Do You Love Football?! by Jon Gruden

Author:Jon Gruden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

In 1993 the Packers had targeted two blue-chip free agents to sign—Reggie White, the dominant defensive end for the Eagles, and Harry Galbreath, an offensive guard with the Dolphins. Both guys had played at Tennessee, although only Harry and I were there at the same time. When we were talking about how much we wanted Galbreath during a meeting, I told Ron Wolf, “I know Harry Galbreath. I used to live right next door to him in the Stokley Athletic Center. He and Bruce Wilkerson were my next-door neighbors.”

“Yeah, right,” Ron said.

When Galbreath’s name came up a second time I again said, “I know this guy.”

The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Clarksville, Tennessee. I was on a mission to recruit Harry. I spent a couple of nights at his house and told him all about the high quality situation he would be coming into with the Packers. It wasn’t as easy a sell as I thought it would be.

“Hey, Gru, Green Bay’s cold, man,” Harry said. “It’s really cold. I can’t play in the cold.”

One night we played pool and I issued Harry a challenge. “If I beat you at your house, on your table, you’ve got to come to Green Bay,” I said. I won, in a stunning upset. We ended up signing Harry, as well as Reggie. Did my clutch pool playing have anything to do with us getting Harry? I’ll always believe it did.

Getting Reggie was supposed to turn us into a Super Bowl team. Somewhere along the line, we forgot we actually had to earn that status on the field. The result was that we started the ’93 season 1–3. We weren’t playing well at all. Reggie called a team meeting. It was supposed to be players only, but I couldn’t help but kind of eavesdrop on it, because I knew my man Sterling was going to have something to say.

“We’ve all got to step up individually,” Reggie said to the rest of the players. “We’ve got to dig down deep now. We’ve got to make plays.”

“Hey!” Sterling said, in that booming voice. “You’ve got to make plays. I’ve got to make plays. We’re the highest-paid guys on this football team. How many sacks do you have in the first four games?”

Sterling called Reggie out. It got heated a little bit with stuff being said back and forth. The next game was that Sunday night game against Denver. Reggie put that legendary hump move on the Broncos a couple of times where he would get that low center of gravity and great leverage, maneuver his hand underneath the offensive tackle’s armpit and use the guy’s own weight to literally lift him off the ground and throw him upfield. Sterling did his part and we ended up winning 30–27. We went on to win three in a row, finishing 9–7 and going to the playoffs.

I’ll never forget that meeting. What I learned was that, although they might not always admit as much

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