Guts and Genius by Bob Glauber

Author:Bob Glauber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Near the end of Parcells’s nightmare first season as head coach, he sat down with Giants beat writer Vinny DiTrani of the Bergen County (New Jersey) Record, ostensibly to discuss what the coach planned to do to get out of the mess he found himself in.

“Put your pen down,” Parcells told DiTrani.

Parcells wanted to go off the record and knew he could trust DiTrani, a widely respected reporter and writer who lived not far from where Parcells grew up in Bergen County. From one Jersey guy to the next, Parcells laid out his plan.

“I wanted to do the usual ‘what the Giants need to do’ type of story,” said DiTrani, who was nicknamed “the Sage” by Parcells, a nod to DiTrani’s football intelligence. “One day after practice, he takes me into the coaches’ room and showed me this seven-point plan and said, ‘If I can do these things, we turn this franchise around.’”

The list included an upgrade of the team’s weight room, which was embarrassingly small and without the latest training equipment. Parcells confided he needed to get rid of several players and replace them with players more to the coach’s liking—tougher and tougher-minded than many of the ones on the current roster.

“The whole thing, right across the board,” DiTrani said. “He’s giving me all these things, and I’m like, ‘Why can’t I write this?’”

“Because I haven’t told George Young,” Parcells said, “and I don’t want him reading it in the paper.”

Not long after their meeting, DiTrani had an off-the-record conversation with Young about Parcells’s shaky situation.

“Well, [Parcells] came in and told me what he wanted to do,” Young told DiTrani.

“Oh, you mean his seven-point plan?” DiTrani asked.

Young looked at DiTrani.

“How’d you know that?”

DiTrani smiled and told him about his conversation with Parcells.

“That helped sway George,” DiTrani said of Parcells’s checklist of priorities. “George became convinced the guy has a vision, so let’s let him try it.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.