There’s an old saying from Mark Twain that, “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
I truly believe that, and in fact, I would say that behind every great man is an even greater woman. You see that a lot, including in sports, and especially in the NFL, where coaches, because of the constraints, are married to their job almost as much as they are married to their wife.
Wednesday is Valentine’s Day, which is the time to talk about things of this nature. Really, it should be a holiday in the NFL, when the league would be well-served to stand and honor the women who have helped in so many capacities and offered support to their husbands, boyfriends, fiancés and significant others.
I saw that up close with the Browns in the cases of head coaches Chris Palmer and Sam Rutigliano.
Palmer and his wife, Donna, are each other’s best friends. Palmer would say that when he was out on the practice field, he would take phone calls from only two people, then Browns President Carmen Policy “and my wife, and not necessarily in that order.”
Palmer added, in a magazine feature I did on him when he got the job in 1999, “I may be the head coach here, but she’s the head coach at home.”
When Palmer was fired in 2000 after only two seasons on the job with the expansion franchise, his wife was incredibly upset and wasn’t at all shy about letting anyone and everyone know it, especially media people who called the house seeking a comment from her husband.
Rutigliano and his wife, Barbara, both of whom will turn 93 this year, have been married for 72 years.
“People ask us if at any point in all that time we considered divorce,” Rutigliano quips. “Murder? Yes! But never divorce!”
It likely would have been Barbara with the smoking gun. She ran the household just fine without him. Sam bought the house in Waite Hill, in the far eastern Cleveland suburbs, which they have lived in since he got the Browns job in late December 1977. Then he began putting the club together. Meanwhile, Barbara arrived in town and, with their children in tow and, upon seeing the house for the first time, started putting the place together. He got two straight AFC Coach of the Year awards a few years later for his rebuilding efforf. She did an even better job but had to settle for getting praise from the neighbors.
Long hours come with football coaching jobs. The work days were unbelievable in the early 1970s when Rutigliano worked for the New England Patriots under workaholic head coach Chuck Fairbanks.
“One day,” Rutigliano said, “I finally went to him and said, ‘Coach, my wife is going on a dinner date tonight. I’d like to be there.’ “
He got the OK.
It has gotten only worse in coaching, hours-wise, since those long-ago days. Less is never more in that profession. Rather, more is more.
As such, then, it will never, ever happen, but it would be nice if, on Valentine’s Day every year, the team owners would be given an edict from the NFL office stating, “When it comes to the coaches, let’s institute, for this day only, a ‘Lighten up, Francis’ approach.
Steve King
