PHOENIX – All week long, to the point of exhaustion, Tom Coughlin stood tall and he answered the same question posed in a thousand different ways. How did you change? Why did you change? Was it difficult to change? Do you have change for a five? At what point did you know you needed to change? David Bowie could have been his interpreter.
Turn and face the strange (ch-ch-changes) …
All week long, Coughlin hung in there like Eli Manning in the pocket, never once lost patience with the subject, even though he knew as well as everyone else milling about those various Super Bowl podiums the real questions lurking underneath.
“How did it feel to be told you had to change or lose your job? Were you really an ogre before? Are you comfortable with this kinder, gentler, you? Do you still have to get to meetings 10 minutes early?”
Yesterday, on his first full day as a Super Bowl-winning coach – the title he will carry the rest of his life, the accomplishment that will be in the first sentence of his obituary – Coughlin finally revealed something else about the way he approached this season, and the reasons why he altered that approach.
“It was time,” he said, “to start having fun, and to enjoy this job.”
And you know something? All coaches should enjoy such an epiphany, achieve such a moment of clarity. The big coaches, the successful ones, they spend so much time on the chase, pursuing players, and better jobs, and richer salaries, and higher levels of competition, that it’s become anathema to admit just how cool it is to be one of the 32 men who work as NFL head coaches.
“I always evaluate who I am and what I can do to be better,” Coughlin said. “And to me, it was critical to be able to maximize the things about this life that I enjoy the most.”
Sure: Coughlin had to change in order to save his job, to keep a career that would never again have included another NFL job if he’d been fired from this one, at age 61. Yes: Coughlin needed to improve communication with his players, needed to invent that leadership council, needed to physically keep ajar the door to his office he’d always insisted was open.
“There were things we wanted to hear from Tom because, quite frankly, I wanted to make sure this was still an environment where he wanted to work,” John Mara said earlier in the week. “It wasn’t just a one-way street, ‘Tom, do this or you’re gone.’ We valued him, and didn’t want him to be uncomfortable, either. Because it seemed like he was miserable at times last year.”
Misery, of course, can be a coach’s closest companion, if he lets it. The agony of losing always far surpasses the ecstasy of winning. You can be consumed in details, destroyed by misfortune. And if you happen to wear emotions on your expressive Irish face, the way Coughlin tends to, then the television cameras become an additional tormenter.
“There were times,” a friend of Coughlin’s confided yesterday, “when he would look at himself on TV and his shoulders would sag and he’d say, ‘That’s just terrible. That’s not me. Why do I look that way?’ And I’d tell him, ‘That’s how you always have looked your whole life. It’s just that people notice it more when you coach the New York Giants.’ “
See, that’s the chapter of the story everyone failed to pick up all week. Those changes? They were mutually beneficial. The Giants got a coach they could communicate with, relate to, understand. And Coughlin retrieved that part of his soul that led him to this wildly bruising, itinerant life in the first place.
It was a transfiguration that may have started early last January, when he convinced his bosses that he really was a player’s coach at heart. And one that ended late Sunday night in the Giants’ locker room at University of Phoenix Stadium with Antonio Pierce, one of the toughest nuts any coach has ever had to crack, wrapping Coughlin in a long embrace.
“Look at what you did,” the coach said.
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” the linebacker said.
The job probably never seemed more fun, more enjoyable, than at that exact moment.