Former Fullerton Coach Is Party to Fassel’s Success

The coach of the Giants, who has so much more to him than anybody ever thought, stood outside the temporary offices for the public relations staff at the team’s hotel on Kennedy Boulevard. Jim Fassel had just finished one last television interview and was on his way to a meeting with his coaches. But for now, in a rare quiet corner of his Super Bowl week, he went back more than 30 years, to when he was a star quarterback in junior college, to the coach who really started his football life.

The school was Fullerton College. The coach was Hal Sherbeck. There were eight other hotshots who wanted to be Sherbeck’s starter that season. Fassel beat them all out by the seventh game, Fullerton won the national championship, and now every college recruiter around knew about him.

The first semester that year was all football, Fassel said. The second semester was all parties. This came from a Giants coach who looks about as wild as a vicar. Maybe his looks were always deceiving.

“I didn’t just go to all the parties; I organized them,” Fassel said. “I was suddenly the big man on campus. I started out that semester missing a lot of classes. But I’ll guarantee you, I never missed a party.”

USC, where Fassel ended up, came around. There were letters every day, from as far away as Florida State. This was a kid whose mother worked as a receptionist for the original Anaheim Angels and whose dad, Bud Fassel, was equipment manager at Anaheim High. Now, just like that, a few games into his freshman season, and the kid was going places, fast.

He was walking through the gym at Fullerton one day when Sherbeck said he wanted to see him in his office.

“I thought he was going to show me a new batch of recruiting letters,” Fassel said.

Sherbeck took him into his office and closed the door and said, “I’d like to know just what the hell you think you’re doing.”

For the next 10 minutes Sherbeck, according to Fassel, “chewed me out good.” Sherbeck talked about maturity and real leadership. Sherbeck told him he’d gone from being a leader to a follower in the blink of an eye, and that was no way to last in football, or anything else.

“He basically told me to grow up,” Fassel said, “and get my fanny back to class.”

This week Fassel flew Hal Sherbeck from his retirement home in Polson, Mont., all the way to Super Bowl XXXV. Bud Fassel is gone. He died a decade ago, when Fassel was an assistant coach with the Giants. He’d had a bypass operation that saved his life, was supposed to prolong his life, then died as a passenger in an automobile accident. Dorothy Fassel died during the ’99 Giants season. Neither one of them gets to see the triumph of this season, the splendid coaching triumph of their son’s career.

But Hal Sherbeck, as close to a father figure as Fassel has now, will be at Raymond James Stadium today. He gave Fassel his first coaching job, at Fullerton, as a quarterbacks coach, in 1973. Sherbeck’s star quarterback that year was Steve DeBerg. And that was the beginning of a long journey for Fassel, one that finally brought him to one of the dream jobs in sports, coaching the football Giants. It turns out the kid from Fullerton was able to last, after all.

“[Sherbeck] got me going in the right direction in this game,” Fassel said. “I had to have him here for the biggest game of my life.”

“When things got tough, he would step forward,” Sherbeck said before beginning the long trip that would take him from the Missoula airport to Minneapolis to Tampa.

Then he was laughing about that meeting in his office and talking about how he didn’t give Fassel his first start until the seventh game of that championship season, against Fullerton’s biggest rival, Orange Coast College.

“Didn’t even tell him until the locker room right before the game,” Sherbeck said. “He went out and threw for about 330 yards and four touchdowns. I threw him in there, and he responded like a champion. And from then on, I knew he was the type who’d step up when things got tough.”

Fassel is tough. His team is tough, tougher than anybody knew, tougher and better. Ray Lewis and the Ravens are suddenly big talkers, talking about shutting out Fassel’s Giants. So the Giants are asked to step forward the way the coach always has when things have been on the line for him.

“Crisis makes the man,” Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said. “Nobody remembers peacetime generals.”

There is so much more to Fassel than you see, or think you see. The fire-breathing Fassel, the one who made his playoff guarantee for the Giants after 11 games--Accorsi sees that Fassel all the time. So the quiet leader of Hal Sherbeck’s great Fullerton team has gotten louder over time. This season he finally made his noise in public, for everybody to see.

“He was always a leader,” Sherbeck said. “Not because of what he said. Because of who he was. His teammates believed in him and accepted him. Now his players believe in him and accept him. The things I always preached to him about family and teamwork, those were the words I heard coming out of the mouths of all his players after the Vikings game. I sat there watching on television and felt as if I were hearing an echo.”

Sherbeck’s words became Fassel’s. The Fullerton quarterback who won a junior-college championship now tries to win it all at Super Bowl XXXV. And if he does, well, then there will finally be a party neither Hal Sherbeck nor Jim Fassel wants to miss.