‘Lost a great one today’
Coach Mac a winner in football and life
Dick MacPherson might have been the nicest man who ever coached pro football. Certainly he was the only one who ever gave my daughter a quarter.
It was 1992 and things had turned sour for the Patriots, as was often the case in those days. Coach Mac had arrived with some fanfare a year earlier after a decade spent turning Syracuse into a college football power and immediately improved the 1-15 Patriots to 6-10, which was a respectable first step.
But there was a shadow of disorganization over the organization that seemed to always keep it in the dark. Ownership had been in a shambles for years between the last days of Billy Sullivan and the short ones of Victor “I bought the Company” Kiam and James Busch Orthwein (who was from the side of the Busch family that didn’t get into the beer business).
Management was the king of mismanagement, with a former college athletic director named Sam Jankovich at the top and a former player agent named Patrick Forte as general manager. All you needed to know about Forte was he wanted to fire Bill Parcells.
By the middle of MacPherson’s second season, the locker room was a viper’s den, and Coach Mac was getting sick trying to make this collection of misfits better. They’d lost a half-dozen in a row when he spied a 3-year-old girl sitting next to me at a press conference because her sitter was ill and came right down and shook her hand.
Then he gave her a quarter. Just like your grandfather might have.
That’s the way most people who played for Dick MacPherson during tenures so successful at UMass and Syracuse that he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2009 remember him. His two-year stint as Patriots head coach was just a 8-24 blip on a career of both football and interpersonal success.
“Lost a great one today,” tweeted former Dallas Cowboys and Syracuse fullback Daryl Johnston after the news got out that Coach Mac had died yesterday at 86, still in his beloved Syracuse. “I owe this man so much. He believed in me before I did.”
Coach Mac believed in everybody, which was his great strength. Unfortunately he also seemed to believe everybody, which with some NFL players is not a wise choice. The troubles he encountered in New England were so trying they left him hospitalized with acute diverticulitis halfway through the 1992 season, resulting in surgery that sidelined him until the final game of the year. They lost that day, 16-13, in overtime. That figured.
He was fired two years and one day after having been hired because he refused to scapegoat his staff and fire his assistants, as Jankovich demanded. He wouldn’t blame them for a 2-14 debacle.
“I dreamed of coming here and putting this thing together,” MacPherson said after being let go. “I didn’t stop dreaming until right now. . . . I feel that if you are the head coach of an organization, the ultimate blame should be put on you, so if anybody goes, in my opinion, the head coach should go.”
No firing the offensive coordinator. No blaming the defensive staff. The man who gave a child a quarter and a smile was a stand-up guy unwilling to throw others under the bus to save his hide.
He was, to be fair, probably a mismatch for the NFL even though he’d been a successful assistant in Cleveland and Denver, where he rose to defensive coordinator. He admitted as much later in life, seeing that the college game and the kids who played it were perhaps the place best suited for a guy who gave out more bear hugs than tongue lashings.
When he was first hired in New England, MacPherson got the news while in Maine, where he was born and raised. He was sworn to secrecy by Jankovich and complied as best he could. But when you go to mass every Sunday and the priest asks what’s new, are you going to lie?
Dick MacPherson wasn’t. He told his parish priest a little secret only to hear it broadcast from the pulpit a few minutes later. Keeping secrets wasn’t Dick MacPherson’s strong point. Dealing with people was.
“He was just the greatest guy,” longtime Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim said after learning of MacPherson’s death. “He was one of those rare guys everybody loved.”
They didn’t love him just because he won, but he won plenty, going 45-27-1 at UMass (1971-77) and 66-46-4 at Syracuse (1981-90). He won four Yankee Conference championships in seven years in Amherst and rebuilt a moribund Syracuse program into one that went to five bowl games and was 36-10-3 in his final five seasons before heading to New England.
His greatest team was the 1987 undefeated Syracuse squad that was 11-0-1 and finished ranked fourth in the country after Auburn coach Pat Dye settled for a game-tying field goal in the Sugar Bowl rather than going for the win on the game’s final play from Syracuse’s 13-yard line.
It was a bitter pill to swallow, but MacPherson instructed his players to keep their feelings to themselves after noting they left the field without shaking their opponents’ hands for fear of what they might say.
Coach Mac then went to the postgame press conference lugging the Sugar Bowl trophy he’d been given, speaking without words his true feelings. His team had battled Auburn to a standstill, finally taking the lead on a 38-yard field goal with 2:04 to play. When it was done, kicker Tim Vesling said, “Our coach would have gone for a touchdown.” I bet he would have. Every day wasn’t great for Dick MacPherson, of course. Certainly he had too few good ones in New England. But he lived life on the sunny side of the street, as we all should.
Even in the midst of a season of disappointment and chaos, he saw a little kid sitting nervously at a press conference and put her at ease with a smile and a quarter. And when he was finally inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2009, he didn’t beat his chest about his accomplishments or recall Dye’s decision that might have cost him a 12-0 season.
Instead he let a wide smile crease a face that always understood the power of a smile and thought about where it all began, up in Old Town, Maine, and said, “I’m the only guy in the state of Maine that’s in it!”
Somebody should have come over and given him a quarter. And a smile.