Jim Fassel thought he had made the Bears in 1972 when coach Abe Gibron broke training camp in Rensselaer, Ind., and brought only three quarterbacks to Soldier Field.
A seventh-round draft pick from Long Beach State, Fassel still cherishes the phone call he got from George Halas.
“Papa Halas welcomed me to the organization, and I’ll always remember that. That was unbelievable,” Fassel said.
Bobby Douglass, Kent Nix and Fassel survived training camp.
“I thought I was in pretty good shape to make it,” Fassel said. “So I came in one day and all my gear was gone. I thought, `Oh, man.'”
Linebacker Doug Buffone and guard Jim Cadile acted shocked.
“What the heck is this all about?” they asked. “We have to get this straight. We can’t be cutting players without telling them.”
“My heart sank,” Fassel said.
Turns out the veterans had moved Fassel across the locker room as a practical joke.
Fassel remembers one thing about Gibron:
“Abe fined me for being 2 pounds overweight. He weighed 319. I went 206. And I had to go up to Ed McCaskey’s office and write a check.”
Fassel was getting his first dose of the big-time, and it helped prepare him for a life of unpredictability and insecurity that led to coaching the New York Giants in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
A few days after breaking training camp, the Bears gained the playing rights to Zeke Bratkowski, who was Gibron’s offensive coordinator and also would serve as the Bears’ disaster quarterback who did not play despite a disastrous 4-9-1 season. Fassel was released before it started and hooked on for one season as a player-coach with Hawaii in the World Football League.
Fassel, 51, is a family man and football has been part of the family since his late father, Bud, the assistant fire chief in Anaheim, was hired as a full-time equipment man for the high school. Jim was a ballboy who watched his father encourage kids and refuse to allow anyone to quit the team.
His dad always had wanted to be a coach, but World War II prevented him from getting a college degree. In the past two weeks, Fassel said the well-wishers his father had influenced have moved him.
“A lot of them didn’t have fathers,” Fassel said. “A guy sent an old practice jersey with no numbers, just a stamped `A’ for Anaheim. He said, `I thought you’d like to have it because your dad did all the repair stitch work by hand on the jersey.’
“It’s a crusty, old, dirty jersey, but it will be displayed in a proud place in my home.”
Then there is Hal Sherbeck, Fassel’s coach at Fullerton Junior College who will attend this Super Bowl. Sherbeck used to dress 100 players, refusing to exclude anyone. When rules limited the roster to 60 for the national title game, Sherbeck threatened to forfeit. Fullerton dressed 100 and won 41-0, the same score as the NFC title game that sent Fassel to Tampa.
The Giants, a family organization if there ever was one, were having intramural problems a year ago when defensive players Jessie Armstead and Michael Strahan criticized Fassel’s moribund offense. Kerry Collins had replaced Kent Graham at quarterback. Graham was released after the season, following previous starters Danny Kanell and Dave Graham out the door in Fassel’s first three seasons.
When Fassel’s mother, Dorothy, was sick during the 1999 preseason and died that November, Fassel turned the play-calling over to quarterbacks coach Sean Payton. This season Fassel made the Naperville native the team’s offensive coordinator and turned the game plan over to him.
“It kind of wore on me that I was trying to wear all the hats,” Fassel said. “It doesn’t matter who’s calling the plays; if we don’t have a focus, toughness or togetherness about us, the plays don’t matter. I had Sean Payton to assign play-calling to. I couldn’t assign an assistant coach to team unity.”
If coordinating were just play-calling, it would be one thing. But coordinators must match personnel groups and make sure the right players are on the field. They must scheme for offense while the defense is on the field.
“It’s draining,” General Manager Ernie Accorsi said. “It’s awful tough to try to maintain an overview and a relationship with the defensive players. When [Jim] turned that over, he just was able to be more of a big-picture head coach.”
Coincidentally, the bickering waned.
“Coach Fassel told us a long time ago to have less talk and more action,” Strahan said.
Before this season, Fassel received a one-year contract extension through 2001 so he wouldn’t be a lame-duck coach, but 2000 was his make-or-break chance, just as Bears coach Dick Jauron acknowledges 2001 is crucial to him.
Two months ago, after a two-game losing streak dropped the Giants to 7-4, Fassel guaranteed a berth in the playoffs, which took the pressure off the players and placed it squarely on himself.
“[Fassel] was at the point where he said, `What do I have to lose?'” Strahan said. “During the week we didn’t have to read about what we could do and what we couldn’t do. Instead, we read about how crazy he was.”
After moving 12 times in his first 24 years of coaching (and one unpleasant stint as an air-conditioner salesman), one prediction didn’t sound crazy at all.
“I kid him that his hair is not blond, it’s red,” Accorsi said. “He has a temper. People think of him just as an accountant. He’s a tough guy. I’m a believer that in any job, you either get better or you get worse. He has gotten better.”
Fassel’s best friend in coaching is Brian Billick of the Baltimore Ravens. The two met when Fassel was an assistant at Stanford and Billick had taken a job with Bill Walsh in public relations for the San Francisco 49ers in 1979 just to get his foot in the NFL door.
Their bond is conversation. Never have opposing Super Bowl coaches liked to talk so much, even about subjects other than football.
They are both gurus of offense, both slightly frustrated at the moment and both happily riding strong defenses.
“If you’re a smart head coach, you learn to win games with the teams you have,” Fassel said.
Fassel’s first job in the NFL was an assistant with the Giants in 1991-92 during the failed tenure of Ray Handley, a time when Fassel had to deal with more important problems than work.
Kitty and Jim Fassel’s youngest son, Mike, was 10 and practicing with his Little League team when he tripped and stumbled into a table. His larynx was damaged so badly he almost died. He underwent operations for eight years, up until last April, when Fassel cut short a mini-camp to take his son for one last surgery before he left for Boston College as a place-kicker.
“I admire the way he has fought this and didn’t let it stop him,” Fassel told New York reporters last spring.
Shortly after Mike’s accident, Fassel’s dad was killed in a car accident.
“My father and I were very close,” Fassel said Wednesday. “Probably the reason I’m doing what I’m doing is because he was in athletics.”
The Fassels’ oldest son, John, coached in the NFL Europe League in the spring. Second son Brian graduated from Seton Hall last spring. Daughter Jana plays basketball at Fairleigh Dickinson.
Fassel said he loves the Super Bowl spotlight. He knows things can’t get much better in his profession than they are this week. He also knows things can get worse. His team, a reflection of their coach, knows these things too.
“There’s a mental toughness about us right now,” Fassel said, “the way our guys are playing, playing hard, keeping their focus that’s allowing us to do a lot of things.”
