E-GIANTS
Dave Klein was the Giants' beat writer
for The Star-Ledger from 1961 to 1995.
He is the author of 26 books and he is one of
only four sportswriters to have covered all the Super Bowls.
Dave has allowed TEAM GIANTS to reprint some of his articles.

By DAVE KLEIN
BILL PARCELLS HAS RESIGNED AGAIN, BUT DON'T THINK HE'S REALLY GONE

Right, he's no longer with the Giants, and he hasn't been for a long time. But has Bill Parcells ever been far from the fans' minds?

Is it nostalgia that brings him back, or dislike? Did he ennoble the team, and thereby the fans, or did he slink out the back door? Did he elevate them or abandon them?

You are free to choose the answer that applies to you, but nevertheless he deserves to be mentioned here. He resigned as the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys yesterday with a year remaining on his contract, and the first set of words that came to mind was: "So what else is new?"

He ran out on the Giants in the spring of 1991. He took off a year and then accepted the head coaching job with the New England Patriots and ran out on them, too, in a dispute with the owner, Robert Kraft, but only after he took them to a Super Bowl -- and lost it. He took the job as head coach of the hated New York Jets, and once again he resigned. But in that case he named his replacement -- Bill Belichick, and 24 hours later "Little Bill" resigned, clearly tired of being in the shadow of Big Bill. The irony is that Belichick became the head coach in New England, where he has strung together a won-lost record that will get him in the Hall of Fame -- alongside Parcells -- and has already netted him three Super Bowl rings.

So what else is new? Parcells is a professional job-seeker, and more recently he became the head coach of the Cowboys -- and if there is a team Giant fans dislike more than that one it lives in Philadelphia -- and now he is gone. A year early. Two weeks or so after an abrupt ending in a playoff game he should have won, except that his newest young quarterback, groomed and coached with meticulous care, fumbled the snap for an extra point, of all things.

So Giant fans are either smiling with a sense of satisfaction that he's finally out of their hair, or plotting ways to get him to come back to the Giants, or wondering which team he'll coach next after he takes a year off (maybe) to regroup.

The answer is that he is probably finished coaching. The stress and strain on a 65-year-old man is enormous. It has cut down men far younger. Still, there is a magical quality to Parcells, who blends some sort of surrealistic aura with the hard-to-dislike mentality of a so-called "Jersey guy," something of which he is intensely proud.

"Listen, fellas," he would say. "I don't want to hear about long-suffering fans. I only want the die-hards."

He said that once, when he was the head coach of the Giants, and when he finally took them to their first Super Bowl -- something no Giant fan had ever seriously entertained -- someone asked him if this would be the biggest, more important game he would ever coach.

"Only if we win," he said. "If we lose, it's just another game."

The things he said reverberate, and there are way too many to remember, much less to repeat. He had a way with people. He could make players listen to him and take his insults and still consider him a friend-father figure-guru.

You probably all remember the game on Dec. 1, 1986, when the Giants went to San Francisco for a Monday night "Game of the Decade." They were 11-2 at the time, the 49ers were almost as good, and it has become clear that one of the teams was going to represent the NFC in Super Bowl XXI.

The Giants trailed at halftime, 17-0.

In the locker room, he was a angry as he had ever been, cold and nasty to the players, verbally abusive. He told Phil Simms that he wasn't playing well at all. "What did you do, take a [uh-uh, not here] vacation, Simms? You plan on going out there for the second half? I would vote against it. You are embarrassing yourself."

Simms went out and threw a touchdown pass. Now it was 17-7. He ran off the field, ran past Parcells and yelled: "How about that, coach?" Parcells gave him one of those disdainful looks. "We're still losing, Simms," he said.

Simms went out again and threw another one, and when he ran off the field, closer to Parcells, he yelled: "You like that one, coach?" Parcells shook his head. "You know, if the game ended right now, we lose," he snapped.

So Phil went out and threw one more (which forged the final score) and now he trotted off the field, parked next to Parcells and said: "How about that one, coach?" And Parcells, never changing his facial expression, looked at him and said: "It's about damned time, isn't it?"

He was never the same coach once he left. In his heart, I think, he didn't want to go. But he had some valid health concerns and he was frustrated to a frenzy about what he perceived as his absence of authority. He wanted to draft the players, he wanted to hire and fire players. But the great general manager, George Young, held that job.

Young once addressed the situation succinctly: "I told Bill," he said, "that my job is to put the players on the field and his job is to coach them."

It wasn't enough. When he went to the Patriots, he had that power. In truth, he wasn't a very good general manager. His drafts, like everybody else who has ever tried it, were fair. He is like the stage play several years ago -- "Arms Too Short to Box with God." He is always over-reaching, always more ambitious then anyone else. Maybe that's what makes him Bill Parcells.

So is he finished coaching now? One would think so. It is kind of late in the day for him to start all over again. But you know, you can never say never with this man. The itch will come. The reputation will precede him. Some owner is going to have himself a little dream about owning the team Bill Parcells coaches and it is going to turn into an offer.

Will he take it? That depends on his state of mind. He is probably not going to coach in 2007, but in 2008 -- and so what if he'll be 68? -- he just might decide to go for one more Super Bowl. It probably won't be with the Giants, although there should be some position for him in this team's organization.

But you can never say that Bill Parcells is gone from football. He has turned that into somebody else's embarrassment too many times before.

See ya, Bill. We just don't know where.

Check out Dave's website at E-GIANTS where you can subscribe to his newsletters which run much more frequently than what is available here.
- Team Giants

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