,000 in his second, and the club would have an option for a third year at about $350,000.

  “Why don’t you call your wife and your parents,” Norman suggested. On the speakerphone, Richie dialed up Liz.

  “They offered me the job,” he told her.

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone for a long moment, and then Liz blurted out, to the amusement of the men in the room, “Well, you’re going to take it, aren’t you?”

  HIS APPOINTMENT LANDED in the middle of an explosion of team anger. Buddy’s Boys were furious.

  “It’s ridiculous, man,” said Seth Joyner. “I think it’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Unfuckingbelievable…. Well, I just think, I’ve talked to Keith [Byars] and I’ve talked to Jerome and I can just tell you right now, it’s just going to cause a real bad situation. I don’t care who they bring in here. It’s like all the positives about the team are just gone out the window right now.”

  Keith Jackson called Norman a moron.

  “I think everything is crazy right now, everybody is going crazy around here, the players are going crazy,” he said. “I don’t want any ties to this team anymore. I don’t want to be here anymore. I think a lot of other players will say it, too. We don’t want to be around here anymore.”

  Richie waited out the mutinous blasts, lying low when Norman’s cutting remarks about Buddy and the team’s image and Jerome hit the press—even though he agreed with them. Especially the stuff about Jerome. He hadn’t forgotten the scuffle with Jerome on the practice field. Jerome forgot about that kind of thing minutes after it happened (he had even been impressed with how Richie had stood up to him), but not Richie. The disrespect galled.

  “I’m not exactly sure what Jerome’s problem is, but he can’t respect himself very much, being the way that he is,” the new head coach said, pacing in his office, filling the stale air with cigar smoke. “Out of control with everything he does and says. It’s cute and entertaining early on, but it gets old. Because if it’s not addressed, the other players, especially the younger ones, they think it’s right. I think that in coaching you have an obligation to teach the players that they are in public all the time…. You don’t just perform on Sunday as a coach or a player and then the rest of the week do whatever you want. I’ve seen Jerome walk by a little kid holding out a piece of paper and a pen, and brush them away with his hand saying, Out of my way!” Richie balls his fist with anger, and says to the absent Jerome, “You son of a bitch, that ain’t right! To some little kid whose father is encouraging him to have enough courage to go up and ask for an autograph? He has to understand, it’s not going to be that way with me. I’m a fair guy, but you have to act right. You have to have a certain amount of respect. You have to understand that coaches are here to help you, and that they are coaches, and they’re not here to take shit. That’s how I feel. Without having an ax to grind. I don’t want anyone coaching with a knot in their stomach. That’s how I feel.”

  Like all true monks in the temple, Richie knew— without question— what’s right. He’d been preparing for this moment for twenty years. He was not about to do some kind of talent search to fill out his staff; that’s not the way the priesthood works. Richie already
had his own staff picked out, guys whom he had worked with over the years, guys who thought the way he did, guys whom he’d told from time to time, shooting the bull the way coaches do, When I get the headset, I want you to work with me. Bringing them in now was a macho thing, proving not just that Richie remembered his promises, but that he had the muscle to make them happen. Within the year he had assembled his crew: Bud Carson as defensive coordinator (they worked together with the Jets from ’85 to ’88), Zeke Bratkowski as quarterbacks coach (Jets ’85-’89), Jim Vechiarella as linebackers coach (Jets, ’83-’85), Jim Williams as strength coach (Jets ’82-’90), Richard Woods as running backs coach (worked with Richie back in New Orleans in ’77). The following year he would reel in Larry Pasquale as special teams coach (Jets ’81-’89).

  But the one part of the team he inherited that Richie couldn’t remake in his own image was Buddy’s defense. Theirs would be a tenuous relationship at best. The hot tempers cooled when reality settled in—after all, what choice did these players have? They could play for Richie and earn their six- and seven-figure salaries or join the American workforce in a sluggish economy. And Richie couldn’t cut these guys; they were, after all, the best defense in the NFL.