The Brat Comes to the Big Time

steve spurrier is the highest-paid coach in the history of pro football, and he's never coached a game

Steve spurrier sucked up all the oxygen in the room. Reporters couldn't get enough of him. He was the highest-paid head coach in the National Football League ($25 million for five years) and he worked for the league's most volatile owner, Dan Snyder. As the fourth Washington Redskins coach in less than two years, Spurrier was not a symbol of job security. But the reporters at the NFL meetings in Orlando treated him as an established celebrity.

The fascination with Spurrier gained momentum as the 2002 season approached, and it went beyond the basic elements of high pay and high risk. Spurrier is the most compelling personality to arrive in the NFL in a long time. He is the most innovative and most controversial college coach of the Nineties. And perhaps the best. No other college coach--not Knute Rockne, not Joe Paterno, not Bear Bryant--reached 100 victories so quickly. And Spurrier has an ego and a mouth to match his record. He does not look, act or talk like a typical football coach. He is trim where most coaches are beefy. In a tight game, he is the most animated person in the stadium, throwing his trademark visor, yelling at players and officials until the veins stand out in his neck and his face turns almost purple. Instead of the cliché, which most coaches rely on in order to get through an interview, Spurrier will actually tell you what he thinks. He will even mock football decorum.

He does not feel compelled to make nice with the opposition. In fact, he is the other thing. A taunter. When he was head coach at the University of Florida, Spurrier liked to call Georgia's Ray Goff, "Ray Goof." He likes to stick it to his opponents, even after he has beaten them. He enjoys inflicting pain almost as much as Hannibal Lecter does.

After winning the 1993 national championship, Florida's fiercest rival, Florida State, found itself embroiled in a controversy over a shopping spree involving players who used an agent's credit card to run up charges at a Foot Locker store. To amuse some boosters at a dinner one night, Spurrier announced that FSU stood for Free Shoes University.

The line got a laugh, so he used it again and again.

A couple of seasons later, Spurrier brought his number one-ranked team into Tallahassee for the last game of the regular season against number two FSU and lost 24--21. Spurrier's boys did not lose (despite the close score) so much as get their bells rung and their asses handed to them. The Gators' quarterback and eventual Heisman winner, Danny Wuerffel, spent most of the day on his back. After the game, Spurrier accused Florida State of playing dirty. On a television call-in show with FSU's head coach, Bobby Bowden, listening in, Spurrier said, "Florida State plays a little differently than most of the teams in the SEC do. Alabama players tend to go in there and just give a little shove and try not to hurt the quarterback."

The clear and grave implication was that FSU players try to hurt opponents. Bowden, characteristically, tried to deflect the controversy. "Well, maybe we stop hitting at the echo of the whistle," he said, "instead of at the whistle itself."

Spurrier, however, was not going to be appeased. "Obviously," he said to reporters, "Bobby Bowden and [FSU defensive coordinator] Mickey Andrews are telling their players to try to knock the quarterback out of the game."

Spurrier wouldn't stop on the late hits. By the time the two schools played a rematch five weeks later in the Sugar Bowl for the national title, he had focused the spotlight on himself instead of on his team and he had won the mind game. Florida won 52--20 and the Gators were national champions for the first time in school history.

Spurrier routinely and gleefully violates the old coaching rule about not running up the score. Florida and Georgia had been hate-your-guts rivals since before Spurrier's playing days. One of his toughest losses as a player was against Georgia in 1966, when Florida was 7--0 and dreaming of a championship. Georgia put an end to those dreams, 27--10.

So, 29 years later, in 1995, Spurrier ran it up on Georgia. With the clock running down and the reserves in the game, Spurrier called a trick play that went for a touchdown and made the final score 52--17. The Georgia fans were howling and throwing things at Spurrier as he left the field, smiling. Asked about that play, he explained that no team had ever scored 50 points against Georgia at home. "We wanted to make it a memorable game for the Gators--and it was."

Spurrier craves victory, of course, and you won't hear him mouth homilies after a close game. If he were an executioner, he'd be good at his work. He might even tell a client, in his last moments on earth, "You know, you look kind of fat."

Good as he is, though, there is something improbable about Spurrier the coach. He almost missed his calling: He came to the trade by accident and, son of a gun, discovered he was a genius. He won the Heisman trophy in 1966 and quarterbacks--especially Heisman winners--don't usually make good coaches. Coaching is too much hard work for the prima donnas of the game and Spurrier was unquestionably one of those when he graduated from Florida in 1967. He was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers and spent the next nine seasons mostly carrying a clipboard on the sidelines. He was finally waived by the 49ers and picked up by the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1977. In the one professional season he started at quarterback, his team lost every game. There is a newspaper clip on the wall of his office, the headline of which reads: Spurrier put on Waivers.

"A lot of people think it has all been easy for him," says one of his old teammates, "winning the Heisman as a player and the national championship as a coach. All they see is the arrogance. But Steve knows about humility. He learned all about that backing up John Brodie and losing every game with the Bucs."

His first attempts at coaching were similarly humbling. He was playing a lot of golf and assumed that, eventually, he would fall into the predictable groove of the aging football star. "I figured I would do PR or something, like athletes do," he once told a writer. The Heisman would be his ticket to coast.

But he signed on as a quarterback coach at Florida and realized the game was in his blood. He was released after a coaching change. Nothing personal, just housecleaning. So he moved to Georgia Tech as an assistant. But Tech had a bad year and the head coach was fired. Once again, Spurrier was looking for a job. He had been unemployed now three times in two years.

Next stop was Duke, which no one ever called a football powerhouse. Spurrier was made offensive coordinator, but the talent was so thin that he had to advertise for pass receivers in the university newspaper. Duke had so-so seasons but the offense was exciting and scored points. In 1983 Spurrier was hired as head coach by the Tampa Bay Bandits of the United States Football League.

The league folded after three seasons, but Spurrier's teams won games and were exciting. He went back to Duke as head coach and the Spurrier legend began to take shape. His teams moved the ball so quickly they seemed almost to be playing fast-break football. They won the Atlantic Coast Conference title, went to a bowl game, beat North Carolina for the first time in 10 years and they were--little old Duke--even accused of running up the score on the Tarheels. Spurrier just loved that. It was like being accused of picking on Mike Tyson.

Florida, meanwhile, was in the doldrums and a movement started among the faithful to bring back the prodigal.

Before Spurrier arrived at Florida, the Gators had never even been South-eastern Conference champions. Plenty of doubters thought Spurrier wasn't the answer. He might have run through the Atlantic Coast Conference, where they thought of basketball as a major sport, but his nose was insufficiently hard for SEC football, where defense and fundamentals ruled.

But Spurrier's Florida teams won right out of the gate with offense. His teams eventually won six conference titles and one national championship. He was smarter than everyone else. He let it be known that he didn't believe in staying all night at the office. He knew he couldn't outwork some of his rival coaches, so he would just have to outthink them. He thought several of them out of jobs--desperate coaches who stayed late trying to come up with ways to stop Florida's offense while the man who'd designed it was out on the golf course, working on his scratch game. The golf game didn't make him any more popular with rival coaches and fans. Neither did his looks--youthful and sublimely untroubled--like a guy who had done well on the PGA tour and retired to Florida to tend to his investments. He had an aura, and when it slipped, there was rejoicing. After Nebraska beat Florida 62--24 for the national championship, running up more than 600 yards of old-fashioned, hard-nosed offense against the Gators, a former SEC coach called a newspaper reporter at seven o'clock the next morning, waking him up to say, "See, I told you that shit wouldn't work against a real football team."

Typically, Spurrier took that defeat ungraciously. When his quarterback, Wuerffel, was sacked for a safety after Spurrier had called for a pass out of a no-back formation from the one-yard line, Spurrier said it was the quarterback's fault--that he should have taken the penalty if he saw the formation wouldn't work. After other defeats, he has blamed the officials or his players. "We can take losing," he said after one tough loss (to FSU). Then he demonstrated the opposite. "But we hate to beat ourselves," he said. "You hate to play so stupid that you don't give yourself a chance to win. We're not smart enough to be great."

He is so thin-skinned that he sends handwritten letters to reporters who write stories that he doesn't like (calling them "a_holes" [sic]). He once wrote a letter to a newspaper saying, "I have accepted the fact that the world is full of critics. They play no ball, fight no fights, make no mistakes, because they attempt nothing. They sit back and criticize the doers of the world who make mistakes because they attempt many things."

He carried on a feud for years with one Orlando columnist, refusing to speak to him or acknowledge him at press conferences. After the reporter retired, Spurrier said, "I guess I outlasted him, huh?"

He let it be known, early in his tour at Florida, that he would turn down all (concluded on page 139) Steve Spurrier continued from page 88 invitations to speak to civic clubs. He was invited, once, by an alum to play in a local golf tournament. As an inducement, the man offered him the weekend use of a condominium on the beach. "What do I need that for?" Spurrier asked. "I've got my own condo."

"But that's just Steve," says the man who tells the story. He is an admirer and, in truth, it's hard not to feel a kind of sneaky admiration for Spurrier. He got there his way. All alone. Football is a team his way. All alone. Football is a team sport in a corporate world, but they came to him. He turned down several NFL jobs before he signed with the Redskins. He is still the solitary artist. And among the stories that do not get told are the ones about his generosity to friends in trouble, about his charitable works or his successes as a husband and father. For a man who is so volatile and exposed in public, the private Spurrier is remarkably introverted. Reporters come away after one-on-one interviews impressed and liking the man. They also enjoy his company on the golf course, where he famously plays to win, indulges in head games with the competition and makes everyone play it where it lays and putt out on every hole.

But he is known most of all a as a coach. Last January, he left the field in the Orange Bowl, hearing boos from the fans of a team he had humiliated. Florida had buried the season's Cinderella team, Maryland, 56--23. Had Spurrier run it up? Maybe. Because he knew then what nobody else in the world did. He was hanging it up at Florida.

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The owner of the Washington Redskins is not a patient man. Dan Snyder is short and wears glasses but emotionally he could be a Spurrier clone, with the same appetite for winning. It is hard to imagine the two working long and amiably together, unless Spurrier takes the Redskins immediately to the playoffs and shortly thereafter to the Super Bowl. The pressure to win will be on him as he never felt it in Florida. Also, if Spurrier thought the press in Florida was exceedingly critical, welcome to Washington.

Already, Spurrier is comparing himself to the great Redskins coach Joe Gibbs, who won three Super Bowls. Gibbs is as laconic and buttoned-up as Spurrier is voluble and flamboyant. The only thing they have in common is an ability to coach football. To start winning rings, Spurrier has brought in players, like Wuerffel, who were with him at Florida but have, so far, failed in the pros. There is something defiant about it, as though he wants to make the point that those NFL coaches who snubbed his Gators were as wrong as the coaches who believed the Fun and Gun would never work in the SEC. When he does show them, he will be at center stage, in front of one of the largest audiences in the world.

Question is: Will he fall on his ass? Who knows? Millions are no doubt praying for it. But you'd be a fool to bet that way.