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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
Like many in the business,Mike Shanahan is a well-traveled coach, having served as—from left—Dan Reeves’s offensive coordinator in Denver, the Raiders’ head coach and offensive coordinator for the 49ers. JANET REEVES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
GEORGE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES
PAUL SAKUMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
For Shanahan, life’s work continues with the Redskins shanahan from D1
that week. He rifled through the clip- pings looking for something he could use. Injuries. Changes in staff. Hirings, firings. Player arrests. Subtle tip-offs about scheme. It’s the secret to his success: the coupling of exhaustiveworkwith a canny exploitation of the laziness, indiscretions and lack of conviction in others. “Most people don’t believe that they
deserve something special,” Shanahan said during a recent conversation in his new office. “They believe the other per- son should have it. It’s up to you to let them know they do deserve it, because they put the work in. They’ve done the things necessary to let themselves win a championship.”
Worker, fighter S
hanahan started working at just 14, an evasion of child labor law made possible by his mother Dorothy. She
took the birth certificate of her oldest son to the local library and used clerical supplies to alter his date of birth, so he could pass for 16 and carry a toolbox. It wasn’t a first in the family. Ed Shanahan had falsified his own age in order to enter the armed services at 15, and did two years with the Signal Corps in Korea. When he came out of the Army, he got his equivalency degree and be- came an apprentice electrician. He worked overtime to feed six kids on $15,000-$20,000 a year, and Mike was expected to contribute. “Work is in his nature,” Ed says. “He was oldest so he got responsibility early, and hewasa big help to the whole family.” Franklin Park, Ill., was a bleak parish
of raw industrial parks, bounded by O’Hare airport’s cargo terminals and railroad freight yards. Mike did shifts cleaning the floors of the local plants, sweeping debris left by the machinists— alloys, steel and cast iron. “I spent about 10 hours a week mopping things up,” he says. He also unloaded sacks of cement from conveyor belts. He flipped burgers at a drive-in joint called Dave’s. He worked construction for $5 an hour. The expectation was that he would
follow his father in the trade, unless he became a fireman, his mother’s ambi- tion. ButMike wanted something differ- ent: an education. No one in his family had ever gone to college. Also, he thought he might want to be a coach. He had a knack for games; fields of play just seemed to unfold before him. When he was 12, even before he knew how to win much of anything except a fight, he beat his grandfather at chess. He took the old man down in just four moves, with an embarrassing strategy calledFool’sMate. When he wasn’t pulling his arm-wea-
rying shifts at the local plants, he was at football, basketball or track practice. At first no one thought he’d amount to much; his coach at Main Junior High wrote him off as one of the “try-hard” kids. “He kind of insinuated the group over there wasn’t as talented,” Shanahan says. Shanahan resented it, and dealt with it the way he was taught, with pugnacity. When there was an argument, it was
often settled by fistfights in the front yard. “It was a blue-collar neighborhood with quite a fewbrawls, but itwasall kids stuff” Ed says. At East Leyden High School, Shanah-
an was more than a “try-hard” guy. He fought his way on to the varsity football though he weighed only 110 pounds. His father worried he would get himself seriously hurt. On the day he announced he’d made the freshman team, Ed just said, “Ohmy God.” But Shanahan never really thought
about the size factor. “You just kind of forget about it,” he says. “You say, ‘Hey, I got what I got, deal with it.’ ” He became the best athlete in a school
of 2,500 students, a quarterback and most valuable player. A scholarship was his only shot at college, since therewasn’t enough money for tuition, but neither of his parents liked the idea, for different reasons. His mother thought he should settle down to a paying wage. “MyMom, she kept track of everything you spent, and everything you spent, you were responsible for,” he says. “If I calledhome and it was three dollars, I had to pay.” Edfeared for his safety. He was still so
light that his father said, “I’ll gladly pay your way rather than see you play at your weight.” But Mike replied, “Dad, I’m gonna play no matter what.” He took the only full scholarship he was offered, at Division II Eastern Illinois. His father’s
AL MESSERSCHMIDT ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES Ultimately, Shanahan’s hard work and persistence paid off when he was named the Broncos’ head coach before the 1995 season and won a pair off Super Bowls.
“We thought of ourselves as football players rather than receivers, and Mike rewards players with that mentality.”
-— Ed McCaffrey, former Denver Broncos wide receiver who spoke of Coach Mike Shanahan’s affinity for players that overachieve
fears were fulfilled. In the spring of 1974, his junior year, he was speared in the ribs in a scrimmage. Shanahan could barely breathe, but he finished the game. At home, he urinated blood and began
convulsively throwing up. At the emer- gency room, doctors at first couldn’t find anything wrong—because they couldn’t see his kidney, which had been shoved behind his spine.He passed out from the pain, his heart stopped beating for a half minute and he had to be revived with electric paddles. A priest administered last rites. But he rallied after surgery to remove his ruptured kidney. When he regained consciousness, his football coach, Jack Dean, told him he wouldn’t play again. Shanahan petitioned the school to let
him back on the field, but was turned down. Instead he pursued a master’s degree and worked as a student assistant on the team, with the idea of becoming a high school coach. “He was going to be content with being a PE teacher,” says his son Kyle, the Redskins’ offensive coordi- nator. Instead, Shanahan found a job as a dormitory assistant and errand boy for the football staff at the University of Oklahoma, headed by a young coach named Barry Switzer, who appreciated a wishbone quarterback. Shanahan drove across the country and showed up at the football office, where he volunteered to
do every odd job.He picked up recruits at the airport. He drew charts and broke down game film, any tedious task some- one was happy to hand off. “He was a minimum salary guy who
lived in a dorm for free,” Switzer says. “We’d say, ‘Mike, go do this, go do that, get this done for us.’ You learn that way, you pick up. We all start out as go-fers. Head coaches are made, they’re not born.” Years later Shanahan advised his own
son, when he too wanted to get into coaching: “I don’t think you get jobs by calling people up. You get jobs by work- ing hard at a place. You don’t have to apply, if people know you do a good job. The word of mouth will get you jobs.” That washowit happened for Shanah-
an: Switzer noticed his diligence and assigned him to work with quarterbacks. When the 1975 national championship Oklahoma squad posed for its team photo, Switzer called him over and told himto get in the frame. “Thatwasthe day he felt like a coach,” Kyle says. A year later, a coach named Joe Salem ofNorth- ern Arizona asked Switzer about the young assistant. Would he make a good offensive coordinator? “Hell yes,” Switzer said.
Shanahan’s newjob came with a hitch:
he had to cancel his honeymoon.He and his new wife Peggy were booked to go to Acapulco. Instead, the morning after
they were wed in Illinois, they packed their car and drove to Flagstaff. In Springfield, Mo., they hit a windstorm and had to pull off the road. InOklahoma City, they ran into a dust storm, and in Albuquerque, an ice storm. When they reached Flagstaff, itwascovered by a foot of snow. At each stop, Peggy said, “Just think, we could be in Acapulco right now.” “That was the wakeup to coaching,”
she says. “I think I cried all the way.” The odyssey was only beginning. They moved four times in the first four years of marriage, from Arizona back to Illinois, then to Minnesota and Florida. They moved again to Denver when he made the jump to NFL assistant in 1983. Peggy became accustomed to the
gypsying. “I thought it was fun,” she says. Their two children, Kyle and Krystal, felt the same way, though by the time Kyle was 15, they had moved six times. The understanding in the family was that Shanahan’s work was “a passion,” he says. The hop-scotching included a trau-
matically brief stay with the Oakland Raiders in 1988-1989, when Shanahan was fired by owner Al Davis four games into his second season as head coach.He went back to Denver in 1991 as offensive coordinator, only to get caught in the middle of a feud between then-head coach Dan Reeves and quarterback John
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