Levy still has coaching fire at 87
FORMER COACH of Montreal Alouettes and Buffalo Bills keeps sharp on his computer and with a tough workout regimen
Marv Levy turned 87 in August, but the man who led the Alouettes to three Grey Cup games in the 1970s and the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls in the 1990s believes he could still be a head coach.
“I think I could,” said Levy, who won two Grey Cups in five years with Montreal, but lost all four Super Bowls with Buffalo.
Levy retired from coaching following the 1997 NFL season and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001. When I spoke with him on the phone from his Chicago home on Thursday, he told the story about an NFL team owner calling him five or six years after he retired to consult with him about a vacant head-coaching position. Levy told him he was interested in the job for himself.
Levy said the owner responded: “Marv, I’m 12 years younger than you and I know I couldn’t do it.”
“So I shrugged it off,” Levy said. “I guess they think you’re too old ... but could I (still coach)? ... Yes!”
Levy did make an NFL comeback in 2006, at age 80, when the Bills hired him as their general manager, a position he kept until the end of the 2007 season.
Levy still works out for an hour every morning — either jogging or on an elliptical machine, lifts weights three times a week and watches his diet. He enjoys the occasional glass of wine or a martini, claiming the olives have omega-3 and are good for you.
“I learned that one from my father,” he said with a laugh.
And Levy is now learning more about the Internet, teaming up with Outbid (www.outbid.com) — a San Francisco Bay Area tech startup — to host an online auction Monday that will benefit the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund, a non-profit group that provides financial and medical assistance to retired and debilitated NFL players in dire need.
“I would say on a scale of one to 10, I’m about a 3.5 right now,” Levy said with a laugh when describing his computer skills. “I can do email and a little research on it, but to say I’m real tech savvy ... no, I’m not. My wife’s pretty good, my son-in-law is fantastic and my four-year-old granddaughter is way ahead of me.”
Levy added that when he came out of retirement to become GM of the Bills, computers were one of the new challenges he faced.
“Absolutely,” he said. “After practice (in the old days), we’d come in and put the film on the projector and away we’d go. When you’ve been used to doing it so long the other way, there’s a period of exas- peration you go through trying to adapt to the new ... but you better do it. If you don’t change with the times, the times are going to change you. This new Outbid enterprise sounds very intriguing and I’m going on for the first time on Monday.”
Levy has had a sideline view of violent NFL collisions and says concussions will always be a part of the sport. But he applauds the NFL for new rules that have been put in to try and minimize them.
“I think it is by far better-monitored right now,” he said. “I’m sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, ‘Shake it off ’ or something like that ... or ‘Come on, you got to be tough ... get back in there.’
“I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.”
Levy also wishes the NFL union would be more concerned with the players “who helped make the game what it is today and lobby more on their behalf.”
“I had a guy back in 1960 (halfback Don Perkins) who was the first pick in the entire (NFL) draft when I coached at New Mexico,” Levy recalled. “He got a $10,000 one-year contract with a $5,000 bonus. He was outstanding for about five or six years (with the Dallas Cowboys), but injuries ended his career early. Dan Reeves, a guy who coached in the league for a long time and was a teammate of his, told me: ‘Best player I ever played with.’”
Among the sports memora- bilia Levy will be auctioning online on Monday is an autographed copy of the fictional novel he wrote, Between the Lies. The book follows two NFL expansion teams, the Los Angeles Leopards and Portland Pioneers, as they advance to the Super Bowl while putting the game’s integrity on the line. One of the coaches pays his players to injure opponents.
The book was published in September 2011, shortly before news broke about the New Orleans Saints’ bounty scandal.
“My jaw dropped,” Levy said. “My book was released about two or three months before that (scandal) came out. I definitely did not base it on that. For a long time I was an assistant in the NFL to George Allen, and George was paranoid that other teams were cheating on him ... that they were offering bounties, that they were wiring our locker room, that they were putting food poisoning into the pregame meal of the other team’s stars, stuff like that. Many coaches I know always sort of suspected maybe the other guy is offering a bounty, but I never knew anyone who did. I had one coach that was trying to teach our players to injure an opponent to get him out of a game. ... I don’t know if he was offering a bounty. I fired him.”
Between the Lies was Levy’s second book, following his autobiography in 2004, Where Else Would You Rather Be? And now the man with a master’s degree in English history from Harvard is working on a new project.
“I’m about 75 pages into a book on poetry,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody wants to read it. It’s on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, ‘Okay, that’s another one.’ They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.”
Levy spent only five seasons in Montreal as part of his 47-year coaching career, but still has “the fondest memories” of the city.
I asked him about his favourite memory from his Hall of Fame career.
“I put in tremendous long hours doing it,” he said, “but I never worked a day in my life. It was fun. That’s my memory of it.”
To l earn more about Marv Levy’s online auction on Monday and to see the items up for bid, go to http://www.outbid.com /auctions/4648. With the Bills playing in Toronto on Sunday, find out what Levy has to say about people who put down the CFL in favour of the NFL, and get his Super Bowl pick for this season on Stu Cowan’s blog at montrealgazette. com/stuonsports