SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs NEW YORK : THE COACHES : Parcells, Reeves in Same Tough Spot--Different Men, Different Temperaments

One dresses as if he’s headed for a board of directors’ meeting. The other looks as if he’s going out to mow the lawn.

One has been accused of being aloof and uncommunicative by his players. The other thinks the chance for a little locker room repartee is the best part of his job.

One has a Georgia drawl that makes Jimmy Carter sound like a Shakespearean actor. The other has a “Noo Joisey” accent so thick it makes you crave hot pretzels.

One was so sickly as a child that he couldn’t work on the family farm, but grew strong enough to survive eight seasons in the NFL. The other was a strapping, all-everything, three-sport-star kid who passed up the opportunity to play pro football to take a $3,000-a-year coaching job at a tiny Midwestern college.

The Broncos are understandably cautious about hugging their impeccably groomed coach after a victory. You know what it costs to have a $700 suit cleaned? After the Giants win, they dump a tub of Gatorade on the head of their coach, a man they call Tuna.

Denver Coach Dan Reeves and New York Coach Bill Parcells do have one thing in common, though: Each will be standing on the sideline Sunday at the Rose Bowl with a chance to win Super Bowl XXI.

This is Super Bowl No. 6 for Reeves, who made regular appearances with the Dallas dynasty as a player, a coach and a player-coach in the ‘70s. But, like Parcells, it’s his first as a head coach.

They took different paths to the top. Reeves apprenticed at the right hand of Tom Landry, that guru of high-tech football. Parcells bounced through the college ranks and a couple of pro assistant jobs before getting promoted to the Giants’ top spot.

Reeves, who celebrated his 43rd birthday Monday, was the youngest coach in the NFL when he got the Denver job in 1981. As Landry’s protege, he was considered a shoo-in for a head coaching job and was New York General Manager George Young’s No. 2 choice for the Giants’ job in 1979 when Ray Perkins was named.

Parcells, 45, the Giants’ defensive coordinator for two years under Perkins, was a bit more of a longshot, especially when you consider that former New York assistants Landry and Vince Lombardi couldn’t make it through the ranks to get the Giants’ top job.

Young’s reasoning for promoting Parcells?

“We thought if he could coach half the team, he could coach all of it,” Young said.

Bill Parcells is the quintessential “player’s coach.” He must be. He didn’t seem to mind that nose tackle Jim Burt told Joan Rivers and a national television audience that the reason they dump Gatorade on their coach is: “It’s just like when you were a kid--you always pick on the chubby guy. We’re still doing it.”

Parcells tries to talk to every player every day, even if it’s just a sentence or two. He loves practice and hanging out in the locker room. But he also uses the well-aimed barb and the players’ machismo mentality to motivate--sometimes even bait--his team into inspired play.

A group of Giant offensive linemen were chatting recently, feeling pretty good about themselves and their chances going into the division playoff game against San Francisco. Parcells walked up and asked how the meeting of the board of directors of “Club 13” was going.

No one present missed the shot. Parcells was refering to the Giants’ meager 13 yards rushing in the comeback win over the 49ers during the regular season.

Sometimes, though, the players get glucose-sweet revenge.

In October of 1985, Parcells spent an entire week before a game against conference-rival Washington screaming in Burt’s face. Burt responded with a great performance, and after the game Parcells smiled and said, “I got you ready.”

Burt smiled and agreed, then dumped a tub of Gatorade over Parcells. A tradition was born.

“He knows what gets me to react,” Burt admitted. “It doesn’t bother me anymore but it used to bother me that he used me as a tool to (psych up) other players. I know him too well now.”

Veteran linebacker Harry Carson, who has taken over Burt’s duties as official tub-overturner, is still amazed at Parcells’ ability to push his players’ buttons.

“He’s a great motivator because he knows exactly what to say,” Carson said, “Damn, he knows what things will really eat at you.”

Parcells swears there’s no grand plan, that he’s just being himself. He’s coaching the only way he knows--and loving every minute of it.

“It’s not a philosophy,” he said. “It’s just the way I am. I do things a certain way, but I don’t ask the players’ nature to correspond with my nature. I want them to be themselves and relax.

“I also want them to know their role on the team, and those roles are ever changing. So I try to talk to my players every day individually, to sit down and visit with them. That’s the fun part of being a coach. It makes me feel like I’m 25 again. If I couldn’t do that, I’d get out of the business.”

That doesn’t seem likely, now. And if he brings a Super Bowl title home with him, the folks in the tri-state area may never let him go anywhere but back and forth between his home in Upper Saddle River, N.J., and the Meadowlands.

“I’ll be forever grateful to Coach Parcells because he gave me a chance when most people wouldn’t,” said receiver Phil McConkey, who spent five years away from football piloting helicopters in the Navy. “That kind of open-mindedness is typical of him, though.

“But the thing that really makes him stand out is that he’s an absolutely great manager. Handling people is more important than designing plays for a head coach. It’s the most important thing for any manager.”

That’s a lesson Dan Reeves learned the hard way. Reeves has been known to yell at a player or two himself, but it wasn’t always accepted by his team the way the Giants seem to revel in Parcells’ outbursts.

Reeves and quarterback John Elway got into a screaming match on the sidelines this season that they’re still talking about in Denver. But not many of Reeves’ players scream back. In fact, during Reeves’ early years at Denver, most of the Broncos were afraid to even talk to him.

That form of dictatorship lasted four seasons. It began to change one day during training camp in 1985. Dissension was spreading, and a number of Broncos got together and decided that veteran cornerback Louis Wright should get the dubious honor of telling the coach that many of the players were afraid to come to him with their problems.

“I was one of the older guys, and the player rep and people kept coming to me and saying something should be done,” Wright said. “So I did it.

“He was a little upset,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Yeah, he kinda went off on me. That’s his style, though. He’s got a temper. He knows it, everybody knows it. So he got a little loud and vocal.

“But he’d never been a head coach before and I don’t think he knew things weren’t going all that smoothly. Once it was made aware to him, it got a lot better. It was just part of his learning process.”

It was also a shock for Reeves, and the soul searching that followed left him a changed man.

“Louis came to me and said he wanted to talk. I thought he just wanted to have lunch,” Reeves recalled. “He told me some of things that bothered the players. I told him I’d think about them and see what I could do.

“The biggest thing it did was have me look at myself and do a self-evaluation. I don’t know how many people have actually sat down and evaluated themselves, but there’s an awful lot of things about yourself you don’t necessarily like. And trying to explain to people why you’re the way you are is difficult--because sometimes you don’t even know.

“But I think it was a good meeting. It helped me understand that I wasn’t exactly the way I perceived myself. I thought I was a player’s coach because that’s the way I came into coaching. Yet some of the players felt they couldn’t come in to talk to me. You tell them your door is always open, but that doesn’t mean much if they’re afraid to come in.”

Reeves has mellowed. He admits he must fight his own impatience and his fiercely competitive nature. “I have a tendency to want the players to get better yesterday,” he said.

“I’m extremely competitive and I do a lot of hollering. When I was a player--and I was not a great player--if I was doing something poorly, I started hollering at myself. That’s the way I got myself fired up and that was the way I did the players when I first got here. I guess a lot took those things personally.

“Now, I’ve found that one of the key things in coaching is to know who you can holler at and who you can’t.

“I’ve mellowed some. I don’t think I’d still be around if I hadn’t mellowed some. But the worst mistake you can make as a coach is to try to be something you’re not. I can play golf and holler at myself and I get worse.

“But football, to me, is a game of emotions. Somebody hits you hard, you get mad, you come back and hit them harder. Football’s a game where you can get mad and still execute. That’s the reason I love it.”

And the Broncos are enjoying the game a great deal more these days, too.

“He’s changed a lot,” receiver Steve Watson said. “When Dan first got here, he had jet black hair. I guess it’s our fault he’s so gray now. Too many close ballgames. But I think the problem was that he was trying to do everything himself at first. And he was sort of aloof.

“But now the lines of communication between player and coach are wide open and he tries very hard to involve us all in the decision making. Before every game, each player writes down the things we feel we can accomplish, the things we think will work and the things we don’t think will work. And he’s open to the suggestions. We’re all closer because of it.”

Bill Parcells, NFL coach of the year, is living a dream come true.

“I’m very, very, very lucky and I mean that from my heart,” he said. “Not many people get to do just what they’ve always wanted to, where they’ve always wanted to and have it turn out the way they’ve always wanted it to. I’m just very, very fortunate.”

Parcells was born in Englewood, N.J., and grew up in suburban Hasbrouck Heights, not far from where Giants Stadium is now.

“I went to my first Giant game in the Polo Grounds in 1954,” Parcells said. “In the next four or five years, I probably went to 15 games. It was pretty hard to be in New York in those days and not be a Giant fan--unless you were a Communist.”

He excelled in football, baseball and basketball at River Dell High School. His high school basketball coach, Mickey Corcoran, became his Tom Landry. When asked who most influenced his coaching career, Parcells points at the now-retired Corcoran, a mentor and good-luck charm whom the superstitious Parcells always keeps close at hand.

Parcells went to Wichita State, where he was a two-time All-Missouri Conference linebacker and good enough to be selected in the seventh round of the NFL draft by the Detroit Lions. He chose an assistant’s job at Hastings College.

“I wanted to be a coach,” he said, shrugging.

He served as an assistant at Wichita State, Army--where he became good friends with an assistant basketball coach named Bob Knight--Florida State, Vanderbilt and Texas Tech.

In 1978, he was named head coach at the Air Force Academy. Air Force was 3-8 that year--Parcells’ first coaching experience with a losing season--and the next year he accepted an assistant’s job with the Giants.

But before the season began, he resigned and took a job with a Colorado land-development company. Parcells doesn’t talk much about that year. Friends say Parcells’ wife, Judy, was tired of moving around the country. She changed her mind, however, when she saw how unhappy her husband was with his new career.

So in 1980, Parcells was back in football, serving as linebacker coach for the New England Patriots. In ‘81, Perkins hired him as defensive coordinator and Parcells installed the 3-4 defense in New York. Two years later, Parcells was in the head coach’s office when Perkins departed for the University of Alabama.

Parcells had a depressing debut. Twenty-five players were on the injured-reserve list at one time or another during that season and the Giants were 3-12-1. His job was in jeopardy, but it was off-the-field traumas that almost cost him his sanity.

Running back Doug Kotar died of a brain tumor. Assistant Bob Ledbetter died of a stroke. And both of Parcells’ parents were seriously ill. They died six weeks apart.

Did he ever think then that a Super Bowl could be just three years away?

“I thought the toilet bowl was in my future,” he said. “It was a very difficult time for me. It’s history now, though. I got through it because I decided not to let them get me. I didn’t know who they were, but I wouldn’t let them get me. I was determined to go on with more resolve than ever.”

The resolute Giants have been 33-15 and made the playoffs three straight years under Parcells. After last year’s playoff loss to the Bears, Parcells promised the players and the fans the Giants would make it to the Super Bowl this year.

A promise he somehow managed to keep.

“What makes all this so special for me is that Bill and I came in at the same time,” Burt said. “We started this thing from the ground floor together. I know him pretty well. And I know what this means to him.”

Parcells admits he’s happy for himself. But he’s dedicating this game to the Giants who suffered through some of the franchise’s leanest years.

“I’m most happy for the older guys,” he said. “The guys I’ve seen bleed and sweat and die and hurt. The guys I’ve seen on airplanes with ice bags all over there entire body, game after game, year after year.

“They deserve this game more than anyone.”

Dan Reeves grew up on a farm near Americus, Ga. Rheumatic fever when he was 5 years old left him too weak to do the normal chores, but by the time he was 9, he was driving the tractor and dreaming about the day he could get off the farm.

He was a quarterback at Americus High and good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of South Carolina. His coaches remember him as an analytical player who knew everyone’s assignment on every play, but Reeves said he never had any intention of coaching when he began his career as a free-agent running back with the Cowboys in 1965.

He suffered dozens of knee injuries during eight seasons with Dallas. His career rushing yardage, 1,990 yards, may look like little more than a decent year for Eric Dickerson, but Reeves’ understanding of the game was enough to persuade Landry to talk him into becoming a player-coach and then a full-time assistant.

Like Parcells, Reeves suffered through a season of discontent and decided to chuck it all and get a job in the real world. After putting up with the dark moods of running back Duane Thomas in 1971 and ‘72, Reeves quit coaching and got a job selling real estate.

“Football takes you away from your family, and I felt like my children were at an age where I’d be happy if I spent more time with them,” Reeves said. “That was the basic reason. And 1971, even though we won a world championship, was probably the worst year I had in football because of the Duane Thomas situation. It wasn’t a lot of fun to coach.

“But after one year in real estate I realized that you can’t run away from problems. You have to face them and deal with them. And I really missed football. Plus, I found out that unless you’re happy, the time you spend with your family is not time they’re going to enjoy.”

Just ask Judy Parcells.

So by 1974, Reeves was back coaching the Cowboys’ running backs and back with a clear picture of what he wanted to do with his life. He watched every move Landry made and took mental notes. Landry’s influence is evident in more than the Broncos’ record, an impressive 58-35 under Reeves.

“I spent 16 years with a great coach and I think I learned a lot and got a great foundation,” Reeves said. “It’s the same as playing the game. You have to learn the fundamentals. You can put it into any package you want, but it’s still blockin’ and tacklin’.

“I think I learned from a great teacher--not only the X’s and O’s, but making executive decisions, handling things with dignity and class and building the respect of people across the country.”

Even in his practice garb--slacks and a natty Bronco sweater--Reeves looks more like an elderly cheerleader than a coach. He started wearing the expensive suits on game days because he thinks it helps him control his temper. You can bet he’ll look like a GQ model on Sunday, too, but that outside appearance will mask a stormy sea of anxiety.

“I think the excitement level will be the same as it was when I was a player in the Super Bowl,” Reeves said. “But now I feel more pressure because of all the responsibility. A lot of people are looking to me for all the right answers.”

But then, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Coach?