yeah, LT and Parcells are kind of an adorable pair.
ALSO, b4 ilnfl went down I was going to make an "I Love Bill Curry" thread. there's something about the way he talks that is really captivating.
OTM. he has that great accent, but he also seems to be deeply thoughtful and almost pained about everything he says. I dunno, the NFL has become so self-congratulatory about race matters, it was really moving to hear him dissect the sources of his own racism and his discomfort with it. I thought it was a really brave interview. I luv him now.
here's the Ryan article. it's sad:
Each morning at 5 a.m., Buddy Ryan's day begins in solitude, mucking out the stalls of his horses. He has 17 of them, and three mares in particular are named for milestones in his colorful and sometimes cantankerous lifetime.
There's FortySixBlitz, named for the 46 defense that Ryan conjured as a defensive coordinator, and which the 1985 Chicago Bears executed in brutal and brilliant fashion during a championship season. There's FiredForWinning, a reminder of how his head-coaching career with the Philadelphia Eagles came to an end in 1990 despite a 43-38-1 record and three consecutive playoff appearances.
But his favorite is Bayside Girl, named for his wife of 36 years, Joanie. Ryan met her in Queens in 1968, after Weeb Ewbank brought him to the Jets as an assistant. She was a high-strung New Yorker; he was a steel-willed Okie.
When they retired here in 1995, the Ryans embraced the simple life and tried to breed a Kentucky Derby champion. On Sundays, they watched N.F.L games, a league Buddy spent 34 years in, paying special attention to the teams coached by his twin sons, Rex and Rob, the defensive coordinators at Baltimore and Oakland.
Unlike football, life cannot always be neatly schemed. In 2003, Buddy moved Joanie to an assisted-living home after her Alzheimer's disease, diagnosed two years earlier, finally made it impossible for him to care for her alone.
On Sunday, Ryan will watch the Bears play in the Super Bowl for the first time in 21 years, against the Indianapolis Colts, but it will not be the most important thing he will do that day. That will be attending Mass with his wife in the morning, having lunch with her and her favorite priest, and sitting with her for the afternoon.
''It's our date,'' said Ryan, 73. ''Sometimes, she recognizes me. Sometimes, she thinks I'm her father, which is O.K., too.''
When Ryan eventually settles into his recliner at his home on a golf course, he will watch two teams with old friends on each sideline play a game that he loves. He will watch how the Bears' defensive coordinator, Ron Rivera, a backup linebacker when Ryan was Chicago's defensive coordinator, handles the Colts' offense designed by Tom Moore, who coached with Ryan under Bud Grant in Minnesota.
''I miss the camaraderie of the locker room, and the strategy, but I got more than enough to keep me busy,'' Ryan said. ''When I hit the pillow each night, I sleep good. I'm one of those people who need a lot of turmoil in my life so I can stay focused.''
Ryan knows the image of him as a gentleman farmer and caring family man are at odds with the nasty public one assigned to him in the 1980s and 1990s when his Bears and Eagles defenses were smashing through the N.F.L. He acknowledged that he encouraged the latter.
The 46 defense put as many as 10 people on the line of scrimmage and blitzed mercilessly, Ryan said, so ''we could find out who the second-string quarterback was.'' He allegedly offered bounties for injuring quarterbacks and even kickers. His most famous misdeed was captured on national television during the 1993 season, when Ryan was the defensive coordinator for the Houston Oilers. Upset with the offensive play calling of Kevin Gilbride -- now the Giants' offensive coordinator -- Ryan hauled off and slugged his fellow coach.
''I remember thinking two things,'' said Rex Ryan, 44, who was a college assistant watching on television at the time. ''That these heated moments happen more often than you think, and that Dad's reputation for being out of control and Neanderthal was sealed. He'd never get another head-coaching job, and I'd never get a job at all in the N.F.L.''
In 1994, however, Buddy Ryan was named the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, and he gave Rex and Rob their first N.F.L. jobs, as defensive assistants. Even though they had been ball boys on every N.F.L. team he had coached, Ryan had tried to steer them away from the profession.
When Rex and Rob turned down a management-training program in the food services industry, Buddy checked all three of them into a hotel in southwestern Oklahoma, secured an easel and over two days taught them every nuance of the 46 defense.
''Then I told them to go work their way up the college ranks so they could learn their A B C's of coaching,'' Ryan said.
When Arizona went 8-8 in Buddy's first season, the Ryans looked like geniuses. When they went 4-12 the following year, the whole staff was fired. While Buddy Ryan was out of football for good, his sons were merely beginning their N.F.L. careers.
So Buddy and Joanie moved to the 176-acre farm they had bought in 1976 in nearby Lawrenceburg. When Joanie went into the assisted-living home two years ago, Ryan sold the farm, bought a home here and 80 acres 10 miles away in Bagdad, Ky.
His former players know where he is: They call frequently, and a few have even visited.
''It is remarkable how much they love Buddy,'' said Debbie Ellis, a friend who owns the farm where Ryan boards his horses. ''You see these big, grown men giving him a hug and a kiss on the neck.''
Among them are Gary Fencik, a safety and captain of the 1985 Bears. Ryan still calls Fencik by his number, 45, just as he calls the Hall of Famers Mike Singletary and Dan Hampton by their nicknames, Samurai and Big Rook. It was Fencik who helped write a letter to George Halas, the Bears' owner, on behalf of the defense urging that Ryan be retained when it became clear that Coach Neill Armstrong would be fired after the 1981 season.
''He was tough, and you had to earn his respect,'' Fencik said of Ryan in a telephone interview. ''Once you did, Buddy would do anything for you. He was consistent, too. On Mondays when we watched film, if you had a bad game, you were glad the lights were off. It didn't matter who it was -- he'd rip you.
''His genius as a coach beyond the scheming was that he trusted his players, and he'd give us enough discretion to gamble on things. It gave us ownership in the system and inspired great loyalty.''
Halas was moved enough to make a rare appearance at practice to guarantee that Ryan and his defensive staff would remain in place. He then hired Mike Ditka as the Bears' coach.
Ditka and Ryan were an arranged marriage. They alternately groused and ignored each other, and during the Bears' championship season they nearly came to blows at halftime of a game against Miami -- Chicago's only loss that season. Still, after pasting New England, 46-10, in Super Bowl XX in New Orleans, Ditka and Ryan were hoisted onto the shoulders of their players and carried onto the field.
Ryan grinned mischievously when asked about Ditka.
''I don't talk to him now,'' Ryan said. ''I never talked to him when we coached together.''
Instead, Ryan talks to his former players, or his boys, whenever he wants to remember the joys and pressures of coaching in the N.F.L.
He talks to Joanie Ryan about how the simple life they sought is not always so simple. About how last week, they lost a foal on the same day one of their fillies won a race at Turfway Park. About how hard it is, despite some stakes wins, to breed a Derby champion. About the $10,000 the soybean crop brought in, and how he's now thinking of planting corn.
About how much he misses his Bayside Girl.
''I don't know how much she understands,'' Ryan said, ''but I tell her everything anyway.''
― horseshoe (horseshoe), Monday, 12 February 2007 08:08 (seventeen years ago) link