SUPER BOWL XXII : THE COACHES : Reeves, Gibbs: They’re Alike in Many Ways

SAN DIEGO — Dan Reeves, the one-time Georgia cracker who has led the Denver Broncos into another Super Bowl, coaches football more successfully than he ever played it, his old friends agreed this week.

As a quarterback and halfback in his youth, Reeves was a classic overachiever, at South Carolina and with the Dallas Cowboys.

At South Carolina, they still remember the day he set a record that has stood for more than 20 years. With the ball on his team’s one-yard line, Reeves, playing quarterback that day, dropped back and calmly threw to a flanker, who was immediately tackled in the end zone.

“It’s still in the book as the only forward pass ever completed for a safety,” a former teammate said. “We’re all very proud of Danny.”

Joe Gibbs, back in the Super Bowl this week as the leader of the Washington Redskins, can also look back on a playing career that apparently thrilled no National Football League scouts, since Gibbs never played in the NFL.

Like Reeves, he was a hard-hitting overachiever who, as a tight end and linebacker in the 1960s, thrilled only his coach at San Diego State, Don Coryell, later an NFL coach himself.

Coryell, who called him “my favorite headhunter,” put together a film of Gibbs’ biggest hits one year and amused himself by running it over and over. The yells and shouts coming out of the coach’s darkened office were always the tip that Coryell had the Gibbs tape on his projector again.

“Way to go, Gibbs!” Coryell yelled each time as the projector whirred noisily. “Bam! Pow! Look at that hit. Run it again, man. One more time!”

Gibbs, 47, and Reeves, 44, never met as football players, but as football coaches here they are. They’re the last two survivors of the long pro season, which has already dispatched 26 coaches. And by Sunday night there will be a 27th casualty.

Whoever it is, his loss will take some of the happiness out of the other’s victory. For these are good friends. During the season, they’re on the phone together almost every day, Gibbs said. And in the off-season, they and their families often socialize, Reeves said, at NFL meetings and on holidays.

The obligation that takes each away from his family for half the year is the worst thing about football, both have often told friends. Even so, both place football first. During the season, for example, Gibbs always leaves for work early Monday morning and never gets home before Thursday, sleeping in his office three nights a week, sometimes four.

One day last year, lonesome, Gibbs asked his wife, Pat, to make an audiotape of her life with their two sons, Jason Dean, 18, and Coy Randle, 14.

At first, Joe said, it was a beautiful tape, with homey passages about schoolwork, making beds, and so on. Near the end, however, Pat and Coy Randle got into an argument.

“The audio ends with them screaming at each other,” Joe said, sheepishly. “We never tried that again.”

But still lonesome, he asked Pat to whisper sweet nothings into another tape and send it over.

“That was also beautiful--for a while,” Joe said. “There she is, all by herself, but suddenly something she says upsets her--and she picks a fight. The tape ends with her screaming at me. “

After long tours as assistants, Gibbs and Reeves became NFL head coaches the same year, 1981, when Reeves immediately slipped into a different life style. Instead of sleeping in his office, he worked at home, where, sometimes, he could see his wife, Pam, and their three children, daughter Dana, 22, son Lee, 20, and daughter Laura, 16.

Each morning, Reeves hung around the house until his children left for school, spent all day with the Broncos, then came home for dinner and work in the evenings with a movie projector in his den.

Said Pam, approvingly, “He often isn’t with us mentally, but he’s always available. If someone has a math problem, he’ll come out and help.”

It follows that, so far, the Washington workaholic has been slightly more successful than the Denver math tutor. Although this is Reeves’ second Super Bowl--his second straight, a rare accomplishment--it is Gibbs’ third. And his team has already won one.

“Three Super Bowls in seven years,” Reeves mused the other day when he met the press on his first afternoon here. “Having been (an NFL coach) in the same period, I realize what an achievement that is for Joe.”

At different San Diego hotels, Reeves and Gibbs, pawed at by large groups of reporters in jeans and T-shirts, came into Super Bowl week dressed much alike in coats and ties. In their thin-rimmed spectacles, moreover, the two Super Bowl coaches looked much alike, resembling a couple of rising vice presidents at downtown banks.

Put Joe Gibbs behind a microphone in a soft, white robe, he’s a popular TV preacher. Hand Reeves a six-shooter and put him in a plaid shirt, he’s a Western hero.

Put them in business suits, they’re where they are now: members of the new generation of handsome, young-businessman coaches.

Reeves is a tad heavier than Gibbs, testifying to one of his hobbies.

“Dan could read a recipe like a woman,” his sister, Joanne, said. “His idea of a good time on a rainy day was to have a couple of kids over and bake a batch of nutfinger cookies.”

That was in Georgia, where Reeves was born. Until he was 18, he lived on his father’s farm outside the village of New Era, near Americus, which is just over the horizon from two identifiable U.S. place names--Andersonville, site of a Civil War prison, and Plains, home of former President Jimmy Carter.

An all-county pitcher in his high school days, Reeves was very fast but also very wild. A headline from that era reads: “Reeves Pitches No-Hitter as Americus Wins, 15-13.”

Gibbs is also Southern born, a native of North Carolina. He is from Mocksville, N.C., which is a metropolis by contrast with New Era, Ga. His father was a lawman, a deputy sheriff who chased bootleggers. His mother introduced him to the Southern Baptist religion which, Pat Gibbs said, is absolutely the only thing in Joe’s life today except football and family.

“The only book Joe reads is the Bible,” his wife said.

Some of the personal qualities that Gibbs shares with Reeves are a driving ambition, scary self-confidence, and out-of-this-world intensity. They’re as intense as Coryell looks.

Pam Reeves talks about the day that her younger daughter, Laura, walked off the backyard basketball court and came in the house crying during a family game.

“Laura said that Dan wouldn’t pass her the ball anymore because they were losing,” Pam remembers.

That made it one against two, but single-handedly, intent on nothing but success, Dan struggled gamely against his teen-age son and other daughter, and won.

“He came in smiling,” Pam said. “The kids knocked his bridge out, and loosened a tooth, but he was smiling, so I knew he’d won.”

Gibbs can understand all that. Still, intensity isn’t all there is to life. Even a man who sleeps in his office needs the finer things occasionally, or so a friend reasoned last year when he gave Gibbs a large green plant. Gibbs stuck it in a corner, admired it every day for a day or so, then forgot about it.

John Madden, who visited him a couple of months later on his way to a Redskin game, says the conversation went like this:

Madden: Why don’t you ever water that plant?

Gibbs: I don’t have to. It’s plastic.

Madden: That’s the first brown plastic plant I ever saw.

Gibbs: Brown! You’re right. Well, I thought it was plastic.

There are those who believe that Gibbs’ intensity and work habits are a psychological reaction to a decision he made long ago to spend his life playing. “I remember thinking: ‘I don’t want to grow up,’ ” he said.

Coaching, of course, is like playing--but it does pose a problem: Although Gibbs still feels like a teen-ager, nothing but hard work keeps a man in coaching.

Pat, aware of all this, notes that Joe was happy as a kid on the day he came home for Christmas, when he announced that he had two or three hours to kill. As usual, he brought Christmas presents for all--none of them wrapped.

“Joe has never wrapped a present in his life,” Pat said. “He can’t stand to wait for you to open them up. He’s still just a boy at heart.”

So is Reeves. After four decades, the Denver coach is still trying to make up for his first six years, which he spent in bed with a rare fever. They finally got it with a new antibiotic requiring a needle every four hours for several weeks.

Said Reeves: “I set another county record, for most needles in the rear end.”

As a 44-year-old juvenile, Reeves is best known today for the tricks that make him the life of the party every time he’s invited out. He can bounce a golf ball on a table and catch it on the back of his hand. He can put a dime on the table and blow it up into a glass of water. In a saloon, he can move an egg from one shot glass to another without touching it and without cracking the eggshell.

“You have to blow it across,” said Reeves. “And I’ll bet you five bucks you can’t do it.”

Over the years, learning such stunts, he has lost a fortune to city slickers--but it has all come back, and a lot more, from unsuspecting friends. He will invest hours, days, weeks learning a trick.

When old Dallas Cowboys get together, they like to reminisce about the night that Reeves lost $90 in his rookie year at training camp--all the money he had--playing a game that was new to him, darts.

Afterward, he found another dart board somewhere and practiced until dawn.

“The next night we played again and Danny was the big winner,” former Cowboy Dennis Thurman said. “If you take him once, he’ll practice until he takes you. You can’t beat Dan Reeves at anything.”

You can’t beat Gibbs, either, which should make Sunday’s game of some interest. The underdog, Gibbs, is the NFL’s biggest winner of the 1980s.

There’s only one thing he can’t handle--defeat.

“The worst I ever saw Joe Gibbs was on the plane ride home from (a Super Bowl loss at) Tampa,” said Washington Times columnist Morrie Siegel. “He sat hunched over in his seat all the way, talking to nobody, just reading the Bible.”

On the night last year that Reeves lost the Super Bowl, he couldn’t even read--couldn’t see the words through the tears.

A year later, Reeves appears to have made a complete recovery. In any case, from a San Diego hotel podium on his first day in town, he came up with the line of the week.

Asked if he intended to have a curfew here for his team, Reeves said: “As you know, we have a one-man team, so we’re having a one-man curfew. No. 7 (John Elway) will have to be in at midnight every night. The rest can go out and have fun.”

It’s harder for Gibbs to be funny, but he has his moments. In the early ‘80s when he was first voted coach of the year, he was reminded that he was the third Redskin to win that honor in a decade--following George Allen and Jack Pardee--both of whom were fired.

Standing at the microphone, Gibbs cleared his throat and asked: “Is acceptance mandatory?”

Actually, his family has always thought of him as a man with a nicely developed sense of humor. Said his wife, “When you’re at a movie and some guy is laughing like crazy, that’s Joe Gibbs.”

Reporters covering Gibbs and Reeves in this winning season for both have had things somewhat easier than in years past.

“(Gibbs) is more open, looser, having more fun this year,” said Christine Brennan, who covers the Redskins for the Washington Post. “He’s more mellow, if I can use that word. He knows he’s darn good at what he does.”

Brennan, who has been on the Redskin beat for three years, was asked about reports that despite his success, Gibbs suffers from feelings of insecurity in dealings with the Redskins’ billionaire owner, Jack Kent Cooke.

“I don’t see that,” she said. “As far as I can tell, Cooke and Gibbs have a normal employer-employee relationship.”

Joe Sanchez, who covers the Broncos for the Denver Post, has found that those who understand Reeves get along with him.

“(Reeves) blows up at me about once a year,” Sanchez said. “He’s so competitive, he challenges you. If you’re not familiar with him, you see this as a negative trait. You have to accept it as part of the man.”

Reports that Reeves feuded with former cornerback Louis Wright, forcing him to retire a year prematurely, have been overdrawn, in Sanchez’ view.

“Louis is such a nice guy, he’s easily manipulated in an interview,” Sanchez said of stories that Wright has been critical of Reeves. “He’ll say just about anything the interviewer wants him to say.”

One Reeves behavioral area that has escaped criticism is his capacity for work--a habit he picked up on the farm, perfected as a Dallas halfback and carried to Denver.

Those observing him years ago at the Cowboy training camp at Thousand Oaks discovered that Reeves sometimes sat up all night studying Tom Landry’s playbook. He memorized every assignment of every player on every play.

One of his friends, Cornell Green, the former Dallas cornerback, said: “Danny wasn’t much of a running back--no size, no speed--but he always knew exactly where every (Dallas) player was going to be. That’s what gave him his edge.”

Nevertheless, Reeves never saw the day when he could outwork Gibbs.

On their honeymoon, Joe escorted his bride to one of the great vacation spots of the world, the site of Super Bowl XXII, where he had taken a job as an assistant coach at San Diego State.

Recalling those idyllic days, Pat said: “When Joe got up that first morning and went to work, I was trapped in the apartment without a car, without a phone, and without anything to eat. And Joe had no idea when he’d be home.”

He came home just before midnight.

“Somehow,” said Pat, “I got the feeling that this was going to be a different kind of marriage.”