Fish story

A new book chronicles the final season of former Patriots coach Bill Parcells.
Why does the departed Tuna still grip New England?

by Jason Gay

IS THERE ANY rational reason for a person in these parts to read The Final Season, the new book chronicling Bill Parcells's last year as head coach of the New York Jets? Absolutely not. Last year's Jets, of course, finished with a middling record of eight wins, eight losses -- in other words, they weren't great, they weren't horrible. That's not exactly the kind of final season you chronicle, much less pay $25 of your hard-earned money to read about. In fact, if you think the final season described in The Final Season: My Last Year as a Head Coach in the NFL (William Morrow, 235 pages, $25) is compelling material, then you might as well throw down another $50 for Notting Hill: Kind of a Good Movie and The BLT: The Half-Decent Sandwich.

But the freaks and acolytes are surely lining up at the local Barnes & Nobles because Bill Parcells -- now semi-retired, for goodness' sake -- continues to tantalize New England sports fandom unlike any other figure of the past decade. Arrogant, eccentric, sometimes brilliant, sometimes grossly exaggerating his own brilliance, but always -- always -- hugely entertaining to watch, Parcells still haunts the region's sports consciousness, years after he abandoned New England for New York. Listen to the lugs on sports radio bark about their old coach -- whom they invariably, but respectfully, call Tuna, Parcells's long-timenickname -- and they sound like guys talking about the first time they got dumped. They loved him, now they hate him, but they'd take him back in an instant.

Why does Parcells grip New England so? His achievements here, although impressive, weren't the kind that get bridges or tunnels named after people. (Folks, they lost that Super Bowl in '97, and Parcells's overall record in four years here was 32 and 32.) Likewise, he was never much of a Yankee -- Parcells said he was comfortable in New England, but he was always, at heart, a Jersey guy, and he admitted as much. And he never pandered to the locals. Parcells wasn't someone who was going to stroll around Boston's Quincy Market, slapping high-fives. In fact, his biggest community venture outside his coaching duties was probably his stint as a pitchman for Dunkin' Donuts.

Parcells made an impact here not only because he was a winner, but also because he succeeded at being an outsize personality in a region that has encouraged quiet conformity in its sports heroes. He could be a jerk, but he was a jerk who could take us to the Super Bowl. He was full of himself, but he was impossible not to watch. When he left, we moaned for months. We will measure all future coaches against him. And years later, when he speaks, we still listen.

IT WON'T surprise you that as sports books go, The Final Season is not a memorable one. This is not entirely Parcells's fault, nor is it entirely the fault of The Final Season's co-author, long-time Boston Globe columnist Will McDonough. When Parcells set out to write The Final Season, he probably assumed it would be a season not only worth chronicling, but also worth commemorating. The Jets were coming off a superb 1998 season, in which the overachieving team (12-4) came within two quarters of making it to the Super Bowl. Expectations for the 1999 campaign were even higher, and in his dreams Parcells probably envisioned winning the big one and going out on top, on the shoulders of his loyal, hulking troops.

It wasn't meant to be. In what would turn out to be the equivalent of losing Tom Cruise on the first day of shooting a Mission: Impossible sequel, the Jets lost several of their most talented players in the first game of their season, including their quarterback, Vinny Testaverde, who was out for the season with a ruptured Achilles' tendon. (In a twist only the most detached of Tuna followers could label a coincidence, the Jets' tragic game was against the Patriots.) As Parcells himself acknowledges in The Final Season, these losses were devastating, and for all intents and purposes, the Jets' Super Bowl dreams became precisely that: dreams.

At this point, a lot of would-be books would have died in the publisher's wastebasket. Especially after the Jets slogged out to a 1-6 record, it would have been understandable if Parcells and McDonough had thought hell, let's pull the plug on this one. It's a tribute to Parcells's optimism (and, most likely, his lucrative book contract) that he continued to assemble this season-long diary.

Or is it? More than anything else, The Final Season is a testament to the wily coach's tremendous ego. Really -- what other professional coach could get away with writing a 235-page tome about an 8-8 season? And expect people to read it? Essential to understanding the Parcells legend is the fact that no one buys the legend more than Parcells himself. From the way he bullied his players, condescended to the media, and prohibited his assistants from speaking with the press, it's clear that Parcells is in love with his own opinions and personal aura. Sure, you could buy his aw-shucks, lucky-stiff, I'm-only-as-good-as-my-players shtick, but it's as disingenuous as Pedro Martinez calling himself just another pitcher.

We fans, of course, are guilty of encouraging this remarkable self-aggrandizement. In New England as in New York, people hung on the Tuna's every word. His post-game press conferences were covered live, with the zeal of wartime State Department briefings. We allowed Parcells to inhabit a fictional world of his own creation, in which he truly believed that the game of football was a matter to be treated with the utmost seriousness, and head coaches, like generals in the heat of battle, were to be respected, never questioned. (For this reason, it should come as no surprise that Parcells's book is vastly outselling Parcells, a new biography from Bill Gutman, published by Carroll & Graf. As of October 23, A Final Season was ranked 624 on the Amazon.com sales list. Parcells: A Biography was ranked 17,870.)

All the hero worship allows Parcells to believe that even his most mundane decisions and musings are fascinating insights, to be analyzed and dissected as if they were delicate maneuvers on the Western front. This conceit makes for some amusing moments in A Final Season. Parcells, for example, provides readers with a transcript of his remarks to Jets rookies on the first day of training camp. Not a piece of the remarks, not a summary. The entire speech. Here is an excerpt:

Clay Hampton is our head equipment man. Any equipment problems that you have or anything that you need, you go to Clay. Don't pick up anything in the locker room that does not belong to you. That is a good way to get out of here fast. If you need to have it, Clay knows where to get it. He's been doing this for quite a while and will help you with what you need: type of shoes, the fitting of your helmet, shoulder pads, all of all that.

Riveting stuff, clearly. Common sense tells us that if you are not a football coach yourself and you still find this kind of thing fascinating, you should be committed to some place with white corridors and mush for breakfast every morning. But I devoured that stuff, and no doubt others will, too. We devour it not just because it's a look behind the curtains of professional football. We devour it also because it's Parcells -- and we have been led to believe by the coach himself that if he says it, it's interesting.

Indeed, A Final Season contains a lot of revisionist history, a.k.a. the World According to Parcells. We get to hear the coach's account of his defection from New England, which, four years after the controversial maneuver, he makes sound as seamless as a move from sous-chef to head chef in a fancy restaurant. We get to hear Parcells's self-absorbed version of last winter's "Belichicken" fiasco, in which his loyal assistant coach Bill Belicheck got cold feet when Parcells stepped down, and ended up fleeing the Jets for New England. Once again, we get to hear Parcells's impassioned plea on behalf of his favorite player, linebacker Lawrence Taylor, a defense that largely ignores the troubled player's history with drugs. The way Parcells glosses over opinions that are contrary to his own (and, sometimes, over the facts) brings to mind the image of a grandfather reciting war stories in front of grandchildren who are too respectful to point out the occasional inconsistencies.

What ultimately redeems A Final Season is that, in a crisis season, the cocky coach finally shows a little vulnerability. The Jets manage to right their season by going 6-2 in their final eight games, but the coach cannot work enough magic to conjure up a playoff berth. Despite his insistence that the hard-fought .500 season was one of his most satisfying, it's obvious that not going out on top pained him incredibly. In its frankest moments, A Final Season is a portrait of a man who came up short. What should have been a glorious moment was instead a muted defeat. Instead of riding off into the sunset, Parcells, the once-great conqueror, limped off stage to quiet applause.

But somehow, he managed to do it with great gusto and style, making a mediocre season seem larger than life. And that, more than anything else, is the heart of the Parcells fascination. In the modern sports era, very few people or events live up to their hype. Star players burn brightly and generally fade quickly. Rookie phenoms often remain exactly that. Super Bowls are usually far from super. But Parcells not only delivered on the promise of success; he did it with the kind of personal energy and charisma that couldn't be duplicated if you raided the gene pools of Vince Lombardi, Red Auerbach, and five other sports-coaching legends. Parcells brought that energy and charisma to New England, New York, and wherever else he traveled in his cantankerous football odyssey. That's why we embrace a vain, otherwise silly exercise like A Final Season. When it comes to Bill Parcells, history gets to be written not only by the winners, but also, it turns out, by those who go 8-8.

Jason Gay, who grew up in Belmont, now works for the New York Observer, where he follows the Tuna closely.