Renaissance Man

In the afterglow of a career we sometimes miss the fine points. History remembers the obvious, time fades the tintype of nuance, until only the record books remain.

I'm remembering Marv Levy's four trips to the Super Bowl. Commonly, high-profile people wander onto the stage, have their moment in time, then regress into oblivion, leaving no appreciable footprint on history. Marv Levy was not one of them. Levy entered the NFL coaching fraternity with a brief and marginally successful run with the Kansas City Chiefs. Years later, he surfaced with the Buffalo Bills, a "small market" by NFL criteria, inheriting a cabal of good players (not great ones), only to proceed to cut a swath through the NFL record books, into the Hall Of Fame.

Levy devoted his career to coaching, but lost in Levy's Sunday exploits are his Harvard graduate degree in History and an uncanny genius for group psychology. "There's no coach I'd rather play for," said over-achieving quarterback Jim Kelly. In chorus, most Bills players rejoined with a resounding "roger that."

It's legend that before his first college game as a head coach, Levy gathered his University Of New Mexico players in a wild, frenetic huddle, asking his players in animated urgency, "Is there any place you'd rather be than right here, right now?" Across the years games and seasons passed with calendar pages, but Levy asked the same question before every game.

Levy-isms abound like exhibits at Canton among alumni and coaching circles. Once he was asked about "being a great coach in the locker room." Levy sardonically replied that, "Equipment managers are great in the locker room. A coach needs to be great on the field."

By his own admission, he often made absurd but unmistakable comparisons between serious historical events and football. One season when the Bills opened with several difficult road games against playoff teams, Levy made reference to Adolph Hitler's early WWII triumphs: "Hitler was knocking off everybody -- you remember their success? Then they went into Russia and got clobbered. You guys know why they lost? They lost because they couldn't win on the road!"

On leadership, Levy was introspective and succinct. Once asked about his secret, he offered, "I never thought leadership was a question of grabbing someone's face mask or ordering them to follow my plan. Instead I thought it was a process of saying, 'Follow me,' and showing them how to be better." And that the Bills became, season upon season.

When you wonder about your career on a tough day, and breaks don't seem to be flowing, think of Marv Levy in his pre-game huddle, staring into the eyes of 60 NFL players, voice rising above the cacophony of the crowd, exhorting them with his weekly challenge: "Is there any place you'd rather be than right here, right now?"