Bald, tan Richie Kotite, the crown of his head framed by a faded pink eyeshade, stands on the gridiron, cigar jutting strenuously from his clenched teeth, surveying the crowded practice field like General MacArthur in the prow of a landing craft. He is a wildebeest of a man; he looks assembled from spare parts: short thick torso mounted on long skinny legs with broad shoulders and long powerful arms. With the pink visor—which allows his dome to go brown as the rest of his face—aviator sunglasses propped on a liberal Levantine schnoz, the cigar (a Cuban big enough for an Al Capp cartoon), softening belly, outsized limbs and colossal trilbys, the effect is solid but lubberly.
It’s the first day of Eagles voluntary camp, two weeks of workouts without pads on the green fenced-in field off the parking lot outside the Vet. On the grass, leaning with youthful ease into limbering exercises, are more than eighty young men, warming up to the serious business of trying out for the ’92 Philadelphia Eagles. Veterans, draftees, and free agents are all out there together, presumably equals at this starting gate, but actually not. There’s a core group of forty or so established veterans who will make the team. The rest are all competing for about six or seven roster spots, and even that competition is already stacked in favor of Richie’s draft picks. This year he’s selected two hotshot running backs, Siran Stacy of Alabama and Notre Dame’s Tony Brooks, who now warm up alongside Norman’s latest milliondollar free-agent acquisition, Herschel Walker. Randall Cunningham is readying for his comeback, jogging up and down with a shiny black brace on his surgically rebuilt left knee. Buddy’s Boys are back, too— Reverend Reggie, Seth Joyner, Clyde Simmons, Andre Waters, Wes Hopkins, Byron Evans, Eric Allen, Mike Golic, Mike Pitts, and Ben Smith, although Ben is still standing around on his bum knee. Most of them had taken off the first two days of workouts, still grieving—it was just days ago they buried Jerome. Someone has traced number 99 in lime on a corner of the practice field.
It is a sunny hot morning in early July. The nearby skyline of Center City trembles in a bright thermal haze, but the green, silverwinged helmets and numbered jerseys already herald the approach of autumn. Just beyond the north fence, some of the big rigs that roar past on 1-676 lean happily on their horns to hurry on the season.
Richie enjoys the truckers’ salutes, but that’s about as close as he wants fans to get. Richie doesn’t like to be watched. When he’s working in his office, he keeps the door shut. One of his first public acts as the Eagles’ head coach last year was to close off the Eagles’ practices to the public and Pack. Buddy’s practices had been social events. Avid Eagles fans were free to wander up and down the sidelines, gaping, cheering, snapping pictures, shouting encouragement. Buddy would stand, legs apart, belly forward, rim of his cap pulled down to the top of his glasses, silently twirling his whistle at the precise center of his world, oblivious to the commotion. Richie is, in contrast, a study in anxiety. He paces and shouts and sticks his head in huddles and watches the sidelines like a wary mother hen, annoyed even when the boys pulling water jugs get too close to the action. Out at West Chester University, during the team’s official monthlong training camp, a thousand fans or more show up for every practice, morning and afternoon, camped out on blankets and folding chairs, trying to catch glimpses of their favorite players, getting familiar with the top draft picks, and sizing up the free agents trying desperately to impress. Club executives escort groups of season ticket holders and corporate sponsors right down to the sidelines for these sessions, so they can hear the players swear and grunt and see the blood, sweat, and spit fly. It had become such a beloved tradition that, much as Richie hated it (“I found one asshole standing right next to me in the huddle one day,” he’d say, with disgust), he had no choice in the matter—how would it look for Norman, whose boyhood water bucket—carrying episode in West Chester was now legend, to wall off his team from the masses? But these two weeks of voluntary camp and the rest of the season up in Philly were Richie’s call, and he kept them closed to the public.
People hadn’t minded so much in ’91. They just nosed up to the fences, which were only about ten yards from the field. But this year Richie has ordered a green tarp draped around the perimeter, and while he works out his troops in private, there is angry milling outside the fence.
“Hey, Kotite,” bellows one of the disappointed, a familiar rude male rumbling, voice of the riled Philly fan, “Buddy let us in!”
Richie rips the cigar from his teeth like he’s been waiting all week for this moment. In his angriest coach’s bellow, he thunders back, “I don’t give a shit what Buddy did!”
“Asshole!” the fan shoots back.
Richie takes a couple steps toward the fence now, making eye contact with the retreating heckler through an opening in the tarp. Waving his cigar angrily, he shouts, “Get the fuck out of here if you don’t like it!”
Then he turns to a writer standing near the gate, and says, “Don’t print that.”
Defining boundaries has been a problem for Richie ever since becoming head coach. It is a rule of human behavior that those with the least power flex it most, and Richie wields his with gusto. A pro football team is an organization about the size of a typical Wal-Mart. A head coach can tyrannize a roster of about fifty players, about two dozen assistant coaches, trainers, film technicians, equipment managers, and office help, but that’s it. Although his true sphere of influence is actually quite small, public adoration, press clippings, and weekly performances before millions can make an NFL head coach seem (in his own mind, anyway) like a major public figure, a great man. Hence this tendency Richie has of giving orders to people not on the payroll.
He’s actually a nice guy, an aggressively nice guy, if he likes you. He’s honest and loyal to a fault. And even though his mind is racing a mile a minute about football, twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year, Richie remembers his friends and keeps his promises. He’s adamant about that. His preferred method of social interaction is the telephone. He carries a folding cellular one in his pocket at all times, even on the practice field: it’s his lone, static-filled link to the larger world beyond the tarp-draped fence. It wasn’t always like this. As an assistant coach, Richie had more time for people. His internal rhythm was about ten beats slower.
But right from the first hours of his elevation, Richie began to change. The pressures of the job inflated some traits and deflated others. The cigar, which he used to light up by himself back in his office, was suddenly with him always, a prop. Richie immediately struck a deal with a Cadillac outlet, and the coach’s parking space just outside the front entrance at the Vet, which had long sported Buddy’s four-wheel-drive Bronco Rancher, now displayed a gleaming luxury cruiser. Always a busy, solitary man, Richie grew paranoid and brusque. Buddy, whom he had served loyally for a year, became the author of everything wrong with the Eagles. In conversation, Richie was suddenly opinionated to the extreme, announcing his take on things in that preemptive way the insecure have of assuming agreement. “We think alike, right?” he’d say, then press on without pausing for response—interested now in audience, not dialogue.
This, anyway, was the Richie most people saw. He remained the relentlessly upbeat character who had this jocular way of calling grown men “kid,” who would never cut a player from his roster without sitting down with him to commiserate—”You’re looking at a guy who was cut four times! Four times!” He took time to phone patients facing brain surgery (as he had thirteen years before) to offer advice and his own robust style of encouragement: “You let the doctors handle their part, but you have a job to do, too … you have to fight it, get on with your life … survive!” Away from the pressures of his job, Richie was as decent and nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet. Only now, as a certified High Priest of the Pigskin, Richie was nearly impossible to get out from under. Not that he complained. No way. Richie was doing exactly what he’d always wanted—at least since he stopped playing football himself. Most people didn’t know or didn’t remember that Richie had been a player, a tight end and special teams demon for the Giants and Steelers. His old aggressiveness and athleticism were obscured now by the bald head, the glasses, the rounder contours of middle age. The former boxer and tight end now looked almost bookish, especially on his TV show, where he sat on a stool looking roundshouldered and uncomfortable, glasses reflecting the stage lights, head defensively scrunched into his shoulders. Around reporters, Richie (not without reason) looked like he expected at any moment to get bonked on the head from behind. The Pack, annoyed at being locked out of practices, promptly dubbed him “Coach Uptight,” and the name stuck.
Once he was anointed, the take-charge tough-guy side of his character was unchained. The full-throated bullhorn of a voice he once reserved for the practice field (the players had nicknamed him “Horn”) became more and more his natural tone of voice. The Brooklyn accent had always been there, but now emerged the full-blown Brooklyn Slouch, a way of carrying himself with his shoulders hunched and his head cocked, exaggerated hand gestures to accompany the guttural streetwise palaver—the whole urban tough-guy shtick. Richie’s standard posture at a press conference was combative. By the set of his shoulders, the belligerent look on his face, his thrusting hand gestures, he came across like an unrepentant school bully— Yeah, that’s what I did, so what? Now, when he called you “kid,” it sometimes came off in an impatient, patronizing way that not everybody appreciated. When he punctuated his sentences with a rhetorical “Okay?” or “All right?” or “Am I right?” as he always had, the effect was now sometimes like a quick left jab to the nose, keeping you off balance, setting you up. He would be charming one day, growly the next. At his best, he would stop and chat with strangers, kid around with the Pack, or telephone an old friend out of the blue just to say hello. At his worst, he had begun to transmogrify into a self-important bore, a man who now moved so fast there wasn’t time for him to really talk to anybody, who formed snap judgments about others (whom he tended to see as either wholly friends or wholly enemies), who could be darkly critical of people behind their backs, who bullied those who worked for him (and even some who didn’t, like blowing up at the crew that produced his weekly TV show), profanely chewing out reporters who dared criticize or lampoon him—and all the while promising everybody, unsolicited, with loud authority, “Richie Kotite’s not going to change!” and “I’m still gonna be the same old Richie!” Only nobody could remember his thinking that “being Richie” had ever been such a big deal before.
LIZ CORKUM WAS always impressed by how hard the guy worked to just be Richie. She was a teenage sophomore at Wagner College on Staten Island when she met him. Growing up as a happily sheltered only child, a good Catholic girl, a cheerleader and Catholic Youth Organization trooper, Liz discovered in Richie a remnant of the college life she thought she’d find when she started school in ’70. Instead of proms and mixers and pep rallies, she found herself surrounded by hippies and radical feminists. She didn’t like it.
She met Richie at a campus bar. He was a tall, dark, muscular graduate student who drove a nice car, wore his hair short and neat, and dressed nicely—and he played for the New York Giants! Liz liked the fact that he was about ten years older than she was, because she felt about ten years older than her contemporaries. His personality, politics, and values had survived the sixties unscathed—my God, it was as if the guy had been in a time capsule for a decade!
Some of this was not so good. Along with Richie’s gracious, oldfashioned manners, he was as unambiguously male as a silverback gorilla. When he was driving, for instance, nobody was allowed to pass him on the road. It was as if his car were his team, and the other cars were all the other teams, and anybody who butted in front or sped past in the outside lane tapped a savage competitive reflex. Another thing: Richie was a friendly guy, but he was almost pathologically brusque. He was always preoccupied and in a hurry. Conversations with Richie of more than ten or fifteen seconds were rare and difficult. Once you got past the pleasantries—he was good at those—he was ready to move on. Richie was like a fast-moving rig on a long interstate run. If you were interested in him, he wasn’t about to slow down; you had to find a way to grab on as he motored past.
Liz grabbed on. There would be time to work on all these things, and besides, Liz admired Richie’s determination to be his own man. It was tough being a silverback in the Age of Aquarius.
Within a month of meeting her, Richie mentioned marriage.
“I’ve never really given it a lot of thought before, but since I met you, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said.
Liz’s first thought was sarcastic—Does he plan to ask me what I think about it?—but she liked the idea. She would make him wait until she earned her degree, and she was enough influenced by the bra burners that she had no intention of becoming a full-time housewife for some superjock, but Liz had no objections to being swept off her feet.
Richie loved to tell people he was from Brooklyn, and he had the whole Slouch down, the loose but burly sidewalk strut and familiar hey-yo-I’m-talkin’-to-you growl of the tough city kid. But Richie’s Brooklyn wasn’t the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of yore; he grew up in fashionable Bay Ridge, a park-rimmed shoulder of carefully landscaped suburbia fronting on the Narrows north of Fort Hamilton, spreading out like a slice of the American dream to the northeast as you pass over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Richie’s view of Brooklyn streets was from the window of the bus that took him to private school. His father, Eddie, son of a Lebanese immigrant, had carved a lucrative niche for himself in the booming world of advertising in postwar New York. He and his wife, Alice, whose parents had immigrated from Syria, were well off enough to buy a winter home in Miami and to enable Eddie, an avid sportsman, to own a few racehorses and even sponsor some heavyweight fighters.
Richie was born in ’42, his sister, Barbara, a few years later, and they formed a close-knit family. Long after they had outgrown it, Eddie still called them by the pet names he had given them as babies. To him, Richie was still “Mummy,” even when he had grown to a strapping six-three and weighed well over two hundred pounds. Once, when he took his brother-in-law out to watch Richie’s football practice at Wagner, the boy’s uncle complained when Eddie kept using the pet name.
“Why do you keep calling him that; you’re embarrassing him.”
“Look, Uncle Charlie,” said Richie, looking down on both men. “I like him to call me Mummy, okay?”
The father insisted that Richie call him Eddie, not Dad. He wanted to be his son’s best friend. Richie had been a shy, overweight boy until Allie Ridgeway, a trainer Eddie had hired to work with some of his fighters, began teaching his boss’s son to box.
As his body grew tall and firm, and his boxing skills improved, Richie’s confidence swelled. The discipline he learned in the gym, along with his growing stature and bulk, turned chubby, unhappy Dick Kotite into a prep-school sports star. He was a good athlete, not a great one. He excelled because he worked at it. Winning meant more to Richie than anyone else. To his old schoolmates, the enduring memory of him is that of a lean, tawny kid with a smile on his face and a ball in his hands. Years before it became fashionable, Richie would run with weights around his ankles to improve his speed, and on Friday nights, when his friends went on dates or to dances, Richie would ride the subway up to his father’s office on Madison Avenue, and Eddie would take him to more boxing lessons, first with trainers at the New York Athletic Club, then to the famous Stillman’s Gym.
Wagner offered Richie a football scholarship, but he had his sights set higher. He enrolled as a freshman at the University of Miami. He planned to try out as a walk-on for the school’s Division I football team that summer.
To stay in shape (and maybe catch a coach’s eye), Richie entered a campus invitational boxing tournament and fought the first formal matches of his life. He had been sparring for years without actually having a fight, and he surprised even himself by knocking out four opponents straight to win the title Heavyweight Champion of the university. Eddie, who attended every bout, was thrilled, but he knew enough about fighting to know that his Mummy would never be more than an amateur. Richie, then nineteen, got a chance that summer to spar with real heavyweights, even with young Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammad Ali). Richie would later recall that Clay “hit me about five times before I had a chance to react.”
When he failed to make Miami’s football team, Richie reconsidered the scholarship back up on Staten Island. He transferred to Wagner in time to play football in ’62, and over the next three years became a standout tight end, winning Little All-American honors and attracting pro scouts—which didn’t happen often at the small private school. In ’65, Richie was drafted by both the AFL Jets (during that league’s red shirt draft for longshot players to round out their practice squads) and the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings (eighteenth round).
The Jets, who had just signed Joe Namath to a then-amazing $427,000 contract, offered Richie $15,000. Eddie was escorted by head coach Weeb Ewbank upstairs to see the big boss, Sonny Werblin, who felt Richie from little Wagner College down the way ought to be sufficiently in awe of so generous an offer to sign that day. Eddie said they had promised Jim Finks, the Vikings’ general manager, that they would at least meet with him in Minnesota before Richie signed with the Jets. Werblin was theatrically aghast. He told Eddie he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The kid was going to turn down $15,000?
“I don’t know what Richie is worth,” Eddie argued, “but a promise is a promise.”
Eddie didn’t like the way Werblin was talking to him. Who did this guy think he was? Did he take him for some kind of rube? Eddie was a successful businessman and sportsman in New York City, a promoter, a dealer—he was somebody—he sure as hell wasn’t going to let his son get buffaloed by some two-bit upstart football league. It was insulting. He and Sonny exchanged some hot words and Eddie split.
Father and son flew out to Minneapolis together. Eddie liked Jim Finks right away. Even though the Vikings only offered $10,000, they took the deal. Now all Richie had to do was make the team. Eddie stayed at a motel near training camp, and he would come out to the practice field every day to watch. He would chat up anybody on the fringes of the facility who would talk, scrounging for clues about how the coaches felt about his son. He got all excited one day when the caterer told him he had overheard Norm Van Brocklin and the other coaches saying nice things about his Mummy.
But Richie blew out his Achilles tendon, and he was history. In those days, a club could just drop a player if he got hurt, which happened a lot. Back at the motel room, nursing his sore tendon, Richie was inconsolable.
“What did I do wrong, Eddie?” he kept saying. “What did I do wrong?”
But he wouldn’t give up. As a low-round draft pick who didn’t make it, the best Richie could hope for was to become what about half of all pro football players are, a grunt, a hardworking, low-profile battler who enters every summer training camp easily expendable and hangs on by working twice or three times as hard as everybody else, mastering the unglamorous parts of the game and impressing coaches with his attitude and intelligence. If he made it, he could expect to earn just a moderate middle-class wage from week to week (the average salary of an NFL player in ’70, after the first collective-bargaining agreement, was $23,200; which means the grunts were making well below $20,000). Richie wasn’t above playing any angle. One day, when former Giants defensive back Emlen Tunnell, then an assistant coach, heaped praise on Richie’s expensive suede jacket, the kid took it off and handed it to him without hesitation.
Richie got cut four times, and every time he got mad, not at the coaches or the team that cut him, but at himself. He would tell Eddie, “I’m going to learn from this. I’m going to make it next year.” It was no coincidence that many future coaches came from the ranks of the grunts. They were the guys working hardest, the ones playing for neither money nor fame, but for love. They were the ones who woke up one morning at age thirty to find that their life had become the Game.
Richie’s playing career lasted seven years, most of it sitting on the bench and hustling downfield on kickoffs and punts with special teams. He got a chance to play some tight end regularly in ’71, when Giants starter Bobby Tucker was injured. He caught ten passes for 146 yards and scored two touchdowns, but as soon as Tucker was well, Richie was back on the bench. He felt disappointed and frustrated. “I know I can start in this league!” he would complain to Eddie and Liz, but he wouldn’t get another chance. He hung through the ’72 season with a dislocated shoulder, determined to complete the five years needed to qualify for an NFL pension. He was thirty years old when that season ended, and he had long since known football was going to be his life. His master’s thesis at Wagner concerned the impact of TV on development of the NFL. He and Liz were married the following summer, after she graduated from Wagner with her English degree.
Both she and Richie expected he would be trying out for the Giants again that summer, when Joe Morrison, the Giants’ running back/wide receiver, was offered the head coaching job at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and invited Richie to be his assistant. So when the Kotites got back from their honeymoon, Richie went to see Wellington Mara, the Giants’ owner, and retired as a player. Liz found a job as publications editor in the university’s PR office, and the two diehard New Yorkers headed south.
They didn’t like it. Some of the women Liz worked with were openly suspicious of Richie’s dark complexion.
“What is Richie?” one asked, after Richie had stopped in Liz’s office soon after they moved down.
“What do you mean?” Liz asked.
“What is he? What’s his race?”
“Well, he’s Arab.”
“Is that like being a mulatto?” the woman asked.
It made Liz feel uncomfortable.
For Richie, the problem was working with kids. It was hard to make them take football seriously. He was dealing with hotshot highschool all-stars who had better things to do than listen to some coach tell them they had to work hard at something that had always come so blessedly natural. And Richie wasn’t the kind to nurture a relationship or spend a lot of time getting to know anybody. He had been to the mountaintop; he was a pro! And now he was supposed to teach and motivate these children?
What he hated most was recruiting, and it was a big part of the job. In the off-season he’d spend months traveling the rural backroads to meet with high-school wonders Tennessee was trying to recruit. Richie’s way was to walk in, lay the deal out in about thirty seconds, and conclude, “You want to come or not?” Any hesitancy or posturing was enough to send Richie right back out the door— Who needs this? Of course, this technique wasn’t going to be terribly effective with the most-sought-after kids, who had piles of recruiting letters and obsequious college suitors waiting in line. Richie was appalled to learn he was expected to woo these teenagers. Imagine it. You sit down in a tiny living room with, like, four dozen trophies and plaques and game balls on the shelves and on the walls alongside the framed portraits of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., and JFK, and the parents are crowded around the eighteen-year-old kid on the plastic-covered sofa with his shoe box full of recruiting letters, all of them hanging on every word … and waiting, waiting for just one thing, for you to pucker up and kiss his tight little high-school all-American ass. Richie couldn’t bring himself to do it. He could barely understand most of these people, with their slow, down-home, cornbread drawl, and they sho-nuff had trouble with his Brooklynese.
He stuck it out for four years before resigning and volunteering as an unpaid assistant with the Saints under Hank Stram. One year later, when Stram was fired after New Orleans went 3—11 in ’77, Richie followed fellow Brooklynite Sam Rutigliano (who had been Stram’s receivers coach) north to Cleveland. Rutigliano had just been named the Browns’ head coach, and he hired Richie to coach his receivers.
Liz hadn’t followed Richie to New Orleans. She was pregnant when he left, and she wanted to be with her mother in New York to have the baby, a daughter, whom they named Alexandra. She rejoined Richie in Cleveland after almost a year of living apart.
It hardly mattered. By now, Richie was a full-fledged football monk. He lived at the training facility seven days a week, putting in thirteen-, fourteen-hour days. He handed Liz his paycheck every week, and all he asked for back was a little golf money (he’d sneak out sometimes at four in the morning to play by himself at sunrise and be back at the training center in time for an 8:00 a.m. start). Liz and her mom, Stella, had become inseparable. They lived back on Staten Island half of the year and spent the other half in a suburban house near the Browns’ training complex. The house had a room for Stella. All the normal chores and burdens of family life—the mortgage, raising the kid, shopping, banking, the church, friends, the neighborhood, the schools—fell to Liz. Richie’s part of the deal was … well, just to be Richie. His life was football, football, football. When he started complaining on the phone to Liz in the summer of ’81 about his vision, she assumed it was from watching so much game film.
Richie first started noticing it when he went jogging. He ran with some of the other coaches every afternoon, and on one jog he could no longer see the guys beside him—it felt as though he were wearing blinders.
Playing on special teams with the Giants twelve years earlier, Richie had gone to the hospital with a mild concussion. The skull X ray had turned up a peculiarity, what the doctors dismissed (without any other symptoms) as an abnormal thickening of his skull near the pituitary gland. This, of course, prompted lots of jokes about Richie being especially thickheaded, but when this vision thing started the old joke started haunting him. The thick-skull notion was just a theory. Another possibility was a tumor.
When he was driving back to the Browns’ training camp after Cleveland played its exhibition opener that summer, Richie’s vision blurred. He stopped by Sam Rutigliano’s room in the dorm that night and mentioned it.
“You probably just need new glasses,” Sam said. But to be sure, he advised Richie to make an appointment with the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, the leading medical center in the area.
He went for tests on Wednesday morning. That afternoon, before Sam went out for practice, he got a call from Richie, from a phone booth.
“They found a mass, a tumor,” he told Rutigliano, just as matter-of-factly as a man calling his boss to say he’d gotten a flat tire on the way in. “They’re gonna take it out.”
Richie checked into the hospital that day. Sophisticated CAT scans revealed the “thickening” to be a tumor, grown now to about the size of a walnut, close to his pituitary gland. The doctors said Richie had probably been born with it, and that it was almost certainly benign—although the only way to be sure was to take it out and check. Left alone, it would continue to grow, and it would press harder and harder against Richie’s optic nerve (as it had begun to do) until he eventually lost his sight. The operation was risky. It involved a delicate procedure that had a long list of potentially disastrous, even fatal, consequences and would mean cutting into his brain by going up through his nose. “Hey,” said Richie, “at least you’ll have plenty of room to maneuver!”
He was unbelievably upbeat about the whole thing—although he was scared to death. Sam and his wife visited Richie at the clinic that night. Liz and Stella and the baby were still in Staten Island. The Rutiglianos sat by Richie’s bedside and prayed, and Richie kept on his stubbornly positive face.
“Don’t worry, Sam, I’m gonna be back, all right? I’m gonna be back.”
Liz flew in for the surgery. She thought the worst thing was having to listen while the doctors ticked off the dire probabilities—this much chance of blindness, this much chance of disfigurement, this much chance of paralysis, this much chance of death. Richie sat through the recitation unmoved. Football coaches were experts in a business that got no respect; every fan felt free to second-guess a football coach, and many felt sure they could do the job better, which, of course, they couldn’t. So expertise was one thing coaches learned to respect in others. Richie figured, if these guys were as good at their job as he was at his—hey, no sweat! Right? What more could you ask? Let’s kick off!
Liz was a wreck. Sam and his wife kept stopping by to sit at Richie’s bedside and pray with them, which was sweet and thoughtful, but a little portentous, too.
The operation took nine hours. The tumor, as the doctors had predicted, was benign.
Thirteen days later, wearing a Cleveland Indians batting helmet, Richie was back on the practice field. He was out there for the Monday night season opener, a 44-14 pounding by the Chargers. It was like nothing had ever happened. Boy, was Richie proud of that. In later years, he’d save that story for the in-depth profile interviews, the ones in which the reporter tries to get at what really makes Richie Kotite tick. Sure, a guy proves he has stones when he makes a pro football team and bangs heads with the big boys, but staring down a brain tumor, going to sleep for nine hours on the operating table with at least a decent chance of never waking up again, that shows stones of a different order. And you don’t spend twenty years around football fields without knowing what it takes to forge your own legend. The Indians’ batting helmet was Richie’s badge of honor. Back less than two weeks after facing down the Big C. What a man!
Actually, after thirteen days of no game film, no practice, no hanging out with the guys eating pizza and poring over game plans until all hours, thirteen days of sitting home through endless quiet summer days, looking for something on the TV, reading and rereading the sports page, hanging out with Liz, Stella, and the baby, my God, Richie was about to go nuts!
The worst thing was, at least for the first few weeks, Richie wasn’t allowed to drive. So Liz had to take him everywhere. In the passenger seat, he was impossible. It was like Liz had never driven before. She was coached every step of the way.
When a car passed her on the expressway, Richie would growl, “He just made you look like a jerk.”
“Like I care!” Liz would say.
As Richie rebounded to a full recovery, the Browns started to slide. Rutigliano would last for another season and a half in Cleveland, but the Browns were clearly headed into a down cycle when Richie got an opportunity to move back home. Joe Walton, who had helped coach Richie when he played for the Giants, had just been named head coach of the Jets. The first person he offered a job was his former backup tight end.
For Liz it was a homecoming. They bought a little Cape Cod with a swimming pool out back that adjoined the backyard of her parents’ house, the house where she had grown up. Richie would spend the next seven seasons with the Jets, while Liz sent Alexandra to the same schools she had attended. The Kotites felt settled. Liz lived in the lap of her family while Richie toiled in the temple. He was named offensive coordinator in ’85, although Walton continued to supervise game planning and call the plays on Sundays.
Which was fine with Richie. He was a Corporate Coach through and through. The new High Priests were highly paid executives in the sports-entertainment business, an international industry with an image to maintain. Like corporate men everywhere, they knew the value of networking, of getting along with others, of handling the press and public with professional charm, and (most important) of showing mutual respect within the walls of the temple. They even respected the guys up in the booth tinkling the ice in their gin, or, if they didn’t, they learned how to pretend real good, because it was easy enough to get axed for losing without thumbing your nose at the guy in the black hood.
Richie’s pro football journey had begun with refusing a fifteen-thousand-dollar offer from Sonny Werblin. Now he was just one step away from the high holy headset in the Jets’ organization. He’d gotten there not just by knowing the Game and building a reputation for success, but by cultivating goodwill with everyone he met within the temple (Buddy would call it kissing ass). You never knew, from year to year, which coaching legend would be out on the street, and which eager novitiate you met on the sidelines of the Senior Bowl would be the next to be anointed, wearing the headset, assembling his very own staff.
It was these things, even more than any coaching success, that led to Richie Kotite’s ascension.
GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Richie’s sudden elevation in Philadelphia, there was bound to be talk. Sports fans love intrigue as much as the next person, and for those under the impression that Buddy was really running the club, his firing and Richie’s hiring in the space of about seven hours was a palace coup. And the first thing to understand about a palace coup is that the official story, of course, ain’t it.
Rumors flew. The “real” story began to emerge in the days immediately after. Richie, see, had been in on this all along, plotting with Harry and Norman. Randall had been in on it, too. Randall was key. Randall provided the only real scrap of evidence. Ever since Norman had voluntarily renegotiated the quarterback’s contract in ’88, extending it five years and paying the quarterback millions, the owner had wedded his club’s ambitions to Randall’s remarkable (if erratic) talents. To the conspiratorialists, of course, the plum contract had made Randall a rival prince, a player with too much power to suit Buddy. Buddy liked his players subservient and grateful, not rich, opinionated, and tenured. But all this would have stayed idle speculation if Randall hadn’t been saying some pretty odd things in the days before Buddy’s firing. After Buddy benched him for three plays in the Redskins play-off game, Randall told the Pack he had felt insulted and confused. Then the next day, cleaning out his locker, he had gone off on one of his unrehearsed riffs into some hound’s microcassette tape recorder: “We just hope Richie’s here next year, because I’m sure he’s going to get some offers as a head coach on other teams, too. He’s got a lot of experience, and changing offenses again would be tough on this team. Of course, I want to see Buddy come back. Buddy’s a good coach. I mean, Kotite’s a great coach.”
Buddy good … Richie great?
Granted, Randall was always saying pretty odd things, but, to those inclined to suspicion, there was something ominous here, it was as if he knew. And then there was the report—from somewhere, something somebody inaposition to know told somebody else, which was good enough for somebody inaposition to broadcast as the Real Truth to many thousands of listeners—that led one to believe that Norman, Harry, Richie, and Randall had been seen suspiciously lunching or dinnering together (accounts varied) in New York City, that Gomorrah, two days before the coup. A plot! After he got fired, Buddy performed the last of his weekly radio programs at a bar crowded with raucous supporters, and while Buddy wasn’t inaposition to know and wasn’t exactly gonna confirm anything … well, hell, it stands to reason when a guy like him gets canned after winning all them football games and going to the play-offs three times in three seasons, it don’t take no Phi Beta Kappa to figure out somethin’ kinda fishy’s been goin’ on! If Buddy believed there was a conspiracy, that was good enough for most folks, and … ponder the implications here. Hadn’t that Keith Jackson warned everybody about this? The Eagles had just fallen flat on their face in that Wild Card play-off game against the Redskins. The defense, of course (Buddy’s Boys), had been superb, but the offense, particularly Randall, hadn’t done squat (two field goals were it). Kotite, offensive coordinator; Randall, quarterback. Hadn’t Buddy gotten so fed up with Randall’s lackluster showing that he yanked him in the third quarter, put in his own boy McMahon? How long had they been plotting against him? You had to admire it, the neatness of the coup, complete with conspiracy, cunning, and betrayal. There was even Buddy’s shocked pirouette at the moment of the kill—”I’ve never been fired for winning before.”
Only one thing wrong with this version. None of it was true.
What was true was that Richie owed his job with the Eagles not to Buddy, but to Harry Gamble.
They had met back in ’77, when Harry was still coaching at the University of Pennsylvania. After messing around with the wishbone offense with only moderate success for a few years, Harry was looking for a way to jazz up his passing game. With Archie Manning at quarterback in the late seventies, the Saints had one of the NFL’s better passing games, so Harry made a trip to New Orleans that off-season for a few weeks of tutoring from receivers coach Sam Rutigliano and his young unpaid assistant, a helluva good guy named Richie Kotite.
Back in Philadelphia in the summer before the ’78 season, Harry got a surprise phone call.
“Howyadoin’, Harry?” came a gust of loud, upbeat Brooklynese. “It’s me, Richie. Richie Kotite. How’s the new system coming?”
Harry was pleasantly surprised. He told Richie that they had been working hard on the new passing game, but that he still had some questions.
As Harry’s mind started trying to frame the questions while he had his buddy from the pros on the phone, Richie volunteered, “Great! Would you like me to come down?”
“Oh, no, Richie, I couldn’t ask that.”
“Don’t be silly; we’re friends, right? I’m up here on vacation in Staten Island, you’re only … what? An hour and a half away?”
And Richie drove down—helluva guy!
Harry never forgot it. As his own career took its startling trajectory over the next thirteen years, he watched from a distance as Richie moved to Cleveland and then New York. When Norman demanded a change in his offense after the ’89 season (against Buddy’s wishes), Harry told his head coach, “Do you know who would be a helluva guy who could come in here and be offensive coordinator for us?”
Of course, Buddy knew who Richie Kotite was. Within the fraternity, everybody knows everybody else. But Richie had never coached with Buddy before, and if there’s one thing about coaches, they prefer to look out for the guys they’ve coached with before.
“I don’t know anything about the guy,” Buddy said.
“Well, I think he’s got a helluva feel for the game,” said Harry.
“Let me look into it,” Buddy said.
Days later, when Richie was hired, Harry read a quote from Buddy in the Inquirer that said former offensive coordinator Ted Plumb had recommended Kotite. Buddy also said Richie had been given a rave notice by Joe Namath. There was no mention of Harry. Harry just shrugged off the slight—wouldn’t look right for Buddy to admit that the Ivy League guy upstairs had had a good idea.
Richie had lost his job in New York as part of a clean sweep when Walton got canned after winning only four games in ’89. It came as a blow to the Kotites, who were now deeply rooted on Staten Island. Richie had been lucky. He knew coaches in the NFL who had picked up and moved more than twenty times over the years, and here he had been able to work for seven seasons in the pros just a short drive from the neighborhood where he grew up. His daughter, now thirteen, was looking forward to following her friends to nearby Notre Dame Academy. Still, Richie knew what he had to do. True monks go wherever they must go. He got a call from Joe Bugel, offensive coordinator for the Redskins, who was considering head coaching openings in Atlanta and Phoenix, so he and Liz were waiting to hear about that when Buddy’s secretary called and invited him down to Philadelphia.
The Eagles signed Richie to a one-year contract, so after what had just happened with the Jets, they didn’t even consider moving. Richie would stay at the Hilton Hotel in Mt. Laurel and come home for dinner after practice on Fridays—not for the whole night, mind you; Richie drove back to the hotel that night. Liz and Stella would come down for the home games on Sunday, and they would all go out to dinner afterward. Otherwise, Richie lived in the basement of the Vet, trying to develop rapport with Ran-doll, studying films, working up game plans, supervising offensive practices, and going home alone every night to the Hilton.
Richie had considerable freedom to run the Eagles’ offense. He was mostly left to develop game plans and pace his half of the squad in practice, but Buddy was often a pain in the ass during games. All the coaches were connected by intercom and carried on a running dialogue throughout the action. The ones in the booths up on the mezzanine relayed intelligence and suggestions down to the sidelines, asking questions, kicking around ideas. Buddy listened in on all this and usually didn’t have much to say unless there was a decision to be made. Buddy was good at making decisions. He made ‘em fast and he made ‘em often. He didn’t like to discuss ‘em, before or after; he just made ‘em. “Actions speak louder than words” was one of his favorite truisms. He wasn’t terribly sensitive about the artful twists and careful logic of Richie’s game plans either. He’d just weigh in when he wanted something done. It was annoying as hell.
“Run the damn ball,” he’d say, leaving the details to Richie.
Then “Run the damn ball again.”
Or when he did let Richie call a play, “What the fuck are you running that play for?”
Buddy sometimes would forget to inform Richie when he had made a decision. Richie would look up from his neatly color-coded, laminated play list to see running back Thomas Sanders brushing past to head out on the field.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
“Coach Ryan told me to go in,” Sanders would say.
Richie scowled. “Then get your ass in there.”
That would have happened because Sanders, a former Bear, was a guy Buddy had brought in. Richie had little success developing players he brought in. One big project in ’90 was Roger Vick, a running back Richie had fallen in love with and convinced the Jets to take with their number-one pick in the ’87 draft. Vick had never proved to be anything other than a lackluster running back, but Richie hadn’t given up on him. When New York waived Vick in ’90, Richie convinced the Eagles to sign him—even though Buddy felt he already had a surplus of backs. Vick would carry the ball just sixteen times that season, mostly because Buddy didn’t share Richie’s enthusiasm for the kid.
“What’s forty-three doing in there?” he’d ask, if he noticed Richie had slipped Vick in. “Twenty-five [Anthony Toney] and twenty-three [Heath Sherman] know this offense better than he does, git one a’ them [Buddy’s draft picks] in there.”
Richie would reluctantly wave Vick off the field. Vick was waived right off the team before long.
Despite these game-day squabbles over personnel and plays, Richie knew he had a mandate that transcended Buddy’s fiats. The club was paying him $99,000 that year to whip Buddy’s talented but undisciplined offense, led by their talented but undisciplined three-million-dollar-plus (per annum) quarterback, into a more consistent scoring machine. After the ’89 season, even Buddy had to admit that his approach to offense—just give Randall the ball, a couple of receivers, and a decent running back, and turn them loose—wasn’t going to cut it. Buddy’s Boys on defense were damn frustrated by the other half of the locker room. Randall always produced a play or two, either all by himself or with one of the Keiths (Jackson or Byars) that would be on the weekly highlights show, enough to bolster the quarterback’s fame and fortune, but come crunch time for the team, the offense would stall. Deep in his own territory, with the whole field in front of him, Randall was virtually unstoppable. But as they drove into enemy territory, and the room to maneuver shrank, it was harder and harder for Randall to produce. He was completing only about half of the passes he threw, and without his improvised scrambles (which got harder to do when the team moved within scoring range) the Eagles had no running game to speak of—subtract the team-leading 621 yards Randall had gained in ’89 and the Eagles were at the bottom of the NFL in rushing. That didn’t diminish Randall’s accomplishment, of course. He was the best running quarterback the game had ever seen. But it meant that when the team was in a tight spot, at third down and short yardage, or trying to batter its way into the end zone, other teams had only to key on Randall to stop the play.
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 about 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.
Through the ’91 season, after Randall went down, the defense couldn’t really fault Richie too much for the team’s struggles— although the head coach was hardly blameless in the string of quarterbacking disasters on his side of the ball.
But by the beginning of the ’92 season, Buddy’s Boys are getting restless. They still see Richie as Norman’s boy, and he still sees them as a foreign camp in his own locker room. When he talks about the offense it’s “us” or “we,” but when he talks about the defense it’s always “those guys” or “them.”
“They” are the best defense the league has seen in more than a dozen years. And it is pretty clear to everybody that Richie needs them more than they need him.