Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (6 page)

At that point, my dad was coaching at what’s now known as the University of Buffalo. It was his first big break at the college level. He was the defensive coordinator there and he was working some extremely long hours. In fact, the other coaches were complaining about how much my dad worked and he just mocked them.

Buffalo was already the fourth or fifth place my mom and dad had moved to. After he got fired at Gainesville High, he went to Marshall High in Marshall, Texas. Then he got a college assistant job at Pacific (all the way in Stockton, California), then Buffalo. He had another stop at Vanderbilt down in Tennessee. That is part of the stress the coaching life puts on a family. When coaches get hired, it’s not like they do a lot of the packing. As a coach, you’re expected to drop everything and go to the next place because there’s always work to do. The place that’s hiring you is replacing some guy who probably left and they need you immediately.

That leaves the wives to do the packing and all the other details that go with moving. The wife of a coach better be a saint. And even if she is, it’s tough. We were in Buffalo when my mom had enough. She’s a smart woman and she wanted to do more with her gifts than follow my dad around the country each time he got fired and hired somewhere else. She got her degree from Oklahoma A&M and taught high school wherever my dad’s job took us. When we got to Buffalo, she finished her master’s degree in education. After she and my dad split up, she went to the University of Chicago and got her PhD in education administration in two years. Along the way, she was Phi Beta Kappa.

While my mom was at Chicago getting her doctorate, the three Ryan brothers went to Ardmore to live with Grandma Ward. Bamma Ward was great—tough, but great. How can you not love football if your grandmother is named Alabama? Seriously.

After my mom graduated, she got a job at the University of Toronto, working for the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She taught and conducted some research there on the education of children from remote areas. Ontario is this huge territory in Canada, as big as Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas combined, and she was looking into the educational opportunities and performance by kids who spent hours each day just getting to school, like taking snowmobiles just to get to where the bus would pick them up.

Like I said, my mom has lived a great life herself. She was in
Toronto for 19 years, then spent seven years as the vice president of the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Canada. She’s worked for the World Bank and traveled the world to places like Indonesia, Australia, France, Germany, and Singapore—all in all, I think she’s had a really interesting life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The three of us boys moved up to Toronto with her once she accepted the position there. Toronto was a great place to grow up—clean, safe, and fun. When we were young, Rob and I would jump on a bus to get to the train and take it into town to go watch hockey games or do whatever we felt like doing. I remember when we were 14 and the Toronto Blue Jays started up in 1977, we went to the first game. We didn’t have to have Mom cart us around or watch over us.

The only thing is that Canada isn’t really too big on football. They like it enough; you’ve got the CFL, after all. But as they like to say up there, they play both sports: ice hockey and road hockey. It was ice hockey in the winter and road hockey in the summer. When we were growing up, the biggest show on TV was
Hockey Night in Canada
. That was every Wednesday and Saturday night (it was before cable TV got big), and that was religion in Canada. It was either the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens on TV, and the whole country would watch. In fact, that’s why for all those years either the Leafs or the Canadiens would always play at home on Wednesday or Saturday night. You had to have the screaming crowd in the background to add to the excitement. We all learned to play hockey. My big brother Jim still plays to this day, more than 40 seasons in the books. He’s proud to tell you he plays in an adult league in St. Louis.

Football was a little different matter, though. Like I said, they play up there, but it’s not exactly the same thing. You can be pretty physical in hockey and everybody expects that. As graceful as you have to be to skate and play a sport, it’s still a rough game. When my brother and I played football with that kind of aggression, the refs didn’t quite understand it. They once kicked us out of a game for hitting too hard. Of course, part of the problem was that we hit
the coach’s son too hard, but my mom was standing there after they kicked us out, yelling at the officials, “It’s football!”

While we were in Toronto, my mom was great about my dad, too. We kept in close contact with him all the time. We even went down to Miami with her to be around my dad at Super Bowl III, between the Jets and Colts, back in January 1969. There Rob and I were, all of six years old, playing in the sand on the beach while Joe Namath was guaranteeing a victory even when he’s this huge underdog. Then we watched him and the Jets back it up.

And you wonder why I like bravado so much.

By the time we were 14 or 15, we were going back and forth a lot to my dad’s, and my mom realized the sports up in Toronto weren’t very well organized. We went to live with my dad so that we could take advantage of developing our skills, since athletics was really where our interests lay. I imagine my brother and I were probably a pretty good handful, too. Actually, I don’t imagine it; I know it. We gave the schools some fits. We hung out every minute together. I mean, every minute. We did everything together.

One year before we moved in with my dad, the principal of the school we were going to in Toronto called my mom and said, “We’re going to split the boys up in different classes.” My mom said to herself, “Well, that’s not going to work.” It didn’t. Rob and I are not identical twins, but we were pretty darn close back then and we looked an awful lot alike. We’d switch classes half the time, particularly if one of us had a test that we weren’t ready for and the other one could do it. We drove the teachers crazy pretty quickly. Finally, the principal called my mom back and says, “Well, this isn’t working, either.”

Not long after that, Rob and I went to live with our dad. Jim was already in college at the University of Minnesota, and our dad was on the Vikings’ coaching staff as defensive line coach. Jim is smart, too, like my mom. He’s an academic. He got his degree from Minnesota, got his MBA from Notre Dame, and his law degree from the University of St. Louis. He’s a lawyer in St. Louis now. He wanted
to be a sportswriter for a while, then he went into the ad business before becoming a lawyer. He’s just a sharp, sharp guy.

Let me say one thing about Minnesota. For my dad, it was a great place because he got a chance to work with Bud Grant, a guy he really looked up to in a lot of ways. People don’t really know this, but Grant was one of probably the three most influential people in my dad’s career: Grant, former Jets coach Weeb Ewbank, and the great George Halas. Obviously, Ewbank gave my dad his first pro job and was a special person. He’s still the only coach in NFL history to win championships with two different teams. He won two NFL titles in the 1950s with Baltimore, including the 1958 title game still known as The Greatest Game Ever Played. Then he won Super Bowl III and put the AFL on the map.

Talk about putting a stamp on history. Ewbank really knew how to relate to players. Ewbank also had a huge influence on my dad’s thinking about how to attack the quarterback. Ewbank used to spend a lot of time devising ways to protect Namath. Namath was the meal ticket, as Ewbank used to say. Namath already had bad knees, so keeping him protected was a must. What my dad realized, like so many others, is that the defense had to attack the quarterback, the nerve center of the offense. That had to be the primary goal, whether it was physically or mentally. The quarterback has to be pressured somehow. And Halas is Halas. You’re talking about one of the fathers of the game. He also meant a lot to my dad because he stood by him.

But Grant was special from another perspective: his sideline approach. Bud Grant was stoic, unflappable, and didn’t put up with any BS. You couldn’t rattle Bud Grant, and he wanted to make sure you couldn’t be rattled. At least that’s how my dad understood Grant, and he understood it right away. My dad still tells the story of interviewing with Grant for the assistant’s job.

He sat down in Grant’s office and then Grant walked in and sat down. Grant didn’t say anything at first and the silence went on and on. Finally, after about five minutes, Grant asked, “You got any dogs?” My dad said yes. Another five minutes went by and Grant
didn’t say anything. Finally, he asked, “You hunt with them?” My dad said no. Another five minutes went by and Grant said, “Okay, you got the job.” To this day, my dad thinks Grant just wanted to see if he would get nervous.

As much as people may not believe it, my dad styled himself on the sideline like Grant. He remained calm. Now, people don’t believe that because of the Gilbride thing; they think he was a crazy man, but he was just the opposite. Of course, he would swear in a game and he might give you the kind of answer that would melt you to your kneecaps, but he wasn’t losing his cool. He was just getting to the point.

My dad also met Alan Page, the Hall of Fame defensive tackle, when he was in Minnesota. Page wasn’t just a great player; he was a serious scholar and a gentleman. In fact, he was elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court as a judge in 1992. Page played the first 12 years of his career with Minnesota before finishing up his last three years with the Bears after my dad went to Chicago with coach Neill Armstrong, another Vikings assistant the Bears hired. That association with Page proved vital for my dad.

For Rob and me, moving to Minnesota wasn’t so great. We lived in Edina, a pretty affluent community near where the team trained. It was a nice enough area, but everybody was kind of stuck up and clique-ish. You had the jocks on one side, the druggies over on the other side, and then other little groups. That’s not what my brother and I were about. We wanted to hang out with everybody. It’s like later, when we were in college at Southwest Oklahoma. We played football and then we hung out with all these regular guys. We were both 6-foot-2, 225 pounds at the time. We’d be at the bar on a Saturday night and some guy would look to start something with one of our smaller buddies, and the next thing you know he’s looking at Rob and me. We liked that.

But we weren’t in Edina too long, because at the beginning of 1978, my dad went with Armstrong when Armstrong was hired by Halas and the Chicago Bears. That’s when my dad ran the defense
himself for the first time. My brother and I went with him, too, and we all lived in Prairie View, Illinois, which was a lot better for us. We loved it there and we ended up going to Adlai Stevenson High School.

More important for my dad—and eventually me and my brother—that’s when he started coming up with the schemes for the 46 defense, which really changed the game.

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Now, remember that and think about this: In 1981, the Bears were about to fire Armstrong and his staff after four seasons. The team wasn’t very good. They’d gone 30-35 over the four seasons, making the playoffs once and getting bounced after the first game.

Rob and I were freshmen at Southwest Oklahoma at the time. My dad had a friend down there who helped us get going with the football team. Really, I should have probably been playing baseball by that point. I could really pound the ball in high school. But my senior season was bad, because I lost one of my contact lenses and I was afraid to bug my dad to get a new one. I remember just not being able to see the ball at the plate. I know it sounds kind of dumb as I look back on it, but my dad was having a rough time. The 1980 season, which was the first half of my senior year of high school, hadn’t gone so well and then my dad found out he was going to have to get a big section of soft tissue on his back sliced off because he had some kind of growth on it. I just didn’t think the contact lens was that big a deal, comparatively.

Then came the 1981 season, and Armstrong was done after that. I was wondering what was going to happen to my dad. What happened is that he ended up with more leverage than ever before. Here’s how it went: All of the Bears’ defensive players got together and signed a letter asking Halas to keep my dad. Every single one of them. It was Page, the guy my dad had begun coaching back in Minnesota, who wrote the letter and the rest of the guys signed it. So old man Halas (he was 86 by that time) did it. He kept my dad
and the entire defensive staff, which really pissed Mike Ditka off when they hired Ditka to replace Armstrong. Here’s Ditka, a Bears legend himself and the first tight end ever elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, having to let my dad run the defense. Ditka tried talking to my dad a bunch of times and my dad never listened. Well, he listened, but his response was usually “Fuck you. I run the defense.”

The simple fact of the matter is that the players believed in my dad. They knew he had ideas that were going to work. Besides all the brilliant concepts that were developed for the 46, the philosophy of the scheme was basically pure aggression. This is what defensive players want. My dad knew it then. I know it now. My brother Jim put it this way: “Dad was always tapped into the mind of the defensive player. Defensive players understand the concept of bend-but-don’t-break and read-and-react, but it’s not what they’re about. The whole basis of a defensive football player is to be aggressive and destroy. My dad epitomized that philosophy when he designed the 46 in Chicago.”

Better yet, the Bears were starting to get the players who could make those ideas work.

Now, before I get to that, let me backtrack a little. The chapter in Jaworski’s book about the 46 does a great job of describing how the defense worked and its impact. I would love to give you a full breakdown on the defense, but I could go on forever. I could write a whole book about the 46 and what it’s done for football, but I’ll just say that if you want to learn more, Jaworski does a nice job of describing not just the technique but also my dad, even if they didn’t get along too well during their one season together in Philadelphia.