ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, January 25, 1997 TAG: 9701270102
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS
SOURCE: RON BORGES THE BOSTON GLOBE
THE UVa ALUMNUS HAS enjoyed a 30-year coaching career that has taken him and his family all over, including the Super Bowl.
For a man whose job is defined by numbers, Al Groh got his coaching start in an odd way.
``I failed statistics,'' the Patriots' defensive coordinator said Thursday.
At the time, Groh was a senior at the University of Virginia and thought he was headed to a business graduate school after majoring in commerce and minoring in football and lacrosse as a starter in both. But math intervened and a new career sprung from those thorny roots.
``I'd already been accepted to business school,'' Groh recalled. ``That is what guys did then. You went to college, then you went to graduate school, then you got on the Long Island Railroad [to Manhattan] and waited for the weekends.
``But I failed statistics, so to raise some capital to pay for another semester I got a job running the beer machine at Sigma Nu [fraternity]. It was 25 cents a beer and it taught me a great lesson about the business world. Keep your product close to your customers.
``I needed some more work though, so I went to the Student Aid office and it was run by a gentleman who had been a graduate assistant coach at Virginia while I was playing. He asked me if I'd be interested in helping coach at a local high school. I was. I took over the outside linebackers and the team went 10-0. From that point, I was off and going.''
That was the start of a career that has twice led Groh to the Super Bowl and once made him the second winningest head coach in Wake Forest history during his six years there (1981-86). Along the way were stops at seven colleges and four professional teams and the building of four homes, of which he lived more than a year in only one.
An auspicious meeting
It is a different sort of life than a man who rides the Long Island Railroad every day and longs for the weekends would know, but at the time he first got into it Al Groh had no idea where it was leading or what it would take to get him where he is today. All he knew, deep in his heart, was that it probably all began before he ever got to Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Va. It began around 2 p.m. one Friday afternoon in the back row of an economics class at Virginia.
``The class had two big lecture sessions and then a smaller seminar on Fridays,'' Groh recalled. ``I was hanging around a pipe shop one day before class and I ran across a book. It was `Darrell Royal Talks Football.' I bought it on the way to class and when I got in there I propped my notebook up and put the book inside and read it the whole class. As we all know, inception comes long before conception, so I think that's where it all really started.''
Groh also started his relationship with his present boss, Bill Parcells, a long time ago, back in 1968, when Groh was hired as one of the plebe coaches at Army and was assigned to the youngest coach on Tom Cahill's varsity staff. The young coach's name was Bill Parcells.
When Groh arrived at West Point he had never met Parcells, but the day he did turned out to be an auspicious one, and not merely because it would lead to twice assisting him on Super Bowl teams. It was a more important day than that because the day he met Bill Parcells he met someone else, too.
``I met Bill Parcells in the morning and I met Anne Staley in the evening and I'm still with both of them,'' Groh said. ``That was a great day for me. After I met Bill, we went to get something to eat with the other plebe coaches and when we got there I went to sit down and somebody said, `Don't sit there. We always sit over here.' I said, `Why's that?' and somebody told me `because that's Anne Staley's seat.' They did me a big favor.''
There had to be times, however, when Anne Staley wondered if the favor was reciprocal. As is the case with nearly every man who makes his life coaching college and pro football, the most important thing next to talented players and an understanding of the game is a tolerant wife with a good road atlas. That is not something all wives are inclined to master.
On the road - again
Football has taken the Grohs to Charlottesville for two years and then West Point, N.Y., for two years and then back to Charlottesville for three years and then to Chapel Hill, N.C., for five years and then Colorado Springs (and back with Parcells) for two years and then on to Lubbock, Texas, for one season before the road turned east to Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the longest stretch he'd be anywhere since he left his parents' home in Mineola, N.Y., for college.
Groh spent six years at Wake Forest, where he won a lot of games but ended up where most head coaches end up eventually, looking for work. He found it for one season with the Atlanta Falcons before he went back to college for the last time as South Carolina's offensive coordinator in 1988.
If this list is exhausting you, think what it was doing to the Grohs, and it wasn't nearly over.
After a season at South Carolina, Parcells called again and Groh answered, coming aboard as the New York Giants' linebackers coach in 1989 and eventually ascending to defensive coordinator under Ray Handley in 1991, after Parcells won his second Super Bowl and retired.
``My wife had designed our dream house in South Carolina,'' Groh remembered. ``We'd been in it four months. All the boxes weren't unpacked yet. And my son Michael was an all-state quarterback there. I wanted him to stay and he wanted me to go take the job with the Giants.
``That's the kind of life you lead in this business. Anne and I have built four houses and the first three we only stayed in for a year.''
The last was the one they now have in Hingham, a town Groh has grown to love and a home Anne has made into their new dream house. Normally they could feel safe there because normally the man who coordinates a defense that gives up an average of 10 points over the last seven games of a Super Bowl year knows where he'll be next fall.
Future a mystery
But these are not normal times in Foxboro. These are times of trial and turmoil as Parcells and owner Bob Kraft find new ways to engage in mind-to-mind combat and the grappling seems to have led Parcells to within days of having to have his mail forwarded. Where that leaves the Grohs is anyone's guess, but Groh is a realist. The peripatetic football life has made him so.
He understands that when head coaches move, assistants whose contracts have all run out - as those of all of Parcells' assistants will Feb.1 - usually move with him or move somewhere else. A state of inertia is not normally how things stay for even the most successful defensive coordinators, which Groh is presently among.
But how does he explain to his wife that even if the Patriots win the Super Bowl on Sunday their family will very likely be packing boxes by next Wednesday? To be frank, he doesn't have to explain it.
``Anne and I have never really talked about this part of it because the moves have mostly been upward. I remember one time in an interview she said this isn't a normal way to live for a lot of people but it's normal for us. She was right. We've always been married and there's always been football.''
But why, one wonders, has there always been football?
A man of many hats
Groh thought about that when he was asked to explain the path he has chosen. He thought for several minutes before he spoke and when he was done he thought some more before answering questions on more immediate concerns, like how to stop Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers from ruining his Sunday. But then he came back to the why of it all.
``It's not football per se,'' Groh said. ``It's the problem-solving part of it and the dynamic action in which it happens and the time you have to do it in.
``Monday is your research day and if you can get more done than your opponent that day you're ahead. Tuesday is planning day. It's the day you know if you make a wrong turn you're going to Detroit, not to Tampa. The decisions you make on Tuesday have a lot to do with what happens on Sunday.
``Then there's the chess game part of calling the game itself. The players have to execute it all, of course, but there's a matchup that goes on from sideline to sideline, too. That's part of the intrigue and part of the creative process.
``I think all of us have a creative side. I can't draw a straight line with a ruler and I can't play good music on the radio. I have no talent in the arts. But football is an area where I've been able to be creative. There's a degree of that in what you do as a coach.
``The last thing is it's a business where you have immediate feedback as soon as you're walking out of the stadium. I have a good friend who's an attorney and he says he envies me. I don't know why anybody would envy this lifestyle, but he says sometimes he has to wait six or eight months for a result. There's no scoreboard. I think it's those immediate challenges and the competitive nature of it all that you get into.
``Sometimes you're doing research. Sometimes you're planning. Sometimes you're a classroom teacher. Sometimes you're creating something new. You wear a lot of hats.''
Groh has learned to love all those hats no matter where he's had to go to wear them. Thirty years ago he wore his first one at Albemarle High School. Sunday he'll wear one on the floor of the Superdome in the biggest football game of the year.
If he knew a sine from a cosine he might never have gotten off on this tangent but, frankly, he and Anne Staley are more than happy that he did.
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines KEYWORDS: FOOTBALLby CNB