Unquestionably, He’s the Biggest Man Among the Giants : NFC: New York’s Parcells can dish out the verbal abuse, but the players understand his methods and respect him enough to keep serving up victories.

As always, it starts out as a grin, then it changes. His eyes sharpen, his voice rises to a tone that could knock out cement walls, and his grin tightens into a mockery of smiling people everywhere.

Everson Walls, beware.

Bill Parcells, sultan of sarcasm, man of a thousand frightful faces and coach of the New York Giants, is at it again. The grin, then the grimace. To know Parcells, to play for Parcells, to even tolerate him for more than a few tense moments, you just have to live with it.

Walls, wise enough to understand the method to the madness and confident enough not to be broken by the daily egging, lives with it.

“He came to me and said I was the worst guy in the league at jamming the wide receivers,” Walls said Thursday, describing Parcells’ latest lashing of the Giant cornerback during practice Wednesday.

“I mean, the ball is about to be snapped during practice, and I’m on defense and I’m over here trying to defend myself to my head coach. He’s a mad-dog type of coach.”

And from such tender moments are Parcells’ Giants forged.

Tossed alternately from fear to respect to, probably, love for their complicated coach, the Giants have quite regularly been moved to do exactly what the 49-year-old Parcells wants them to do: Win one for the Ripper.

It may not be the most talented team in the league; indeed, man for man, the Giants seem somewhat inferior to their Super Bowl XXV opponent, the Buffalo Bills. They are old at key positions, and their starting quarterback is someone who will start the seventh game of his career Sunday.

But it is Parcells’ team, infused with his fire and inflamed by his motivational bon mots, and that means it wins.

If this sounds similar to the coaching methods of Indiana basketball legend Bob Knight, well, besides a devotion to simple, conservative, defense-oriented play, the two share a close friendship that began in the 1960s, when Knight coached the Army basketball team and Parcells was an assistant on the football team.

Nice, quiet conversations those two must have.

“Walls, oh yeah, I holler at Walls a lot,” Parcells said with that same grin-to-grimace look Thursday. “He’s one of my big holler-at guys.”

Not the only one, though.

“I’m going to say what I want to say, and if you don’t like it, it’s too bad,” Parcells said. “I just tell them at the beginning of camp, if you’re sensitive, you’re not going to last too long here.

“That’s a two-way street, though. My players are allowed to say things. I can’t be too sensitive either. Most of the time, they’re going to say things, too, and that’s OK, doesn’t bother me.

“Hey, if we view ourselves as teachers, and I think that’s basically what coaches are, I mean, you’ve got to get a little response from your pupils somewhere or you don’t know whether you’re getting to them or not.

“And having some guys who’ve been with me for a long time, it eases the other ones into that particular mode. You get rookies, they see, hey, if you walk into our training camp this year, and you see Parcells yelling at (veteran quarterback) Phil Simms . . . this (rookie running back) Rodney Hampton, he’s figuring he might get yelled at himself.”

But if carping is all Parcells did, there’s no way he could have lasted as long as he has and kept the Giants in the Super Bowl hunt as consistently as he has. What he does, his players say, is more akin to a constant stream of chatter, sometimes happy talk, sometimes not-so-happy.

“I don’t have any problem with it,” linebacker Steve DeOssie said. “He’s just as mean to everybody with the criticism. But then again, he’ll turn around.

“He’s a unique coach. He’ll criticize you in a minute, and he’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. But by the same account, you do something right, and he’ll be the first one to let you know.

“I may have talked to Tom Landry five times the whole time I was in Dallas. It’s only 9 a.m., and I’ve already talked three times with Bill Parcells.”

The Parcells Method of Football is as basic as he is blunt. The Giants play strong defense, they play careful offense and they don’t make mistakes. Flash is for 49ers, glamour is for those teams who go up and down from year to year like a roller coaster.

Slow and steady wins the football games, and turnovers are felony offenses. That’s why he’s currently in love with 33-year-old tailback Ottis Anderson, who will carry the ball more often than 33-year-olds are supposed to carry it--and do it up the middle without fear of fumbling.

“We have a rule in New York that our backs don’t fumble, OK?” Parcells said edgily. “They may fumble some, but we have a rule that our backs don’t fumble, because if they fumble, they’re somebody else’s backs pretty quick.”

After a 3-12-1 record in his first season, 1983, Parcells has coached the Giants to six double-digit victory seasons in seven years, highlighted by their Super Bowl title after the 1986 season.

Parcells, who grew up a Giant fan in Northern New Jersey, has a 77-50 regular-season record in his eight New York seasons, with a 7-3 playoff record.

He left his head coaching position at the Air Force to join the staff of then-Giant coach Ray Perkins in 1979, left that season to go into business, joined the New England Patriots’ staff in 1980, and in ’81 rejoined New York as Perkins’ defensive coordinator. When Perkins was fired, Parcells, then 42, was elevated by General Manager George Young.

Parcells has often dropped hints that he is thinking of quitting the Giants for a softer life--the open job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is a rumor--and says he will evaluate his situation, as always, at the end of the season. But could he ever again have what he has in New York?

Players have come and gone--only linebacker Lawrence Taylor and Simms remain from the team he took over--but the Giants have stayed at the top, true to what Parcells demands they be.

They’ve done this because he has made sure they would. For example, Parcells enlisted DeOssie’s help to do some research into the character of Walls before the Giants decided to sign Walls as a Plan B free agent prior to this season. DeOssie played with Walls in Dallas.

Walls could play. But could he play for Parcells?

“I basically asked (DeOssie), can I coach this guy or not?” Parcells said. “And what I’m asking him there is, is this guy going to be too sensitive, is this guy going to not take criticism well, is this guy going to fit in with the way you see us at the New York Giants?

“Then (Walls and Parcells) sat down, had a little talk. I told him what I expected of him. Told him what I initially planned to do with him (use him as a backup). He wasn’t all that enamored of that, but he also was able to talk with some veteran players.

“One of the statements I make to my team when we go to training camp, no matter how many years, one of the first things I say is, ‘Look guys, I’m going to go by what I see--not what you’ve done in the past; I’m going by what I see.’

“And he was convinced that I would go by what I saw. And what I saw in (the exhibition) season was that he should be a starting corner(back).”

It all began, Parcells says, with the start of his relationships with Simms and Taylor, who are his twin symbols of consistency, hard work and the Giant way of football.

When younger players are confused or less than amused by his actions, Parcells counts on his veterans to “explain” what he means. Through them, the word goes out.

Parcells has been known to bicker with the two, Simms especially, but he says it’s all part of the constant communication he likes.

“I think our personalities, all three of us--Taylor, Simms and Parcells--are very similar in some ways,” Parcells said. “From time to time, that leads to a little head-butting, but on the other hand, I think the relationship with those guys . . . I have to say it’s special, because it’s special to me.

“I really don’t know how they feel about it, but it’s very special to me. I love both of them.”

And when he says this, he isn’t grinning, but his voice is soft and he isn’t looking to motivate anyone except, perhaps, himself.