Do You Love Football?! (2 page)

It's hard to believe that such a range of emotions can be separated by such a relatively short amount of time. But, you know, it's also hard to believe a lot of the things that happened to me in the course of the year and in the course of my career.

One minute someone's calling you in the middle of the night telling you that you've been traded-yes, traded-from Oakland to Tampa Bay. The next minute you're trying to sell yourself and your ideas to players and coaches whose love and loyalties still belong to the man you're replacing. The next minute you're in the Super Bowl . . . staring across the field at guys you coached and coached with for four years.

As exciting as it was to be up on that platform, I will never forget the feeling of being on the sideline before kickoff. Right behind me were Paul Warfield, Larry Csonka, Don Shula, Bob Griese, Nick Buoniconti, Larry Little, and Jim Langer. These Hall-of-Famers from the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in NFL history, were there to participate in the pregame coin toss. These are men who became immortal when they beat the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII and finished that season 17-0. And when they saw me, they said, "Hey,

Coach Gruden, good luck to you." All I could think was Holy Toledo! They know who I am. A little ham-and-egger from the University of Dayton is talking to Don Shula and Paul Warfield and Larry Csonka.

Right there it began to hit me how far I had come on this wild and wildly fast journey. At thirty-nine I knew I still had plenty of miles to go. I knew that there was still a whole lot more for me to learn and accomplish. To that point, though, I realized how much I had benefited from being around brilliant front-office people and some exceptional coaches. I've always considered the experience the football version of an Ivy League education, like graduating from Harvard, only with pigskin instead of sheepskin. And no one could have had a better live-in professor than my own dad, Jim Gruden, who has helped and encouraged me every step of the way.

As the Dolphin Hall-of-Famers walked out for the coin toss I got on the headset to my younger brother, Jay, who worked as an offensive assistant on our coaching staff during the season, and said, "You should see Larry Csonka, man. I'll bet he was a bitch to tackle." Jay laughed. Pretty goofy stuff to be talking about only minutes before the biggest game of our lives, don't you think? But that's what football is all about-plugging into the energy and excitement of the moment, reflecting on the memorable games and plays of the past, pondering the many challenges ahead. There really is nothing like it.

You can always find something to complain about in life. I've never liked being around a guy who has a litany of excuses, a guy who bitches all the time. In other words, the kind of guy I was on the way to becoming earlier in my career. It took my dad to set me straight. We always talk by phone four or five times a week. After getting off to a 1-3 start in my first year as offensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles, I was bitching to my dad about everything.

"Man, we're just terrible," I said. "We can't do anything right. We're going to get our asses kicked."

I was looking for a little sympathy, maybe a little understanding from someone who would know exactly where I was coming from and, as a bonus, might just hate to hear one of his boys sounding so unhappy. Did I ever have the wrong person for that.

"Hey, if you don't like it, why don't you leave?" my dad said. "If you don't like it, then get the hell out of town. Do something else, because this is coaching football.

"You've got a great opportunity, son. You're the offensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles. Do it! Coordinate the offense!"

I got off the phone and realized that he was absolutely right. You can go through this business complaining about everything.

Even though we wound up winning the Super Bowl, there were a lot of reasons for me to bitch and make excuses during last season: Oh, man, I have to put together a new coaching staff because all the assistants I had in Oakland were under contract.

Damn, we've lost Marcus Jones, one of our defensive ends, for the whole year with a knee injury. Geez, we haven't had Anthony McFarland, one of our starting defensive tackles, for almost half of the regular season because of his broken forearm and broken foot, and now we won't have him for the playoffs.

Golly, Brad Johnson, our starting quarterback, is going to miss the last two games of the season with an injured back.

I don't want to be like that. I don't want anybody around me to be like that. We're here for a very short time, and we're in the NFL. Are you kidding me? What an ideal setting to have some fun. If you don't have fun coaching or playing in the NFL, where are you going to have fun in America? You travel on a beautiful jet airplane. You stay in a Ritz-Carlton. You eat the nicest food you could ever think of eating. You have a police escort to the stadium. You have brand-new footballs. You have socks that fit and stay up perfectly. You have a stadium packed with fans.

It's exciting as hell.

Now, it's not easy. There are all kinds of challenges to face, all kinds of reasons to whine. But nobody wants to be around a whiner. Nobody wants to hear your excuses. Does that mean I'm always fun to be around? Get real. To be honest, there are a lot of times when I can be a miserable sonofabitch. I've been accused of being a guy who sometimes has to be miserable to be happy. I don't know why that is. What I do know is that I don't ever want to get the feeling that everything's perfect, everything's rosy because that's when you lose your edge. If you let that happen to you, you're dead.

Peek into my brain and you'll see what I mean. On any given day, I'll be thinking things like:

You won a big game, so what? We've got to play these guys now. They're bigger and stronger than the team we saw last week.

How come our third-round draft pick from last year is not performing up to the standards that we expected him to?

Hey, what's the deal with this weight machine? How come the Denver Broncos have a bigger one than ours?

Oh, you won the Super Bowl. That's great. But we haven't won a game this year, have we? What are we going to do this year?

I'm still in search of what I call the Master Game Plan, the head coach/offensive coordinator's Holy Grail. That's the one where your opening possession's a nine-play, eighty-yard touchdown drive. You never punt. You never turn the ball over. You never commit a penalty. You score touchdowns on every series.

You score seventy, eighty points in a game. That's what we're after. It can be done. It will be done in the NFL. If I can't aim high, aim for the absolute best, aim for what some people might think is impossible, well, if I can't do that, what's the use?

I also know this: Through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, you're always going to be ahead of the game if you love what you do for a living. It's like Kathy Gruden taught her three sons while we were growing up: "The most important thing is to find your passion and go after it."

For me and for Jay, it's football. Hell, Jay's thirty-six years old and he's still playing quarterback for the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League. For my older brother, Jim, it's an entirely different calling; he's a successful radiologist. You can bet that Jim is every bit as passionate about that as his two brothers and our father are about football, and as our mother was throughout her teaching career.

You only live once, so you might as well find something that you love to do and do it. Get after it. Max out.

TWO
Doing It the Knight Way
"We are not going to tolerate error!" -COACH BOBBY KNIGHT-

MY DAD'S INVOLVEMENT in football sparked my love for the game and my desire to pursue a career in coaching. He's still involved, as a consultant to our player personnel department, which he joined in the summer following his retirement after sixteen seasons as a regional scout for the San Francisco 49ers.

How about that? I've got my dad providing his scouting expertise. I've got my brother Jay helping me call plays from the press box. All I have to do now is hire Jim as one of our team doctors and we'll have the Gruden family pretty well covered.

Before I was even born my dad was assistant football coach at Fremont Ross High School, located about twenty miles outside of Sandusky, Ohio. That was where I joined the Gruden

roster, but it wouldn't be long before football would cause my dad to make a series of moves throughout the state-to Crawford, where he was head coach at Galion High; to Tif?n, for an assistant coaching position at his alma mater, Heidelberg College, where he had also played quarterback; to another assistant's job at the University of Dayton, where John McVay was the head coach at the time before going on to coach the New York Giants and become general manager of the 49ers.

Wayne Fontes, former coach of the Detroit Lions, and his brother, Lenny, who was an NFL assistant, were also on that Dayton staff. Lenny had a son by the same name. Whenever the Flyers played at old Baujan Field, young Lenny and I would pick up about nine or ten of those red paper Coke cups off the ground, crumple them up and jam them together until we formed the shape of a football so we could play our own little game of tackle in the end zone as the actual game was going on.

That is, until someone would run us out of there.

In 1973 my dad made his first big jump when he became running backs coach for Lee Corso at Indiana University. I was ten years old when he took the job, and I remember every one of those players. While my dad and I were sitting in field-level seats at one of my brother's arena football games, my dad suddenly pointed to the guy holding the down-and-distance marker on the sidelines.

"That's Dale Keneipp," he said.

"Number thirty-seven?" I said.

My dad almost fell out of his chair because I had remembered Dale's number and the fact he had played safety for Indiana in 1973.

Not long after that I got a call from my dad, who told me that Walter Booth, a cornerback on that '73 Indiana team who went on to become a lawyer, wanted to talk to me about investing some of my money.

"Number six?" I said.

I can remember Trent Smock and Keith Calvin at receiver, Scott Arnett at quarterback, Mike Harkrader at tailback, Courtney Snyder at halfback and Rick Enis at fullback. I can name the whole team, even though the way it performed on the field could make a lot of those guys easy to forget. Our best season was 5-6. We got our brains beat in by the Big Ten powerhouses like Ohio State and Michigan.

While living in Bloomington, Indiana, I became friends with Tim Knight, a fellow member of the Working Men's 49ers Pop Warner football team. He was just like me, the son of a coach.

The only difference was his father was Bobby Knight. I don't give a damn what sport we're talking about, he sets the standard for coaches everywhere. Coach Knight would take the IU basketball team all over Indiana, to places like New Castle and Fort Wayne, just to play scrimmages. There is no way to overstate Indiana's obsession with basketball. The movie Hoosiers has it exactly right. Sometimes Tim would call up and invite me to come along as one of the ball boys with him, and that made me one of the luckiest kids in the world. I'd be riding on a bus, throughout the state of Indiana, with the IU basketball team. I'll never forget it. Tim and I would sit in the back, eating grape candy with Quinn Buckner, Bobby Wilkerson, Wayne Radford and Kent Benson.

Once we went into the locker room at halftime, and Knight wasn't only coaching his starters; he was coaching the whole team. I stood there quietly and was just blown away. I remember him talking about defense. Well, not talking-screaming.

Yelling about playing defense and hustling. Giving a thorough demonstration of the difference between a stationary and a moving pick. I also remember that his players gave him their full attention when he walked in that room-and tremendous respect. It was clear to me then that Coach Knight is a true leader and puts his whole being into what he does.

There was a lot of conformity there, which was something my dad understood better than I did at the time. He told me that I had to have my hair cut before I got on the basketball team's bus. I was pissed about that because I thought I looked kind of cool with the long, scraggily hair I had back then. But the rules were the same for every kid with any connection to the IU team: no earrings, no jewelry, no tattoos and, unfortunately, hair above the ears. When we would stop at a restaurant for dinner on the way home, everyone was reminded about table manners and proper conduct. Assistant coaches were on top of every detail. It was a class operation. It was about how to become a man.

Coach Knight's practices were like games. Actually, they were harder than games. Honest to God, his practices were longer than and as intense as anything I had ever seen. They were physical. They seemed to last forever. It was not "Go out there and shoot ten free throws." It was "Go out there and make ten free throws." It was structured to be very situational and as gamelike as possible. The biggest points that Coach Knight would stress were "Don't make stupid mistakes! Don't get careless with the ball! Take high-percentage shots! Fundamentals! Techniques! We are not going to tolerate error! We are not going to tolerate undisciplined, careless error! We are not going to have that at Indiana! It . . . is . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . happen!"

Those were the words that you heard all the time. And I do mean all the time. He established a sense of urgency to get it right in practice. When you laced them up for Knight at Indiana or you lace them up for him now at Texas Tech, whatever time practice starts, you'd better be there five minutes early. You'd better be mentally prepared to execute-which means you'd better have studied your game plan the night before-because it's going to be mentally as well as physically taxing. If you're a star player, if you're Kent Benson or Quinn Buckner, you're going to get coached just as hard as Tom Abernethy and Jim Crews. While basketball's not football-maybe we've got a lot more situations to practice because there are eleven guys on the field and a football field's a lot bigger than a basketball court-the lessons I learned from being around the Indiana basketball team are still with me. The most valuable: Teach your players how to practice. That's even more important than teaching them what to practice, because if you don't establish the pace you want and if you aren't consistent about it, they're going to work the way they want to and it's going to change with each day. You have to let them know that you want them practicing hard, with a sense of purpose, every time. With us, there are no thirty-five- to forty-minute breaks where we're just walking around and playing grab-ass. This is dress rehearsal, man. Our performances are live.