Guts and Genius

INTRODUCTION

Bill Walsh walked up to the front door of the greenish-gray split-level home on Silverwood Drive and fell into the arms of his best friend.

Mike White could see the anguish in Walsh’s face. Had expected it, actually. As he held Walsh, he knew how utterly defeated his friend had felt after suffering such a crushing blow to his career. A blow Walsh was convinced had meant the end of his decades-long dream of becoming an NFL head coach.

In January 1976, Walsh had thought he’d get the chance after Paul Brown had announced his retirement from coaching. But when Brown turned not to Walsh, but to Bill “Tiger” Johnson, there was anguish. There was anger. There was doubt.

By the time he’d made his way to White’s home in Lafayette, California, Walsh was devastated. He needed an escape, a place to gather himself and figure out what he’d do next.

White—Walsh’s longtime confidant with whom he could share his innermost thoughts and fears—took in his friend.

No questions asked.

“He was just this beat-up person when he showed up,” Mike White remembers of the lowest moment of Walsh’s career. “He just had to find solace somewhere so he could get his thinking together and react to what had just happened.”

Despite Brown having placed his complete faith in Walsh to run what would eventually come to be known as the renowned West Coast offense, the seventy-one-year-old head coach and Cincinnati Bengals owner passed over his forty-four-year-old assistant and instead selected Johnson, his offensive line coach, who offered a more traditional approach to coaching. History would ultimately bear out how utterly misguided that decision was, but at the time Brown was convinced Johnson would be the better leader and that Walsh’s expertise in running the offense would give the Bengals a more reliable staff.

Walsh was inconsolable.

“Paul Brown once told me the reason he didn’t make Bill the head coach was because he felt Bill was too high and too low, that he couldn’t handle the lows of coaching to create enough consistent highs, that a loss would just wipe him out emotionally and he wouldn’t be able to function the next week,” said former Philadelphia Eagles and St. Louis Rams coach Dick Vermeil, another of Walsh’s closest friends.

And there was some truth to that.

“Bill would go through tremendous mood swings, and the mood swings are a sign of insecurity,” Vermeil said. “I had it myself. Bill was always insecure. He had to prove to himself that he was as good as he thought he was.”

Walsh’s mood as he walked into White’s home was as disconsolate as his friend had ever seen. Walsh had flown to California alone, leaving behind his wife, Geri—who was pregnant with the couple’s third child, Elizabeth—and sons Steve and Craig. He needed a safe space, and he turned to his longtime friend White, whom he had first met in 1960 when the two were assistant coaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I remember getting this phone call from Bill, and it was like someone had just died,” Marilyn White said. “He said, ‘Marilyn, it feels like you’re the only ones I can call.’ It was sad, because Bill was very happy in Cincinnati. They had roots there, and they planned on being there for a long time.”

“He just needed to take a deep breath,” Mike White said.

So they converted an all-purpose room in the basement to create a makeshift bedroom for Walsh, and they spent the next few days together, trying to process what had just happened and figure out where Walsh could go from there.

Walsh didn’t know where he would turn next. The one thing he did know was that he could never go back to Cincinnati.

Dave Butz came off the practice field and was headed toward the Washington Redskins locker room when Joe Gibbs walked over to him for a private chat.

This was early in the 1981 season, when Gibbs was a rookie NFL head coach still in search of his first win and Butz, a thirty-one-year-old veteran defensive tackle and a holdover from former coach George Allen’s “Over-the-Hill Gang,” was uncertain about the direction of the team. The losing streak would eventually grow to five straight games to start the year, and Gibbs was tormented over his team’s slow start.

Gibbs was concerned that team owner Jack Kent Cooke, a notoriously demanding personality, was growing impatient to the point of making a change. Cooke had taken a chance on Gibbs, formerly an obscure forty-year-old offensive coordinator from the San Diego Chargers who’d run Don Coryell’s wide-open passing offense, known as “Air Coryell.”

Yes, Gibbs feared he’d become the first coach in NFL history to be fired without ever winning a game.

Gibbs had installed Coryell’s offense when he got to the Redskins, figuring he could out-scheme his rivals in the NFC East, a division known for its reliance on the running game as the central focus on offense, and imposing size and power on defense. The Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles were the class of the division at the time, with Tom Landry in his late prime as the Cowboys’ coach and Dick Vermeil coming off the Eagles’ first Super Bowl appearance the previous January. The New York Giants were beginning to emerge from the worst period in franchise history under disciplinarian coach Ray Perkins. And the St. Louis Cardinals had a dynamic young running back named Ottis Anderson.

Gibbs’s first four games were against divisional opponents, and he lost every single one of them: 26–10 to the Cowboys, 17–7 to the Giants, 40–30 to the Cardinals, and 36–13 to the Eagles. It was no better in his fifth game, as Bill Walsh’s San Francisco 49ers, in the early stages of their first Super Bowl championship run, beat the Redskins, 30–17, at RFK Stadium.

Concerned that some of his most important veteran players like Butz might check out and lose faith in the first-year coach, Gibbs offered words of reassurance.

“We had lost a whole bunch of games, and Gibbs came out to me and said, ‘Dave, we are so close. I don’t want you to give up and get demoralized. We are so close to doing great things. I want you to keep trying. We are on the edge of doing great things.’”

Butz nodded and thanked Gibbs for the encouragement, unsure whether Gibbs truly knew what he was talking about, or whether the losing would continue and Gibbs’s time in Washington would indeed be short-lived.

Butz didn’t know it at the time, nor did any of Gibbs’s other players, but the coach was about to go against every conviction and every principle he’d ever learned—not knowing if it would work, but convinced he had no other alternative.

The consensus was unanimous: Bill Parcells had to go.

The Giants were staggering to a 3-12-1 finish in Parcells’s first year as the Giants’ head coach, and memories of the darkest years of the franchise were haunting the Mara family. Team president Wellington Mara had presided over the lost years of 1964–1978, when the Giants had gone from a consistent championship-contending team to a franchise besmirched by failure. Rock bottom had come on November 19, 1978, when the Giants were seemingly headed toward victory over the Eagles at Giants Stadium and simply had to run out the clock in the final seconds against an Eagles team with no time-outs remaining.

But rather than having quarterback Joe Pisarcik do the sensible thing and take a knee, offensive coordinator Bob Gibson inexplicably called for a handoff to Larry Csonka. The ball caromed off Csonka’s right hip and was scooped up by Eagles defensive back Herman Edwards, who returned it for a 26-yard touchdown to give Philadelphia a 19–17 win. Gibson was fired the next day, and during the Giants’ next home game, a small plane flew over the Meadowlands carrying a banner: 15 YEARS OF LOUSY FOOTBALL—WE’VE HAD ENOUGH.

The fallout from a play referred to by Giants fans simply as “The Fumble” eventually led to the hiring in 1979 of George Young as general manager, a compromise choice that was acceptable to Wellington and his nephew Tim. The two were not on speaking terms but had agreed to Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s recommendation of Young, then a personnel assistant with the Miami Dolphins. Ray Perkins was Young’s choice to become head coach in 1979, but when Perkins left in 1982 to coach at the University of Alabama, Young appointed Parcells, a promising defensive coordinator under Perkins.

But by December of Parcells’s first year on the job, it became clear to all three of the Giants’ decision makers that a change had to be made.

“Parcells gets hired in 1983, and really the only basis upon which he was hired was that he had some head coaching experience, which wasn’t a heck of a lot,” said John Mara, Wellington’s oldest son and now the team’s president and co-owner. “We come to the end of that season, and the jury is very much out on Bill at that point.”

It was an excruciating season in every possible way, and not simply because of the final record.

Parcells had misjudged his quarterback situation, anointing Scott Brunner over former first-round pick Phil Simms. More than two dozen players wound up on injured reserve. After getting off to a 2-2 start, the Giants lost ten of their next twelve games.

Parcells’s personal loss that season was incalculable. His mother, Ida, had died in December. His father, Charles, had died two months later. His running backs coach, Bob Ledbetter, suffered a stroke in late September and died less than three weeks later.

“Both my parents died. My backfield coach died. Hey, it was tough, but that’s still no excuse,” Parcells said, looking back on the most difficult year of his life. “Listen, they’d seen enough. Everyone was on board with it.”

The decision had been made: The Giants would look for a new coach.

Howard Schnellenberger was their man.

Parcells was as good as gone.

There could not have been a more unlikely set of circumstances binding together three coaches who would eventually grow to dominate the NFL, preside over what might have been the greatest era of football the league has ever seen, and transform their own legacies into Hall of Fame careers.

Walsh, Gibbs, and Parcells went about building championship teams in vastly different ways, some of it involving the sheer genius of play calling, and some of it brute strength and the kind of mental and physical perseverance required to reach the pinnacle of success in the toughest league in professional sports. And while they all overcame uncertain beginnings, they grew into masterful tacticians and universally respected leaders.

They came of age during a time in the NFL when their coaching profession was dominated by Hall of Famers Tom Landry, Don Shula, Chuck Noll, and John Madden, a daunting list of coaching geniuses in their own right. But Walsh, Gibbs, and Parcells would eventually become the pillars for the next generation of coaching greats, and their influence over the league was unmistakable, as these three men built teams that dominated the era.

Walsh would go on to win three Super Bowl titles and leave behind a team that won another a year after he retired. Gibbs won three titles in a ten-year span, and Parcells won the Vince Lombardi Trophy twice. In the eleven Super Bowls from 1981 to 1991, teams built by Walsh, Gibbs, and Parcells played in ten of them and won nine championships.

Along the way, they coached many of the greatest teams and the greatest players in NFL history, and coached in many of the greatest games ever. They also had rivalries among themselves, with some surprising results. While Walsh and Gibbs were unquestioned offensive geniuses whose systems were at the heart of their greatness, it was Parcells who mostly got the better of his two rivals in big-game situations.

They drove their teams hard, and they drove themselves hard, eventually to the point where they all had to step away because the game had consumed them. Often motivated by fear and insecurity—two characteristics they all went to great lengths to hide—they brought out the best in themselves and in all the people whose lives they touched.

Beneath the fear and insecurity, a rare combination of guts and genius fueled their ascension and gave rise to what many consider the greatest era in the history of professional sports, the impact of which continues to resonate in today’s game. Consider this: Since 1981, a combined thirty Super Bowl championships have been won either by Walsh, Gibbs, Parcells, or coaches who either worked directly under them or were part of their coaching trees. That’s an astonishing thirty of the thirty-seven championships since Walsh won his first title.

This is the story of their lives and their careers, and the indelible imprints they left on America’s game.