Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (34 page)

Really, all this stuff just motivates me, and I think it motivates the players because they know how behind them I am. If the newspapers want to make fun of me, go ahead. Now, be funny. That “Fatman and Robin” headline with me and Sanchez was pretty good. There are guys dressed up in the stands like Batman and Robin now. That’s hilarious, but you go ahead and make your jokes now. I’m going to be on the cover of
GQ
by next year. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

My point is that pressure doesn’t bother me. That stuff is just joking around. I love to watch special moments in sports, like when
Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson. That was an awesome fight. I’ll watch the whole thing when it’s on, because you see what kind of heart Douglas had during that fight. Or there’s the story about the heart of Secretariat. Secretariat was the greatest racehorse ever, totally dominant. He was a big, strong horse—a real monster. When they did the autopsy on Secretariat, they found out his heart was twice as big as other horses’. You hear talk about the heart of a champion, and that’s a literal example. You have to have that strength. I’ve watched the Boston Celtics with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen, and you see that heart. You look at Derek Jeter with the Yankees. He talked one time about how they were going to make every single out matter, every single at bat matter, for all 162 games—and then they did it. That’s how much one guy can influence a whole team, getting everybody to lay it on the line for each other. A real coach knows the value of that kind of heart, that kind of charisma, that kind of leader.

It’s like our decision to take a quarterback with our first-round pick in 2009 while I was talking about winning right away. If you want to win now, you don’t take a rookie quarterback because now the odds are stacked against you, but I knew we needed a young guy to build with, so I said we should do it. I wasn’t afraid to do that. I also wasn’t afraid to say we were going to win anyway. We had one game in 2010 where we lost in overtime to Buffalo even though we ran for 318 yards. Why? Sanchez threw five interceptions. That’s going to happen when you have a young quarterback. Was I happy? No, but was it right to take him? Absolutely, yes. Look, if you want to be a champion, you have to have a quarterback, and I said we were going to be champions so we had to have a quarterback. Yeah, he’s young and I took a big chance, but I have never wanted to be like every other coach. I’m going to do what I believe is right, what is right in my heart. If that means more pressure, fine, I’ll take it. The pressure just pushes me to be great, and that’s really what it’s all about.

H
ere’s the ironic part about the whole weight thing: I was never this heavy until I devoted myself to coaching. I guess this is the price I pay for having such devotion to the game. When I was in college, I was an undersized defensive lineman. I couldn’t even put on weight when I tried. I would eat all the time, even six peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Literally, it was like we had an assembly line: I’d do the peanut butter, Rob would do the jelly, then we’d put them in a bag and off to work we’d go. That’s just how we did things. But I didn’t really grow much.

The problem was that even when I was playing, I was always going and going and going. We’d practice and I’d go for a run. I remember one of the assistant coaches when we were in college would always joke that if they could bottle up my energy and Rob’s energy, we could all make millions. Seriously, I would practice and then go run six miles a day. I just loved to move. Even early in my coaching career, when my dad brought me to Arizona to work with him, we used to run all the time. If we were done at midnight or even 3
A.M
.,
we’d run three miles or whatever, just get the body moving. Now, that’s the frustrating part: People see me now and they have no idea what I looked like before. My only help is Jeff Weeks, our defensive assistant, who went to college with Rob and me. He knows, he’s my witness. He saw me when I was skinny.

That’s when I had it goin’ on. Oh yeah, I had the guts to ask some serious women out, which is the only way I ended up with my wife. Some of the other women were way out of my league. Back in high school, I went out with this 20-year-old Playboy Bunny named Roz. I’m serious—my brother will verify. We met at some couples skate event at the roller rink. You were supposed to ask a girl to skate with you, so I went for it. Back then and all through college, I was a good-looking guy and very confident about those situations. Now my looks are all distorted, which bothers me, but I’m still comfortable with who I am when you get right down to it.

Anyway, back then I was thinking, “Hey, you only live once, so you might as well take your shot.” She was smokin’ hot. Rob said she was the best-looking girl in history. So I hit her with “Where are you from, heaven? You look like an angel to me.” She bought it, and I was shocked. I’m serious as a heart attack—she not only bought the line, she agreed to go out with me. I have no idea where she is now, but it happened. That night, Rob and I took her and her friend out for pancakes, some stupid kid thing. Remember, I was in high school. As Rob likes to say now, it was one of those Ripley’s Believe It or Not moments.

Of course, where I really got lucky was with Michelle. She is gorgeous, smart, skinny, and unbelievably strong, reliable, and supportive. I still can’t believe that I got lucky enough to find someone that amazing … and that willing to put up with me.

I know plenty of women in this job—and being a coach’s wife is a job—who get resentful and jealous, jealous of the game and how much guys like me love it, jealous of the competition that we eat up. Trust me that my wife could also be resentful of everything I eat up, literally, after I took this job. I was 200 pounds when we got married.
I’ve gained about 150 pounds at my heaviest. It’s not right, but she never really says a word to me. Yeah, she might say, “Honey, you’re looking a little husky, you should drop some weight.” Husky? I look like the refrigerator. I have lost the weight before. I got down to 235 one time, then bounced right back to 310. I was 310 when I took this job, and all of a sudden it was 340. Is it the stress? Is it that I’m so happy? I don’t know exactly why, but I know that I’m loving what I’m doing so much right now, I don’t want my health to get in the way of this time in my life.

I hear people say that you should just make time to work out, that’s the answer. Right—when am I going to do that in this job the way it needs to be done? As it is, I don’t see my family enough, and now I’m supposed to get up an hour or hour and a half earlier so I can hit the treadmill? Look, I’ve done that and I know it’s the best way, but it’s not realistic. I’m 48 years old and I’m the head coach of this team. I love doing my job and I love my family. If I have to sacrifice somewhere, I’ll do it another way.

That’s why lap-band surgery was important for me. I dropped 40 pounds almost right away and I felt so much better. The inspiration for me was Tony Siragusa. He told me he got to be over 400 pounds at one time and then decided to do the procedure and got back down to 325 right away. Jamie Dukes, the old offensive lineman who is with the NFL Network now, he had it, too. We also had a woman in our office who did it, and it really worked. The only drawback for her was that she would throw up if she ate too much. I hate throwing up. I’ll just fight through it rather than throw up. When people look at me they say, “Just get rid of it if you’re feeling bad,” but I just can’t.

I had to do the surgery, even when my brother was telling me not to. I had to get off that roller coaster of dieting, then ballooning back up. And it’s been the greatest thing I ever did. I studied it beforehand to make sure it was the right choice for me. So did our owner, Woody Johnson. In fact, the band is one that’s made by his company, Johnson & Johnson. He got involved and he said, “If you’re going to do this, we’re going to find the best person.” The other thing I
did was look at the gastric bypass option. I wasn’t going to do that. I found out that 3 percent of the people who do that die, and I know that Charlie Weis had real problems with it. Plus, I’ve heard that people eventually gain some of the weight back. Probably not so bad that it’s not a good idea, but eventually your stomach stretches out again even with the gastric bypass. I know there are ways around the lap band. People who eat a lot of ice cream don’t have as much success with the lap band. Still, it just seemed like a better option for me. Look, either way that people do it, I understand. Once you get on the eating roller coaster, it’s so hard to get off it. It’s brutal.

The funny thing is that I didn’t do it because my health was awful. I’d go to the doctor and all the tests would come back looking fine. My cholesterol, my blood pressure, liver function, and kidney function—all that stuff was just fine. Back in Baltimore, the doctor used to bust my balls all the time. He looked at me and said, “You look great … on paper.” I’m huge. I love to eat. Like I said, my favorite is Mexican food. I just love tacos. Then there’s pizza and lasagna. Yeah, just pour on the carbs. I don’t even know how many I’d eat when we went out—probably more after a loss, but you just eat because you love it. You start and all of a sudden you forget how much you have pounded down because you’re having such a good time. It’s like at Thanksgiving—I love all that food. You get turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, the cranberry sauce, the corn, then pecan pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie.

Yeah, just line up the pies and keep them coming.

The lap band has been great for me, because now I still eat a lot of that stuff; I just can’t eat as much. Now when I’m full, I stop or it gets uncomfortable, or if I try to have something like a cheeseburger, I feel awful. The bread just expands in my stomach and I’m miserable. With pizza, now all I can do is eat the toppings, not the bread. I get pissed about it, but that works for me. I have to watch what I eat, because physically I’m not going to feel good. We still go out after games, but I get uncomfortable very quickly and I just stop eating. It’s perfect. I will tell anybody who needs this that they should do it. I
feel great now and I don’t have to constantly think, “Hey, how much did I eat earlier today? What can I eat now?” When you’re going and going and going the way we do in this job, it’s like you’re always looking for something to fuel you.

Maybe that’s why I always end every team meeting with the line “Let’s go snack.” Now, I know people who were watching that stuff on
Hard Knocks
were thinking, “Yeah, there goes the fat guy. He can’t wait to eat.” But that’s not how I’m thinking about it. Yes, I love to eat, but I also want guys to finish on a positive note after a meeting. It’s one thing to talk about being great, but you have to follow through on it. That’s the point of putting pressure on yourself, to keep you working at it. Now, I want the guys to have fun when we’re doing our job, but I make sure they know we’re here for a purpose, even if we may not all be here forever.

That’s one of the things that had been brought up about the 2010 season. They said that we were just going for it this year, which is why we brought in Jason Taylor, LaDainian Tomlinson, Braylon Edwards, Santonio Holmes, and Antonio Cromartie. All those guys are either at an age where they could retire soon or they had one-year contracts and would be free agents at the end of the season. I hear people say that those guys are “rentals.”

Well, for many of these players this may be a rent-to-own situation. You don’t know what’s going to happen with certain guys and we’re open on a lot of fronts. Some players are best off when they have that one-year deal, where the pressure is on them all the time to make good decisions, work as hard as they can. That’s a tough decision, and that’s where you have to be a business manager in this job as well. Obviously, that’s where Mike Tannenbaum gets the brunt of it. The key thing is we’ll never keep a player I don’t want just because of salary. We have to do what’s best for the football team. Sometimes it’s a tough decision, like letting Thomas Jones and Alan Faneca go. Sometimes it’s an easy one, like letting Eric Barton and Chris Baker go. With Faneca, it was really hard, but I was able to lean on coaches like Bill Callahan and Director of Player
Development Dave Szott. It was the same type of situation we had with our kicker, Jay Feely. I didn’t want him to go. Mike Westhoff, our special-teams coach, loved him and Feely was a guy who was emotionally tough. He could handle the pressure in New York, but we let him go and got Nick Folk, and Folk has been great for us. I wanted to keep Marques Douglas, but I couldn’t. I’ve been around that guy for like 10 years. He’s one of my guys, but these are the decisions you make because of the rules.

Coming into the 2010 season we were in a tough spot. Because we finished in the top four of the league in 2009—meaning, we were one of the four teams to make the conference championship games—we were really limited about what we could do. It’ll be the same thing preparing for 2011. If we lost a player in free agency, we could sign somebody. Otherwise, we had to wait until June to sign some guys, like we did last year with backup quarterback Mark Brunell and Jason Taylor. Now, some teams might complain about those rules because it was all based on the fact that the collective bargaining agreement went into the last year and there was no salary cap. What I did was use it as motivation for our guys. I told them that we were going to lose some players and not be able to replace them because of the rules. That meant they were going to have to find ways to get better on their own. They were going to have to find solutions. All we had to do was get a little bit better across the board and we could get to the top of the game, because we were already a conference finalist. We were that close—it wasn’t going to take much more to get to the Super Bowl. So coming into last year each guy worked his butt off. Physically, we got better in the weight room. We are the only team in the league that had 100 percent participation in the off-season program. I knew that as a coach I was going to have to get better, too, if we were going to stay with teams like Indianapolis and New England. That’s how it is every year.