Post by TheShadow on Dec 9, 2007 10:23:06 GMT -5
www.sfgate.com/
Tom FitzGerald, Chronicle Staff Writer
Nobody knows the life of a football coach's wife better than Mac Gibbs' wife, Dixie. Her guy works longer hours than a presidential candidate. Their daughter is ridiculed in school because dad's team is losing. Nobody has to ask if he's had a good or bad week: It's up there on the scoreboard and in the media for the world to see.
"Being a football coach," Dixie said, "is not like being a banker, where if you're clever enough you can tamper with the credits and debits - and maybe get away with it."
Behind a lot of married coaches is somebody like Dixie Gibbs, even though Dixie Gibbs doesn't exist. She's the creation of novelist Nanci Kincaid, who was married for 23 years to Al Kincaid, a former college head coach. When they divorced, she swore off three groups of men: "credit-card people, criminals and football coaches." A few years later, she married Dick Tomey, now the San Jose State coach, proving that life comes with its own trick plays.
NFL and top college head coaches generally are multimillionaires, but they serve at the pleasure of others, people who know how to wield an ax. Their families typically lead nomadic existences; when coaches are under fire, the families usually get to share the pain. The wives and even the kids need to develop a thick skin, according to the wives of three prominent Bay Area coaches.
Kincaid was writing the book "Balls" in the late 1990s when she started dating Tomey. It's told from the point of view of the various women involved in the life of a college coach who rises to national prominence in the 1970s, then falls out of favor, and sacrifices his family in the process. The protagonist is the long-suffering Dixie, whose daughter asks her: "Are they going to fire Dad?"
"No, sweetheart, not if they're smart."
"But, Mom, what if they're not smart?"
When Mike and Kathy Nolan's children were young, the couple rarely took them to games.
"We just said that's Mike's job. He just wants to be a dad. (Parenthood) is what's important to him," Kathy Nolan said. "I've seen a lot of (coaches') kids really stressed out because of their dad's job."
This dad's job is head coach of the 49ers, whose 3-9 record in his third year has brought a storm of public criticism, including calls for his firing.
Sitting in her husband's office in Santa Clara, Kathy Nolan, 50, said 24 years of marriage and eight moves have helped her weather the pitfalls of coaching, the arrows of the media and the hostility of frustrated fans.
"If anything, I feel more for the kids than I do for me," she said. "I don't have to go to school and hear ugly things said about my husband."
Three of their children are in college, and the other is in high school. Like other offspring of head coaches, they've all heard the schoolyard refrain: "Your dad sucks. He should be fired."
This kind of thing is so familiar to coaches' families that they often coach their kids on the phrases to use in response.
"I've always had the belief that happy people don't say mean things," Kathy said. "If a kid says something mean, that's really their problem. That's not what somebody in a good place says. So don't let it bother you."
Sometimes the jabs come from adults. When Mike was the defensive coordinator of the Redskins, son Mike went to a school nurse with a headache. She told him, "Maybe if the Redskins were winning, you'd feel better."
The dean of students insisted to Kathy that the nurse was kidding. That didn't mollify her.
"I can promise you that Chelsea Clinton doesn't think any of the jokes about her dad are funny," she told the dean. "To her, they're very painful."
Of course, criticism of coaches is nothing new, nor are radio talk shows in which ripping a struggling coach is inevitable, the louder the better. In recent years, the families and friends of coaches have had to endure another platform of volatile discussion: the Internet.
Friends urge Kathy not to read blogs deriding her husband's worth as a coach. Sports Web sites have added opinionated voices to the fray. For the coach of a losing team, what would have been the barbs of a few columnists or talk-show hosts five or 10 years ago has become a chorus of ridicule.
"There's a mean-spiritedness to some of it," she said. "I'd hate to have the job of writing a column that so-and-so should be fired. I know the consequence of what that feels like, not just to the person but his family. You'd be surprised at how many (friends and relatives) get so upset, that somebody is saying, 'I want that person not to have a job, not to be able to pay their mortgage.' I know that's not the intent, to wish someone ill."
Referring to critical fans, she said, "I don't think they're malicious. They're passionate about the game, and that's what pays everybody's salary. I don't love it when they say things that are ugly, but I can't stop it."
Lane Kiffin, the first-year coach of the Raiders, and his wife, Layla, were at a coaches' luncheon during the NFL meetings last spring. The veteran wives gave the newcomers some tips.
"I'd say 90 percent of the veteran wives said, 'Everyone cancel your papers. Don't get them. Don't read them. Don't listen (to radio talk shows),' " Layla said. "But I do and Lane does. He likes to get the pulse of what the media and people are saying and what the players are saying. And I like to read what he reads."
Rookie head coaches typically get a honeymoon from criticism. When the Raiders lost six games in a row, however, there was some skepticism of Kiffin, 32, who at the time of his hiring was the youngest NFL head coach since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970.
In an interview before the Raiders won their last two games, Layla - yes, her parents were Eric Clapton fans - said the criticism has been muted. "It's been OK so far. I expected it each week to get worse and worse, and it hasn't."
That may have been because, even while losing, the Raiders looked much improved over last year's 2-14 mess. But Layla, 32, is well aware how quickly the fortunes of a coach can turn for the worse.
Her father, John Reaves, an All-America quarterback at Florida who played 11 seasons in the NFL, coached for many years before going into commercial real estate. He was on the staff of Brad Scott at South Carolina. Scott was fired after a 1-10 season in 1998.
"They would put 'For Sale' signs in the head coach's yard," she said. "I know it can get brutal."
Even as the offensive coordinator at USC, her husband caught some flak, especially after a loss to Texas in the national championship game after the 2005 season and after an upset loss to UCLA in 2006 kept the Trojans out of the national title game.
The criticism comes with the territory, she said. "Some of these teams and schools are so passionate."
Partly in response, coaches and their wives around the country are close-knit. "We're all in this together," she said. "We're all getting hired and fired and moving all around, and our kids are trying to get adjusted."
Having taken San Jose State out of the football doldrums with a 9-4 record including a bowl victory in 2006, Dick Tomey earned a grace period with this year's 5-7 team, which took mighty Hawaii into overtime before losing. He has been under fire before, though. His 1999 Arizona team, coming off a 12-1 season in which it was ranked as high as third in the nation, was pounded in a nationally televised opener by Penn State 41-7.
Ranked fourth in preseason, the Wildcats sagged to 6-6. The following year, they were 5-6, and Tomey was gone after a 14-year stint that included seven bowl invitations.
"I feel Dick was so beloved in Arizona," said Kincaid, who married him in 1997. "Was he beloved by every person there? No. But the media got ready for a change. He got great love from fans but a lot of hassle from the media in the end."
She had endured relentless criticism of her first husband, Al Kincaid, at Wyoming in the 1980s. The Cowboys hit bottom with a 3-8 record in 1985, including a 59-0 loss to Brigham Young.
"Laramie is a tough place if you're from elsewhere," Nanci said. "It's an isolated place. They take pride in being America the way it used to be. I'm not about America the way it used to be. I'm about America the way it should be, or can be. When you're in a small community like that, you feel under the spotlight all the time, whether or not you are."
Their two young daughters "had a great childhood there," she said, but she added: "It's interesting to see children whose fathers are constantly being attacked in the media and by teachers.
"In a place like San Jose or a big city, it's less painful. You're not in the paper every day. You don't turn on the radio and hear anonymous people calling in to say bad things about your dad."
She said her kids, now grown, became "two of the toughest daughters ever" as a result of insults directed at their father. The older one, Ali, was in seventh grade when she found out a teacher was making Al Kincaid jokes in another classroom. She confronted him and told him she didn't appreciate it. He responded that he knew what it was like to be a coach. "Last year, I coached ninth-grade girls volleyball," he said.
Ali called home in tears. "I went to get her," Nanci said, "and I remember thinking, isn't it amazing that adults don't have better sense?
"That's when I decided that maybe we weren't going to be church people. Sunday comes after Saturday. You go with all the self-righteous folks, and they've all got something to say about the game the day before."
"Mac leaves thirty minutes later. He has a plane to catch. Chicago. A couple of great prospects there."
- Dixie Gibbs, immediately after the birth of their son, in "Balls"
The strains of the profession on marriages are often profound. Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh and his wife, Miah, divorced in 2006, when he was still coaching at the University of San Diego. (He is getting married again next month.)
Like Mike Nolan and Lane Kiffin, Harbaugh is the son of a coach. "It's in his blood," Miah told the San Diego Union in 2004. "He lives football. He loves the game. He had to have some way to stay in it."
Miah lives with their three children in Coronado. Attempts to reach her for an interview were unsuccessful.
On a visit to the University of Oregon, where he was going to walk on as a football player, high school senior Mike Nolan was being shown around campus by a student who knew Kathy, a sophomore, and asked her to talk to the guy.
"He's kind of cute," she remembers thinking. "Too bad he's so young."
At a party a year later, the freshman kept asking her to dance. They dated 51/2 years before getting married.
Kathy thinks some depictions of the lives of coaches' families are overly bleak, but she admits Mike has always worked long hours, although he's not among the many coaches who sleep at the office during the season. Typically he leaves the house at 7 a.m. and works till 11 p.m. or midnight on Mondays and Tuesdays, getting home an hour or two earlier on other days, and getting home Friday for dinner.
"When our kids were little, I think people thought we were having marital problems," she said with a laugh. "They'd see me putting the Christmas lights on and dragging the garbage cans out.
The kids knew that "being their dad was always the most important thing to him," she said. "But there was only one of me, and we have four kids, so I couldn't be at all their games. They were good at understanding that."
These days, there's rarely time in his day for even a phone call home, but Kathy and Mike probably see each other more than most NFL coaches and wives do. She travels to away games with the team, and she accompanies him as he drives to work in Santa Clara each day from their home in Saratoga, stopping for coffee on the way. Then she picks him up at the office late at night.
"No one's interrupting us," she said. "We have time, just one-on-one, to talk. We both look forward to it."
In high school, Layla Reaves told her mother, "You're crazy to marry a coach. They're never around."
On the other hand, her brother David is quarterbacks coach under Steve Spurrier at South Carolina and brother Stephen is a quarterback at Southern Mississippi who wants to become a coach. "It's just sick how it's in our family," she said with a smile.
She was running the special-events department for the Buccaneers when Lane, the son of the Bucs' longtime defensive coordinator, wandered in. "Oh it's Monte Kiffin's son. I have to be nice," she remembered thinking.
He won her over, just as he later would win over dozens of recruits for USC. When they met, he had just finished two years as a graduate assistant at Fresno State and was soon headed to the Colorado State staff. He and Layla were engaged three months after they met. They were married in 2000 and have two daughters, Landry, 2, and Presley, 1.
Sitting by the family's backyard pool with a view of the Amador and Livermore valleys, she ticked off the best things about being a coach's wife:
"This lifestyle, when you're on the upswing, is great. It's the excitement, the adrenaline rush. I really respect the passion these guys have for what they do. And the people - I've met so many awesome wives and families that I'll be close to forever."
Her husband doesn't sleep at the office during the season, unlike his dad at Tampa Bay and unlike Cal coach Jeff Tedford, who mentored Lane when he was a backup quarterback and a fledgling coach at Fresno State. (Tedford's wife, Donna, declined to be interviewed for this story.)
That doesn't mean Layla sees a lot of her husband. His usual work day runs 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. They usually spend a quiet Friday night at home, going out to dinner once a month.
During the league meetings, they met Eagles coach Andy Reid and his wife, Tammy, who had to bear an immense burden this year when their two sons were sentenced to prison for drug crimes.
"She's a wonderful person," Layla said. "It just makes me sick (for the parents). I don't think it's necessarily because the dad is away. It happens to a lot of families. I pray to God it never happens to us. I don't ever want to say it's the profession that caused it to happen."
Her clean-cut, laid-back husband might seem out of place at the helm of a team whose organization fosters its renegade image and whose fans are apt to don "Mad Max" regalia on game days. Actually, Layla says, he'd love to listen to heavy metal with them. "It fires him up to see all those people dressed up," she said.
Nanci Kincaid has written several novels and a collection of short stories, one of which was made into the 2003 movie "My Life Without Me." She had been divorced for a few years and was an English professor at North Carolina when she received a writing fellowship at Radcliffe College, which is now part of Harvard. That's where she was when Dick Tomey called her.
The Arizona coach, who had found out about her divorce from her ex-husband at a speaking engagement, told her he was coming to the Boston area to see his son play minor-league baseball. He and Nanci had met during Western Athletic Conference meetings when Tomey coached at Hawaii.
"When you're in your 40s and you're suddenly a single woman, single life at middle age is no fun," she said. "That phase of life, everybody's a little beat up and cautious and scared. I decided no more coaches, of course. I'm not a football maniac like you might think."
They visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and talked for an hour and a half over dinner at the Hasty Pudding Club in nearby Cambridge. The subject of football never came up. They talked about his two divorces, their children and her book "Crossing Blood."
At her apartment, he read an excerpt from "Balls" of Dixie Gibbs describing her husband, Mac, and said, "Nanci, this is me." He might as well have told her he worked for a credit-card company. "Please don't tell me that," she said.
Tomey, though, is anything but another Mac Gibbs. He is a voracious reader, especially on history. He has his players practice in the morning, before their classes, because he feels afternoon practices are too disruptive to academics and wants his coaches home for dinner. "He's interested in a larger world," she said.
Tomey, 69, and Kincaid, 57, were married in 1997. Most nights he's home by 8 p.m., although the morning-practice routine means he has to leave home by 5 a.m. No sleeping in the office as he used to do when he was on workaholic Dick Vermeil's staffs at Kansas and UCLA.
"I think all coaches of Dick's vintage have some regrets about their fathering," Kincaid said. "The only thing that makes it bearable is that they were father figures to some other people and made a tremendous difference, so it was kind of a trade-off."
Nanci Kincaid
Husband: Dick Tomey, San Jose State
Age: 57
Children: Rich Tomey, 37; Ali (Kincaid) Bergthold, 35; Angie Tomey, 33; Leigh Kincaid, 29
Married how long: 10 years
His typical in-season work day:
5 a.m.-7:30 p.m.
Quote: "That is the great irony of it. You're in such pursuit of these W's and they bring you such brief joy. They're gone, and you're back in the trenches."
Kathy Nolan
Husband: Mike Nolan, 49ers
Age: 50
Children: Mike, 23; Laura, 21;
Jennifer, 19; Christopher, 15
Married how long: 24 years
His typical in-season work day:
7:30 a.m.-11 p.m.
Quote: "I know coaches who have had their marriages talked about in the papers. Things that should be private aren't private. That's the nature of the job, and everybody knows it."
Layla Kiffin
Husband: Lane Kiffin, Raiders
Age: 32
Children: Landry, 2; Presley 1
Married how long: 7 years
His typical in-season work day:
6 a.m.-10 p.m.
Quote: "A lot of the wives stick together because we're all alone at night and on the weekends, so it's kind of nice to have each other."
