BABB- Haley took ‘roundabout’ path to NFL coach

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Haley took ‘roundabout’ path to NFL coach
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star


The walleye hadn’t been biting for hours by the time the Haleys and the Russos sat down for dinner.

They came to Chautauqua Lake in New York for long weekends each May, the men casting lines into the water until the fish grew bored of the bait. It was the early 2000s, a couple of years after Todd Haley had decided he wanted to be a football coach. May was the time NFL coaches, grunts and decision-makers — Haley was a grunt — could get away for a few days without the phone ringing.

On this night, Haley excused himself, and his wife, Chrissy, remained at the table with their friends. Haley and George Russo had known each other since high school. Russo believed in Haley when he wanted to be a street hockey player, a pro golfer, a golf coach and an NFL scout. And now Haley felt like being a coach, and that was fine with Russo. He’d support his friend if he wanted to clone oxen.

But this was a tough one to accept.

“Chrissy said that night, ‘I have no doubt he’ll be a head coach someday,’ ” Russo says now. “We just kind of laughed.”

Russo said something like, “That’s nice,” and the conversation went elsewhere. The notion didn’t seem worth more than a few seconds’ thought, Russo says now. Haley was in his mid-30s. He was still a low-level assistant for the Chicago Bears. And this was Todd they were talking about, the man who had once been so burned out on football that he wouldn’t go near a field.

“He was just trying to discover himself,” Russo says. “But it was a little later than most of us.

“Reality was pretty far off.”

•••

A 41-year-old man sinks into a brown leather armchair at Chiefs headquarters, exhausted by how quickly this all came down. Five days earlier, Todd Haley was calling the plays for the Arizona Cardinals at the Super Bowl, a loss Haley is glad he hasn’t had time to stew over.

“A dagger going in,” he says. “The good thing is, I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it.”

Haley leans his head back and takes a long breath. It’s Friday afternoon. His eyes are dazed, and his speech is slower now than it was an hour earlier. He was introduced around noon as the Kansas City Chiefs’ head coach. In the two hours since, he’d been led by strangers to new places to speak with dozens of new people.

But now he’s sitting, most of the reporters having taken their cameras and notebooks down the winding staircase and leaving Haley in the quiet.

The new face of the Chiefs has a 5 o’clock shadow a little after 2, Haley’s tired face wearing the last 24 hours. He and Chrissy boarded the 8 p.m. flight out of Phoenix on Thursday, got to Kansas City a little before midnight, hit the rack after 1, and Haley says he finally went to sleep, well, maybe not at all.

After his 10 minutes in the leather chair, Haley acknowledges he has more to do: fly back to Phoenix and persuade two of his five children that moving might be fun, a new start. It’s still a surprise to his children, something none of them saw coming even a few months ago. Then again, even Haley’s closest friends wouldn’t have believed it until it happened.

Haley admits that he took something less than the traditional route to becoming an NFL head coach.

“A roundabout,” he says, lifting his head off the back of the plush chair.

But he’s somehow done it, surprising his friends and former coaches and, heck, even himself. He says he didn’t get into football to become a head coach. That was hardly reality.

Now he’s the man the Chiefs have chosen to rebuild a torn franchise and win back the trust of a community skeptical that Kansas City can become relevant in the NFL any time soon. Haley says he’s proof that unlikely things can happen — and quickly. He’ll call his friend Russo in a few minutes and discuss the last 13 years.

Look at all that’s happened, he’ll say. Did either of them ever think this was possible?

“He’s surprised,” Russo will say after his telephone conversation with Haley, “but he’ll be able to handle it.”

Before Haley goes, he has time for a quick story.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard this one yet,” he says.

He’s the man he was an hour ago: young, energetic and hopeful. It’s a good story, and the twists keep coming. This is where he starts:

“First,” he says, “I don’t have any regrets about how I’ve gotten here.”

•••

Haley was in the gymnasium at Upper St. Clair High School near Pittsburgh, sizzling passes with the same three-quarter delivery as Dan Marino.

“I do a mean Marino,” he says now.

Boy, the young Haley looked like a quarterback, too: a 6-foot-2 prototype who’d watched the legends and wanted to become one himself. Haley’s father, Dick, was a legendary scout for the Steelers, and he helped discover the players who’d win four Super Bowls in the 1970s.

Dick Haley brought home game film, and he and his son watched it together.

“He always had those tapes running,” Russo says of his friend’s father.

Todd went with his dad to scout players, and competition didn’t end when Dick clocked out. Todd says now his father never stopped coaching him, leaning out their home’s windows to shout instructions while Todd played pickup basketball in the driveway, or giving him notes after baseball games to point out things Todd could have done better.

“He’d have been a great coach,” Todd says.

Even when Dick was a coach, a one-week stand-in on his son’s Pop Warner team, Dick moved his son from running back to guard, which crushed the kid, but darn if the team didn’t win because Todd Haley kept opening rushing lanes.

It was natural. Todd was a football player with a polished mind and a gifted body. Upper St. Clair High coach Jim Render saw Haley throwing those passes, the form, the footwork. Then again …

“He looked like a tight end to me,” Render says now.

Render approached the kid and asked him to try out. Haley declined, and Render was stunned. Haley said he had no desire to play football. He’d absorbed enough of it during his childhood, and the last thing Haley wanted to do was bury himself in that infernal game again.

Render persuaded Haley to attend one practice, just to watch unless he wanted to get in the huddle, of course. But Haley wanted nothing to do with it. Four years came and went, and Haley never suited up for the Panthers.

“I mean, I wanted him,” Render says. “Let’s put it that way: I wanted him. He was a good-looking, good-sized kid. I don’t know. I guess I failed.”

Render says Haley was quiet in those days, the type of kid whose confidence didn’t match his talents. Haley preferred to play street hockey, sitting in the school library in those days to draw up formations and plays for teammates. And he liked the solitude of golf.

“I like to blame my father,” Haley says, a dry joke delivered without a smile. “He coached me so hard. So hard.

“My dad was such a legend in the Pittsburgh area that I wanted to show that I could do something.”

Dick Haley showed his son how to grip and swing a golf club, but Haley didn’t become serious about the game until his father gave Todd some distance. When he did, Haley took to it and carved out dreams of playing on the PGA Tour.

He could break 70, Russo says, and he seemed to possess passion for the game’s details, the techniques and tricks that helped him and others improve. Haley played on the University of Florida golf team with Chris DiMarco, the three-time PGA major championship runner-up, and Haley said their skills were close in those days.

But DiMarco kept improving, and Haley’s game crested. He played on mini-tours but settled into a job working maintenance at a golf course, and he made a living teaching lessons. From sunup to sundown, he says, for six months each year for three years, he taught the finer points of golf. He enjoyed teaching, spreading his knowledge and watching others flourish as a result of his method.

Then he realized there was something missing in his life. He was 25 when he realized that, a decade after leaving football behind, he’d forgotten how much he’d once loved the game. He wanted to find a way into his father’s business. He knew that wouldn’t come easy.

“I was at one of those crossroads in life,” he says.

•••

Haley was making good money at the driving range, and he took a pay cut to work in the New York Jets’ scouting department. He’d observe prospects and drive executives to the airport — whatever was asked of him.

“Subservient stuff,” says another personnel man on that staff, Scott Pioli.

The men didn’t run in the same circles, exactly. Pioli was a young executive, and Haley was a foot soldier. But they got together occasionally to discuss players, and the conversations sometimes grew heated with enthusiasm — players they liked or didn’t like, the ideas they’d have preferred to toss a long time ago. The young colleagues sat together and solved the world’s problems, telling each other what they’d do if they were ever in charge of a football team.

“Some colorful discussions,” the Chiefs’ new general manager says. “We weren’t confrontational. Just passionate.”

Haley had returned to football, but his father’s shadow still gave him the chills. Dick Haley was nearing retirement, but Todd was still his father’s son, a kid trying to make it on his own in the same game, in the same field, that his dad had defined decades earlier.

“He had to work harder — more and longer hours to show people,” Pioli says, “and prove to people that he’s going to stick around in this league.”

But then he gave it up. The scouting, that is. Haley gathered his nerve one day and walked into Bill Parcells’ office, telling the legendary coach that he wanted a spot on Parcells’ staff. His coaching staff.

Parcells told the youngster he was crazy, pointing toward a personnel job that Parcells had been eyeing him for. It was a good job, Parcells pointed out, and he wouldn’t have to slice his salary in half as he would as a bottom-rung assistant.

Haley wasn’t convinced.

“I want to coach,” Haley told Parcells.

“Well,” Parcells said, “this is what I can pay you.”

Haley was 30. He was married, and the couple had a young daughter. The assistant quality-control coach job was open only because Parcells’ preferred candidates, former NFL quarterbacks Jeff Rutledge and Jeff Hostetler, wouldn’t accept the meager salary.

Haley accepted it. He never did like following in lockstep with his father. This was his chance to try his luck on his own — pay cut and all.

“He realized the magnitude of working with Parcells and where he could go,” Haley’s friend Russo says. “That was his eye-opening moment. He knew he could really go down this path and be successful.

“He would just never take no for an answer. If he felt one thing about something, whether it was (to) Charlie Weis or Bill Belichick, he would always voice his opinion. Sometimes that would get him in trouble — a lot of times it would — but if Todd felt strongly about something, he is going to make it happen. Even when we’re fishing, I’ll want to go over here, and he’ll want to go over there. We’ll go over there and end up catching fish. It’s funny — nine times out of 10, he’s right.”

•••

Todd Haley sits at a table between Pioli and Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt, his two new bosses, and he’s trying to look serious and proper in his dark suit and red necktie.

He’s fighting the exhaustion of the previous 24 hours, the previous seven days, the previous 13 years — the unusual path he traveled to the top of an NFL franchise, without bothering to pause for a breather.

Haley admits this wasn’t a goal when he began coaching less than a decade ago. It wasn’t realistic enough to qualify. Then again, neither was the path he took: studying under Parcells, working two assistant jobs and serving two seasons as the Cardinals’ offensive coordinator, helping Arizona reach the Super Bowl.

Now here he sits, waiting his turn between two powerful men, hoping to prove once again that he can accomplish things his way, untraditional as his way has been.

Haley hasn’t followed the path of his father, or anyone really, and it has pulled him where few thought was possible — one hard road behind him but another lying ahead.

“He was in a position that he could’ve taken advantage of,” Pioli says of Haley’s option to use his father’s influence, “and he didn’t. He worked.”

Pioli introduces the Chiefs’ new coach and steps away from the lectern. It’s Haley’s turn. He’ll have a chance to do it his way. And this time he didn’t even have to take a pay cut. He signed a four-year contract worth $12 million.

“Football’s nothing I ever really got away from,” Haley will say. “There were some sacrifices that I had to make. And some big decisions, some livelihood decisions. It could have gone the other way.

“I think this was just always in me.”

[DTLB58]

Nice read. Thanks.