Super Bowl Monday

by Adam Lazarus

  Near the end of Taylor’s second year (the strike-shortened season), the 3-3 Giants still had a shot at the postseason. But head coach Ray Perkins stunned the team and the New York media with an announcement. Iconic University of Alabama head coach Bear Bryant retired on December 15, 1982, and the next day, Perkins—the leading receiver on Bryant’s national championship teams of 1964 and 1965—took his place.

  Giants General Manager George Young tapped Parcells as the replacement.

  “Very few people in the world get to do what they hoped to do,” Parcells said at his introductory press conference. “I think the New York Giants for Bill Parcells are what the University of Alabama is to Ray Perkins. My first reaction when I got the job was that I was a very lucky guy. I would have done this for free. It’s the job I always wanted.”

  “I think he’ll make a great coach,” Taylor said after he learned of the hiring. “When he want to be, he’s tough. You know when Bill’s in a bad mood that you’d better get in gear.”

  Eight years later, Taylor was the last remaining player (Phil Simms was inactive) from the roster Parcells inherited in December 1982. For most head coaches, the presence of Taylor—arguably the finest defensive player in NFL history—would have been enough of a good luck charm; not for Bill Parcells.

  He carried a “lucky towel” in his bag. Prior to Super Bowl XXI, New Milford (N.J.) High School head coach Rich Conti sent Parcells a red towel, with a note reading, “Dear coach, this towel has never lost. It won two state championships in New Jersey; you take it to Pasadena with you.”

  Parcells’ wife even participated in the superstition. At the urging of Giants fan Dan Paulino, who sat behind the coaches’ wives’ section at home games, Judy Parcells wore the same white Giants hat during the team’s last twelve games of the 1986 season. New York won each game, including Super Bowl XXI. But because the Giants began the next year 0-5, Judy permanently stuffed the hat in a drawer.

  After the Super Bowl victory over Denver, Parcells returned the lucky towel to coach Conti, who won the state title again in 1988. Conti mailed it back to Parcells before the NFC Championship Game, and the towel was present for Super Bowl XXV.

  The rituals continued even before the team landed in Tampa. For the trip from California, he demanded that United Airlines pilot Augie Stasio fly them. “Augie from the Bronx,” as Parcells called him, had flown the team plane to Pasadena the week of the Super Bowl XXI victory; he also flew the team to San Francisco for the NFC Championship Game.

  And, of course, for Super Bowl Sunday, Ottis Anderson was again ordered to wear the same set of practice pants he wore during both playoff victories.

  “We had a lot of superstitious guys: myself and Ottis and Lawrence,” said Parcells. “We weren’t tempting fate in those days.”

  Those superstitions comforted Parcells while he was standing in the visitors’ locker room at Tampa Stadium during the halftime of Super Bowl XXV. So did the collection of football minds he counseled with.

  After he took the Giants head-coaching gig, Parcells pursued continuity within his staff. He retained his former boss, offensive coordinator Ron Erhardt, and promoted the team’s special assignments coach, Romeo Crennel, to special teams coach. Crennel and Parcells previously coached together for three seasons at Texas Tech.

  Parcells also promoted the youngest member of the Giants staff. Thirty-year-old Bill Belichick moved from special teams to coaching the linebackers. That 1982 season was Belichick’s fourth with the Giants and his seventh as a full-time coach. And he brought much more experience to the job than the lines on his résumé indicated.

  Belichick’s father, Steve Belichick, played fullback for Struthers High School and Western Reserve Academy, both in eastern Ohio. Like his son’s future boss, he too dabbled briefly with a playing career for the Detroit Lions. During the 1941 season, Lions head coach Bill Edwards—the former coach at Western Reserve—promoted Belichick from “towel boy” (more accurately, equipment manager) to play fullback. He scored three touchdowns—including a seventy-seven-yard punt return against Green Bay in the season finale—during his only year as a professional player.

  Following service in the navy during World War II, Steve took the head coaching job at Hiram College, then moved on to assistant positions with Vanderbilt and North Carolina.

  “He was a lot like Bill in his younger years,” said Don Gleisner, a defensive back and team captain at Vanderbilt. “Steve was the kind of a guy who was loyal to his family, he was loyal to his wife, he was loyal to his employer, he was loyal to his players, and loyalty, integrity and trust were his reputation.”

  Steve and his wife, Jeannette—the Vanderbilt team’s Spanish tutor—welcomed William Stephen to the family in 1952. By 1956, the Belichicks moved to Annapolis, where Steve found a permanent home, coaching and scouting for Navy. Growing up a part of the Midshipmen football program—a perennial football powerhouse until the late 1960s—Bill came to share in his father’s passion.

  Each year, as a young child, Bill spent the annual Army-Navy game on the sidelines. At age seven, he saw Joe Bellino, the Heisman Trophy winner that season, score three touchdowns in Navy’s 43-12 win at Philadelphia Stadium. A few years later, the boy started surreptitiously scouting for the Midshipmen.

  “There was a real close game,” Belichick said years later. “There was a lot of confusion. I was walking by one of the Army coaches when something dropped out of his pocket. It was the game plan. At that point my father knew the system, and now he had all the terminology. The next year, he’d say, ‘I see you ran the Jones special last week,’ and they’d say, ‘How did he know that?’”

  Bill developed into a capable football player and fantastic lacrosse player at Annapolis High School, Phillips Academy, and Wesleyan College. But even at an early age, he showed a tremendous aptitude for diagramming football plays and understanding and interpreting game film.

  “This guy decided he wanted to be a head coach when he was about seven,” remembered Ernie Accorsi, the NFL general manager who later hired

  Belichick for his first head-coaching job. “I remember when [John F.] Kennedy was running for president. . . . When he first started talking early in his campaign, I said, ‘This guy’s been preparing to be president.’ He knew exactly what he wanted to do if he ever became president. That’s kind of the feeling I had with Belichick. He knew he wanted to be a head coach. There was no question in his mind. That’s what he geared his whole life for.”

  Belichick left Wesleyan in the spring of 1975 and went looking for a job in the NFL. Baltimore Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda planned on hiring General Manager Joe Thomas’ cousin as a defensive assistant. Thomas’ cousin became unavailable, and George Boutselis recommended Belichick for the job that mainly included breaking down film.

  “That’s when I hired Billy,” Marchibroda said thirty-five years later. “I knew to begin with that he would be a hardworking fella, and also his father was working with the Naval Academy in the football department as a coach. And I thought that once I hired Billy and interviewed Billy, I thought, well gee, if Billy couldn’t do the job, he could always go to his father. But that really wasn’t necessary. Bill was the kind of guy, once you gave him an assignment, you didn’t see him until it was completed.”

  Coaching assignments with Detroit, then Denver, impressed Ray Perkins, who brought in Belichick to assist with the New York Giants defense and handle the special teams for the 1979 season. On the plane from Denver to New York, he saw Bill Parcells, who had just left the Air Force Academy to take the linebackers job with the Giants.

  Surrounded by tough, hard-nosed military coaches during his childhood, and a coach himself by age twenty-three, Belichick had several mentors. Among others, he patterned his style on the model set by coaches Len Fontes, Dan Sekanovich, and Pete McCulley, as well as his father’s former Navy colleagues, Wayne Hardin and Rick Forzano.

  “A lot of my philosophy and background comes from them,” Belichick sai
d during his second year with the Giants. “I apply it to special teams, mainly to be aggressive. Wayne Hardin and Rick Forzano were both a pretty wide-open type of coach. They weren’t coaching to sit back. I’ve copied a lot of their ideas.”

  That aggressive approach occasionally frustrated his head coaches.

  During the 1981 season (from the press-box level coaches’ booth), he instructed Giants kicker Joe Danelo to “squib kick” after New York scored a go-ahead touchdown with under a minute remaining against the Redskins. Belichick wanted to keep the ball away from Mike Nelms, one of the league’s top returners. The squib did not produce the results Belichick hoped for: a Redskin scooped up the kick and reached near midfield. Washington tied the game, then defeated the Giants in overtime. Head coach Ray Perkins was infuriated with Belichick’s move.

  “In the rain,” Belichick said afterward, “when you put the ball on the ground, it’s tough to handle. It skids. This time, it just didn’t work out. But if the same situation came up again, I’d make the same recommendation.”

  That proactive, original, even stubborn, thinking would serve Belichick well once Bill Parcells promoted him to defensive coordinator for the 1985 season. That year, the pass-rushing trio of Lawrence Taylor (13 sacks), Leonard Marshall (15.5 sacks) and George Martin (10 sacks) each had career years. During Belichick’s first two seasons of stewardship, the Giants defense yielded just 16.2 points and topped the NFC in sacks. And in the second half of Super Bowl XXI, Belichick’s defense thoroughly shut down John Elway, one of the key factors in New York’s victory.

  That outstanding unit lost several of its stars after the 1988 season, however. George Martin and Hall of Famer Harry Carson retired. Former Pro Bowl defensive end Jim Burt was let go, as was starting safety Kenny Hill. Although Taylor, Marshall, Pepper Johnson, and Carl Banks remained, the defense needed to be rebuilt for 1989. Parcells trusted Belichick with the task, and he rewarded the head coach. The Giants surrendered the fewest points in the NFC.

  “He’s always given me the job to do and let me do it,” Belichick said near the end of that season. “He’s let me instill my personality in the defense, as opposed to being his clone and relaying everything he would want done.”

  On the surface, Parcells and Belichick were two very different men. Parcells’ size and gruff demeanor instantly projected confidence and command. Physically, he diminished the five-foot, ten-inch, 190-pound Belichick. And Belichick’s aloof, often quiet, nature didn’t often inspire his players. Early on, according to George Martin, Belichick had “a terrible bedside manner.” Several of his players referred to him as “Doom.”

  “They talked about him as being gruff, about having no personality; they talked about him as being coldhearted. None of that’s true,” Don Gleisner remembered. “I believe for some reason, he wanted to keep that gruff image, whether that would help him or not.”

  “Bill puts a great emphasis—as did his father, as I did, and I think I learned it from Steve Belichick—on the same principles that apply in business, apply in football. You’ve got to have discipline; you’ve got to have integrity. You’ve got to have loyalty. You’ve got to work hard. And those were all things that were ground into Bill, and ground into me. And I think we got them from Steve.”

  Bill Parcells shared those same principles. Both coaches also desperately wanted to win, and they knew that superb defense would achieve that. But differences in personality suggested they did not get along.

  “Parcells would challenge Belichick to make a decision on anything from strategy to how to handle an injury with the media,” the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg later said.

  The catch was, if Belichick’s decision didn’t work out, Parcells would say, “You’re fired.” He put him under a lot of pressure and fired him about four or five times during that period.

  I recall one game in Dallas when Belichick came out with some fancy blitz package on first down, and Parcells said, “What the hell are you doing?” And Belichick said, “I’m giving them a different look.” And Parcells said, “No you’re not, you’re showing these 76,000 people how smart you are. You’re being a circus act.” Parcells then muttered, “You need those X’s and O’s guys during the week, but on the sidelines, they’re not worth a damn.”

  Later, as opposing head coaches, Parcells and Belichick faced one another five times. Fittingly, each was a defensive battle, with Belichick winning three games, Parcells two: the average score was 15-11. They would also return to the coach–assistant coach relationship in the late 1990s, first with the New England Patriots, then the New York Jets. And the bizarre circumstances in 2000, surrounding the Jets head-coaching job, furthered the public’s perception of acrimony.

  On January 3, Jets head coach Bill Parcells announced his retirement and took on an advisory role with the team: “I’m not going to coach any more football games,” he said. “This is definitely the end of my career.” Belichick, the team’s defensive coordinator, was named the head coach. The next day, he resigned, and he eventually took the head-coaching gig with the Jets’ divisional rival, the New England Patriots.

  “Most of the perceived conflict came when Bill left the Jets. He was doing what he thought was right, and I had a responsibility to run the business the way I thought was right, so there was a difference of opinion there,” Parcells said ten years later. “Bill and I have a fine relationship now. . . . We did spend a lot of good years together, and both of us realize that.”

  Harmonious relationship or not, the Parcells-Belichick union flourished.

  “We’re just two different people,” Belichick said in 2011. “Maybe our strengths played off one another. . . . Bill is very good at big picture things. . . . I’m more detail oriented, sometimes maybe I get caught up in some details and I might miss something that’s bigger picture. I think there’s definitely a good balance there.”

  Throughout the 1980s, the Giants coaching staff remained uncommonly consistent, especially for a perennial playoff team. Parcells, Erhardt, and Beli-

  chick each kept the same job from 1985 to 1990. No other NFL team could boast that type of continuity at the head coach and coordinator positions.

  Some Giants assistants inevitably left to take promotions elsewhere, but Parcells’ fire and palpable hatred for losing attracted eager, talented replacements. By the later part of the decade, Parcells built a staff in his own image: young, hungry, no-nonsense. In 1988, he hired a passionate disciplinarian, Tom Coughlin, to coach his wide receivers. Al Groh, who served as defensive coordinator during Parcells’ lone season at the Air Force—he also helped recruit Lawrence Taylor to the University of North Carolina—joined the Giants as a defensive assistant in 1989.

  And before the 1990 season, Parcells hired Charlie Weis, who, in just one year as head coach at Somerset Franklin High School, defeated Watchung Hills and Ocean Township to win New Jersey’s central group three sectional championship the previous November. Designated a “special assistant,” Weis worked as the Giants’ jack-of-all-trades, cutting film and completing other tasks for the rest of the staff.

  “Charlie was the whipping boy,” Parcells remembered years later. “I was the whipping boy once. Belichick was the whipping boy once. Everybody gets to be the whipping boy.”

  Parcells’ assistants didn’t remain whipping boys forever. As of 2010, that staff would, collectively, own thirty-one Super Bowl rings. Soon, several of them would be the ones giving the orders, rather than taking them. On that 1990 Giants staff, five of the assistants would go on to be NFL head coaches; Weis later became head coach at Notre Dame.

  Parcells mentored his young staff and encouraged them to advance. And his “coaching tree” would ultimately become one of the most abundant in the modern era.

  “I always laugh when people say ‘oh well, this coach couldn’t win without that coach.’ We had a lot of that with Belichick and myself. I’ve always felt it was the job of the head coach to hire good coaches; I think I was fortunate enough to
be able to do that,” Parcells said years after his coaching career ended in 2007. “It was a unique group. I’m proud of them. I was very fortunate to have them. But I think collectively, we all learned from one another.”

  9

  Grinding Out a Championship

  “The first drive of the third quarter is the most important of the game,” Parcells told his team just before taking the field for the second half. “We have to do something with it.”

  Behind 12-10, Hostetler and the New York offense opened the second half at their own twenty-four-yard line. From the outset, they did not seem to heed their head coach’s advice. An incompletion, a false-start penalty, and a short screen play left the Giants with a difficult third and eight, deep inside their own territory. But an elusive catch-and-run by Dave Meggett—he caught the pass several yards shy of the first-down marker, then ran through the tackles of two Buffalo defenders—kept the drive alive. Within a few minutes, the man who Meggett often relieved did the same.

  Ottis Anderson carried the ball just seven times in the first half: not nearly as many carries as he would have expected given the orders Bill Parcells issued that week.

  “Parcells said, ‘We just gonna pound [you] to death,’” Anderson remembered. “And we wanna know what plays you’re comfortable with because we gonna run those fifteen to thirty times a game until we wear ’em down. . . . How you feel about that?’ I said ‘Bill, I’m ready to play; whatever you do is fine by me, and I look forward to the challenge.’”