[irishjayhawk]

Spoiler!

A Dream In The Making

The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life, began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic.... He thought of the little things....

—SHERWOOD ANDERSON, Winesburg, Ohio

Scott Pioli has what looks like the biggest desk in America. The thing must be 14 feet long, with drawers large and deep enough to hold two or three defensive tackles. The desk is a thing of beauty—dark stained wood and a thick glass top—and it is enormous because of a misunderstanding. Pioli had looked at the blueprints for his new office in Kansas City, and he misread the proportions. He has never had a good mind for spatial relations. After taking over as the Chiefs' general manager nearly two years ago, he expected a normal-sized desk and instead got one bigger than the team bus.

He still feels sheepish about it, but he has grown used to the big desk. Pioli is 45 now and still has a bit of the look of the All--New England defensive tackle he was at Division II Central Connecticut State. He sits behind the big desk the NFL-recommended daily allowance of hours (18, often) and thinks of little things. All of his professional life, Pioli has longed to recapture something, something from his childhood, something difficult for him to explain. It is something he tries to explain now. He begins to talk about how, in building a team, you want—no, more than want, you need—to find people who will do the right thing most of the time.

Then he stops. No. That will sound wrong, sanctimonious, and that's not what he wants, not at all. "There are a million skeletons in that closet," he says, and he points at the closet past the end of his desk. He turns the conversation, starts to talk about how powerful a team can be, how much a team can mean, how much his own team....

And he stops again. No. His eyes redden, and he stares at the wall with the writing on it, and he knows that he is blowing it. Bruce Springsteen, Pioli's idol, sings about how he "lived a secret I shoulda kept to myself." Pioli feels words are diminishing what is in his mind. People will get the wrong idea. This is why he doesn't like talking about it.

He repeats some of the core words about building a team, hoping their power might fill the empty spaces. Reliability. Dependability. Accountability. Discipline. But these words have been used so often and so much in vain that they shrivel and fray and lose their color in the light of day. Say discipline, for instance, and people think of banning long hair and earrings and tattoos, of avoiding dumb penalties. "That's not at all what I'm talking about," Pioli says.

Lived a secret he shoulda kept to himself. Yes. It's better to say nothing. There are fewer misunderstandings that way. For most of the previous decade Pioli was the Patriots' general manager without being called that; his official title was vice president--player personnel, featuring a dash instead of the word of—like United States--America. Nobody could say precisely what the title meant, and it didn't matter. Led by coach Bill Belichick, inspired by quarterback Tom Brady and flanked by scores of people famous and unknown, New England and Pioli won three Super Bowls in four years. They lost another in February 2008 after going 18--0 during the regular season and playoffs. For all this, ESPN named Pioli NFL personnel man of the decade.

He stayed in the shadows. It is almost impossible to find a story about Scott Pioli that does not refer, usually at length, to his anonymity. The popular thought was that he remained in the background in deference to Belichick, his friend and mentor, and there is some truth in that. But then in January 2009, after turning down more jobs than he will ever reveal, he came with great fanfare to Kansas City to reshape a dysfunctional Chiefs team, and he moved right back into the shadows. At his first press conference he announced that he expected the coach, not the G.M., to be the public face of the franchise. He talked about how he had no interest in individual stardom—"I'm not here to sell jerseys"—and he rarely did interviews. When The Kansas City Star attempted to do a bigger story about him, where he comes from, what drives him, what he thinks about, Pioli called friends and family back home in Washingtonville, N.Y., and asked them not to reveal anything. The story that appeared in the paper was mostly about how Pioli wanted no story to appear in the paper.

This year the Chiefs have improved dramatically—on Sunday they beat the Seahawks 42--24 for their seventh win in 11 games, more victories than they had in 2008 and '09 combined—and Pioli has stayed in character. He has been distant, careful, emerging only every now and again, mostly to remind everyone that his team is still a work in progress. He sits behind that big desk, and he scouts college players, and he talks with agents, and he works over the salary cap, and he pushes his coaches, and he raises expectations, and he pierces egos, and every now and again he stares at his wall where the Winesburg, Ohio passage is written in calligraphy. The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life.

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What did that young man want?

"It's hard for me to put into words," Pioli says, "but I have these friends... ."

He has other friends in sports, of course. Pioli has spent most of his professional life seeking out anyone he thought had good ideas about how to put a team together. He's on something like a quest. He learned more about team-building from Belichick than anyone else. He has learned plenty more from his father-in-law, a pretty fair coach and G.M. named Bill Parcells. (Pioli and his wife, Dallas, have a daughter, Mia.) But those four friends are all about his age, and they have similar ideals. They have all had success—they have been part of four pennants, two World Series wins, three Super Bowl victories and four NBA championships. They talk about many things, as friends do, but mostly they talk about how you build teams, real teams, in this crazy era of big contracts and Nike commercials and a million other distractions.

"Obviously," Francona says, "our sports are different." Francona likes to bring Pioli into the Red Sox' clubhouse a few minutes before a game and watch him do a slow burn when he hears the loud music and sees how relaxed all the players look. Where's the passion? Where's the fury? What are those guys doing over there—dozing? Are you kidding me?

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"I have to tell him all the time, 'Scott, we play 162 of these things,'" Francona says. "It's different in football, where they play one game a week and [game day] is, like, sacred. We do this every day. And if we put too much emphasis on one game, if we have too many team meetings, if we get up for every game the way they do for football, it's not going to work."

In the end Francona feels sure there are more similarities than differences between baseball and football. He and Pioli had met briefly a few times but got to know each other on the night in November 2005 when both were inducted into the New England Chapter of the Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame. That night, Francona says, they talked about a million things and came to realize that they saw them precisely the same way. By the end of the night they were finishing each other's sentences.

"How often does it happen," Francona says, "when you are talking to someone and you realize that you know exactly where that person is coming from, and they know exactly where you're coming from?"

And so they have leaned on each other about what kind of players you need to make a team, what kind of leaders you need, how you handle the roughest situations. Just this year, when the Red Sox struggled in April and early May, Francona would often talk to Pioli about David Ortiz. Ortiz, of course, is a Boston icon, one of the best and most popular players in recent Red Sox history, a leader on the 2004 and '07 World Series winners. And Ortiz was utterly helpless at the plate. He was hitting .143 with one home run on May 1. He looked sapped and old at 34, and Francona felt utterly conflicted.

"What do you do when an icon is not playing well?" Pioli asks. "Terry and I talked about that a lot. That's one of the toughest questions we face. On the one hand the team always matters more than the individual. But on the other hand there are questions about loyalty. I mean, Big Papi, there you have a great player who has done so much for the team both on the field and off. And everyone is watching—the fans, the other players, the media. Everyone is watching."

Francona admits he wasn't sure if Ortiz would come out of it. "I think you just try to be aware," Francona says. "That's one of the things Scott and I talk about. You just try to be aware of everything, let it all in, and you don't make decisions with your emotions. I know David felt we weren't staying with him. And I know a lot of other people thought we were staying with him too much. It's all how you look at it."

In the end Francona mostly stayed with Ortiz—who went on to hit .286 with 31 homers and a .558 slugging percentage from May 1 through the rest of the season.

"It was difficult," Francona says. "I know Scott feels this way. You have to look at the big picture. Then you have to look at the small picture. Then you have to look how the small picture affects the big pictures. Let's face it. There are a lot of pictures."

WASHINGTONVILLE

Scott Pioli comes from the Village of Washingtonville—it's a place old enough that it's still called a village. It is about 60 miles north of Newark, a couple of miles off the New York Thruway, a blue-collar place of about 6,000 people filled with firefighters and police officers and union workers. It is the sort of town Bruce Springsteen sings happily and unhappily about, which is probably why Pioli has had a poster of Springsteen on his wall from his earliest memory.

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There are two experiences that stand out from Pioli's childhood in Washingtonville, two events that created this intense desire to build close-knit, rely-on-each-other, us-against-the-world football teams. One was in 1981: That was the year he played on a Washingtonville High team that went 10--0 and won the conference championship. Pioli loves that team. There were only 31 players on it. They weren't especially talented—not one would go on to play Division I—and they had no real history of success to draw on. Washingtonville had never been very good at football.

But those kids had grown up together, and they looked out for one another, and the only thing that mattered to any of them was winning. They gave up 53 points all season. "There were three other teams at least that were clearly, visibly, unquestionably more talented," says Pioli. "We outtoughed them. We outthought them. We outconditioned them."

And this is when Pioli started to think about what a team of intensely devoted and disciplined players could do. Well, actually, he started thinking about it a few years earlier. But the 1981 team crystallized the thought in his mind. Togetherness, real togetherness, could beat all the talent in the world.

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Edited for people who like screen-estate.