Fassel Keeping his Cool, Even With a Slow 1-2 Start

First thing Jim Fassel did after the physical part of practice was over was smile. A genuine smile, not one of those football coach crocodile smiles that’s really a warning: Ask a question I don’t like and I’ll bite your head off.

He did ask, “How you doin’?” It was, after all, a bright sunny day, but the real issue was him: How are you doing? The New York Giants’ great expectations are wounded by a 1-2 start.

And the answer was that it was important for him to keep smiling even though the Giants are approaching a time of crisis. They could reach it as soon as today at San Diego, but he wouldn’t want to transmit that to a team that needs to believe it isn’t as bad as it looked against Dallas on Monday night.

Yes he can get angry. “I have to remind myself,” he said. “A couple things I definitely know about myself: I can have a very bad temper.”

The media has not seen that terrible temper in the two seasons the man has coached the Giants. This is a business of coaches full of sound and fury, often signifying nothing. In contrast with Bill Parcells, who has great charisma and shows not much charm, Fassel shows considerable charm; perhaps the charisma glows from a championship ring. Challenge Parcells and risk either a glacier or hot lava. Usually he’s using the media to convey his anger to players.

Well, there was this one time when Fassel was booked to appear on a TV show, “The Last Word,” after which he would take his wife and son to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Well, the show’s limo driver was late and phoned to ask how to get to the coach’s home, and as the driver was backing out of the long driveway, he asked Fassel for directions to the studio. And the coach showed that temper: Everybody out of the car; I’m not going to that show.

Well, Kitty Fassel talked her husband out of his snit, telling him not to let that driver ruin their evening. So he insisted that a different driver--one who could read a map--take them to the show. And it turned out that Jim, Kitty and young Mike had a nice evening.

Of course, there’s a moral to the story in getting the Giants in the right direction. The last thing Fassel wants to show the youngest team in the league is anger. They won their division last season after a 1-3 start and that’s what he wants in their psyches right now.

This can’t be a crisis so soon. “I don’t think so,” he said. “We’ve lost two in a row. We dug ourselves out of a hole last year.” Then he added, as if as a salt of realism, “we’re on the brink of falling back into it.”

He holds some of himself in reserve, trying not to be comsumed by being a football coach. He said he was reading the paper in his kitchen during the bye week last season and asking his wife, was there something different about the room. “She had it painted about six weeks before,” Fassel said.

However, he can identify Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and he knows the Mets are the hot story in the papers now. “I have a reasonable handle on world issues,” he said. He knows about the Monica Lewinsky controversy. In a number of ways, the coach Fassel most resembles is Joe Gibbs, the one-time genius of the Redskins. But in the last crisis in Washington, somebody mentioned Oliver North and Gibbs said, “Who’s he?”

So Fassel is tuned into things that might play in the heads of his players. “This team is different from last year--mental makeup and everything else,” he said. “You get into a problem and maybe they don’t deal with it as well. I see our team gets emotional and I don’t want them to get frustrated.

“You get into a critical situation, it could be third down or whatever; I don’t want them to become hyper, frustrated, tense. I want them, when we break the huddle, to say, ‘OK, we’re gonna get these guys.’ ”

The last thing the coach wants a team to see is his own frustration. You could call it panic. “If something isn’t working,” he said, “ ‘Let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s try that, let’s try that.’ Soon you’ve got no direction and you don’t get good at anything.”

So this week he doesn’t yell at them. He’s been trying to teach, as in the teaching that goes on in preseason camp. If this were a veteran team, one that had experienced some success, the coach could pick out certain individuals as object lessons or use them to goad the others. This team doesn’t have a lot of that, and he doesn’t want to drive emerging players into a shell. He is especially aware of what goes on in Danny Kanell’s head--Fassel earned his reputation as a coach of quarterbacks.

The coach can get in the quarterback’s face just so much. “Hey, in the game there may be a ‘Pick it up,’ ” Fassel said. “Still there has to be a sense of ‘OK, this is what we got to do.’ ” We may remember the acid exchange between Parcells and Neil O’Donnell when they went last season.

Fassel has been extremly supportive of Kanell. “He said he thought I played pretty good in the first three games,” the quarterback said.

If they can’t beat San Diego, who can they beat? But that’s not what Fassel wants his team thinking.