New high-fiving chapter in coach's career

AMERICA AT LARGE:While Pete Carroll's Seattle Seahawks have acquired legions of new admirers over the past week, none of them are likely to be found on the campus of the University of California

IN OCTOBER of 1997, two months into his tenure with the New England Patriots, and Pete Carroll had just learned Foxboro Stadium would be unavailable for the practice session he had planned for his team. Out the window of the meeting room where Carroll conducted his daily press briefing, workmen were putting the finishing touches on the stage and a stack of amps that comprised, at that moment, the largest structure in Foxboro, Massachusetts, in anticipation of a Rolling Stones concert on the Patriots’ home field two nights later.

By the time he was relieved of his duties three years later, Carroll would come to view the “brutal” Boston-area media as a sworn enemy, but at that point an era of good feeling still prevailed. The Patriots had reached the Super Bowl the previous season and had won five of their first six games in this one, and the overbearing shadow cast by Bill Parcells, the coaching legend Pete Carroll had succeeded, didn’t seem quite as daunting.

As if by arranged signal, Stacey James, the team’s media relations director, announced the coach would answer only one more question. Perhaps because I’d been gazing

out at the mammoth stage, I asked the first thing that popped into my mind.

“What’s your favourite Stones album?”

My fellow scribes groaned, to a man, and James looked as if he’d just eaten something unpleasant. Carroll decided he’d take one more football question, but even as he nodded toward the raised arm of a sportswriter across the room, he blurted out: “Let It Bleed”. At that moment I decided I liked Pete Carroll.

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Although the nation’s newspapers devoted considerable space to the subject in the week between the end of the regular season and last weekend’s wild-card play-off games, the issue was beyond debate. Parcells is usually credited with articulating the standard by which NFL success and failure are measured (although he was paraphrasing Popeye), which is to say, “You are what you are”. And in that respect, the 2010 Seattle Seahawks were indisputably the worst team ever to reach an NFL play-off.

It wasn’t just that they went into their season finale against the Rams with a 6-9 record. Over the 16-game season they surrendered more than a 100 points more than they scored. Their defence was ranked 27th in a 32-team league.

Their opponents outgained them by more than a thousand yards – even though the Seahawks played the fifth-easiest schedule in the league.

That they won an execrable division despite a losing record was considered a travesty. That a 7-9 Seattle team would actually be hosting a home game last Saturday while two teams, the Giants and the Buccaneers, had been eliminated despite 10-6 records, was considered such an injustice that NFL mavens spoke openly of amending the rules to prevent repetitions.

So what happened, of course, was that the 10½-point underdogs, with their first-year head coach, Peter Clay Carroll, hopping about the sidelines like a giddy schoolboy, slapping his players on the back when he wasn’t high-fiving them or hugging them, welcomed the defending world champion New Orleans Saints to Qwest field, and three hours later sent them home, tails between their legs, having administered a 41-36 spanking that ranks among the more astonishing upsets in NFL post-season history.

The carriage is supposed to turn back into a pumpkin on Sunday. The Seahawks will again be double-digit underdogs when they travel to Chicago to play the Bears in the divisional round. But this much is also true – all those folks who wanted to revamp the post-season format to prevent repetitions of such unworthy qualifiers getting a home play-off game? You haven’t heard a peep out of them over the past week.

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If we seem to be evincing a soft spot for these upstart underdogs, full disclosure is probably in order here. Not only do I go way back with Pete Carroll, but I also have something of a history with Seattle’s

offensive and defensive captains, a pair of second-generation NFL players whose fathers I covered back in the Neoplasticene Age.

Television viewers who watched quarterback Matt Hasselbeck throw four touchdown passes in last Saturday’s romp over the Saints might have been looking at a grizzled and balding 13-year NFL veteran, but I found myself recalling Don Hasselbeck as an NFL rookie tight end in 1977. Two decades or so ago, Don’s teenaged son Matt often came straight from the practice field at Xavierian High School to work out on the sidelines with the Patriots quarterbacks.

Similarly, when the armchair fan watches Lofu Tatupu he might see a tough-as-nails linebacker who is the heart and soul of the Seahawks’ defence, but I think back to a January afternoon a quarter-century ago in New Orleans, when Lofu’s father, fullback Mosi, asked me to help him fish a Patriots’ team-mate out of the urinal trough of a Bourbon Street saloon, where the team-mate had passed out days before Super Bowl XX.

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Pete Carroll’s first NFL coaching tenure had lasted just one season (he was handed his walking papers when the 1994 New York Jets lost their last five games on the trot), and his three-year stint in New England (one he describes as “the longest 10 years of my life”) may have been doomed from the outset.

He had been preceded by one legend (Parcells), but was succeeded by another (Bill Belichick), and his rah-rah sideline comportment was openly mocked by many, including his players. His enthusiastic demeanour (“pumped” and “jacked” were the words he frequently invoked to describe his state of mind) and hip style were deemed more suited to the collegiate game, an assessment that seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy when he took up the reins of the programme at USC and proceeded to win seven straight Pac-Ten Conference titles, and National Championships in 2003 and 2004.

“I love being here. I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he would say after receiving a contract extension that, at $3.5 million a year, made him the highest-paid college coach in the land. Then last January, with what seemed indecent haste, Carroll bolted the USC job to return to the pros with the Seahawks.

It didn’t become clear until months later that he had gotten out of LA one step ahead of the posse. An NCAA investigation stripped USC of the 2004 national championship.

Star running back Reggie Bush was ordered to return the Heisman Trophy. By the time the football police were through, USC had been forced to forfeit many of its 2004 wins and all of its victories in the 2005 season. The school was further penalised with the loss of 30 football scholarships and a two-year ban from post-season bowl games.

That all of this occurred with Carroll safely employed in Seattle did not sit well in certain parts of Los Angeles.

LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke wrote that Carroll had gone in one stroke “from a coach who presided over the greatest days of USC football to one who was in charge of its biggest embarrassment”.

Suffice it to say that while the Seahawks have acquired legions of new admirers over the past week, none of them are likely to be found on the USC campus.

Among all the factoids to emerge over the past week, the most astonishing may be that Carroll is, at 59, the second-oldest coach in the NFL today. Only the Giants’ Tom Coughlin, 64, is older. It’s hard to imagine, say, Coughlin with a Twitter page, but Pete Tweets.

And Carroll, he would be the first to tell you, is pumped and jacked.