Yes, Sir, Parcells Gets Your Attention

NEW ORLEANS —  He won’t throw a pass, kick a punt, lay a block or make a tackle--he won’t even hold for a field goal--but he may play the deciding role in the winning of Super Bowl XXXI on Sunday. He hates the very idea. But, then, Bill Parcells hates many ideas.

Bill Parcells never reminded me of a football coach. He always reminded me of a New York City cop. A cop whose feet hurt and whose wife just left him.

You know how they are. You come up to one and ask him what’s the best way to get to Greenwich Village and he says, “What do ya wanta know for?” Or, “What do you wanta go there for?” Or he says, “Do I look like a tour guide? Do I look like I got nothing better to do than guide you around New York?”

He thinks of the world as perps looking to mug somebody. He has one expression, annoyed; one attitude, go away, can’t you see we’re busy here!

But the greatest pro football coach in history, Vince Lombardi, was just like this. Like Parcells, he was a New Yorker with small tolerance for idiots and bores. Who liked things done his way and didn’t much care how he got it, whether it was politically correct or even polite.

Many coaches today are afraid of their players. Or their owners.

Bill Parcells was never afraid of anyone. Or anything. He’d come up to God and tell him to tuck his shirt in--so why should he tiptoe around some cretin in cleats simply because he makes more money than he does?

Football is a coach’s medium--just as movies are a director’s medium and politics are a spin doctor’s. It has been said every institution is a lengthened shadow of a man, and in football that man is the coach.

The Green Bay Packers are a two-touchdown favorite over the New England Patriots this Super Bowl--but they might be three or four if it weren’t for the Patriots’ four-star leader.

Look at it this way: Would the American Third Army have manhandled the German army without General Patton? Not as easily or as quickly.

General Parcells runs his football team like a company of privates. The players might come to practice in Rolls-Royces, but they had better be ready to do a lot of saluting and Yessiring when they get there.

When they get to a game, they’re afraid to look over to the bench when they foul up. They know the general--excuse me, the coach--will be standing there with his lip curled. As if he can’t make up his mind whether to have you fired on the spot--or just taken out and shot.

I won’t say the Patriots are afraid to lose. But they know the coach won’t like it one damn bit. Parcells isn’t into quote-unquote doing your best. Your best is not good enough.

It’d be a great part for George C. Scott. Parcells usually wears this baggy old sweater to games--Bill Parcells can’t be bothered with what he looks like--but he should come to work in helmet and riding boots and a field marshal’s baton. He’s in charge here.

He has already won two Super Bowls. His Giants beat the Denver Broncos in 1987 and the Buffalo Bills in 1991.

He doesn’t brook half-hearted effort. He subscribes to the Lombardi theorem that the name of the game is block-and-tackle. Like England, he expects every man to do his duty.

It’s fashionable to make matchups in a Super Bowl game. See who the opposition is, who has to block a Lawrence Taylor, who has to guard Jerry Rice--and so on.

Parcells’ guy on the other side of the field is a cuddly sort with two or three chins, a smooth face and the quiet, almost diffident manner of a motorman. He’d make a great spy.

Mike Holmgren seems like a guy a player could go to and cry on his shoulder if things went wrong, and he’d say, “There! There! It’s going to be all right. Tell Papa where it hurts.”

He looks like your favorite uncle, the kind who’d bring you candy, take you to the zoo. It’s hard to picture him angry.

It’s hard to picture Bill Parcells any other way. He looks at you like something he hadn’t ordered, as the fellow said. Or as if you were in his parking space.

Parcells doesn’t take part in the news conferences down here this week, he conducts them. He tells you what he’ll answer and what he’ll look a hole through you for asking. You get some idea of what a guy who just had a punt blocked will feel like coming back to the bench.

Not altogether surprisingly, Parcells’ management is disappointing him these days. The Patriots’ owner, Bob Kraft, takes the not-unreasonable position that ownership entitles him to make personnel decisions.

The underground has it that Parcells was appalled at this kind of insubordination on the part of the front office. I mean, whose team is this, anyway? Parcells lumps owners with tight ends--they do what they’re told.

Coach knows best. As his wide receiver, Terry Glenn, whom Coach Parcells once dismissed with the pronoun “she” because he missed a couple of exhibition games because of a hamstring injury, said the other day: “Sometimes, Coach says something you don’t agree with, but then you see it work and you say, ‘Gee! I was wrong.’ Coach needs respect. After all, he’s been there, done that.”

Parcells wishes management would shape up like that. It’s not likely. In spite of public displays of solidarity, it’s more likely General Parcells will be leading the New York Jets this time next year. If he can lead them to the Super Bowl, his next act will be walking to the Statue of Liberty from the Battery. It’ll be good riddance to New England and the Patriots anyway. But then, any New York cop considers anything north of 125th Street as hicksville anyway.