Do You Love Football?! (4 page)

When I went to work for the 49ers as an offensive assistant in 1990, I think he remembered me as that little skinny guy who was always staring at him like some weirdo. I was as intimidated by him at San Francisco as I was at South Bend, but there were a lot of assistant coaches and head coaches and front-office people that were also intimidated by Joe along the way, for sure.

Joe was special. He had that charisma about him like no one else I had ever been around. He was the Pied Piper. Everybody loved him, and he had an unbelievable following from everywhere. How he lasted until the third round, I'll never know. He must have had some bad workouts before the draft.

But Joe was an iceman. What he did at Notre Dame, bringing teams from behind, was absolutely amazing. Forget about the '79 Cotton Bowl. What about the '78 game against USC in the LA Coliseum? I can still remember it as if it were yesterday.

We were getting our brains kicked in and Joe brought us back by leading us on three fourth-quarter touchdown drives to give us a 25-24 lead with a minute left. Then a bad call screwed us.

After driving the Trojans to midfield, Paul McDonald got hit while dropping back to pass and fumbled. The officials ruled the pass incomplete, but to this day I know that that was a fumble. Anyhow, the clock stopped, McDonald completed a quick pass and that set up Frank Jordan's winning thirty-seven-yard field goal with two seconds left. I'm still pissed off about that game.

With Joe in there you just knew when we got the ball back; we were going to win the game because that guy was going to do whatever it took to make it happen. And, by God, he did.

I didn't really have a lot of drawn-out conversations with Dan Devine, except for one. We were playing Air Force and we were beating them 24-0. I was a junior in high school and a guy in his mid-forties sitting behind me was on the offense's ass-which meant he was on my dad's ass and on all the offensive coaches' asses-the whole game. And it was 24-0. And we were 9-0.

Finally I turned around and I said something mean to this guy. We got in a pushing-shoving contest and I just hauled off and cranked him. Smashed him right in his face. He went to hit me back and his metal watchband grazed the side of my face, tearing open my cheek. I had blood all over my face. Even though I got my shot in, it looked like I was the one who got drilled, like I was the one who got the big "L" in that bout. I was like Rocky Balboa. Cut me, Mick!

As the usher came to take me away, some of the coaches' wives were crying, probably because they saw me covered with blood but also because I think they were embarrassed by my behavior. Not long after that Coach Devine called me into his office. He made some fatherly points that, as a seventeen-year old, I definitely needed to hear.

"Don't try and fight every individual battle, because you can't win every one," he said. "Choose your opponents carefully. This is Notre Dame and people expect a certain kind of conduct."

He challenged me to get some composure, but I know he appreciated me sticking up for his coaches and for his team. My dad also was concerned about me and, in his own way, he, too, expressed his appreciation for my loyalty to the Fighting Irish and to him. He reinforced what Dan Devine said, telling me, "You've got to remain poised, keep your cool and walk away."

I wasn't the biggest guy and I wasn't stupid. I was emotional, but I didn't go around the stadium during a game or the town or my school looking to pick a fight with anyone who ever said something bad about Notre Dame, the coaches in general or my dad in particular. Besides, I had a pretty sharp tongue myself, and that was how most of the altercations I was involved in were fought-in an exchange of words instead of an exchange of fists.

It's hard sometimes being a coach's son or being a quarterback's dad or being the wife of a player. Whenever a coach is fired or a player is traded or released, it's not just the player or coach who is involved. It affects a lot of other people-the family, the close friends. We lost to Clemson one year, and the next morning we found signs from moving companies, such as Allied Van Lines and United Van Lines, stuck in our yard. All the coaches had that done to them. Today, with talk radio and the Internet, with all the writing and chatting about every single thing that happens in sports, there's even more heat to take than there was then. There are a lot of people who live in the hometown of a team who you would expect to have a devoted relationship with that team, but it's not always the case.

I don't know if there are words to adequately describe my commitment to Notre Dame and its football program. I don't know if anyone could ever truly understand the depth of the love I had for the Fighting Irish. And then one day it all disappeared.

That was the day my dad got fired by Gerry Faust, who took over as head coach at Notre Dame after the 1980 season.

Although the team had finished 9-2-1 and played in the Sugar Bowl-where we lost to Herschel Walker and the Georgia Bulldogs-Dan Devine decided to retire because his wife had taken ill. Faust came from Cincinnati's Moeller High School, where in eighteen years he had a 174-17-2 record, including seven unbeaten seasons, five state championships and four mythical national prep titles.

As a result of the head coaching change, my dad and a few other assistants lost their jobs to make room for guys Faust wanted to bring in with him from Moeller and other places.

Looking back on it now, I understand where Coach Devine was coming from. He was in his mid-fifties and had coached for more than thirty years. He was at a stage in his life where he had to do what he had to do. At the time, though, I was devastated.

I didn't want to go down in the basement, where those Notre Dame banners were, anymore. I wanted to blow up our house.

I'm still, to some degree, bitter about my dad being let go by Notre Dame, because those were the three greatest years of my life. To have it all taken away was hard to get over. It was like I got fired, too. I lost my friends on the team. I lost my Notre Dame connections. I actually couldn't stomach the thought of them playing on Saturday without my being part of it. I felt betrayed.

That was my first close encounter with the harshest reality of the coaching business. I've since come to understand that getting fired is something all coaches go through if they're at it long enough. I understand now that it's a possibility no matter how good it's going. The Fighting Irish had been in the Sugar Bowl.

My dad had recruited the number-one rated quarterback in each of three states (Chris Brown of Kentucky, Blair Kiel of Indiana and Scott Grooms of Ohio) and signed them all in same year. Do you know how hard that is to get three blue-chip kids at the same position, in the same class, to go to the same school? To do that with three guys is almost unheard of. And then you're fired?

Yes, I understand it happens that way sometimes, but it doesn't keep me from being mad as hell. That year I became one of those sour, angry hometown guys who was rooting against the Irish. I became the guy who was like the Grinch who stole Christmas. And when Faust decided to change the uniforms to those ugly royal blue jerseys, I hated Notre Dame even more.

When the Fighting Irish went 5-6 in 1981, Gerry Faust's first year, that was the greatest year of my life. Those were the greatest eleven weeks of my life.

My experience at Notre Dame was one I wish every kid could experience. In fact, if you're an assistant on my coaching staff and you have a son and you want him to be a ball boy, then by all means bring him to practice. If you want to let him go in the meeting rooms and the locker rooms and the weight rooms, and he's old enough and can take care of himself, I'd love to have him come by. My three boys are a little too young for that, but I'd love to have the coaches' sons around. Why? Because I know what it's like to get to know the players and be a part of something special and the images that it left with me. I want to share that with other coaches' sons. After being fired by Gerry Faust, my dad took a job out of football just so I could finish my senior year at South Bend Clay.

He sold corrugated boxes for a year. And he was a hell of a box salesman. He made more money selling boxes than he ever made in coaching. He had a better car to drive. He had a bigger expense account. He got to see me play more. When he worked for Lee Corso for five years at Indiana, I never got to see my dad away from work, because he was almost never home.

At one point after his dismissal from Notre Dame, my dad started to talk about how guilty he felt because of all the time he had been away from us. He said he was giving serious thought to staying out of coaching for good so he could be around us more. I can relate to those feelings of guilt now, but back then I couldn't. "Are you nuts?" I told him. "You've got to get back into coaching." I'll admit my reasons for saying that were totally selfish. I loved having my dad around more, but I looked forward to game day too much for him not to go back to coaching. There's no game day in the box business.

Sure enough, once I graduated from high school my dad was right back in football, this time in the NFL as the running backs coach for the Buccaneers. My dad got knocked down, but he didn't stay down. He didn't even get his pants dirty. Instead of putting his energy into feeling sorry for himself, he put it into getting another job. That's a characteristic that I hope I have, that I hope we all have.

You've got to show resiliency. There are a lot of good coaches out there right now who are out of work. When it's my turn to join them, I hope I can rely on what I witnessed from my dad to push me through that time.

But as a coach, you can't be looking over your shoulder every second. People ask how difficult it is to be loyal to the club you work for, knowing full well that this is a business and that you could be out on your ass tomorrow. It isn't difficult at all, because you live in your hopes, not in your fears. If you're going to work every day waiting for the anvil to smash you right in the head, you're in the wrong business. You constantly work yourself into a fired-up, optimistic mentality, and you don't think about the consequences of losing. You don't think about getting fired. You don't think about all the negative things. Otherwise, you're going to be a basket case and not be able to coach anything.

FOUR
If You Can't Throw the Perfect Pass, Draw the Perfect Circle

S UPER BOWL XXXVII wasn't the first Super Bowl that I was in. I was the MVP of about sixteen or seventeen Super Bowls before that. At least in my mind I was.

When I was a kid I made every big play in every big game on the fields of my imagination. I'd stand in front of the mirror and pretend to be Curt Gowdy, telling millions of television viewers about what a sensational player Jon Gruden was. I loved Curt's voice. Sometimes I would be Dick Enberg saying, "Oh my!" as I threw touchdown passes, made diving catches, and went the distance on a handoff.

On Sundays in Dayton I'd be in front of the TV watching the Cleveland Browns in those white jerseys and white pants that would get all covered with mud. Then about midway through the first quarter I'd put on my number forty-four Leroy Kelly jersey, which my mother got for me by sending in a form on the back of a box of Aim toothpaste. I'd put on my plastic orange Browns helmet, and I'd be diving in the mud and running for touchdowns just like Leroy did. And like any hero-worshipping kid, I was always writing letters to that guy, telling him how great he was, asking for his autograph.

Bill Nelson was the Browns' quarterback at the time, and I was a pretty big fan of his as well. In 1982, when my dad went to coach for the Bucs, the quarterbacks coach was none other than Bill Nelson. "I can't believe it, Dad," I said, all excited.

"You're working with Bill Nelson." Apparently I didn't have a whole lot of company in that fan club because anyone else within earshot would say, "How in the hell do you know who Bill Nelson is?"

In the summer my dad would take me up to the Browns' training camp for a day to watch them practice, but we never got to any of their games. I followed basketball and baseball as well. I loved the Cincinnati Reds, the "Big Red Machine," and we did go to a lot of their games.

I pretty much had made up my mind about becoming a coach when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. Hell, as a teenager I practiced drawing circles just so that I could be good "on the board."

That's a coaching term for drawing plays, illustrated with X's and O's, on the grease or chalkboard, which usually is the first test a young coach has to pass when he's interviewing for a job in any legitimate high school or college football program. I was always taught when they put you on the board, you don't want to look incompetent. You want to present yourself properly and professionally, which means being able to draw nice, round circles. Some people might think this is funny, but I'm serious when I say I'm one of the best there is at drawing perfect circles. I got that way by drawing hundreds of them, thousands of them.

When I wasn't following sports or dreaming about following my dad's footsteps into coaching, I was acing school, at least early on. I was a tremendous student in elementary school. I was a whiz when it came to spelling, addition, multiplication, and subtraction. I was always the last one left in spelling bees and the first to finish my times tables in math. All of that changed when I got to high school. My mind wandered a lot. I'd think of any number of things I wanted to do instead of my homework-like play Nerf basketball in my room or play Fotoelectric Football or watch a game on TV. I had no interest in geometry or algebra.

I'd read a social studies book for an hour and wouldn't remember a word I read. Not one word.

My older brother, Jim, is a doctor. He's the director of cardio-thoracic imaging at Emory University's medical school and an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. He was a 4.0 student. He was valedictorian at South Bend Clay and number one in his class at Notre Dame. He took the exit exam at the University of Miami Medical School and got the fifth-highest score in the history of the medical program there. He's a genius.