Great Jim Fassel Article (ESPN.Com)
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lineup and tape it to the Fullerton College locker room wall, but in the fall
of 1967, on the most important night of the season, the coach left one line
blank. As his teammates dressed in the stalls, Jim Fassel stood speechless and
stared into the sheet of paper where no starting quarterback had been listed
for a junior college championship game.
Jim Fassel's Giants don't win style points, just games.
Under the lights of Anaheim Stadium, No. 1 and unbeaten Fullerton was meeting
No. 2 Orange Coast College for the national title. Before the preseason
started, Fassel walked into summer practice, ran his eyes down, down, down the
depth chart until he discovered his name eighth out of nine quarterbacks trying
out for the team.
Now, he had climbed his way into the coach's line of sight, and when the
starter struggled a few times in the regular season, Sherbeck inserted his
rising star, Fassel, into the game.
So, who did the coach want for the biggest game of the year? It was simple:
Sherbeck instructed his two quarterbacks to get loose on the field, return to
the locker room in those final moments before kickoff and they'd find out
within minutes of the game.
"What he told me later was that he wanted to see how I warmed up," Fassel said.
"He wanted to see if I was nervous, and he told me, 'You were loose, like you
had been the starter the whole time.' So here we are, playing for the national
championship, and he goes back into the locker room and writes my name down."
Three hours later, Fassel had fired five touchdown passes and Fullerton had won
the national championship, 41-0. Thirty-three years later, the greatest glory
of his playing days stands to the Giants coach as a reminder of the resolve
cemented within him long ago on that warm Southern California night. Across
that season, that night, he discovered he didn't just function under pressure,
but flourished.
"That was the first time I really had a different kind of pressure on me,"
Fassel said. "That's where I found something out about myself. Hey, I was a
quarterback. I always thrived on pressure. I liked those third-and-fives, those
game-on-the-line situations."
When the pressure of his professional life came calling for Fassel, his job on
the line these final few weeks of the season, he has come out throwing for
these Giants. Somehow, the Giants are 9-4 and determined to deliver the NFC
East Championship to the coach who promised it in the papers. For everything
Gentleman Jim Fassel has done these past two and a half weeks on the job -- the
guarantee of the playoffs to the gag-order on his players, the ripping of Mike
Ditka to a stern statement to members of the organization, including
management, to stop offering opinions and "Do your job" -- there's something so
easy to see: Nobody is ever going to be indifferent over Fassel again.
And, just maybe, they're never going to see him as Mister Rogers again.
"I hate that," the Giants coach.
Every week now, Fassel walks to the interview room podium, pours gasoline on
himself and dangles an unlit match in his hand. When it seems he's coming
undone, he's actually coming together. There's more happening here. He isn't
just fighting for his job but fighting for his reputation as a football coach.
There's a part of Fassel just pleading with people, determined to convince them
that this Mr. Rogers, good-guy façade can't stop him as a winning coach.
"I don't think he wants anyone to see him as a nice guy in football, or what's
the word -- a wuss, in football terms," his wife, Kitty, said. "It's not a
connotation a coach wants. Jim is a very good man, but a nice guy in football
he is not."
“ I don't think he wants anyone to see him as a nice guy in football, or
what's the word -- a wuss, in football terms. It's not a connotation a coach
wants. Jim is a very good man, but a nice guy in football he is not. ”
— Kitty Fassel
All this rage has long been simmering beneath the surface with him, this image
as the man you're more inclined to find trimming his hedges in Northern New
Jersey on Sundays than coaching in the NFL. Yes, he despises this perception.
People remembered his big, round eyeglasses, heard him choose "Geez Louise"
over cursing and saw him often be something so troublesome for many NFL head
coaches: A real, three-dimensional person.
"People really don't know me," Fassel said. "Sometimes, people see me in one
light, because I love what I do. I have a wonderful life. I have a great life.
I have a privileged life. I do what I want to do. I make good money. I've got a
good family. I've got it all together.
"But there's no hesitation to put the hammer down in my life, with anybody."
There's an earnestness to Fassel, and the Giants responded to it. They're 9-4,
on the way to the playoffs and a contract extension for the coach. It started
the Wednesday that Fassel walked into the mid-week interview room and sounded
like a crazy man, one with nothing to lose, when, in fact, he had everything to
lose.
"I believe he has reached a benchmark in his career, where he has some coaching
legs to stand on, some experiences, high and low, where if this is the way he
feels, it's with a such a degree of comfort that (he) can make a bold statement
like he's made," Kitty Fassel said.
"This is a threshold he's crossing in his life. This is cleansing."
Just maybe, this is goodbye to Mister Rogers, forever.
I have gained a lot of respect for Fassel of the last three weeks and hopefully
he stays on for at least one more season