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6
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Facing Adversity
“Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”
—LEROY “SATCHEL” PAIGE
Jon Gruden’s father Jim coached running backs for the Buccaneers from 1972 to 1973 and later served as the franchise’s director of player personnel for three years. Jim lost his job with Tampa Bay, and the Grudens moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he worked as an assistant coach under Lee Corso.
Known for his work habits and inspirational persona, Corso posted big red-and-white steelplate signs with potent messages on the locker room walls to motivate his players. When two of these signs were replaced with new ones, Jim Gruden brought them home for his young, impressionable son. Both signs were promptly hung above Jon’s bed. One read: “Luck is when preparation meets with opportunity.” The other: “Nothing ever stays the same. You either get better or worse.” Every day, his father would ask, “Did you read your signs today, Jon?” Over the years, these messages became acutely ingrained in the boy’s brain. On occasion, he still repeats these words to this day.
Through his father’s contacts in the athletic department, Jon was a ball boy for the university’s basketball team—undoubtedly the most coveted job in the state of Indiana for a Hoosier youngster. Here, Jon had a bird’s-eye view of the colorful, intense Bobby Knight, who became his hero. Two years later, Jim Gruden was coaching under Dan Devine at Notre Dame and the Grudens relocated upstate to South Bend. Such is the life of the family of a football coach.
In South Bend, Jon’s newest hero was Joe Montana, the team’s standout quarterback, who went on to NFL stardom with the ’49ers. With large doses of exposure to the Fighting Irish, the young boy became addicted to football, an addiction that he has never kicked. With Montana as his mentor, Jon quarterbacked his high school team in South Bend. Blair Kiel, another Notre Dame quarterback who followed Montana, was a regular guest at the Gruden house. “He had a white Pontiac Firebird,” Jon recalls, “and his dad didn’t want anything to happen to it on campus so he parked it in our driveway. Every now and then, Blair would make my day by loaning it to me. Blair and some of his buddies sometimes came to my high school games, and boy did that fire me up. As a high school student, it was really cool to hang out with Notre Dame players.”
When Gerry Faust came in to replace Dan Devine as the Irish’s head coach, he cleaned house, firing many staff members including Jim Gruden. With a young family to support, Jim took a job as a cardboard box salesman in South Bend. A year later, he got another coaching job with the Buccaneers, and the family moved back to Tampa Bay. Meanwhile, Jon had graduated high school as probably one of the most inspired players ever to have played the game of football. Unlike his older brother Jim Jr. who was a high-honor student and went on to medical school, Jon was an average student. “Jim’s grades were so off the charts, I couldn’t even think about competing with him,” Jon tells. “I figured my best chance to be a standout was on the football field, not in the classroom. I didn’t shine as a high school quarterback but I thought I could grow a few inches in college, put on some weight, get stronger, and maybe someday have a shot at the NFL.” While Jon had high ambitions, he ended up playing three years of college football as a backup quarterback at the University of Dayton, a Division III school.
“When I was in college, my little brother Jay, who was four years younger, was already bigger than I was,” tells Gruden. “Although Jay became an outstanding quarterback and went on to star in the Arena Football League, back then, he was just a big lug. The summer of his sophomore year in high school, he’d just lie on the couch eating crackers, drinking soda pop, and watching MTV. And me. I was the backup quarterback at Dayton and determined to be a star, so I spent my summer getting up before sunrise, running, pumping iron, and throwing footballs all day long. And there was Jay, on that couch all day, stuffing his mouth with chips and popcorn. One day, I said, ‘I’m going on my mile run up Old Saybrook Avenue, get off your lazy butt and let’s race.’ He got up reluctantly, put on his running shoes, and said, ‘Jon, you know I don’t like to run.’
“We were running neck and neck, and I’m getting madder and madder because he was keeping up with me. I’m thinking that he doesn’t work out, and any time now he’ll quit. ‘You’re dying, aren’t you, Jay,’ I egged him. ‘There’s no way you’re going to make it back to the house.’ Then with two-tenths of a mile to go, he turns on a burst of speed and beats me by two hundred yards. To rub salt in the wound, he’s in our driveway doing that Rocky dance, waving his arms above his head. That’s when I realized I’d never be more than a Division III backup. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t big enough. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t good enough. As hard as I worked, I wasn’t going to get good enough to be a starter. Not even at Dayton, a Division III school. I was devastated. Later that summer, Jay and I got in a fight and he beat me up. Getting beat up by your little brother was the final blow. It was the exclamation point on my athletic career.
“From that point on, I began to think about coaching,” adds Gruden. “What else could I do? I loved football and it was my only interest. I said to myself that I better try to get into coaching; otherwise I was going to have a short life in football.”
Jon Gruden won the Super Bowl in 2003. He’s a big-time winner. But he grew up learning to cope with adversity. He saw his father bounce around from one job to another; it was all part of the life of a football coach. It comes with the territory. Jon had personal ambitions of being a great athlete; he never realized his boyhood dream. Sure, he could have thrown in the towel and picked a career far removed from football. That’s what the vast majority of people do when it finally sinks in that he or she will never be a professional athlete, a rock star—a somebody. They put their pipe dreams aside and resign themselves to a life of mediocrity. Most people rationalize and call it “maturity.” Jon Gruden, however, refused to abandon his love for football. He simply altered his dream and chose instead to be a football coach. Although his rise to the top of the coaching profession was meteoric, it was no a bed of roses. He paid his dues along the way. He put in his time as a gofer; he endured nights of sleeping in his dilapidated Buick. And although he only requires a few hours of sleep a night, like the rest of us, Jon had his share of sleepless nights.
I DIDN’T GET OUT OF bed one day transformed from a schoolteacher into a sports agent. Like the five coaches in this book, I paid my dues. Like other successful people, I had my share of setbacks along the way. In retrospect, I learned more from the disappointments I suffered than the successes I had. It may sound like a cliché, but I know from personal experience that when we overcome adversity, we become stronger.
To supplement my teaching salary, I taught history during the summer months at both the high school and junior college levels. In 1978, to reduce taxes for homeowners, the State of California passed Proposition 13. With the ensuing loss of tax revenues, the state made massive spending cuts that greatly reduced budgets for schools, libraries, fire and police departments, and so on. Consequently, I lost my summer teaching jobs, and at age 30, with a wife and four children to support, I had to come up with a way to replace this lost income. A realtor suggested that I should sell real estate, and he offered to pay the fee for my real estate classes. Once I got my license, I sold homes on a part-time basis.
After pounding the pavement to drum up sales, I became acutely aware that the world wasn’t waiting for Bob LaMonte to sell anyone a home. Before getting my first listing, I had many doors slammed in my face. I quickly discovered that there weren’t too many people out there waiting for a novice real estate agent—and a part-time one at that!—to come by and sell their most valuable asset—their home. After soliciting dozens and dozens of homeowners, Rich Campbell, one of the high school kids I taught and coached (that’s right, the same quarterback who became my first athlete client), mentioned to me that his family was moving. Shortly afterward, I stopped by the Campbell’s residence and said that I had a real estate license and would like to be the listing agent. They were kind enough to give the listing to me.
Several weeks later, I sold the house. It was my very first real estate transaction. My first sale! At a meeting with the buying agent, he handed me a signed contract and a deposit check that the State of California required to be deposited in an escrow account. The jubilation I felt on my way back to my realtor’s office is a feeling I’ll never forget. I felt like a freshman who just found out he had made the varsity football team; a high school kid who scored his first-ever touchdown. It was a real high. Once I arrived at my office, I called Sharon and Dick Campbell to tell them that their house had been sold. “And we got your full asking price,” I said. They were ecstatic. “Thank you so much for the confidence you had in me,” I told them.
“It’s you, Bob, who should be thanked,” they responded.
When I sat down at my desk to review the paperwork, I was beaming and stared at the contract for at least five minutes. Then panic set in. Where was the check? I couldn’t find the deposit check! I searched my briefcase and every inch of my car’s interior, but still no check. I rushed back to the buyer’s agent and told him what had happened. I was mortified. “Have you seen it anywhere?” I asked. “Do you have it?”
“How could you lose the check?” he questioned. “I’ve never known anyone in my life who lost an escrow check.”
“I am so sorry,” I apologized, knowing that he had a vested interest in the sale too.
“I’ll have to ask them for another check,” he said. Evidently, he saw how badly I felt and let me off the hook because he stopped ranting and raving.
Then I had to make that dreaded call to the Campbells and tell them what had happened. Experienced real estate agents told me that the buyers would “certainly cool off and the sale was dead.” I kept calling the other agent and he didn’t return my calls. Finally, two days later, he called. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but there was nothing to report because I couldn’t get in touch with the buyers,” he said. “But good news. I stopped by their house this morning and picked up a replacement check.”
The first real estate sale was a humbling experience for me. However, to my dismay, after having one real estate transaction under my belt, I still continued to get rejection—a lot of rejection! That’s because I was viewed as a history teacher who sold real estate on the side. People wanted a full-time agent to sell their home—someone who could give them a full day’s work, every day—not a teacher who could only show a home in his spare time. Part-time real estate people weren’t perceived as professionals—and in fact, most were not. Throughout my first year in real estate sales, I ran into a lot of brick walls, but I had thick skin and I learned not to take it personally when people said no—which most people said to me. With sheer perseverance and tenacity, I hung in there, knowing that if I made enough calls, I would eventually succeed. And I did. By the end of my first year, I sold 13 houses, and after splitting the commissions with my realtor, I took home about $30,000, almost matching my $35,000 teaching salary. My broker was thrilled. I had outproduced 80 percent of his full-time agents.
I continued to sell real estate, even after I represented Rich Campbell, who was drafted in 1981 in the first round by Green Bay for $1.25 million, which included a $500,000 signing bonus. Although Rich Campbell wasn’t the number one draft choice in 1981 (he was number six), as the first quarterback picked, he received the richest contract paid to a college player entering the NFL that year. In retrospect, my real estate experience turned out to be a good warm-up for my future sports agency career because, as I quickly found out, disappointments and obstacles prevail in all fields. Being Campbell’s agent didn’t assure me a one-way ticket to easy street. A year later, Jim McMahon, an All-American from Brigham Young University, was destined to be the number one quarterback in the NFL draft. I met with his old coach, whom I knew at Andrew Hill High School, a sister school to Oak Grove where I taught. The McMahon family formed a committee to interview prospective agents. After the job I had done for Campbell, I thought I had a good shot at being McMahon’s agent, particularly because his high school coach submitted my name as a candidate. Instead, the committee chose to go with a major sports agency.
“You did a tremendous job with Campbell,” one of the committee members told me. “But we felt that you were like the baseball player who comes into the major leagues and hits a home run his first time at bat. That doesn’t mean he’ll ever do it again. We’re sorry, Bob, but we had to go with someone more established and with a stronger background.”
“Don’t give up your day job,” he might have added.
I had been thinking about the wonderful coup it would be for me to have signed two sensational quarterbacks, and both from the same local area. But it was not in the cards. It didn’t help when McMahon signed on with a huge contract. It was a big disappointment. By the comments people were making, I knew they were thinking, “LaMonte had beginner’s luck with Campbell, but lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place.” And yes, the same thought had entered my mind. Maybe they were right. I’ll never be able to repeat the success I had with Rich. I quickly erased all negative thoughts from my mind because from the beginning I believed I would succeed as long as I was true to myself.
Then there was the one I had that got away. A friend of mine from San Jose, California, introduced me to Moises Alou, a baseball player from the Dominican Republic. I represented Alou and he went as a first-round draft pick in professional baseball. His career was blossoming, and then somebody convinced him that he would be better off with another agency. “LaMonte is not a full-time agent, and therefore he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Moises was told. When he told us this, Lynn and I were deeply hurt because we treated him as if he were a son and we had spent so much time with him. In all the 25 years we have been in business, Moises Alou was the only client we ever lost.
Much like my real estate selling, as a sports agent, I learned to accept rejection as part of the business. The rejection that I think is the most difficult in my business is the rejection I get representing a player who’s a free agent. A free agent is a college football player who doesn’t get drafted and tries out for an NFL team. Here you have a young man who was a star athlete in every level of competition he’s ever participated in from Pee Wee football through college. To his chagrin, however, he doesn’t get drafted. As his agent, the team tells me that he’s a borderline player, and if he gets released, I’m the one who breaks the news to him. So I get turned down twice—first from the franchise, and then from the player. And guess who he blames? He says that I did a poor job for him. It’s my fault. Remember now, up until this point in his life, he has always made the cut. So, I’m getting double rejection—from the team and from him! Consider too that it’s significantly harder to sell a free agent than a top draft choice. That’s because the player who goes high in the draft is in much demand.
It wasn’t only potential clients who didn’t take me seriously. Neither did the franchise owners and general managers who met with me to discuss players’ contracts. Compared with the big sports agencies with offices around the world that represented hundreds of athletes ranging from Jimmy Connors to Tiger Woods over the years, I was that history teacher who moonlights as a sports agent. The large agencies employ a battery of full-time agents, attorneys, accountants, public relations people, and scores of other specialists. When one of their agents sits down to negotiate with an NFL franchise, his negotiating team sits across the table from the franchise’s negotiating team. When I am sitting across the table from a team of negotiators, I sit by myself. During the early stages of my career, they didn’t take me seriously. In their eyes, I was a history teacher or some assistant coach in PE who threw out the footballs every afternoon. It took years before I had a track record that dispelled the notion that I was some local yokel who didn’t belong in the big leagues with the big boys. Fortunately, I was able to represent some big-name clients, which gave me credibility. These successes also boosted my self-confidence. No matter what resistance I encountered, I always believed that if I stayed true to myself, I would prevail. Lynn and my forte was the personal touch we provided as a small family business. As a family-operated business, we formed close relationships with our clients. “We have a local touch with a global reach,” I’d tell people.
It took a while for me to learn, but I eventually figured out that when people said no, I shouldn’t take it personally. I didn’t feel rejected because they weren’t rejecting me. They just didn’t want to live in the house I was trying to sell them. In sales, you’ve got to be able to separate yourself from the product or service you sell. And remember, you can’t sell them all! Nobody ever does. If a customer doesn’t want to buy my product, I say to myself, “Some people like vanilla ice cream and some like chocolate ice cream.” Do you see what I mean? It’s a matter of taste. If a customer doesn’t like your product (automobile, insurance policy, dining room set, etc.), it doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you. Nor does it mean you failed.
On a funny note, I was invited by my daughter Valerie to speak to her fourth-grade class. Well, you know how adults have to be careful about what they say around children because they hear everything. When Valerie stood in front of our class to introduce me, she said, “Today my dad is going to talk to you about his career. He is a free agent.” Evidently she had picked up hearing Lynn and I talk about how difficult it was to work with a free agent, and Valerie thought my services were free. I quickly explained to the class that had I been a free agent, we would never make any money. “However, I do represent free agents,” I added, “and as their agent, I do get paid.”
FOOTBALL IS A TOUGH, PHYSICAL contact sport. It’s not for the faint of heart. Think about it. In every play of every football game, players get hit and knocked down. Then they get back up and continue to play. When a team gets badly beaten, it doesn’t forfeit the remaining games on its schedule. The coaches and players learn from their mistakes. The team puts together a game plan for the following week and goes on to complete its season. Backup players replace injured starting players. This is football. The nature of the game is to deal with adversity. Harry Truman could have been an NFL head coach talking to his team when he said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
With offensive lines averaging in excess of 300 pounds per man, and with 240-pound fullbacks and linebackers running 40 meters in under 4.5 seconds, NFL football is indeed a tough physical sport. Some of those huge linemen bench-press 500 to 600 pounds! These guys hit hard. A six-three, 210-pound quarterback is relatively small and fragile compared to a six-five, 300-pound defensive lineman. It takes a lot of guts to stay in the pocket and release a pass at the last moment with split-second precision under the pressure of a full blitz. It’s like playing chicken with a charging herd of bison. Still, check the statistics and you’ll discover that the team with the biggest and baddest linemen doesn’t automatically go to the Super Bowl. Nor is it necessarily the team with the strongest and fastest players. It’s not even the team with the most talent. That’s because NFL football demands people of tough mind as well as physical might. When it comes to winning in the NFL, mental toughness matters. It’s a game where you get knocked down and you get back up. This is Life 101. When you face adversity, you don’t let it defeat you. Success in life is going from failure to failure without failing. This is the lesson taught in Pee Wee football and in high school and college football programs. It’s the same lesson taught in the pros. In the NFL, however, when you get knocked down, you get knocked down a lot harder.
By the time someone has become an NFL head coach, it’s a sure bet that he’s faced his share of adversity and has the intestinal fortitude to overcome it. Nobody works his way to the top of this profession without getting knocked down and bruised. All five of the head coaches in this book played football in high school and college—nobody in the game who has ever been around that long has steered clear of adversity. It’s part of the game. A good example is Mike Holmgren, who has been around the longest of the five coaches. In his youth, Mike was one of the nation’s most outstanding high school players, having been named “Prep Athlete of the Year” in 1965 while playing for San Francisco’s Lincoln High School. A standout quarterback who passed for 3,592 yards in his senior year, he was the most highly recruited player in California that year. The six-five Holmgren went on to play four years for the University of Southern California from 1966 through 1969. It was Mike’s misfortune that he was a passing quarterback and Trojans head coach John McKay favored a running game.
There had been talk that the Trojans were going to adapt to a passing game around their highly touted quarterback, but this didn’t happen. A dislocated thumb and sprained ankle sidelined Holmgren. O. J. Simpson, one of the greatest running backs in the history of football, was also on the team, and he too influenced McKay’s decision to stay with a running game. Winning the national championship in 1967 for the second time in five years (McKay won a third national title in ’72) helped to convince McKay that there was no need to put the ball in the air when his ground game was so domineering. Smaller and quicker Steve Sogge, Toby Page, and Jimmy Jones quarterbacked the team while Holmgren warmed the bench and watched from the sidelines.
Most athletes used to getting the star treatment would have quit the team, and Mike had his opportunity to hang up his helmet when he suffered a shoulder injury during his senior year. But quitting isn’t what Mike Holmgren does. He viewed his scholarship as a commitment to the university and he honored it for his four years at USC. “A lot of guys would have become disenchanted and left,” says Gary Reynolds, who heads offensive quality control for the Seahawks. “Mike wasn’t about to call it quits. So how does he overcome adversity? He finishes it. When a player is down, he challenges him: ‘What are you going to do? Take your ball and go home like you did when you were a little kid?’ Answering his own question, he says in a booming voice, ‘No. You’re going to stay and fight. You finish what you start.’ Mike’s four daughters have been taught to follow the same rule that he applies to his players and himself. ‘When you start something, you finish it.’ ”
Although Holmgren never played enough to earn his letter at USC, he was such a superb athlete, the St. Louis Cardinals drafted him in the eighth round. He went to the camps of both the Cardinals and the New York Jets that year, however, after putting in so much bench time, Mike never made a comeback. He was dropped after one year in the NFL. After receiving a bachelor of science degree at USC, in 1971 he returned to his alma mater, Lincoln High to teach history. The following year, he began teaching and coaching football at Sacred Heart Cathedral in San Francisco which he did for three years. Those first three years in coaching were accompanied by still more adversity. Between 1972 and ’74, Sacred Heart had a sickly record of 4 wins and 24 losses. Again, Holmgren could have thrown in the towel and said, “Coaching isn’t for me.”
Having lost his father as a teenager, Mike became the patriarch of the family at age 16. Holmgren has always been a fighter. A man with great resilience, he has the tenacity to pick himself off the mat, never giving in to defeat. In a world where our failures outnumber successes, a winning attitude is essential. Mike Holmgren is a man who refuses to allow setbacks defeat him.
Andy Reid was a starting tackle and guard at Brigham Young University in 1979–81. During his playing days at BYU, the school was ranked in the top 15 by both the Associated Press and United Press. A strong, competitive player, like the other four coaches, by the end of his senior year, Reid came to terms with the fact that his playing days were over when he was not included in the 1982 NFL draft. Any dreams he might have had of playing on Sunday afternoons were over. He did, however, stay on at BYU, where he got a job with the football team as a graduate assistant, marking an unpretentious launch of his coaching career.
THE DAY ANDY REID WAS scheduled to arrive in Philadelphia to meet with some of the coaches on the offensive unit, an ice storm caused the plane to be rerouted to nearby Baltimore. After hours of delay, Reid took a train to Philadelphia and arrived after 10:00 that evening. The Eagles’ head of security, Butch Buchanico, had been waiting for his new boss, and knowing that Reid was tired and hungry asked him if he’d like to meet some of the coaches who were waiting at the office for his call. “Andy was bushed,” Buchanico says, “but he was also hungry and was anxious to meet some of his assistant coaches. So I called my favorite restaurant, Fredrick’s, and said to Freddy’s mother, ‘Jeannie, I’ve got the new coach and we need a table for six. I know it’s late, but can you do this for me?’ It was closing time; however, she agreed to stay open to accommodate us.
“When we got there, there was a long table of businessmen who must have been drinking for hours, and they were having a grand time. They were the only customers in the place, and we were seated at a table next to theirs. When they found out that Andy was at our table, they started doing Eagle chants. Then a guy at the other table who owns a lot of car dealerships in town, stood up, half-drunk, and announced, ‘I have a toast to make to the new head coach of the Eagles. Welcome to Philadelphia. Boooo!’
“ ‘Congratulations, Andy,’ I said to him. ‘You just broke the record. You’re our first coach to get booed before you even started.’ Andy burst out laughing. He thought it was hysterical. The car dealer was so taken with how Andy reacted that he sent over a bottle of champagne. Andy went over to his table and personally thanked him. He made a lifetime fan that night. That’s the way Andy is. Rather than losing his cool, he diffused what could have been an otherwise awkward situation. Now that I know him so well, this is vintage Andy Reid. Instead of getting bent out of shape over a minor thing and making a mountain out of a molehill, he puts things in perspective.”
Reid’s assistant, Carol Wilson, remembers her boss that first night in town. “Andy is a Mormon and doesn’t drink, but he doesn’t frown on people who do. He just drinks one Diet Coke after another. After we left the restaurant, we went back to the parking lot and my car was covered with ice. Andy took out his credit card and scraped off my windshield. ‘What a fantastic guy,’ I kept thinking to myself.”
A flight through an ice storm that was rerouted through another city followed by a train ride to the original destination makes for an unpleasant day of travel. Being booed by a table of loud, tipsy businessmen that same night is rubbing salt into the wound. Andy Reid, however, who has dealt with adversity throughout his career, is too big a man to let small, insignificant things disturb him. Watch him on the sidelines during an Eagles game. He doesn’t let a missed extra point, an interception, or a fumble upset him. He’s been in the game long enough to know that dwelling on a misplay is nonproductive. That’s the game of football. You get knocked down and you get back up. You stay calm. You don’t sweat the small stuff.
“You can’t change during the tough times,” emphasizes Reid. “You can’t suddenly be a different person or present things to your people a different way. You’ve got to stay consistent. You must remain strong when adversity comes your way.”
Andy Reid is right. Most of us can lead when times are good. Our mettle is tested, however, during times of adversity.
“WHEN I TALK TO MY players,” says John Fox, “I frequently talk about adversity. In fact, ‘Your Walk in Life’ is one of my favorite topics. I spend a lot of time with them talking about what it is to be a man because there is a direct correlation between this subject and being successful as a football player. I don’t limit my conversation to football. I expand it because to succeed on the field, they must be strong men off the field. ‘Throughout your walk in life,’ I emphasize, ‘you will have prosperity. You will also have adversity. You must know how to deal with both because how you do will define you as a man. Some guys don’t know how to handle prosperity. Believe me, you are never as good as people tell you that you are. And you are never as bad as they tell you that you are. Don’t let anyone tell you any of that. You define what you are.’ ”
Fox stresses that there is much to be learned from adversity. In his first season, the Panthers won their first three games. There was much jubilation in the Carolinas; however, it soon vanished when the Panthers lost their next eight games. Then they went on to win four of their last five games and finished the season with a respectable 7-9 record. Not many teams in the history of the NFL have had a six-game improvement in the win column from one season to the next. When asked about 2002, Fox says, “Preferably, we’d like to win them all. All of us here think we can win them all, but that’s only happened once in the history of the National Football League. We had a good season and we learned a lot from the way it started and finished. The players got to experience the difference between winning and losing—and most importantly, learning from the ones we lost.”
Mike Sherman concurs with Fox and says, “I think failure is a strong motivational force in this sport. I tell my players that we will have adversity because it’s part of the process. It’s going to happen. No company has great returns year after year after year. No football team wins every single game. Sure, it hurts when we lose a game, but one game is only one-sixteenth of the season. In this business, we don’t have a lot of time to bounce back, so we can’t let a loss eat at us and carry over to the next Sunday. We have to let it go and get on to the next game. If we have a defeatist attitude, it would permeate the entire team. As head coach, I must be the one to stand up and say, ‘Okay, we can get past this. We lost one of our receivers. We can get past this. Somebody else has to step up. Who’s it going to be?’ We may lose two games in a row, and the media jumps on it and is writing that the team is weak, the coaches aren’t very good, and we can’t win the division title or the Super Bowl. We can’t allow failure to make us fail. As a team, we look adversity squarely in the eye and we don’t back down. Adversity is our glue—it cements us to each other. It brings us together, and it’s part of the process. This sounds funny, but I think adversity can be a good thing! Or as I like to say, ‘Adversity is good, but I don’t want too much of it.’ It’s a powerful tool in building a football team. It gives us character.”
While the game of football is about dealing with setbacks, adversity isn’t limited to the playing field. Players and coaches suffer personal setbacks. This is life. And football teams like all organizations have bad things happen that are not related to sports. For instance, during his four years as Oakland Raiders head coach, Jon Gruden anguished over the death of Leon Bender, a six-foot-five, 308-pound defensive lineman. The 1998 second-round draft pick was an epileptic; he died after having a seizure in the bathroom. His death occurred on May 30, 1998, before he fulfilled his lifetime dream of playing in the NFL. The loss of a young, promising man was a personal loss to Gruden and all Raiders. The following year, another personal tragedy happened when wide receivers coach Fred Biletnikoff’s 20-year-old daughter Tracey was murdered by a former boyfriend. A Hall of Famer, Biletnikoff had spent most of his playing career with the Raiders. Still another heartbreak occurred the following year when Eric Turner, a defensive back, died at age 31 of intestinal cancer. One of the most popular players on the team, Turner’s nickname was “E-Rock” because he was a rock both physically on the football field and mentally and spiritually off the field. Turner was actively involved in the United Way, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
The death of three young people, each with a promising future, puts football in perspective; it is only a game.
SOME TIME OR ANOTHER, EVERYONE faces adversity. Successful people learn from their setbacks and with determination, they get stronger. The weak become discouraged and quit. They abandon their dreams and resign themselves to mediocrity. For the most part, it’s a fear of failure that stifles their desire to push forward.
In baseball jargon, you’ve got to keep swinging for the fences. Babe Ruth, the most famous baseball player of all times, held the home run record for most of the 20th century. But did you know the Babe also holds the record for the most strikeouts? The record book lists the Sultan of Swat with 714 homers and 1,330 strikeouts.
In baseball, a star player has a batting average of .300 or better. A superstar bats .350. Ted Williams was the last player to hit over .400. He did it back in 1941 when his batting average was .406. Of the thousands of baseball players who played in the majors during the past 60-plus years, Williams is the only one who averaged four hits in every 10 times at bat for a completed season (walks are excluded). This means that even the great Ted Williams failed to hit safely six out of every 10 times he went to the plate. Even batting an astounding .406, he had more failures than successes at the plate. Still, every time the great Boston Red Sox outfielder went to the plate, he believed he would get a hit. A baseball player must have this self-confidence. When a player starts to think, “The odds are stacked against me, and I only have one chance in three to get a hit,” his lack of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s because self-doubt will cause his palms to sweat, and he’ll fidget with his grip. He’ll change his batting stance; his concentration on the ball will wane. Sure enough, he’ll end up in a slump, knocking his batting average into a tailspin. Great ballplayers refuse to believe that they will fail. They expect to get a hit every time they step up to the plate.
Likewise, a field goal kicker must believe he will put the ball through the uprights every time he’s called to duty. Imagine the pressure he faces, knowing that the outcome of the game rests on his 50-yard field goal attempt. There’s also a lot of pressure on a basketball player who stands at the foul line. The professional golfer feels it too when he must sink a crucial eight-foot putt. While we might not have a large audience of television viewers watching our performance, we too have times when we are under pressure to execute. And like the professional athlete, we don’t always succeed. But it doesn’t mean we failed. In a field of 100 professional golfers in a tournament, there is only one winner. This does not mean there are 99 losers. There are golfers who earn prize money in excess of $1 million, who never finish number one in a golf tournament.
Nobody likes to fail, but the true champions in every field understand that it’s part of the game. They accept it, regroup, and calculate new and better ways to succeed. High achievers fail many times before they ultimately win. Conversely, people who fail are those who give up too soon. They’re branded as failures. Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor of all time, owned 1,093 patents. Nobody else has ever come even close to this number. While inventing the electric light, Edison made 25,000 attempts before he got it right. A reporter once asked him, “Mr. Edison, how did you deal with 25,000 failures?” Edison replied, “I did not fail 25,000 times. I was successful in finding 25,000 ways the light bulb didn’t work.” Edison had tenacity. He refused to quit. He would not accept defeat.
 | Failed in business in 1831 | |
| Defeated for legislature in 1832 | |
| Second failure in business in 1833 | |
| Suffered a nervous breakdown in 1836 | |
| Defeated for Speaker in 1838 | |
| Defeated for elector in 1840 | |
| Defeated for congressional nomination in 1843 | |
| Defeated for Congress in 1848 | |
| Defeated for Senate in 1855 | |
| Defeated for vice president in 1856 | |
| Defeated for Senate in 1858 | |
| Elected President of the United States in 1860 |
In case you haven’t figured it out, the man with the above failures refused to give up and became one of America’s greatest presidents—Abraham Lincoln. Thank God for his persistence.
Lee Iacocca’s autobiography describes how he got fired by Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company’s CEO. Iacocca had been the automaker’s president for eight years and one day out of a clear blue sky, his boss asked for his resignation. “Why?” a stunned Iacocca asked.
“It’s personal,” Ford answered, “and I can’t tell you more. It’s just one of those things.”
In tears, Iacocca pleaded to be told why he was being fired, and Ford answered, “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”
Devastated, Iacocca vowed not to get mad, but to get even. That’s exactly what he did. He looked adversity squarely in the face, picked himself up, and went to work for Chrysler. Later, as CEO of Ford’s cross-town competitor, Iacocca engineered one of the most incredible turnarounds in the annals of business. He could have given up and, as Holmgren says, “take his ball and go home.” Instead, he opted to fight back. And he came back swinging!
Winston Churchill once delivered a commencement speech at his old prep school. The great British prime minister stood before his audience and said: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” With those words, he promptly walked off the platform. It’s doubtful that anyone in his audience ever forgot his words. In part, due to its brevity. However, Churchill could have spoken for two hours, which he often did, without having had the impact of his two-sentence speech.
Win or lose, head coaches spend hours studying game films so they can learn from their mistakes. They also study films of their opposition, and knowing the competition’s strengths and weaknesses, they put together a game plan. Likewise, a good business leader knows his company’s strengths and weaknesses. He knows because he too studies reports. And he too goes down into the bowels of the company to learn firsthand what he must know to make important decisions. He gets feedback from people at all levels of his organization. He studies the strengths and weaknesses of his competitors. When the company loses business to a competitor, he finds out why by digging and analyzing. When an account is lost, he doesn’t roll over and say, “Oh well, we win some and we lose some.” He takes each loss personally and figures out ways to get the business back—and while he’s at it, pick up some extra business he didn’t previously have!
I mentioned earlier that the average life span of an NFL head coach is 2.5 years, and that the 30 teams in the League during the 1990s had a total of 89 coaches. These numbers make it bone-chillingly clear that a head coach must produce or he’s gone. The turnover rate is not a secret, especially among the current NFL’s 32 head coaches. Knowing that the odds of a long coaching career are stacked against them, the best of them believe they will be the ones who defy the odds. They accept the challenges they face, believing they will overcome adversity and survive in the fiercely competitive coaching world of professional football.
In the first paragraph of his book The Road Less Traveled, author M. Scott Peck states: “Life is difficult,” and then goes on to say that once you understand that, it doesn’t matter anymore, you expect it to be. The road to success is filled with speed bumps and detours along the way. An NFL head coach knows that unforeseen adversity could strike at any time. In a physical game like football, a serious injury to a key player or players is a real and constant danger. Bad things also happen that are unrelated to the game. Players and members of their families get sick and hurt, and these too adversely affect the team. Keep in mind that 20- to 30-year-old men with a lot of money are exposed to fast cars, alcohol and drugs, and other outside negative influences that are beyond the control of a head coach. Similarly, all companies are subjected to exterior negative factors that can unfavorably impact their employees. People in all fields get sick, hurt, and die. The loss of a key employee can be devastating, both personally and businesswise. And of course there are a host of other exterior events that are beyond the control of a business leader. They run the gamut, including everything from acts of terrorism to the state of the economy. Note, for example, what happened to the travel industry following 9/11.
Scott Peck got it right. Life isn’t always easy. This is a fact that we must accept and move beyond it. A sign that I’ve seen posted in several NFL locker rooms reads: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Accept the fact that you will face adversity—you will either overcome it, or it will overcome you.
I’ll conclude this chapter with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, knowing his place shall never be with those timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat.