Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (16 page)

A few days before James’s death, the Colts had suffered their first loss of the season after starting 13–0, ending their bid to be the first team to get through a regular season with a perfect 16–0 record. Dungy missed the next game in Seattle and then returned less than one week after the funeral for the final game of the regular season and then a crushing playoff loss to the Steelers.

All these years later, Dungy is reluctant to say much about the agony he and Lauren went through after their son’s suicide. He had spoken quite eloquently for twenty minutes during a gut-wrenching two-hour funeral service less than one week after James died. There were two thousand mourners at the Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz. The entire Colts team attended. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and four past and present NFL head coaches were there: Edwards, Lovie Smith, Jack Del Rio, and Dennis Green.

“Parents, hug your kids every chance you get,” Dungy told the congregation. “Tell them you love them every chance you get because you don’t know when it’s going to be the last time.”

The last time he saw James was when he dropped him off at the airport in Indianapolis around Thanksgiving. He didn’t have a chance to give him a hug, and that always bothered him. He figured there would be a next time. In one of their last phone conversations, James asked his father if he would get to be on the field in Detroit if the Colts made it to the Super Bowl. Tony assured him he would but cautioned that the Colts had to get there first.

“We loved our son very much, he loved us, and we miss him terribly. James was a good young man with a compassionate heart, and we were glad to have him for eighteen years,” Dungy said at the funeral. “God has him now for the rest of eternity.”

His faith and his family helped him get through it. His football team, too. During the service, he specifically addressed his players.

“I want to urge you to continue being who you are because
our young boys in this country, they need to hear from you,” he said. “If anything, be bolder in who you are. Because our boys are getting a lot of the wrong messages about what it means to be a man in this world. About how you should act, and how you should dress, and how you should talk, and how you should treat people. They don’t always get the right message, but you guys have the right messages.”

During training camp the next summer, Dungy explained to
USA Today
how he was coping with his son’s death. “It’s human nature to grieve, and you’re going to have some pain,” he said. “But then the choice is how you handle the pain. You can choose to go on and fight through it, or you can choose to succumb to it. You can’t make the feeling go away. There’s no Novocain or anything that can just take it away. You begin to realize that you can still function, you can still move forward.”

Dungy mourned the loss of James but did not make himself feel guilty. He didn’t second-guess selecting the demanding occupation of being an NFL head coach. It didn’t change the way he approached his job after taking some time off. He was still an available father. His hours remained the same. Dungy always felt there was more he could do with his life than coach football, but he enjoyed the game, enjoyed influencing young lives. A few weeks after James’s death, the Colts’ dream of winning the Super Bowl ended in a surprising loss to the Steelers. “A couple of big disappointments,” Dungy said after the game. “Obviously, this one doesn’t rank anywhere close to the last one.”

Just one year later, Dungy was standing in the rain in Miami. “I just have to say how sweet this is,” he said. “It’s tough to win. It’s tough to win the Super Bowl.”

The coaching fraternity is small. The jobs are coveted. They are hard to get and harder to keep. Each year at the NFL owners meetings, a group picture is taken of the thirty-two head
coaches. There are significant changes to the picture every year. Some years, there is a massive overhaul with ten new faces. In a year when the owners are not in the frame of mind to pay off existing contracts, maybe there are five new faces. That’s still a lot. At the league meeting in the spring of 2012 in Palm Beach, Florida, the only coach in the picture representing the same team he did in the 1999 photo was Philadelphia’s Andy Reid. That was Reid’s first year with the Eagles. He was a surprising hire from the talent-rich staff that Mike Holmgren put together in Green Bay. Reid worked for Holmgren for seven years, the entire time Holmgren stayed in Titletown, USA, until he left to become coach and general manager of the Seattle Seahawks.

Reid was an unknown to Eagles fans. He had served Holmgren well as his quarterback coach and then assistant head coach, but while he worked closely with Brett Favre, he was never the offensive coordinator and Holmgren called the plays. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie was taking a leap of faith that Holmgren had prepared Reid to be the head coach in one of the toughest sports towns in America.

Reid got off to a bad start with the cynical and demanding Eagles fans by selecting Syracuse quarterback Donovan McNabb over Texas running back Ricky Williams with the second overall pick in the 1999 draft. A Philadelphia radio station rented a bus to transport fans to the draft in New York City to boo McNabb when he came onto the stage to accept congratulations and an Eagles cap from the commissioner, Paul Tagliabue. It wasn’t fair to McNabb, but he handled it well. It was just a preview of the inordinate amount of criticism he would encounter during his career with the Eagles.

Reid, of course, made the right decision. McNabb and Reid were a team until McNabb was traded in the spring of 2010 to the Washington Redskins. In McNabb’s eleven years with the Eagles, they went to five NFC championship games but only one Super
Bowl, and they lost that game to the Patriots. McNabb was never fully appreciated in Philadelphia. He never played his best in the biggest games.

In the days before the Colts played the Bears in the Super Bowl, the lives of Dungy and Reid drew closer together. The unfortunate common denominator was heartache brought about by their children. Reid’s sons Garrett, twenty-three, and Britt, twenty-one, got themselves into big trouble in separate incidents on the same day in suburban Philadelphia while Reid and his wife, Tammy, were vacationing in California. The Reid boys were living at home at the time of their arrests.

According to the authorities, Britt pointed a handgun at another motorist during a traffic altercation. He later was arraigned on nine counts, including making terroristic threats, possession of a controlled substance, and a felony charge of carrying a firearm without a license. Garrett was involved in a traffic accident, and police found a shotgun and ammunition in the vehicle. He told the police he had used heroin before the crash, and a blood test confirmed that he was under the influence of the drug. Garrett was arraigned on misdemeanor drug and traffic charges.

Garrett Reid said he didn’t begin using drugs until he graduated from high school, but according to a probation report read in court, his involvement in drugs and dealing was steep. He started with marijuana and alcohol when he was eighteen and then got into the prescription painkillers Percocet and Oxycontin. He progressed to heroin and cocaine and was in drug rehab at age twenty.

“I liked being the rich kid in that area and having my own high-status life,” Garrett Reid told a probation officer. “I could go anywhere in the ’hood. They all knew who I was. I enjoyed it. I liked being a drug dealer.”

Andy Reid took a leave of absence from the Eagles on February 12, 2007. He was gone until March 23. Later that year, his
sons were sentenced to prison. The judge said the Reid home, in Villanova, Pennsylvania, was a “drug emporium.”

“There isn’t any structure there that this court can depend upon,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said. He added, “I’m saying this is a family in crisis.”

The judge said that Andy and Tammy Reid loved and supported their children and had tried to get them help. During Reid’s time away from football, he accompanied Garrett to a drug rehabilitation center.

It is now more than five years since his sons’ arrests and Reid is running training camp, his fourteenth with the Eagles, in the summer of 2012. Britt had just gotten married and was working as a graduate assistant in Philadelphia with the Temple University football team. His youngest son, Spencer, was a redshirt freshman running back for Temple. Garrett, the oldest, was at training camp with his father, working with the Eagles strength and conditioning staff. That kept him close to Andy and around football. You never stop worrying about a recovering drug addict. Garrett was set to begin classes in sports management in the fall.

On the morning of August 5, Garrett Reid was found dead in his dormitory room at Lehigh at 7:20 a.m. He was residing in Sayre Park, the campus housing the team uses during training camp. Police received a 911 call and efforts to revive Garrett were not successful.

“Garrett’s road through life was not always an easy one,” the Reids said in a statement. “He faced tremendous personal challenges with bravery and spirit. As a family, we stood by him and were inspired as he worked to overcome those challenges. Even though he lost the battle that has been ongoing for the last eight years, we will always remember him as a fighter who had a huge, loving heart.”

The funeral was held two days later. More than nine hundred people paid their respects, including commissioner Roger Goodell, Cleveland Browns president Mike Holmgren, who was
Reid’s boss in Green Bay, the entire Eagles team, Ravens coach John Harbaugh and Saints defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who were former Reid assistants, Colts general manager Ryan Grigson and Browns general manager Tom Heckert, who had worked for Reid in the Eagles front office.

One day after the funeral, Reid was back at training camp. He had already spoken with Dungy. If there was a coach in the NFL who understood the heartache of Andy Reid, it was Tony Dungy. It was surprising that Reid elected to return to work so quickly, but he gave a simple explanation: “I’m a football coach, that’s what I do, and I know my son wouldn’t want it any other way. I can’t put it to you any more frank than that. He loved the Philadelphia Eagles. I know what he would want me to do.”

Reid could relate to the emptiness felt by Dungy. Their jobs were high profile and paid extraordinarily well, but that didn’t make them immune to family tragedy. Dolphins coach Joe Philbin understood. In January of 2012, when Philbin was the offensive coordinator of the Packers, his twenty-one-year-old son fell through the ice on a Wisconsin river and drowned. He had marijuana and twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system. The fourteen-year-old son of Ray Sherman, the Packers receiver coach at the time, died of an accidental gunshot to the head in the family’s garage in 2003 as he played with a gun that had been a gift to his father.

Reid’s players rallied around him. The Eagles fans, who have been tough on Reid for losing four NFL championship games and a Super Bowl, embraced him with chants of “Andy, Andy, Andy.”

“I’ve watched Andy try so hard with his family over the years,” Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said. “He cares so much about his family that it’s a hard one.”

He had football to distract him. But none of that would make up for what he lost in Garrett. “Friendship,” he said. “You get these kids and they grow up. You get to the teens, the higher
teens, and then the twenties and thirties. They become more than your son—they’re your friend. You’re going to miss that. But at the same time, you gain strength from it. He taught me a lot of lessons in life that I’ll use down the road. You’ll always remember his smile and the jokester that he was. Those help you get through the good and the bad times.”

Reid is known to be part of the fraternity that works endlessly, spending long hours poring over tape and game plans and turning his office at the Eagles’ headquarters into a studio apartment several nights a week. His five children were born in five different states as he kept moving around to find better coaching jobs. In Philadelphia, he lives only twenty-three minutes from the Eagles’ offices off Broad Street but sleeps in his office four or five nights a week.

When he worked for the Packers, Reid arrived at his office at Lambeau Field by 4:30 a.m. Gruden, another rising star on Holmgren’s staff, would be there with him. Holmgren felt they competed to see who could arrive first. Reid is a big man. He was twelve pounds when he was born. Between the 2008 and 2009 seasons, he lost eighty pounds and then gained half of it back. He said he was so “huge” that he had trouble walking from the dressing room to the sideline when the Eagles played the Cardinals in the 2008 NFC championship game in Glendale, Arizona. He then lost another twenty pounds. “I tell my wife there is something wrong here. You had the five kids, and it ruined my body,” Reid said.

Every minute his eyes are open during the season, he’s working. “Do I think this is the healthiest business in the world? The way we go about it? No, I don’t,” Reid said. “You try to do the best you can. Some people do it better.”

Owners don’t require their coaches to work around the clock, but they want results. No coach wants to be outworked, so they live with that fear and paranoia. “It’s a sick life,” Patriots owner Robert Kraft said. “I’m not sure if I had a daughter I would want her to marry a head football coach. It’s a very demanding job.”

Reid had two excellent reasons to cut back on his hours and spend more time at home: his health and his five kids. If he had a family in crisis, as the judge said, couldn’t that be attributed partly to his not being home enough? If his house was a drug emporium, wouldn’t a father who was around the house more have been more in tune with what was going on?

“I looked into that quite a bit,” Reid said. “I’m not sure there was a correlation there. People can argue that back and forth.”

He went through periods of guilt after his sons were arrested. He questioned himself. Was it his fault? Was he doing enough for his children? Was he around enough? “Then you talk to enough people, you receive enough letters, you go talk to counselors,” Reid said. “You find out that you’re not the only one; there have been plenty of dads that have spent every minute at home and work nine-to-five jobs with the same issues. Teachers that spend the whole summer at home and work nine to five during the year. It affects a lot of people,” he said. “I don’t mean to be cold. People can question it. Your house caused it. It’s more than that. There’s just more to it than that. That’s not the primary cause. The best thing my wife and I did is we never turned our back on it; we hit it head on and didn’t shy away from anything. We were real with the boys. We had a lot of support from people at the league, we all supported each other as a family, we had support from fans, people who had gone through things. It’s a pretty big epidemic out there that touches a lot of people. At that moment, you think you are the only one, but you find out very quickly that you are not.”