They sat on the South Carolina shore last July for quite some time, two old friends catching up and looking forward.
“He told me, `Kerry, this time next year I’ll be a head coach,'” Kerry Tharp recalled.
Tharp didn’t doubt for a minute Charlie Weis would make that statement a reality.
The two men met in 1984 when Weis was a graduate assistant on South Carolina football coach Joe Morrison’s staff and Tharp was the school’s recently named sports information director, a position he still holds.
On Dec. 13, Weis’ summer prediction came true when he was introduced as the football coach at Notre Dame.
For the next few weeks Weis, 48, will do double duty as Notre Dame’s head coach and offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots, who are trying to return to the Super Bowl for the third time in four seasons.
While his NFL success no doubt made him appealing to the Irish, it was the Notre Dame appointment that’s the culmination of a lifetime dream for Weis . . . and a lifetime of hard work.
Tharp said Weis’ friends recognize it as the obvious ascension of a man marked by talent and passion.
“Charlie had some goals, and he didn’t mind telling you what they were,” Tharp said. “He doesn’t lack for confidence. And I always knew that in his heart he loved the University of Notre Dame.”
Notre Dame was not Weis’ only option. He was expected to be a strong candidate for one of the NFL head-coaching jobs likely to open up after the season.
But when the Irish called, Weis and his wife, Maura, decided Notre Dame was their best option.
“The only two colleges I attended were Notre Dame and South Carolina, so the only two college [jobs] I’d be interested in would be Notre Dame and South Carolina,” Weis said. “We came to the decision when Notre Dame came along that we’d be better off living in South Bend.”
It was familiar territory. Weis’ love affair with Notre Dame began when he was growing up in Middlesex, N.J., the second of five children and the oldest of the family’s four boys.
“Actually, to play, my favorite sport was baseball,” Weis said. “To watch, believe it or not, my favorite sport was hockey.”
But it was the Fighting Irish football squad that fired his imagination.
“When we were kids, every Sunday morning you’d wake up and they would have the Notre Dame football highlights on [television],” Weis said.
Eventually Weis made his way to South Bend as a student. He said he never missed a home football game in four years and probably road-tripped to more away games than was healthy for his bank account . . . or his GPA.
“I went to Notre Dame planning on being a sports announcer,” Weis said. “I loved sports and I realized at a young age that my passion for sports did not compare with my ability for sports. I thought I was going to be the next broadcaster for the Knicks, Yankees, Rangers and Giants.
“As you go through college, you find out that that’s not exactly what you’re looking for. At that time, I thought it would be really great to be a high school head coach.”
After graduating from Notre Dame in 1978, Weis returned to New Jersey. He worked in private industry for a year and didn’t like it, so he answered a newspaper ad for a teacher/assistant freshman football coach at Boonton High School and was hired. He later moved to Morristown High, where he coached football, basketball, lacrosse and fencing.
In 1984, he went to South Carolina to coach under Morrison and earn a master’s degree in education. After the 1988 season, Morrison dropped dead of a heart attack, and his successor brought in a whole new staff. Weis moved back to New Jersey to take a job as the head football coach at Franklin Township High School.
He held the job for only a year, winning a New Jersey state championship. That led to an opportunity in the personnel department of the New York Giants and the beginning of a long association with Bill Parcells.
Though he subsequently would win three Super Bowl rings, Weis recalls his year at Franklin Township as the most fulfilling of his career.
“Of all the jobs I have ever had, and maybe being a head coach at Notre Dame will compare to this, but it was the most rewarding,” Weis said. “You’re a coach, you’re a counselor, you’re a second father, you’re a community leader.”
And Weis took each of those roles seriously. Each week, for instance, he would attend the church or temple service of a different player “so they knew that I was there for them,” Weis said.
Success seemed to follow him around. One year after his 10-1 Franklin Township team won a state championship, Parcells’ Giants won their second Super Bowl, earning Weis a Super Bowl ring in his first NFL season. His other two came with the Patriots in 2001 and 2003.
Soon after landing his first professional job, Weis met his future wife.
“We actually met when I was going out to dinner with some girlfriends,” Maura Weis recalled. “We were kind of inseparable after the first date. He’s my best friend.”
Marrying Maura changed Weis’ definition of success. Winning on the football field was important. But it was equally important, if not more so, to be a good husband and father.
In the summer of 2002, Weis underwent gastric-bypass surgery, determined to reduce his weight after it rose to more than 300 pounds.
It has been reported Weis had the surgery because he believed his girth was hurting his chances of landing a head-coaching job, but he maintains that’s not the case.
“That actually is kind of comical, to tell you the truth,” Weis said. “The first thing everyone says is you’re doing it for physical appearance, trying to get a head-coaching job.
“I didn’t all of a sudden turn beautiful overnight. You are what you are. The bottom line is, I was heading for a heart attack . . . after trying every diet known to mankind. I probably lost 1,000 pounds and gained 1,200. This was a finality to make sure you’re around to be there for that wife of yours and that kid of yours.”
Weis had seen his father die young. Though only in his 20s at the time, Weis became a father figure to his three brothers, three, six and nine years younger than him. He didn’t want to leave his son, Charlie Jr., now 11, saddled with similar responsibility.
But Weis’ good intentions nearly went horribly awry. He almost bled to death after the surgery, spent two weeks in a coma and twice received the last rites of the Catholic Church.
“I had a surgery gone bad and probably should have died, but I didn’t,” Weis said. “That’s a good thing.”
Weis’ recovery was slow at first. He had no feeling in either leg for a while and had to use a wheelchair and coach from a golf cart.
“I told my wife in no uncertain terms to tell them to pick up [the wheelchair] because I’m not using it anymore,” he said.
Weis wound up missing only three days of Patriots camp.
But surviving the scare reminded Weis that life is finite. So later that year, he and Maura launched Hannah and Friends, a foundation named for their now-9-year-old daughter, who suffers from global developmental delay disorders, a form of autism in which a child’s motor skills, social skills and speech advance at a slower-than-normal pace.
The foundation’s goal, executive director Kevin Kaplan said, is twofold: to provide assistance to families with children suffering from the disorder through an initiative called “Hannah’s Helping Hand” and to have a farm in South Carolina “for children and young adults who have autism [or other] globally related developmental disorders.”
Kaplan works with several other foundations involving college and professional coaches and athletes.
“Out of the eight foundations I have, this one has been the fastest starting and, in the early stages, the most successful,” Kaplan said. “That I think is a tribute to the passion Maura and Charlie bring to this.”
Since the day her husband was introduced as Notre Dame’s coach, Maura Weis said more than 300 Irish alums have donated to Hannah and Friends.
As for a career, Weis never considered following in the footsteps of his father, who was an accountant with Lockheed Electronics.
“And I’m hoping my son doesn’t follow in mine,” he said. “I know he’s a sports junkie. I’m praying he doesn’t want to go into coaching–100-plus hours a week away from your family. It’s not the most satisfying way to spend time with your family. There are a lot of things you miss.”
But Weis will do fine balancing his family with success at Notre Dame, Tharp said.
“When you track his career you think, man, this is the United States of America,” Tharp said. “You know, what Charlie Weis came through, that could only happen here.”
