SUPER BOWL XXV / NEW YORK GIANTS vs. BUFFALO BILLS : Bills Enforce Levy’s Law : Buffalo: Coach didn’t want the life of a lawyer, but it took a long time to get to the top of the NFL mountain.

The plan was for Marv Levy to finish Harvard Law School and enter the world of gavels and habeas corpus. Instead, he dropped out after four weeks and accepted a job as an assistant coach of a junior varsity high school football team.

Word of Levy’s decision spread through the Ivy League. The word was either balderdash or flabbergasting.

Much as he tried, a briefcase wouldn’t fit in Levy’s hand. Neckties choked him.

“I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘I want to coach.’ ”

So coach he did. Thirty-four years later, as former Harvard law mates sipped from brandy snifters and sailed Boston schooners, Levy was going down with a ship called the Chicago Blitz of the United States Football League.

It was 1984. Levy had already been fired as a head coach in two countries. Turns out he needed a lawyer to read the fine print of his Blitz contract. The day after he signed, Levy learned the entire franchise was to be traded to Arizona for the Wranglers, who were coming off a 2-14 season.

Could they do that?

They could.

The USFL had almost breathed its last breath. The Blitz was in critical condition.

“It was a team that was totally, totally, totally, devoid of funds,” Levy said. “We went to the airport in school buses. They didn’t even supply the washroom with toilet paper. One of our coaches, at Christmas, gift-wrapped about 20 packages of toilet paper and distributed it around to all the people in the organization.”

For that, Levy gave up a shot at becoming a Supreme Court justice.

Through it all, though, Levy’s opinion of himself never wavered. He knew he could coach. And this week, 40 years after leaving Harvard Law for St. Louis Country Day School, Levy moves to the head of his class as he leads the Buffalo Bills into Super Bowl XXV.

“Persistence is one of the qualities in football, or anything else in life, you are rewarded for,” he said.

Levy has never completely shaken Harvard or academia in general. He stayed long enough to pick up a master’s degree in English history, and his everyday speech was soon sprinkled with such words as officious and proclivity.

Buffalo team meetings are sometimes history lessons.

“You get out the thesaurus for him,” linebacker Darryl Talley said.

Defensive line coach Chuck Dickerson, a wise-cracking former Marine who talks machine-gun fast out of the side of his mouth, said working for Levy is like sitting down to public television.

“I now know that clandestine means in a secretive manner,” Dickerson said. “He issued word masters to all the coaches on the first day. So whatever he says, we can look it up. We can handle it. The hard part was reading the directions for the word masters. It took us six months to work the SOB.”

Down the road some from Harvard, Levy met up with Coach George Allen and what emerged after some laboratory mixing is an intellectual workaholic who was fastidious about detail and winning.

“The one thing I took away from him was that he had a magnificent sense of priority,” Levy said. “What was the most important thing we had to do to prepare ourselves to win? He gave you the responsibility and let you do it. If you didn’t want to work long hours, don’t work for George Allen.”

Levy’s organization skills are legendary. Dickerson said that the head coach can map out an entire season in advance.

“He doesn’t like to throw surprises at his coaches,” Dickerson said. “The most traumatic thing for a coach to do is something different. We’re all robots. Talk about a bunch of machines. We’re like the videos we watch.”

So when Levy explained this week that he had missed a mandatory media interview session because he lost track of time, you suspected it was rather the George Allen in him trying to steal valuable minutes away from New York Giant Coach Bill Parcells, who met with the media while Levy schemed.

Levy says he’s not uptight about the Super Bowl, then says, “I’ve been coaching 40 years and this is the game I’ve been preparing for all my life, and I’m not going to cut a corner on it.”

How many more Super Bowl chances do 62-year-old coaches get?

Levy worked his way, sometimes painfully, up the coaching chain. When he bottomed out with the Blitz in 1985, he seemed destined to be remembered more as a talent scout than as a talent. Bill Walsh was a high school coach when Levy hired him to join his staff at Cal in the 1960s. Levy plucked Mike White out of the school’s alumni office.

Still, Levy had his moments. In 1974, he won a Grey Cup championship with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. From there he jumped to the head coaching job for the Kansas City Chiefs. To help keep the Chiefs’ dreadful defense off the field, Levy installed the stone-age winged-T, an ultra-conservative ball-control offense that put viewing audiences to sleep.

The Chiefs took a pass on Levy in 1982, and he pursued a new career as a television commentator.

Curiously, Levy’s one-year USFL stint amid abhorrent conditions might have turned his career around. The coach who was so controlling was now working in an uncontrollable situation. The five games Levy won rank among his most cherished coaching triumphs.

“It may have been his best coaching job ever,” Buffalo General Manager Bill Polian said.

Polian would know. He was director of player personnel for the Blitz and he later hired Levy as coach after joining the Bills in 1984.

Levy never thought his career was over, not even after the Blitz debacle.

“Did I ever think at the time, when I was with the Alouettes and the Chicago Blitz, that I would be head-coaching a team in the Super Bowl? It would be hard to believe. Is it a dream come true? Yes.”

With Polian running the draft and Levy the day-to-day operation, the Bills improved. Levy replaced Hank Bullough nine games into the 4-12 season of 1986 and finished 2-5. Buffalo improved to 7-8 in 1987 and has won three AFC Eastern Division titles since.

Still, Levy was criticized until this season for using former run-and-shoot quarterback Jim Kelly in a conservative, ball-control offense. But as the Bills gradually added offensive weapons such as running back Thurman Thomas and wide receiver James Lofton, Levy finally saw the wisdom of unchaining Kelly in the theater of the no-huddle offense.

The Bills responded with 428 points, which led the NFL, and have scored 95 points in two playoff games leading to Sunday’s Super Bowl.

There’s a hundred-dollar word for that kind of production, and no doubt Levy, if asked, could come up with it between now and Sunday, in moments he wasn’t instructing his team in the triumphs of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Hannibal.

“Hannibal?” Talley said. “Oh yeah, he’ll tell you about him. He comes up with something and you say, ‘What did he say?’ Then we get into groups and try to figure out what he’s talking about.”