Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (5 page)

My dad really learned how to understand how to motivate each person. By the time I worked with him in Arizona, I think my dad
could say four words to someone and that guy would be ready to lay it on the line for him. He was natural; he was himself. You talk about great motivators, you better be a great motivator if you’re going to do that job in the Army. They’d have these missions in Korea and there’d be one guy who would ask for volunteers to go with him and he couldn’t get anybody to volunteer. When my dad would ask for volunteers, every hand would go up. Everybody felt comfortable going with him. That was the way he was, he would get emotional like I do and you knew that he was going to lay it on the line for you, so you’d lay it on the line for him.

Just as important in that is that my dad was smart. He understood tactics, and that’s what you saw with his defenses wherever he went: the Jets, the Bears, the Vikings, the Eagles, the Oilers, even the Cardinals. His defenses just dominated because he understood the tactics, not just the yelling and screaming. Don’t get me wrong; my dad has redefined how to use four-letter words. My God, people talk about how I talked on
Hard Knocks
, but my dad talked like that in front of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce one time.

Swearing, ranting, and all that crap doesn’t mean anything if you don’t understand how to design plays and how to execute what you’re doing. There’s an old saying about coaches and players: A player only listens to a coach if the player thinks the coach can help him. If the player doesn’t think the coach can help him, the coach is useless. That’s just the way it is. Players will drift off, do their own thing, and completely tune out the coach, no matter how many times you drop an f-bomb.

I don’t know if I can emphasize enough just how good my dad was at motivating people to get out there and do what was required of them. I always admired that about him.

You watch war movies and they don’t show that stuff, the guys who are pissing down their leg, paralyzed by fear, scared to face the bullets because they’re worried the next one is coming at them. I’m not making fun of those guys. Thank God I was never in that position, so who am I to tell somebody in a war what they should do
when real bullets are flying? But my dad wasn’t just facing those bullets, he had to tell guys what to do while they were facing them, too. He had to look at some guy who was scared out of his mind, wanting to run away, and get that guy to fight.

Not that my dad ever bragged about that. I only know this stuff because my dad’s friends from the war have told me. At 18, Buddy Ryan was a fully formed man ready to defend his country and the guys he was in that foxhole with.

Understanding that, now maybe you can understand why he took that swing at Kevin Gilbride, a guy he was working with not in the foxholes of Korea, but years later on the sidelines in Houston.

I hate to bring up the story, but it’s one a lot of people talk about with my dad. Heck, I remember it vividly because I thought everybody would think I’d do the same thing someday. I thought my brother Rob and I were never going to get NFL jobs again because of it.

My dad was defensive coordinator of the Houston Oilers in 1993. It was an incredibly talented team. Just loaded. But the team started 1-4, capped by a 35-7 loss to Buffalo. So my dad, and everybody else, was taking a lot of crap from the fans and the media. That’s the way it goes. But the defense came together and had only one game the rest of the regular season in which it allowed more than 17 points. It was an amazing run and the Oilers won all 11 games. Man, what I wouldn’t give to win 11 straight sometime. That’s not easy.

The problem for my dad was that he hated the Oilers’ offense, which was a version of the run-and-shoot, a four-receiver base offense that called for minimal blocking for the quarterback on virtually every play. It left the quarterback so vulnerable that my dad called it the “chuck-and-duck,” because he knew how defenses would attack it. Warren Moon, a future Hall of Famer, was the quarterback and Gilbride was the offensive coordinator. Moon used to take some vicious shots. The problem my dad had with Gilbride was that Gilbride often left the defense hanging out to dry. Instead of running out the clock when our team was ahead, Gilbride would often call pass plays. When they failed, the defense would have to
go back on the field. My dad’s opinion was that he lost two starting defensive backs during the season because of Gilbride’s play calling. (The funny part is that my dad is sort of to blame for the use of the run-and-shoot—and all the other different types of three-, four-, and five-receiver sets used around the NFL—because those schemes were basically an answer to his heavy-blitz schemes.) I’ve met Gilbride, who’s now the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants and was when they won the Super Bowl in the 2007 season. He’s a pretty good guy and he’s certainly turned out to be a great coach. But you get on my dad’s bad side and that’s it.

So it’s in the final game of the regular season, on January 2, 1994, and Gilbride calls a pass play at the end of the first half with the Oilers winning. Backup quarterback Cody Carlson fumbles the ball and the defense has to go back out there. My dad starts yelling at Gilbride, who starts yelling back and walking toward my dad. So what does my dad do? He punches Gilbride in the jaw and the players have to break them up.

Now, that’s not normal, I’ll admit. But you have to know my dad. The really sad thing about the Gilbride story is that sometimes it overshadows the important contributions by my dad, like how he and Walt Michaels came up with the defensive plan that stopped the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III and led the Jets to victory in the greatest upset in NFL history. That’s the game that led to the merger of the AFL and the NFL.

They forget about how my dad invented the 46 defense, the scheme that made the Chicago Bears champions in 1985 and made them the greatest defense in the history of the game. They forget that the 46 defense forced unreal changes in how the game is played today. You know those pretty spread formations and all that cutesy wide-open offense that everybody loves? (Well, everybody except defensive guys like me, of course.) So much of that is an answer to the schemes my dad developed with the 46 defense.

People also forget about his time with the Minnesota Vikings, when he helped develop the Purple People Eaters defense. They forget
that he helped three different teams (the Jets, the Bears, and the Vikings) get to the Super Bowl, that he was part of two historic teams and was a head coach for two different teams. Sure, my dad had some interesting moments, like the whole Gilbride thing and the “Bounty Bowl.” He wasn’t much for Jimmy Johnson, Tom Landry, or Don Shula, and they weren’t real big fans of him. Heck, my dad couldn’t even get along with Mike Ditka … and they won a Super Bowl together. That’s my dad; he wasn’t going to BS anybody.

But when they use the old expression for defensive linemen, “Let’s meet at the quarterback,” that’s my dad talking. He came up with that. He really was one of the great innovators in the history of the NFL. Two different times, my dad came up with strategies where the league had to hold emergency rules meetings in the middle of the season to adjust for things he did. He came up with the idea of guys faking injuries to get extra time-outs. He tweaked the competition with what he used to call the Polish Punt Team, putting 13 guys on the field at the end of games to prevent returns and burn clock time even if he got caught. Yeah, my dad never found a rule or fellow coach he didn’t want to challenge.

My dad is nearing 80. Now, if you look up his biography online, it will say he was born in 1934. Not exactly. My dad was born in 1931, but when he was breaking into the NFL, he kind of had to change the numbers a little. Even back in 1968, age was a factor. The NFL was already becoming known as a young man’s game, even for coaches. So my dad put down that he was 34 instead of 37. My brother Jim once gave my dad a hard time about it, pointing out that my dad’s real age was listed on Jim’s birth certificate. My dad just grumbled something at him in response.

Not that it much matters. Even at his age, Buddy Ryan could still be a defensive coordinator in the league and be one of the best. No question, he could still dominate. Not just that, he could still lead. My dad was tough: His personality, his language, the way he coached—everything about him was tough. I’ve always wanted to be just like him.

When people say, “Oh, Rex Ryan is just like his dad,” I’m proud of that. In Ron “Jaws” Jaworski’s book
The Games That Changed the Game
(which, by the way, is great for people who want to learn something about the game), a couple of people paid me some really nice compliments at the end of a chapter about my dad’s 46. (I told you it was that important!)

Doug Plank, the guy who wore 46 and inspired the name for the 46 defense in Chicago, told Jaws: “Rex has taken his father’s ideas and improved on them.… He’s created more new looks, more opportunities for his defenders to make plays. It’s still all about creating confusion in the quarterback’s mind, not just hitting people hard. Rex looks for favorable matchups. He’ll give players multiple responsibilities on each play, so when he moves people around, he has the capability of making it look like a totally different defense. The number of men he uses up front is constantly changing. He’ll get more movement from hybrid players rushing from a variety of different angles. Rex’s schemes rely on the
threat
of pressure coming, but that pressure isn’t always geared to overpowering the opponent each play.”

Then Jaws himself wrote: “I think Rex has expanded the scope of the 46 in ways his father could not have envisioned. Rex will take a linebacker from one side of the field and move him to cover a wide receiver—and rotate his down linemen in unconventional ways—with coverage concepts I’ve never seen before. Rex is vigorously responding to the many new looks he sees from offenses, figuring that he needs to be aggressive in order to stay ahead. In that respect, he’s a chip off the old block.”

Or as Mike Singletary, the Hall of Fame linebacker who worked with my dad and learned to love him after some early tribulations, told Jaws: “It’s obvious Rex is carrying on his father’s legacy. He’s so much like Buddy, it’s frightening.”

Gentlemen, you don’t know how much that means to me. I’m not nearly as tough as my dad. I didn’t have to grow up like him. Thank God I never had to grow up that way. But he is who he is and I’m who I am. Am I a gentler version of Buddy Ryan? I would say
so. But everything I am as a coach is based on watching him, learning from him, wanting to be like him. My mom, Doris, is a tough lady. Trust me, she’d be a nasty defensive coordinator, too. There’d be a lot of hurt quarterbacks if she was the one calling plays for the defense. However, when I was growing up, my twin brother Rob and I wanted to be coaches like my dad.

My mom and dad got divorced when my brother and I were two. They tried to reconcile one time, but it didn’t work out. My mom will tell you that she just wasn’t much for the coach’s life as my dad worked his way up from the high school ranks to the University of Buffalo. They met at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) after my dad got out of the service. One of my mom’s sorority sisters at the Kappa Delta House introduced them and my mom was “enamored with football people,” as she likes to say. Like my dad, she grew up in Oklahoma, just north of the Texas-Oklahoma border. Everybody loves football in that part of the world, and my mom still loves it. She’ll watch three college games on Saturday and then my games and my brother’s on Sunday. Like I said, she’d be a heck of a coach herself.

Anyway, my folks were married for about 10 years before they divorced, but the funny thing is that they get along great now. My dad calls my mom at 7:30 some mornings just to talk, forgetting she’s an hour behind him. They had some great times together. My dad loved to dance, and he made her laugh with all his snappy one-liners. He loved her enough that he converted to being a Southern Baptist and he even got baptized in the church before they got married. They tithed 10 percent of what they were making to the church even when they were making nothing. They didn’t allow liquor in the house.

But the coaching life wears on the wives, particularly if you have kids. I thank God for my wife, Michelle, and how supportive she has been, especially raising our sons. Like I’ve said, there are two types of wives in the NFL: ex-ones and great ones. I know firsthand. This business is about long hours, and that means not much support for the wife. Plus, when you’re a coach like my dad was, like I am now,
life is pure joy for you. You’re doing what you love. Next to actually playing football, coaching is the greatest job in the world. You’re as happy as Tony Siragusa at an Italian meat market. But that’s not necessarily true for your spouse.

Here’s a story that will put it in perspective: My dad didn’t even know we’d been born until we were three days old. Seriously. Now, it’s not because he didn’t care. First off, you have to remember that cell phones weren’t around in 1962 and communication wasn’t quite as easy. My mom had gone back to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where she grew up, to have us so she could have more help, since my dad was traveling for work. Her mom, Alabama “Bamma” Ward, still lived there, as did most of the rest of Mom’s family. Because she was carrying twins, the doctor sent her there about eight weeks before her due date, since twins usually come early.

And that’s just what Rob and I did. We were born about six weeks early on December 13, 1962, while my dad was on the road trying to recruit players. My mom tried to get a message through, but he was traveling around and the message didn’t reach him right away, plus he wasn’t expecting us to be born that soon.

Eventually, my mom realized she just couldn’t do the coaching life. I don’t blame her. She had some goals of her own and she fulfilled them. Plus, she had double trouble when my brother Rob and I were born. She already had Jim, who was six, and then came the Ryan twins. Talk about wearing a mom out. I can only imagine. She likes to tell this story about one time when a friend of hers came over while she was giving us a bath. We were both screaming our heads off and my mom’s friend asked, “How can you stand it?” My mom looked at her a little confused and said, “What do you mean?” She had learned to tune out the noise.