Hammock Parties
08-27-2006, 01:31 AM
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/football/nfl/kansas_city_chiefs/15347994.htm
By JOE POSNANSKI
The Kansas City Star
SEASIDE, Calif. | Follow closely because the story moves fast, fast and furious, a bit like Herman Edwards driving his Land Rover through Seaside, his hometown. He takes the turns hard, drifts through the stop signs, and when the Land Rover reaches the hills, he mashes his right foot down, and the car surges upward fast enough to make your ears pop. Herm is getting out of Seaside fast. It’s been that way all his life.
“I knew I had to get out of here,” he says.
That one thought — get out — filled his days and nights.
All the kids in Seaside watched television, of course, but they watched for laughs and thrills. For Herm Edwards, television was an instructional video. He watched the way cowboys walked, the way football players hit, the way rebels talked. He mostly watched Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world. Herm copied the way Ali preached, the way he rhymed, the way he smiled, the way he mugged for the camera, the way he opened his mouth wide just before telling Howard Cosell that he was the greatest of all time. Herm copied everything except for the punching.
See, it wasn’t the violence that captivated Herman Edwards. It was the escape.
“I had to be famous, too,” Herman Edwards says. “I had to travel the world. I told everybody, ‘You watch, that’s going to be me on television. You watch. I’m going to be like Muhammad Ali.’ They laughed at me. But I knew. I knew. I was going places.”
Then, Edwards points out the window at deer that rush by. He says: “Look at that! Beautiful! You have to slow down to enjoy the scenery sometimes.” The needle on the speedometer points to 85 mph.
•••
KANSAS CITY | Herman Edwards, first-year head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, screams in the rain. Nobody else seems to know exactly why the Chiefs are practicing in the rain. Players slip and slosh in the mud. Coaches try to look stern while water drips from their caps. It’s May. It’s minicamp. Real football will not begin for four months.
Edwards screams that this is football weather. It would be a sin to go inside on a day like this, he shouts. A sin! Edwards has been often compared to a preacher, and not always as a compliment. A couple of months earlier, people in Kansas City voted down a resolution to build a rolling roof to cover Arrowhead Stadium. The reasons were complicated, but simple too — nobody really wants indoor football.
“You’re not getting a roof, boys,” Herm Edwards yells at the players in the rain. “No, sir. No roof. You’re going to have to play the game outdoors, the way God intended. You’re going to have to play in the rain and the snow and the wind. You better get ready for it, because there are no excuses in football. No excuses!”
•••
MONTEREY, Calif. | The bus ride from Seaside to Monterey was 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes — longer still on the way home — and young Herm Edwards stared out the window of the school bus every day. He called the bus his 52-passenger limo. He stared out the window and watched the houses grow larger and farther apart, watched the cars grow longer and shinier. Even the Pacific Ocean seemed bluer in Monterey.
Herm wore an afro then that would rise 12 inches above his eyes, and he talked back to anyone who wasn’t his father. It was the 1960s. You bucked authority. Like Ali did. Herm talked back especially to his high school football coach. Why are we running this drill? Why do we have to do that? The first time Monterey High coach Dan Albert noticed Edwards, it was because Herm was in the back of the room bragging to everyone how he was going to make the varsity. He was a skinny 10th-grade receiver then.
“What’s your name?” Albert said with all the harshness he could muster.
And Herm Edwards said: “Call me Mr. Bob.” This was after Bullet Bob Hayes, the fastest receiver in the NFL and Herm’s football hero. He took Bullet Bob’s number, 22, and he told Dan Albert to get ready because he was going to catch more passes than anyone who ever lived in Monterey.
Albert smiled. He was charmed by the kid. But there was something Herm didn’t realize: Monterey didn’t throw the ball. Albert didn’t care for the forward pass — he figured only three things could happen when you threw the ball, and he didn’t much like any of them. Young Herm Edwards constantly jabbered about wanting more passes, let’s throw the ball, are we gonna throw the ball, why don’t we throw the ball more, Coach?
“We play the game to win,” Albert told young Herm, who stewed and complained and finally determined that if he couldn’t catch the ball on offense, he would get his thrills on defense. In three years, he intercepted 48 balls — 22 in one season — which is absurd if you think about it. Dan Albert, now the mayor of Monterey, remembers that whenever an opposing quarterback dropped back to throw, the Monterey offensive guys would stir on the sideline and start putting on their helmets.
“It was amazing,” Edwards says as he looks at his old high school. “I mean, I don’t want to brag, but any time somebody threw a pass — any time — I was there to pick it off. I mean every time. I would read the quarterback’s eyes or I would jump a receiver’s route. But sometimes, man, this is hard to explain … sometimes, I could just sense where the ball was going. I could see the play before it happened. I can’t explain it. I just had to get the ball. That ball was my ticket out.”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Herman Edwards likes cocky rookies. He can’t help it. All young players at camp drown: The game moves too fast, the playbook is thicker than Will Shakespeare’s collected works, the coaches throw out more conflicting ideas than a weekend getaway at James Carville and Mary Matalin’s house. Nobody keeps up, not at first. Some players go into a shell. Edwards likes the ones who talk loud and brash.
“You gotta believe in yourself,” he says. “That was something I learned a long time ago. There were always people telling me I couldn’t do something. Always. I had to decide for myself that they were wrong, I was right, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.”
Herm showed up for training camp in Philadelphia in 1977. He was not drafted, even though the NFL draft went 12 rounds then. Edwards had played for three colleges — he transferred out of Cal twice — and though he led all three schools in interceptions, pro scouts noticed something: He would not show up to be timed.
“I never believed in stopwatches,” Herm says with a wink. There was a reason he didn’t want to be timed. Carl Peterson, then a coach for the Eagles, had known Edwards since high school and got him to run the 40-yard dash for the clock. Then Peterson couldn’t get him to stop.
“What was that?” Edwards asked Peterson.
“I got you at 4.62.”
“Let me run it again.”
“You’ve run it three times. That’s your time, Herm.”
“I’m faster than that.”
He was not faster than that. But he knew: A cornerback who runs the 40 in 4.62 might as well get a day job. So he avoided the stopwatches. Eagles coach Dick Vermeil would not draft him, but he did invite Edwards to camp. Herm Edwards announced his presence.
“I came here to start at cornerback, Coach,” Edwards remembers telling Vermeil. “I didn’t come here to play special teams. If you’re not going to start me, you need to cut me.”
Peterson does not remember Edwards being quite that brassy, but he does recall Edwards telling the coaches that he expected to start, which was a ridiculous thing for a slow, undrafted, three-time-college transfer to say.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a player who was so sure,” Peterson says.
“I wasn’t that sure,” Edwards says. “But man, I could talk.”
Edwards did start his first game. He started every game for 10 years after that. He was slow — and he got beat some — but he also picked off 33 passes, third-most in Philadelphia Eagles history. And he was in the right place for the Miracle at the Meadowlands, when he returned a fumble for a touchdown in the final seconds and beat the Giants. It’s one of the most famous plays in NFL history.
“What would you do if some undrafted player told you to start him or cut him?” Edwards is asked. He smiles.
“I’d say, ‘Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be,’ ” Edwards says. “Then I’d watch him close. I love it when they talk. But they better back it up. Because if they don’t back it up, I’ll run them out of here so fast their heads will spin.”
•••
NEW YORK | People all around professional football don’t appreciate just how consistently bad the New York Jets have been through the years. Since 1970, the Jets have won their division exactly twice. They have had 11 seasons in that time with four wins or fewer. Even the dreadful St. Louis/Arizona Cardinals can’t match that.
Here in New York, where the memory of Joe Namath waving his index finger after Super Bowl III still resonates, you would find it hard to convince people that Herman Edwards coached more Jets playoff games than any other coach in team history.
He did. Then, maybe people in New York didn’t like the way Herm Edwards’ Jets reached the playoffs. Boring. Scary. They made the playoffs the first time in 2001 by beating Oakland on a long field goal. They made it the second time after starting the season 1-4.
And then the third time, oh man, everybody still remembers that 2004 team. Edwards pulled out Dan Albert’s old playbook. The Jets threw the ball fewer than any team except the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers and Jets then met in the playoffs for a game so conservative, the players should have worn ties and cuff links. The score was tied late, and the Jets had two glorious chances to win. But Herm refused to throw, the Jets settled for two long field-goal attempts, and Doug Brien missed them both.
Pittsburgh won in overtime, and all over the city people cursed Edwards because nothing feels worse in pro football, absolutely nothing, than losing because of conservative coaching.
“I don’t think Herm ever got the credit he deserved in this town,” former Jets general manager Terry Bradway says. “He won games. He won playoff games. The only years he didn’t win, it was because our quarterback got hurt. Say what you want: Herm knew how to win games.”
The question: How did a bold, mouthy kid who patterned himself after Muhammad Ali and Bullet Bob Hayes turn into Captain Conservative? When he played ball at San Diego State, they called him “Herm the Germ” and “Bat News Edwards,” and he never shut up, never. He put Vaseline on his shoes so they sparkled under the lights. He would get into receivers’ grills and say to them, “You’re going to beat me? How are you going to do that when I’m the best corner on the planet?” This is the man having his quarterback take a knee late in the game?
Maybe it comes back to his father, Herman Edwards Sr., an army man, a yes-sir-no-sir man, the biggest force in young Herm’s life. He worked long hours, traveled often and died young, so his words pulsate through Herm Edwards’ mind. Sweep the corners. Don’t look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up. Don’t worry about garbage in other people’s yards. Do the right thing when nobody’s watching. These were the things that made sense to Edwards when he became head football coach in America’s biggest city.
And there it occurred to Herm Edwards that maybe he wasn’t really a rebel.
“Did your team quit?” a New York reporter asked him during the 2002 season. Edwards snapped.
“This is what the greatest thing about sports is: You play to win the game,” he shouted. “Hello? YOU PLAY TO WIN THE GAME!”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Cornerback Ty Law has decided it’s time to wind up Herman Edwards. Why not? It’s training camp. The Chiefs are smack in the middle of the aching two-a-day monotony. “Hey, Coach,” Law says, “Why didn’t you work out today?”
“What are you talking about?” Edwards asks.
“I heard you didn’t work out today.”
Herm Edwards’s early-morning workouts are no joking matter. He gets to the weight room at 4 a.m., no later than 5, and he puts in his hour of work come rain, come shine, come blizzard, come tornado. Once, when he coached the Jets, they changed the number combination on the gates without telling him. Edwards stewed in his car for a few minutes and then, well, he climbed the fence. He wasn’t missing his workout.
“I was here at 5 a.m. working out,” Edwards says. Law shakes his head.
“That’s not what I heard,” Law says. He can barely stifle a smile. He knows it’s coming. And then, it comes.
“Is that right?” Herm asks. “That’s not what you heard, huh? NOT WHAT YOU HEARD? Well, it just so happens I was here at 5 a.m., working out, while you were sitting in your little bed. Hear me? I was in here, working, while you were in your LITTLE BED, clutching your LITTLE SHEETS, holding your TEDDY BEAR, dreaming about whatever it is you DREAM about, and hey (he yells to a coach), what time was I in here this morning? Huh? Tell this fool right here, WHAT TIME was I … that’s right, 5 a.m., while you were sleeping in DREAMLAND, while you were …”
He goes on for a while longer, and Ty Law laughs and laughs.
•••
KANSAS CITY | A man walks up to Herman Edwards and asks him if he’s going to scale back the offense. In four years, the Chiefs have scored more points than any other team in the NFL. In those four years, they made the playoffs once, and lost that game.
“I’m not stupid,” Edwards says. “I’m not going to fool with what works.”
“So the offense will stay the same?”
“I’m not stupid,” Edwards says. “Let me ask you something: How many Super Bowls did that offense win? Zero. Right? Zero. We’re going to be a team. We don’t have an offense and a defense. You have to get used to that. We have a team.”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Herman Edwards runs over and personally leads the Chiefs defense through the two-deep defensive drills … he loves the two-deep defense. He calls it the simplest defense on earth. That’s the defense he coached with Tony Dungy in Tampa Bay. When it was right, whew, nobody moved the ball, defensive tackles plowed over guards, linebackers crushed running backs, defensive ends blindsided quarterbacks, safeties picked off passes and broke receivers in two.
Then again, when the two-deep isn’t right, quarterbacks pick it clean.
“Watch my head, you hear me, watch my head,” Edwards yells as he drops back to throw. It’s the quarterback’s head that tells defensive players where they’re supposed to be. Of course, some quarterbacks purposely look the wrong way to fool defenders, and some defenders purposely go to the wrong place to bait quarterbacks — that’s the game within the game — but for now he just wants them to get the basics.
“Watch my eyes,” he shouts. “Simplest defense in the world, you hear?”
The drill ends as quickly as it begins. Drills move fast in River Falls. Practices go 90 minutes except when they go just 75 minutes. Classroom sessions, by Herm decree, are not allowed to go more than 20 minutes at a time. Scrimmages move; the faster the team runs the plays, the quicker the scrimmages end. Dick Vermeil’s practices were 15-round heavyweight fights with plenty of body punches. Edwards’ practices are Oliver Stone movies — a blur of shouts, thuds, air horns and then it’s over.
“I was a player,” Edwards says. “I know what these guys want. I know what they need. I’m not trying to make robots. I’m making football players. I want guys who, when they get on the field, will play football, they will do what the situation demands, they will rise to the occasion. Because once the game starts, I can’t do it for them. I can’t control them like some video game. I need them to play. That’s the kind of practices we run.”
•••
SEASIDE, Calif. | Herman Edwards sits in his mother’s living room, and he’s surrounded by … Herman Edwards. Here’s a photograph of Herm and Chad Pennington standing in front of the New York skyline. There’s a painting of Edwards breaking up a pass intended for Jerry Rice (signed by Rice with the inscription: “One of the few I didn’t catch”). There are two different Herman Edwards bobblehead dolls, there’s Herm on the cover of Sports Illustrated as one of sports’ most influential minorities, there’s another painting of Edwards in his playing days.
“What do you think of my Buby?” Edwards’ mother, Martha, asks. Her Buby — her German term of affection for Herm — has tried to buy a new house for Martha, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving this house. It was the first house she and Herman Sr. ever bought. That was 1961. At the time, the neighbors sent a petition demanding the house be sold to someone else. They did not want a black Army man and a white German woman living on their street. In time, the neighbors softened, and in more time they all moved on or died. Martha is the only one left. She won’t leave. Herman Sr. gave his son discipline. Martha gave him passion.
So Herm returns at least once a year. He puts on a free football camp. He visits old friends. And, mostly, he drives. After a moment or two in the living room shrine, Herm Edwards bolts to his feet. He says, “Let’s go.”
“Where you going, Buby?”
“There’s something I need to do.”
Herm gets in the car, and he drives fast and furious through Seaside. He talks about how beautiful it is there next to the ocean, but he does not slow down to look. He talks about how crazy it is, him becoming a football coach.
“You should have seen me when I was young,” he says. “I was the craziest kid you ever saw. I’d say stuff you wouldn’t believe. I told them all I’d make it big. I wonder how I knew.”
He smiles and seems to relax as his Land Rover rushes up the hills, into the sunset. The funny thing is, he isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t really have anything to do, except get away.
By JOE POSNANSKI
The Kansas City Star
SEASIDE, Calif. | Follow closely because the story moves fast, fast and furious, a bit like Herman Edwards driving his Land Rover through Seaside, his hometown. He takes the turns hard, drifts through the stop signs, and when the Land Rover reaches the hills, he mashes his right foot down, and the car surges upward fast enough to make your ears pop. Herm is getting out of Seaside fast. It’s been that way all his life.
“I knew I had to get out of here,” he says.
That one thought — get out — filled his days and nights.
All the kids in Seaside watched television, of course, but they watched for laughs and thrills. For Herm Edwards, television was an instructional video. He watched the way cowboys walked, the way football players hit, the way rebels talked. He mostly watched Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world. Herm copied the way Ali preached, the way he rhymed, the way he smiled, the way he mugged for the camera, the way he opened his mouth wide just before telling Howard Cosell that he was the greatest of all time. Herm copied everything except for the punching.
See, it wasn’t the violence that captivated Herman Edwards. It was the escape.
“I had to be famous, too,” Herman Edwards says. “I had to travel the world. I told everybody, ‘You watch, that’s going to be me on television. You watch. I’m going to be like Muhammad Ali.’ They laughed at me. But I knew. I knew. I was going places.”
Then, Edwards points out the window at deer that rush by. He says: “Look at that! Beautiful! You have to slow down to enjoy the scenery sometimes.” The needle on the speedometer points to 85 mph.
•••
KANSAS CITY | Herman Edwards, first-year head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, screams in the rain. Nobody else seems to know exactly why the Chiefs are practicing in the rain. Players slip and slosh in the mud. Coaches try to look stern while water drips from their caps. It’s May. It’s minicamp. Real football will not begin for four months.
Edwards screams that this is football weather. It would be a sin to go inside on a day like this, he shouts. A sin! Edwards has been often compared to a preacher, and not always as a compliment. A couple of months earlier, people in Kansas City voted down a resolution to build a rolling roof to cover Arrowhead Stadium. The reasons were complicated, but simple too — nobody really wants indoor football.
“You’re not getting a roof, boys,” Herm Edwards yells at the players in the rain. “No, sir. No roof. You’re going to have to play the game outdoors, the way God intended. You’re going to have to play in the rain and the snow and the wind. You better get ready for it, because there are no excuses in football. No excuses!”
•••
MONTEREY, Calif. | The bus ride from Seaside to Monterey was 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes — longer still on the way home — and young Herm Edwards stared out the window of the school bus every day. He called the bus his 52-passenger limo. He stared out the window and watched the houses grow larger and farther apart, watched the cars grow longer and shinier. Even the Pacific Ocean seemed bluer in Monterey.
Herm wore an afro then that would rise 12 inches above his eyes, and he talked back to anyone who wasn’t his father. It was the 1960s. You bucked authority. Like Ali did. Herm talked back especially to his high school football coach. Why are we running this drill? Why do we have to do that? The first time Monterey High coach Dan Albert noticed Edwards, it was because Herm was in the back of the room bragging to everyone how he was going to make the varsity. He was a skinny 10th-grade receiver then.
“What’s your name?” Albert said with all the harshness he could muster.
And Herm Edwards said: “Call me Mr. Bob.” This was after Bullet Bob Hayes, the fastest receiver in the NFL and Herm’s football hero. He took Bullet Bob’s number, 22, and he told Dan Albert to get ready because he was going to catch more passes than anyone who ever lived in Monterey.
Albert smiled. He was charmed by the kid. But there was something Herm didn’t realize: Monterey didn’t throw the ball. Albert didn’t care for the forward pass — he figured only three things could happen when you threw the ball, and he didn’t much like any of them. Young Herm Edwards constantly jabbered about wanting more passes, let’s throw the ball, are we gonna throw the ball, why don’t we throw the ball more, Coach?
“We play the game to win,” Albert told young Herm, who stewed and complained and finally determined that if he couldn’t catch the ball on offense, he would get his thrills on defense. In three years, he intercepted 48 balls — 22 in one season — which is absurd if you think about it. Dan Albert, now the mayor of Monterey, remembers that whenever an opposing quarterback dropped back to throw, the Monterey offensive guys would stir on the sideline and start putting on their helmets.
“It was amazing,” Edwards says as he looks at his old high school. “I mean, I don’t want to brag, but any time somebody threw a pass — any time — I was there to pick it off. I mean every time. I would read the quarterback’s eyes or I would jump a receiver’s route. But sometimes, man, this is hard to explain … sometimes, I could just sense where the ball was going. I could see the play before it happened. I can’t explain it. I just had to get the ball. That ball was my ticket out.”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Herman Edwards likes cocky rookies. He can’t help it. All young players at camp drown: The game moves too fast, the playbook is thicker than Will Shakespeare’s collected works, the coaches throw out more conflicting ideas than a weekend getaway at James Carville and Mary Matalin’s house. Nobody keeps up, not at first. Some players go into a shell. Edwards likes the ones who talk loud and brash.
“You gotta believe in yourself,” he says. “That was something I learned a long time ago. There were always people telling me I couldn’t do something. Always. I had to decide for myself that they were wrong, I was right, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.”
Herm showed up for training camp in Philadelphia in 1977. He was not drafted, even though the NFL draft went 12 rounds then. Edwards had played for three colleges — he transferred out of Cal twice — and though he led all three schools in interceptions, pro scouts noticed something: He would not show up to be timed.
“I never believed in stopwatches,” Herm says with a wink. There was a reason he didn’t want to be timed. Carl Peterson, then a coach for the Eagles, had known Edwards since high school and got him to run the 40-yard dash for the clock. Then Peterson couldn’t get him to stop.
“What was that?” Edwards asked Peterson.
“I got you at 4.62.”
“Let me run it again.”
“You’ve run it three times. That’s your time, Herm.”
“I’m faster than that.”
He was not faster than that. But he knew: A cornerback who runs the 40 in 4.62 might as well get a day job. So he avoided the stopwatches. Eagles coach Dick Vermeil would not draft him, but he did invite Edwards to camp. Herm Edwards announced his presence.
“I came here to start at cornerback, Coach,” Edwards remembers telling Vermeil. “I didn’t come here to play special teams. If you’re not going to start me, you need to cut me.”
Peterson does not remember Edwards being quite that brassy, but he does recall Edwards telling the coaches that he expected to start, which was a ridiculous thing for a slow, undrafted, three-time-college transfer to say.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been around a player who was so sure,” Peterson says.
“I wasn’t that sure,” Edwards says. “But man, I could talk.”
Edwards did start his first game. He started every game for 10 years after that. He was slow — and he got beat some — but he also picked off 33 passes, third-most in Philadelphia Eagles history. And he was in the right place for the Miracle at the Meadowlands, when he returned a fumble for a touchdown in the final seconds and beat the Giants. It’s one of the most famous plays in NFL history.
“What would you do if some undrafted player told you to start him or cut him?” Edwards is asked. He smiles.
“I’d say, ‘Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be,’ ” Edwards says. “Then I’d watch him close. I love it when they talk. But they better back it up. Because if they don’t back it up, I’ll run them out of here so fast their heads will spin.”
•••
NEW YORK | People all around professional football don’t appreciate just how consistently bad the New York Jets have been through the years. Since 1970, the Jets have won their division exactly twice. They have had 11 seasons in that time with four wins or fewer. Even the dreadful St. Louis/Arizona Cardinals can’t match that.
Here in New York, where the memory of Joe Namath waving his index finger after Super Bowl III still resonates, you would find it hard to convince people that Herman Edwards coached more Jets playoff games than any other coach in team history.
He did. Then, maybe people in New York didn’t like the way Herm Edwards’ Jets reached the playoffs. Boring. Scary. They made the playoffs the first time in 2001 by beating Oakland on a long field goal. They made it the second time after starting the season 1-4.
And then the third time, oh man, everybody still remembers that 2004 team. Edwards pulled out Dan Albert’s old playbook. The Jets threw the ball fewer than any team except the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers and Jets then met in the playoffs for a game so conservative, the players should have worn ties and cuff links. The score was tied late, and the Jets had two glorious chances to win. But Herm refused to throw, the Jets settled for two long field-goal attempts, and Doug Brien missed them both.
Pittsburgh won in overtime, and all over the city people cursed Edwards because nothing feels worse in pro football, absolutely nothing, than losing because of conservative coaching.
“I don’t think Herm ever got the credit he deserved in this town,” former Jets general manager Terry Bradway says. “He won games. He won playoff games. The only years he didn’t win, it was because our quarterback got hurt. Say what you want: Herm knew how to win games.”
The question: How did a bold, mouthy kid who patterned himself after Muhammad Ali and Bullet Bob Hayes turn into Captain Conservative? When he played ball at San Diego State, they called him “Herm the Germ” and “Bat News Edwards,” and he never shut up, never. He put Vaseline on his shoes so they sparkled under the lights. He would get into receivers’ grills and say to them, “You’re going to beat me? How are you going to do that when I’m the best corner on the planet?” This is the man having his quarterback take a knee late in the game?
Maybe it comes back to his father, Herman Edwards Sr., an army man, a yes-sir-no-sir man, the biggest force in young Herm’s life. He worked long hours, traveled often and died young, so his words pulsate through Herm Edwards’ mind. Sweep the corners. Don’t look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up. Don’t worry about garbage in other people’s yards. Do the right thing when nobody’s watching. These were the things that made sense to Edwards when he became head football coach in America’s biggest city.
And there it occurred to Herm Edwards that maybe he wasn’t really a rebel.
“Did your team quit?” a New York reporter asked him during the 2002 season. Edwards snapped.
“This is what the greatest thing about sports is: You play to win the game,” he shouted. “Hello? YOU PLAY TO WIN THE GAME!”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Cornerback Ty Law has decided it’s time to wind up Herman Edwards. Why not? It’s training camp. The Chiefs are smack in the middle of the aching two-a-day monotony. “Hey, Coach,” Law says, “Why didn’t you work out today?”
“What are you talking about?” Edwards asks.
“I heard you didn’t work out today.”
Herm Edwards’s early-morning workouts are no joking matter. He gets to the weight room at 4 a.m., no later than 5, and he puts in his hour of work come rain, come shine, come blizzard, come tornado. Once, when he coached the Jets, they changed the number combination on the gates without telling him. Edwards stewed in his car for a few minutes and then, well, he climbed the fence. He wasn’t missing his workout.
“I was here at 5 a.m. working out,” Edwards says. Law shakes his head.
“That’s not what I heard,” Law says. He can barely stifle a smile. He knows it’s coming. And then, it comes.
“Is that right?” Herm asks. “That’s not what you heard, huh? NOT WHAT YOU HEARD? Well, it just so happens I was here at 5 a.m., working out, while you were sitting in your little bed. Hear me? I was in here, working, while you were in your LITTLE BED, clutching your LITTLE SHEETS, holding your TEDDY BEAR, dreaming about whatever it is you DREAM about, and hey (he yells to a coach), what time was I in here this morning? Huh? Tell this fool right here, WHAT TIME was I … that’s right, 5 a.m., while you were sleeping in DREAMLAND, while you were …”
He goes on for a while longer, and Ty Law laughs and laughs.
•••
KANSAS CITY | A man walks up to Herman Edwards and asks him if he’s going to scale back the offense. In four years, the Chiefs have scored more points than any other team in the NFL. In those four years, they made the playoffs once, and lost that game.
“I’m not stupid,” Edwards says. “I’m not going to fool with what works.”
“So the offense will stay the same?”
“I’m not stupid,” Edwards says. “Let me ask you something: How many Super Bowls did that offense win? Zero. Right? Zero. We’re going to be a team. We don’t have an offense and a defense. You have to get used to that. We have a team.”
•••
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Herman Edwards runs over and personally leads the Chiefs defense through the two-deep defensive drills … he loves the two-deep defense. He calls it the simplest defense on earth. That’s the defense he coached with Tony Dungy in Tampa Bay. When it was right, whew, nobody moved the ball, defensive tackles plowed over guards, linebackers crushed running backs, defensive ends blindsided quarterbacks, safeties picked off passes and broke receivers in two.
Then again, when the two-deep isn’t right, quarterbacks pick it clean.
“Watch my head, you hear me, watch my head,” Edwards yells as he drops back to throw. It’s the quarterback’s head that tells defensive players where they’re supposed to be. Of course, some quarterbacks purposely look the wrong way to fool defenders, and some defenders purposely go to the wrong place to bait quarterbacks — that’s the game within the game — but for now he just wants them to get the basics.
“Watch my eyes,” he shouts. “Simplest defense in the world, you hear?”
The drill ends as quickly as it begins. Drills move fast in River Falls. Practices go 90 minutes except when they go just 75 minutes. Classroom sessions, by Herm decree, are not allowed to go more than 20 minutes at a time. Scrimmages move; the faster the team runs the plays, the quicker the scrimmages end. Dick Vermeil’s practices were 15-round heavyweight fights with plenty of body punches. Edwards’ practices are Oliver Stone movies — a blur of shouts, thuds, air horns and then it’s over.
“I was a player,” Edwards says. “I know what these guys want. I know what they need. I’m not trying to make robots. I’m making football players. I want guys who, when they get on the field, will play football, they will do what the situation demands, they will rise to the occasion. Because once the game starts, I can’t do it for them. I can’t control them like some video game. I need them to play. That’s the kind of practices we run.”
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SEASIDE, Calif. | Herman Edwards sits in his mother’s living room, and he’s surrounded by … Herman Edwards. Here’s a photograph of Herm and Chad Pennington standing in front of the New York skyline. There’s a painting of Edwards breaking up a pass intended for Jerry Rice (signed by Rice with the inscription: “One of the few I didn’t catch”). There are two different Herman Edwards bobblehead dolls, there’s Herm on the cover of Sports Illustrated as one of sports’ most influential minorities, there’s another painting of Edwards in his playing days.
“What do you think of my Buby?” Edwards’ mother, Martha, asks. Her Buby — her German term of affection for Herm — has tried to buy a new house for Martha, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving this house. It was the first house she and Herman Sr. ever bought. That was 1961. At the time, the neighbors sent a petition demanding the house be sold to someone else. They did not want a black Army man and a white German woman living on their street. In time, the neighbors softened, and in more time they all moved on or died. Martha is the only one left. She won’t leave. Herman Sr. gave his son discipline. Martha gave him passion.
So Herm returns at least once a year. He puts on a free football camp. He visits old friends. And, mostly, he drives. After a moment or two in the living room shrine, Herm Edwards bolts to his feet. He says, “Let’s go.”
“Where you going, Buby?”
“There’s something I need to do.”
Herm gets in the car, and he drives fast and furious through Seaside. He talks about how beautiful it is there next to the ocean, but he does not slow down to look. He talks about how crazy it is, him becoming a football coach.
“You should have seen me when I was young,” he says. “I was the craziest kid you ever saw. I’d say stuff you wouldn’t believe. I told them all I’d make it big. I wonder how I knew.”
He smiles and seems to relax as his Land Rover rushes up the hills, into the sunset. The funny thing is, he isn’t going anywhere. He doesn’t really have anything to do, except get away.