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AFM Magazine


Why They Return

When coaches leave, their love for the game doesn't.
by: Gene Frenette
Florida Times-Union
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George Seifert had what seemed like the perfect life. He did what he wanted when he wanted to do it, a leisurely existence that he earned as a retired football coach with the highest winning percentage in NFL history. Following the 1996 season, he left his beloved San Francisco 49ers — the team that once played home games at Kezar Stadium where he served as an usher in high school — after 17 years and embarked on a lifestyle that qualified him for a Robin Leach profile.

Having won two Super Bowl rings during eight seasons as head coach, Seifert decided to kick back. He traveled around the world with his wife, Linda, making stops in places such as Italy, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Chile. There were multiple getaways to Mexico. He went big-game hunting in the Rocky Mountains.

And closer to his second home in Bodega Bay, right on the northern California coastline, the sailboat was always ready to go at Seifert's whim.

"My sabbatical or whatever they call them. I had a great two years off," said Seifert. "I just felt like I had a little more life in me from the standpoint of work, not just having all the leisure time in the world."

So three weeks before his 59th birthday, Seifert took the bait that Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson dangled in front of him — a five-year, $12 million contract — and got back in the coaching waters; back to the career that he became fixated with since serving in 1964 as a graduate assistant at Utah, his alma mater.

"I don't think addiction is too strong a word at all," said Seifert, whose Panthers got off to a 1-3 start in the 1999 season. "I traveled the world, fished and hunted, did as I pleased. Yet there was a point where there was kind of an empty feeling. That was the structure, the camaraderie, interaction, pressure, problems and excitement (of football)."

Seifert couldn't get his football fix during a brief, undistinguished career as an NFL analyst on Fox. He hardly is alone among coaches who got out of the game, then tried television as a means to stay near their sport before returning to the sideline.

What is it about football that drives ultra-successful coaches such as Seifert, Mike Ditka, Lou Holtz, Bill Walsh, Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells to want to take on the challenge again? All of them had reached the pinnacle of their profession with a combined 10 Super Bowl titles and two national championships.

But when the opportunity arose to coach again—often in their twilight years and in dire rebuilding jobs—they jumped with little hesitation.

"People say, 'What do you miss?' " said Ditka, now in his third season with the New Orleans Saints after reaching legendary status in 11 seasons (1982-92) as head coach of the Chicago Bears, including a Super Bowl crown with the '85 team. "It's not the Sunday afternoons. It's the whole buildup to it.

"It's trying to get young men to believe in what you're doing, watching an organization grow and saying, 'Hey, we got a right as much as anybody else.' It's the chess games that go on in coaches' meetings. Yeah, you're on national television and you want to win, but that's just icing on the cake. The cake is all the stuff that people don't see."

Walsh ended his 10-year reign as head coach of the 49ers after the 1988 season by winning a third Super Bowl, leaving at age 57 to retreat to a comfortable existence as an analyst for NBC. Three years later, he shocked his peers by putting the headset back on in the Bay Area. Not in San Francisco, but at Stanford, the university where he served as head coach for two successful years (1977-78) before joining the 49ers. He lasted three years in his second go-around with the Cardinal before back surgery and the grind of recruiting forced him out.

"I couldn't stand up on the field any longer," said Walsh, who returned to the 49ers as president/general manager in January. "The recruiting began to wear and tear on me. I thought, 'Boy, this is going to be tougher than I thought.' "

Still, the man hailed as "The Genius" for turning the moribund 49ers into a dynasty has no regrets about returning to the college sideline. At Stanford, he went 10-3 with a Blockbuster Bowl win over Penn State his first season before slumping to 4-7 and 3-7-1. But Walsh felt it was imperative to fill the void that neither television nor walking the fairways ever could.

"Coaching is your arena," Walsh said. "It's what you've done and it's very difficult to walk away from that. There are so many stories of people who do retire, then the rest of their life they're relating to their golf score. There really isn't much in the way of substance. I felt like I still had a lot to give."

In some instances not even a questionable medical history can dissuade coaches from returning to the game they love. Ditka had a heart attack in 1988 and still takes one pill a day to regulate his heartbeat. Last year he had a rapid beat shocked back into place with a defibrillator.

Parcells also left the New York Giants after a Super Bowl XXV victory over the Buffalo Bills because of questionable health. But when doctors cleared him to return to the sideline, he resurfaced two years later with the New England Patriots.

"You are what you are. Bill Parcells is a football coach, said Parcells upon his return. "I missed the locker room. I missed practice. I don't expect anyone who's never experienced that to understand. It's a very special thing being part of a team. I loved it when I had it and missed it when I didn't, and now I'm on my way to get it back.

"This is my last deal, no doubt about that. After that, I'm John Wayne."

Parcells' forecast proved inaccurate. In 1997, after taking the Patriots to the Super Bowl, he left because he wanted more of a say in personnel matters. Parcells didn't ride off into the sunset as promised. Two weeks later, he became head coach of the New York Jets.

Like so many of his colleagues, the addiction had grown even stronger with time.

Cock-a-doodle-Lou

Lou Holtz at South Carolina? No one thought it possible.

He had spent 11 seasons at Notre Dame, reaching icon status with his quick wit and rebuilding what Gerry Faust had torn asunder. The idea of coaching a Gamecocks' program that has won only one bowl game in 106 years seemed preposterous. Maybe it's an option if you're 40 and it's your first head coaching job, but not at 62 after a lifetime of rebuilding at places like William & Mary, North Carolina State, Arkansas and Minnesota.

And as Holtz himself said: "It had been my dream to coach at Notre Dame. Where do you go from there except heaven?"

South Carolina was in football hell, coming off a 1-10 record last season. It's also handcuffed by being in the same Southeastern Conference division as Florida, Tennessee and Georgia, all schools with more fertile recruiting bases. Three times Holtz turned down offers from USC athletic director Mike McGee — who coached against Holtz when he was at Duke and Holtz at N.C. State (1972-75) — because his wife, Beth, still was recovering from Stage 4 throat cancer.

Beth Holtz was diagnosed a few months after her husband left Notre Dame. Her survival rate was "10 percent," said Lou, and the odds of him taking the South Carolina job seemed less than that.

Then came a double miracle. Beth, after enduring 11 and a-half hours of surgery, 83 radiation treatments and a 40-pound weight loss, gradually moved from cancer victim to cancer survivor. She has regained about 20 pounds and, as her husband soon discovered, is as feisty as ever. Last December, when Lou called his wife from a restaurant in Nashville, she all but ordered him to accept South Carolina's offer.

"She wants me to be happy and she felt this is what I wanted to do deep down inside," Holtz said. "But when she told me to take it, I thought, 'What does she know that I don't know? Does she want me not to be left without a second life?' I know I have to do something if I don't have her. I think she just understood I wanted to be happy and stay productive. I like challenges. But South Carolina knows if she starts to have difficulty with her health again, I'll be gone."

In the meantime, can-do-Lou, who was given a $650,000-a-year contract, is immersing himself in a job that could take him beyond age 65 to rebuild. The Gamecocks got off to an 0-6 start and scored only 32 points in the process.

USC has been a coaching graveyard in the past. So is Holtz concerned that this yearning for one last challenge might end up tarnishing his legacy?

"Yeah, it entered my mind," he says. "We prayed about that. But I think God is more interested in what we do with our talents than how we'll be remembered (in the won-loss column).

"If you have all this energy and think you can help somebody and they think you can help them, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: 'Can I do it?' Then you have to ask your wife the same thing. Next thing you know, here we are."

Where Holtz is at is maybe the biggest challenge in a coaching career that had produced 216 victories going into the '99 season, fourth highest among active Division I-A coaches. Holtz conceded he took the job only because family circumstances fell into place.

South Carolina is close enough to their Orlando home, allowing Beth to monitor her recovery with the same cancer doctors. Holtz also has seven assistants who have worked with him before, including son Skip, who was hired as the offensive coordinator and whom many presume will be Lou's successor if Holtz can get the Gamecocks turned around.

"What you do in coaching if you're successful, you must build a family mentality with a military discipline," Holtz says. "The only friends you have when things don't go well are the people you sleep with, cry with, eat with, bleed with and pray with. Unless you're around that family atmosphere, you can't understand that."

Holtz is off to a shaky start with this latest rebuilding venture. It might cause other coaches to second-guess the choice. But then he scans three letters on his desk in mid-September from former players Arkansas' Tom Jones, N.C. State's Louie Alcamo and Notre Dame's Tracy Graham — who embraced his return to coaching. And suddenly, any regret is gone. Holtz knows he did the right thing.

"These letters just happen to be on my desk, but I do believe in my heart, and I'm not being naive, you try to change people's lives," he says. "Coaching is no different than marriage or life. You can have an impact on people in a positive way. That's part of what gets you in and brings you back.

"You spend all your life putting all those hours in and your clock gets used to it. If you're not productive as a person, then you truly digress. You become cyncial and just sort of waste away. I could have devoted myself to other endeavors like motivational speaking and gotten the same thing. South Carolina made it seem like I was their guy to solve it and get things turned around."

Feeding the fire

If any coach seems to be taking undue risks with his legacy, it's Seifert. He compiled a 108-35 record (.755) in San Francisco and would have remained with the NFL's top winning percentage had he stayed retired. Now anything less than a 9-7 record this season with the rebuilding Panthers would drop him below Vince Lombardi and John Madden on that winning percentage chart.

But his place in NFL history wasn't as big a concern to Seifert as reinvigorating himself in a different environment. In San Francisco, his success was often accompanied by the asterisk that Walsh left him a machine with which any coach could have won. Starting over in Carolina gives him a chance not only to get back in the game but also prove the skeptics wrong.

"Being a 49er was part of my blood," Seifert said. "But at the same time, I had been there 17 years and it kind of had run its course. I felt it was absolutely the right time for me to leave San Francisco."

During his two year layoff, it became apparent to Seifert that the fire to coach again was building back inside him. It began to gnaw at him during last year's playoffs, so much so that his wife pleaded with him to get back on the sideline. He laughed when asked if Linda tried to persuade him to stay retired.

"No, actually is was, 'Would you please go to work? Would you please get out of here?' " said Seifert. "There was this restless beast roaming through her domain. It was time for him to go off and do something instead of trying to create problems around the house just so he'd have something to do."

Unlike Johnson—who went back to the NFL after winning two Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys because it had been a long-time dream to coach the Miami Dolphins—Seifert and Ditka returned to teams in need of overhauls.

The Panthers had built a winning franchise with older players under Dom Capers, now the Jacksonville Jaguars' defensive coordinator. But it crumbled last season when age and an unstable quarterback, Kerry Collins, began to surface. It could take Seifert well beyond this year to correct the damage and change mindsets.

His Carolina debut against Ditka's Saints was less than auspicious. The Panthers lost 19-10. That was followed by a 22-20 loss to Jacksonville in which the Panthers failed on a two-point conversion in the closing seconds.

"I don't enjoy the frustration of losing games. That part is something that tears at you," Seifert said. "If it goes on for a period of time, it could be very disruptive. But everything else, in some ways, has been more fun than it was before when I was with San Francisco. This is totally new, and therefore, totally exhilarating."

Ditka, who turned 60 on October 18, wasn't sure he really wanted to get back into coaching. He held his dream job for more than a decade. And after his abrupt firing by the Bears in 1992, Ditka seemed to find a niche in the NBC studio.

Plus, when NFL openings surfaced, it seemed teams were less interested in hiring "Da Coach" either because of his legendary temper or because younger coaches were more appealing.

And for the longest time, "Iron Mike" was content behind the mike. He didn't squirm to get back on the sidelines until the tag team of Saints' owner Tom Benson and President Bill Kuharich got Ditka's heart pumping again about coaching. He almost quit in 1997 after the team's listless performance in a 20-3 loss to the Atlanta Falcons, publicly saying he would resign after the season.

"I'm probably the wrong guy for this job," an emotional Ditka said. "I'm the problem. I probably should have stayed out."

Those sentiments didn't last long. Ditka signed a five-year contract extension in August 1998 that should keep him in New Orleans through the 2002 season. Somehow Ditka got the fire back.

"When I took the Bears' job, I didn't know what to expect because I had only been an assistant coach," said Ditka. "I had all that youthful exuberance. When you first get that, it's overwhelming. That was my lifetime ambition to coach the Bears. That was the city I loved, the team I played for. Now I'm doing what I'm doing because I want to be as successful as I was before.

"I had no intention of getting back in coaching. I only did it because I got involved with an organization and an owner I liked."

Ditka also did it because there seems to be a universal truth about football coaches: They need that game-day fix. And it's not the same in the broadcast booth as it is on the field.

"It's fine to go play golf every day, but it's more important to have something that you set your sights on and have a goal," said Ditka. "Coaching football is in my blood."

That's why older coaches who have been on top have a hard time staying retired. The game has a way of calling them back.






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