BigRedChief
01-20-2008, 01:13 AM
http://www.kansascity.com/180/story/452546.html
Gailey has been a winner everywhere he’s been
So, you say that Chan Gailey does not excite you as the Chiefs’ new offensive coordinator. Well, nothing new there. This has been the running theme of the man’s life. You think there are a bunch of NFL head coaches who took teams to the playoffs their first two years and then got canned? There aren’t. You could hold a meeting with all those guys on top of a unicycle.
You think the streets are overflowing with coaches who took a college job, promptly led their team to six straight bowl games and then got ushered out the door? Not exactly. You could hold a reunion of those coaches in a barbershop chair.
Chan Gailey is the only man, living or dead, who belongs to both clubs.
This has been the man’s odd gift: Win and leave them shrugging. In 25 years of big-time coaching — ever since Gailey became head coach at Troy State in 1983 — he has won a Division II national championship and coached in four Super Bowls. He has played his part in 20 NFL playoff games, two World League playoff games and five bowl games, which would have been six had they not shoved him out before that sixth was played.
He coached Troy State to that national title (“I was so young I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he says). He was quarterback coach for John Elway (“It was pretty easy,” he says). He was offensive coordinator for some power-driving Pittsburgh Steelers teams (“You can’t turn a non-tough guy into a tough guy,” he says). He coached the most famous football team in America, the Dallas Cowboys, to the playoffs twice before being ejected (“It was very interesting,” he says). He helped the Miami Dolphins win after Dan Marino retired (“We were fortunate,” he says). He led Georgia Tech to bowl games year after year (“My patience level had to go up,” he says).
And yet, people remain blandly unimpressed. Maybe that’s just Chan Gailey. After all, he remains pretty blandly unimpressed himself.
•••
Thirty-six second clip on YouTube — Chan Gailey’s postgame speech after Georgia Tech beat Miami in 2006.
Gailey is choked up. His eyes are watery. He looks like he is about to speak, but he cannot. The words will not come out. “We love you too, coach,” one of his players shouts. Gailey holds up his fist. His players start to applaud, cheer him, shout for him to let it go. He holds his hand up to silence them.
“Let me tell you something,” he finally says. “Character there’s no … there’s no substitute for it (“Amen,” his players shout). How you work, how you play, the heart you show … and a lot of people think that that’s stuff that doesn’t matter, it’s just height, weight and speed and all that. … it doesn’t men … it’s not.
He chokes on his words.
“It’s here,” he says, and he pounds his chest, where his heart is. “That’s where it is. I’m so proud of you.”
•••
Maybe it’s because he just isn’t the kind to be called a genius or prodigy or maestro. Maybe that’s the reason. Gailey would never stand for that big name stuff. He’s just an old-fashioned, beat the chest, talk about character football coach — and that’s all he wants to be. Maybe that’s why Chan Gailey doesn’t get fans’ hearts pumping.
He says all this stuff about exciting fans doesn’t affect him — “You can’t let the fans and the media and all that sway what you believe,” he says — but it does matter. He has come to Kansas City to resuscitate a Chiefs offense that was so painful to watch, you needed four Tylenol just to get through the four quarters. Everyone’s watching.
And the only reason he is here in the first place is because he was fired at Georgia Tech, where he never had a losing record but where the fans lost faith in him.
“(The firing) was based on whether the football team was moving forward and whether our fan base was sufficiently energized and excited about where we’re going,” Georgia Tech athletic director Dan Radakovich said.
Why doesn’t he excite fans? At Georgia Tech, it may have been as simple as losing to rival Georgia every year. But, all in all, it seems to go deeper than that. Maybe it’s his slightly odd name — Chan, short for his middle-name Chandler. Not much football stuff you can do with that name. A woman decked out in Cowboys garb in 1998 held up a crumpled but lovingly crafted sign that read: “Chan Can!” Before long — even as the Cowboys won more than they lost — many signs in Dallas had the words reversed.
Maybe it’s because he makes a point of NOT giving his offense a fancy name like “run and shoot” or “West Coast offense.” He doesn’t like that sort of stuff. He doesn’t like statistics either. “Score one more point than your opponent,” he says. “That’s the whole deal.”
Maybe it’s his unimposing looks. First time Florida assistant coach Ken Hatfield saw Gailey on a football field — this was 30-some years ago — he asked: “You an offensive lineman, son?”
“No sir,” Gailey squeaked. “I’m a quarterback.”
“If you say so,” Hatfield said, and they still laugh about that.
Maybe it’s Gailey’s voice, which still twangs to the small-town tune of Americus, Ga. He does not have a haunted childhood or a sad story to tell. He was no outcast. No sir, he grew up in that small and proud Georgia town — where Shoeless Joe Jackson played ball after being banished and Dan Reeves grew up and Jimmy Carter took Rosalyn on their first date and Chan’s father, Tom, became mayor.
Chan was an Eagle Scout. He once helped save a man’s life (the man was bitten by a snake on the golf course). He married his high-school sweetheart (their first date was at a church revival). He played football because he loved it (loved it so much that at Florida, as the backup-backup’s backup quarterback, he taught himself to long snap just so he could play).
He became a football coach because he idolized his high school coach, Jimmy Hightower, a legend around Americus. Hightower won two state football championships as a coach, three state golf championships, a basketball championship, a baseball championship — the man could coach anything. He was beloved, of course.
“He had such an impact on my life,” Gailey says. “And I thought, ‘If I could just have that sort of impact on lives and also coach football, I mean, what a great career that would be. I really thought I’d coach high school football. I didn’t know about all this.”
Maybe it’s his niceness. Gailey is an indisputably nice man. Friends say he doesn’t swear, he treats everyone kindly, he is a man of faith (though he is careful not to be overbearing or self-righteous). Even when people call for his firing (as people often have through the years — the firechangailey.com Web site is still up and operational even after he was fired), they usually mention that Gailey seems like a nice guy.
Maybe, in the end, this is the problem. Maybe people think he’s too nice. Maybe they think football coaches are not supposed to be nice.
•••
Here’s a memory from Kansas City native Richard Scott, a reporter who covered Gailey’s World League of American Football team, the Birmingham Fire, and a friend for more than 15 years.
“My wife was pregnant with our second baby … and I was sitting in Chan’s office. I’d only known him for about three weeks. I was wearing a beeper; those were the days when you still had beepers. Well, my beeper goes off. And Chan goes Fred Flintstone on me. He starts shouting, ‘Check that number! You could be having a baby! You could be having a baby!’
“A few days later, after the baby came, I was in his office again, and we were talking about children, the difference between first and second children. That first child you are so in awe, you hardly even know what’s happening. But the second one, you think, ‘Holy smokes, I’m a father.’ And we were talking about it, and we were both crying, and his secretary walked in and looked at us. She just shook her head and said, ‘You guys are a couple of babies.’ ”
•••
Or maybe it’s simply this: Maybe too many of us have been caught up in hype and marketing and technology to appreciate a sturdy presence like Chan Gailey. I won’t lie: First impression I had when the Chiefs hired Gailey was to think, “Ugh … retread.” It is in our blood these days — many of us — to want the newest gadget, the hottest trend, the Wii, the iPhone, the young genius offensive coordinator.
I had written that the hiring of an offensive coordinator would tell us a whole lot about Chiefs coach Herm Edwards. Well, the hiring of Gailey seemed to me to clearly say what pretty much everyone believes … that Edwards won’t take a chance.
Then I called around and asked some people to make some anonymous observations about Gailey. They all admitted that he’s not flashy or trendy. None of them was ready to call him a miracle worker. Here’s the thing: They all admired him. That’s the word too. Admire. They didn’t just admire his personality or character, no. They admired his ability to coach and get an offense to score points.
One coach talked about how he gets the most out of his players and suggested I look closely at what he did in Pittsburgh. Well, it’s true. If you look at his two years as offensive coordinator, the Steelers ranked 11th and seventh in points, strong numbers for a team with a limited quarterback that ran the ball more than 54 percent of the time. The year after he left, the Steelers dropped to 28th in points.
A writer suggested he did a very underrated job in Dallas with a crumbling dynasty, and that’s also true. The Cowboys offense was absolutely miserable the two years before Gailey got there. His first year, the Cowboys scored 381 points, top 10 in the NFL, and Dallas won its division. True, he and Dallas’ Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman clashed, but that was inevitable. Aikman was at the end of a great career, and Gailey knew big changes had to be made.
The next year, the Cowboys scored 352 points — 11th in the NFL — and sneaked into the playoffs at 8-8, Gailey told owner Jerry Jones all the changes that had to be made, and Jones responded by changing coaches. The Cowboys went 5-11 each of the next three seasons and collapsed into perhaps the NFL’s worst offense.
A Miami Dolphins fan said that what Gailey quietly did as offensive coordinator in Miami was pretty special. Well, it’s true again. He inherited an offense that had just lost its Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino and whose leading rusher, J.J. Johnson, had gained 558 yards. In his second year — with Jay Fiedler at quarterback and 31-year-old Lamar Smith at running back and a couple of veteran, journeyman receivers — the Dolphins scored 344 points (eighth in the NFL) and went 11-5.
The Dolphins have not made the playoffs since Gailey left for Georgia Tech. And then, as mentioned, he led the Yellow Jackets to six straight bowls, the only Georgia Tech coach ever to do that.
None of it was flashy. None of it made Gailey a hot coaching candidate — quite the opposite. That seems to just be Chan Gailey’s way.
“He’s a coach’s coach,” Edwards says. “You know what I mean? He doesn’t coach for fame. He doesn’t care if anyone notices him. He just wants to help a team win. He’s special.”
•••
Chan Gailey is talking about his father, Tom. He did a lot of things. He coached for a little while. He owned a Western Auto store. He owned a furniture store. He worked as a school administrator, and he was on the school board, and he was on the city council, and he was mayor of Americus. He was a deacon at the church. He did not stop.
And when Chan Gailey was coaching at Troy State, Tom would get in his car before every Saturday game and drive to the game. One game Chan remembers was when Troy played at Delta State, and Tom got into his car and drove 13 hours to Cleveland, Miss., watched the game, got back into his car and drove home.
“He was unbelievable,” Chan Gailey says. Of course, he uses this word about all the people who helped change his life — Dan Reeves, Ken Hatfield, Jimmy Hightower, Bill Cowher, now Herm Edwards. Unbelievable.
Tom died in 1997 of prostate cancer. When asked what he remembers most about his father, Chan says, “He got a lot done. And he didn’t care if his name ever got mentioned. He was a great man. A humble man. … He was one of those guys who thought that he could be successful by outworking people.”
Chan Gailey pauses for a few seconds. He seems like he’s about to speak but words do not come out. Then, they do.
“I hope I’m like that,” he says.
Gailey has been a winner everywhere he’s been
So, you say that Chan Gailey does not excite you as the Chiefs’ new offensive coordinator. Well, nothing new there. This has been the running theme of the man’s life. You think there are a bunch of NFL head coaches who took teams to the playoffs their first two years and then got canned? There aren’t. You could hold a meeting with all those guys on top of a unicycle.
You think the streets are overflowing with coaches who took a college job, promptly led their team to six straight bowl games and then got ushered out the door? Not exactly. You could hold a reunion of those coaches in a barbershop chair.
Chan Gailey is the only man, living or dead, who belongs to both clubs.
This has been the man’s odd gift: Win and leave them shrugging. In 25 years of big-time coaching — ever since Gailey became head coach at Troy State in 1983 — he has won a Division II national championship and coached in four Super Bowls. He has played his part in 20 NFL playoff games, two World League playoff games and five bowl games, which would have been six had they not shoved him out before that sixth was played.
He coached Troy State to that national title (“I was so young I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he says). He was quarterback coach for John Elway (“It was pretty easy,” he says). He was offensive coordinator for some power-driving Pittsburgh Steelers teams (“You can’t turn a non-tough guy into a tough guy,” he says). He coached the most famous football team in America, the Dallas Cowboys, to the playoffs twice before being ejected (“It was very interesting,” he says). He helped the Miami Dolphins win after Dan Marino retired (“We were fortunate,” he says). He led Georgia Tech to bowl games year after year (“My patience level had to go up,” he says).
And yet, people remain blandly unimpressed. Maybe that’s just Chan Gailey. After all, he remains pretty blandly unimpressed himself.
•••
Thirty-six second clip on YouTube — Chan Gailey’s postgame speech after Georgia Tech beat Miami in 2006.
Gailey is choked up. His eyes are watery. He looks like he is about to speak, but he cannot. The words will not come out. “We love you too, coach,” one of his players shouts. Gailey holds up his fist. His players start to applaud, cheer him, shout for him to let it go. He holds his hand up to silence them.
“Let me tell you something,” he finally says. “Character there’s no … there’s no substitute for it (“Amen,” his players shout). How you work, how you play, the heart you show … and a lot of people think that that’s stuff that doesn’t matter, it’s just height, weight and speed and all that. … it doesn’t men … it’s not.
He chokes on his words.
“It’s here,” he says, and he pounds his chest, where his heart is. “That’s where it is. I’m so proud of you.”
•••
Maybe it’s because he just isn’t the kind to be called a genius or prodigy or maestro. Maybe that’s the reason. Gailey would never stand for that big name stuff. He’s just an old-fashioned, beat the chest, talk about character football coach — and that’s all he wants to be. Maybe that’s why Chan Gailey doesn’t get fans’ hearts pumping.
He says all this stuff about exciting fans doesn’t affect him — “You can’t let the fans and the media and all that sway what you believe,” he says — but it does matter. He has come to Kansas City to resuscitate a Chiefs offense that was so painful to watch, you needed four Tylenol just to get through the four quarters. Everyone’s watching.
And the only reason he is here in the first place is because he was fired at Georgia Tech, where he never had a losing record but where the fans lost faith in him.
“(The firing) was based on whether the football team was moving forward and whether our fan base was sufficiently energized and excited about where we’re going,” Georgia Tech athletic director Dan Radakovich said.
Why doesn’t he excite fans? At Georgia Tech, it may have been as simple as losing to rival Georgia every year. But, all in all, it seems to go deeper than that. Maybe it’s his slightly odd name — Chan, short for his middle-name Chandler. Not much football stuff you can do with that name. A woman decked out in Cowboys garb in 1998 held up a crumpled but lovingly crafted sign that read: “Chan Can!” Before long — even as the Cowboys won more than they lost — many signs in Dallas had the words reversed.
Maybe it’s because he makes a point of NOT giving his offense a fancy name like “run and shoot” or “West Coast offense.” He doesn’t like that sort of stuff. He doesn’t like statistics either. “Score one more point than your opponent,” he says. “That’s the whole deal.”
Maybe it’s his unimposing looks. First time Florida assistant coach Ken Hatfield saw Gailey on a football field — this was 30-some years ago — he asked: “You an offensive lineman, son?”
“No sir,” Gailey squeaked. “I’m a quarterback.”
“If you say so,” Hatfield said, and they still laugh about that.
Maybe it’s Gailey’s voice, which still twangs to the small-town tune of Americus, Ga. He does not have a haunted childhood or a sad story to tell. He was no outcast. No sir, he grew up in that small and proud Georgia town — where Shoeless Joe Jackson played ball after being banished and Dan Reeves grew up and Jimmy Carter took Rosalyn on their first date and Chan’s father, Tom, became mayor.
Chan was an Eagle Scout. He once helped save a man’s life (the man was bitten by a snake on the golf course). He married his high-school sweetheart (their first date was at a church revival). He played football because he loved it (loved it so much that at Florida, as the backup-backup’s backup quarterback, he taught himself to long snap just so he could play).
He became a football coach because he idolized his high school coach, Jimmy Hightower, a legend around Americus. Hightower won two state football championships as a coach, three state golf championships, a basketball championship, a baseball championship — the man could coach anything. He was beloved, of course.
“He had such an impact on my life,” Gailey says. “And I thought, ‘If I could just have that sort of impact on lives and also coach football, I mean, what a great career that would be. I really thought I’d coach high school football. I didn’t know about all this.”
Maybe it’s his niceness. Gailey is an indisputably nice man. Friends say he doesn’t swear, he treats everyone kindly, he is a man of faith (though he is careful not to be overbearing or self-righteous). Even when people call for his firing (as people often have through the years — the firechangailey.com Web site is still up and operational even after he was fired), they usually mention that Gailey seems like a nice guy.
Maybe, in the end, this is the problem. Maybe people think he’s too nice. Maybe they think football coaches are not supposed to be nice.
•••
Here’s a memory from Kansas City native Richard Scott, a reporter who covered Gailey’s World League of American Football team, the Birmingham Fire, and a friend for more than 15 years.
“My wife was pregnant with our second baby … and I was sitting in Chan’s office. I’d only known him for about three weeks. I was wearing a beeper; those were the days when you still had beepers. Well, my beeper goes off. And Chan goes Fred Flintstone on me. He starts shouting, ‘Check that number! You could be having a baby! You could be having a baby!’
“A few days later, after the baby came, I was in his office again, and we were talking about children, the difference between first and second children. That first child you are so in awe, you hardly even know what’s happening. But the second one, you think, ‘Holy smokes, I’m a father.’ And we were talking about it, and we were both crying, and his secretary walked in and looked at us. She just shook her head and said, ‘You guys are a couple of babies.’ ”
•••
Or maybe it’s simply this: Maybe too many of us have been caught up in hype and marketing and technology to appreciate a sturdy presence like Chan Gailey. I won’t lie: First impression I had when the Chiefs hired Gailey was to think, “Ugh … retread.” It is in our blood these days — many of us — to want the newest gadget, the hottest trend, the Wii, the iPhone, the young genius offensive coordinator.
I had written that the hiring of an offensive coordinator would tell us a whole lot about Chiefs coach Herm Edwards. Well, the hiring of Gailey seemed to me to clearly say what pretty much everyone believes … that Edwards won’t take a chance.
Then I called around and asked some people to make some anonymous observations about Gailey. They all admitted that he’s not flashy or trendy. None of them was ready to call him a miracle worker. Here’s the thing: They all admired him. That’s the word too. Admire. They didn’t just admire his personality or character, no. They admired his ability to coach and get an offense to score points.
One coach talked about how he gets the most out of his players and suggested I look closely at what he did in Pittsburgh. Well, it’s true. If you look at his two years as offensive coordinator, the Steelers ranked 11th and seventh in points, strong numbers for a team with a limited quarterback that ran the ball more than 54 percent of the time. The year after he left, the Steelers dropped to 28th in points.
A writer suggested he did a very underrated job in Dallas with a crumbling dynasty, and that’s also true. The Cowboys offense was absolutely miserable the two years before Gailey got there. His first year, the Cowboys scored 381 points, top 10 in the NFL, and Dallas won its division. True, he and Dallas’ Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman clashed, but that was inevitable. Aikman was at the end of a great career, and Gailey knew big changes had to be made.
The next year, the Cowboys scored 352 points — 11th in the NFL — and sneaked into the playoffs at 8-8, Gailey told owner Jerry Jones all the changes that had to be made, and Jones responded by changing coaches. The Cowboys went 5-11 each of the next three seasons and collapsed into perhaps the NFL’s worst offense.
A Miami Dolphins fan said that what Gailey quietly did as offensive coordinator in Miami was pretty special. Well, it’s true again. He inherited an offense that had just lost its Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino and whose leading rusher, J.J. Johnson, had gained 558 yards. In his second year — with Jay Fiedler at quarterback and 31-year-old Lamar Smith at running back and a couple of veteran, journeyman receivers — the Dolphins scored 344 points (eighth in the NFL) and went 11-5.
The Dolphins have not made the playoffs since Gailey left for Georgia Tech. And then, as mentioned, he led the Yellow Jackets to six straight bowls, the only Georgia Tech coach ever to do that.
None of it was flashy. None of it made Gailey a hot coaching candidate — quite the opposite. That seems to just be Chan Gailey’s way.
“He’s a coach’s coach,” Edwards says. “You know what I mean? He doesn’t coach for fame. He doesn’t care if anyone notices him. He just wants to help a team win. He’s special.”
•••
Chan Gailey is talking about his father, Tom. He did a lot of things. He coached for a little while. He owned a Western Auto store. He owned a furniture store. He worked as a school administrator, and he was on the school board, and he was on the city council, and he was mayor of Americus. He was a deacon at the church. He did not stop.
And when Chan Gailey was coaching at Troy State, Tom would get in his car before every Saturday game and drive to the game. One game Chan remembers was when Troy played at Delta State, and Tom got into his car and drove 13 hours to Cleveland, Miss., watched the game, got back into his car and drove home.
“He was unbelievable,” Chan Gailey says. Of course, he uses this word about all the people who helped change his life — Dan Reeves, Ken Hatfield, Jimmy Hightower, Bill Cowher, now Herm Edwards. Unbelievable.
Tom died in 1997 of prostate cancer. When asked what he remembers most about his father, Chan says, “He got a lot done. And he didn’t care if his name ever got mentioned. He was a great man. A humble man. … He was one of those guys who thought that he could be successful by outworking people.”
Chan Gailey pauses for a few seconds. He seems like he’s about to speak but words do not come out. Then, they do.
“I hope I’m like that,” he says.