Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (11 page)

W
hen I said publicly in 2009 that I had dyslexia, my family was a little upset about it. My brother Rob said, “Why are you telling people about that? What’s it their business?” We’re twins, but lucky for him, he doesn’t have that problem. I understand why my family reacted that way to me talking about it—they were trying to protect me. Some people get embarrassed about this stuff and, trust me, when I was a kid and I didn’t know what was wrong, it made me embarrassed, too. I wanted to lash out when kids made fun of me for struggling with reading. And I really did struggle.

These days, I couldn’t care less. I’ve come to realize that one of the reasons I am where I am in my life is that I found a way to deal with dyslexia, even when I didn’t know I had it. In other words, in its own way, having to deal with it forced me to become who I am. I was unaware of being dyslexic for so long, that having this disability drove me to work harder, to use my strengths—and that led me down this path. It’s my own personal kind of meeting with Darwin, I suppose. Either you sink or you swim.

I’ve heard that somewhere between 5 and 17 percent of people have some form of dyslexia, which basically means that letters look jumbled as you read them and there’s kind of a disconnect between being able to read them and being able to pronounce them. It really screws up your ability to learn. A lot of dyslexic people will flunk out of school, even though they are intelligent. Doctors say there is absolutely no relationship between IQ and dyslexia. I’m not telling you I’m a genius, but the point is that just because I have dyslexia doesn’t mean I’m dumb. What it means, according to one doctor I met with, is that the people who actually find a way to make it have learned to adapt—and it’s unbelievable how high they can go.

As a kid I remember not having any problem with vision, which was why it seemed strange that I had problems seeing things on the page. Actually, I had great hand-eye coordination. I was a really good hitter when I played baseball in high school. Even as an adult, I could always hit. My brother Jim loves to tell the story about one time when we were in Mobile, Alabama, at the Senior Bowl. This was when Rob and I were just getting started as coaches, and Jim was pretty fresh out of law school and wanted to be an agent representing players. So we were all at the Senior Bowl at one of the little schools where the players used to practice (they practice at the stadium in town these days). We were leaving practice and we walked past the baseball field, where there was a kid pitching, working with the catcher. We chatted with him, trying to be friendly, but the pitcher started bragging on himself about how great he was and how he was getting ready for the draft, expecting to make it big. I was thinking to myself, “He’s not really that tough.” So I grabbed a bat, walked up to the plate, and said, “Okay, show me what you got.” I was standing there in cowboy boots and jeans, just looking ridiculous going up to bat. The kid was so cocky as he wound up. He threw me a fastball, and I just crushed it. Jim guessed I hit the thing like 400 feet. On the first pitch, not even looking one over—that was sweet. I just dropped the bat and said, “Oh yeah, kid, you’re going far.” We all just walked away laughing. The kid was probably shell-shocked.

Anyway, the point is that I never thought there was something physically wrong with me, so it took me a long time to address the problem. Now that I know I’m dyslexic, I don’t hide anymore from the things that might be wrong with me. I don’t hide from the fact that I’m overweight or that I don’t read that well. This kind of stuff basically tells who I am, about some of the struggles I have or have had; I’m man enough to admit it. If I can help somebody realize that I was able to accomplish what I’ve done so far despite what I had to overcome, it’ll make me very happy. This wasn’t a fun thing to deal with.

It’s the same way with my players. If I’m willing to put myself out there with them, they’re going to feel the same way about talking to me. They’re going to open up as people, maybe telling me something that I can do to help them, motivate them, or make them better players. If I’ve got nothing to hide from my guys, they won’t hide from me.

The one person who I think struggled most with my public announcement was my mom, and her problem wasn’t that I talked about it. I think it’s more about guilt. Like I wrote before, my mom has a doctorate in education administration. Think about it: She’s incredibly smart; my dad was an Academic All-American; my older brother Jim has three degrees, including a law degree; and my twin brother Rob has his degree and never had any problems.

Then there’s me, and my mom didn’t ever figure it out. She explains it this way:

I understand where she’s coming from. I’m a parent now and I want to make sure I do everything I can for my boys, but I really want my mom to understand that she didn’t fail me in any way. I mean, really: Is my life bad? I do what I love, and when you think about it, what might have happened if I had actually learned to read more effectively? Would I have ended up as a coach or would I have gone into another career? I know that my disability made me stronger in other ways that have helped me as a coach. When I say I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing, I mean it. I want to be a coach and I
need
to be a coach. I can’t do anything else. This is where I can succeed.

I found out I had dyslexia around 2007. I was visiting a doctor for a completely unrelated reason and we got to chatting. I told her I’d always been a very slow reader. Well, she started asking me a few specific questions and a few minutes later she told me I was almost certainly dyslexic. I was pretty flabbergasted. I thought, “That’s crazy! I would have known it by now.” But then she gave me a test with a list of 100 words that I was supposed to read. It seemed to take me at least 15 minutes to get through it, because I was looking at those words and they were just a jumble of black letters on white paper. When I got done, they called my younger son, Seth, in and gave him the list of words to read. He rattled them off in about 30 seconds, right down the list like it was nothing. I was floored, finally realizing what was wrong with me for all those years. Then I remember just laughing about it, thinking about all the stuff I did trying to accommodate my problem without even knowing what it was.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t embarrassed. In fact, I took some other tests related to reasoning and brain function and the doctors
evaluating those said that I had the highest percent of problem solving and creativity they’d ever seen. That’s how I compensated for what I couldn’t do. You see what I mean about developing other strengths? More important, those problem-solving and creative abilities are crucial for coaching, especially in football. When you play in a game that has 22 moving parts at one time, you constantly have problems to solve and you’re constantly looking for creative ways to attack the opponent. Problem solving and creativity work everywhere in this business.

Let me give you an example of how I dealt with dyslexia without even knowing it. Somewhere along the line, I figured out that I could read more effectively if things were printed on colored paper. I don’t know where or how I figured that out, but it’s true. So I developed a color-coding system for how to organize the plays I wanted to call. I might have had some on blue paper, some on green, some on yellow, whatever worked. If you’d ever see my call sheet for a game, it looks like a freakin’ rainbow. Anyway, then I’d have Mike Pettine, who was one of our staff assistants in Baltimore and is now the defensive coordinator with me on the Jets, print the stuff on different-colored paper. Again, this was before I ever knew I had the disability. It would drive Pettine crazy. He’d say to me: “How can you read that better?” He didn’t understand it. Heck, I couldn’t explain it at the time; it just worked.

The other way that I would compensate is I’d listen very carefully. Again, it’s not that I ever really thought about it, I just did it. I listened to what people were telling me. That’s how I picked up stuff. With the TV and radio commercials that I do now, I have people read the copy to me and I repeat it back to them before we do the taping. It’s just a lot easier for me to get the information that way. If you talk to me, I can pick things up better than I can by just trying to read them off a white piece of paper with black letters.

That’s why I decided to tell people about my dyslexia when I got the job with the New York Jets. I also never hid it from the Jets when I interviewed. You can’t hide stuff like that as you get further up the
line in this business—really, in any business. It’s one thing to be an assistant coach, where you’re not out in the public all the time or expected to be the face of the organization. You’re talking to players a lot, but you’re not in front of them every day doing a speech or some presentation. Being an assistant coach, especially a position coach, you can be a little anonymous (which is good sometimes … like after a loss).

When you’re a head coach, everything is on the table. Your life is an open book. That’s why I figured this was the right time to talk about it. Of course, you may be thinking, “Okay, Rex, it’s great that you admit you’re dyslexic, but how exactly did you get a college degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State, and a master’s in physical education while you were a graduate assistant at Eastern Kentucky? How did you even get through grade school?”

That’s a good question. When I first got started in school—first and second grade—they’d give us little spelling tests. I would get maybe one or two right, and sometimes none at all. It got to the point that if I got the first letter and the last letter right, then that was like me getting the one correct answer. As I went along in school, things got to be more and more embarrassing. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but when you keep failing tests, frustration mounts. So what I did to cope was skip school all the time. We were living in Toronto and my mom would be off working. I had a morning paper route and an afternoon paper route, so my brother and I would be out the door early. Then I’d go to school. If there was going to be softball or floor hockey or something fun during the day, then I would stay. If there wasn’t, I would go home and my mom never really knew. I would never get away with that today, because they’re checking all the time now, but back then it was easy.

The funny thing is, I really liked school, but I didn’t want to be there if I knew I was getting a test back. That was part of the embarrassment. The other way I dealt with it was that if somebody made fun of me, I’d just beat their ass. I was big, so people never really said much. I was still embarrassed, but I was strong enough to keep
people from really hurting my feelings. I’m not saying ass-kicking is a great coping mechanism, but I can only imagine how hard it would be for a kid to feel helpless and not be able to stick up for himself. Quitting school might feel like a better option. When kids would be reading in class, I would just sit there kind of looking at the pictures, turning the pages to make it look like I was keeping up, hoping the teacher didn’t ask me any questions. If the teacher did, I’d make some joke or smart-aleck comment to get around giving the answer, because I didn’t know what I was talking about. At least I stayed in school enough that I could get through to graduate, and I had enough athletic talent to play ball in college. I was lucky.

These days, kids with dyslexia are given a bunch of different ways to learn or read books or take tests, which is great news. But that’s not how it was for me. Once I got to college, I remember how much reading there was and how much I struggled. I would try to learn the material as best I could. I tried to read and write my papers as well as I could manage, but I couldn’t actually make it all come together. There would be so many misspelled words, the papers would make no sense. If I had been allowed to do the tests verbally, I feel like they would have been a snap. I could explain all the material by talking to you. But writing it down or talking about what I’d read? Then, I was stuck.

At one point, I finally dropped out and came back to live with my mom. Rob stayed in school because he was doing fine. He could handle the reading and paper-writing, but I couldn’t. While I was with my mom, I took an English class at a local college. We were supposed to read 10 books, and I couldn’t read one of them. So we tried something. My mom read the books out loud and we would talk about the plot and the material in a lot of detail. When I had papers due, I told her what I wanted to say and she’d type them up for me. When I would go take a test, I would think about all the different questions the teacher might ask, and I’d write down notes on what answers I might use if I got these questions. Whatever the questions ended up being, I’d think about those notes and figure out a way to
use them on the tests. The professor would sometimes say, “Rex, you had a different take on it than I had.” Well, I sure did—because I had memorized the first sentence or two of my notes and then I’d just try to make it work from there. That way I could BS my way through the test but still show I knew the basics. Now, the written tests never looked anything like my papers because my mom would help make the papers look good. My written tests, on the other hand, looked atrocious and were filled with mistakes because my spelling was so awful. But in the end, I was able to squirm by, and I figured out how to pass the course.