THERE were times, Mark McCabe remembers, when he wanted to pop by his coach’s office every now and again and show him his scrapbook. Back at Royalton-Hartland High in upstate Middleport, he had been a pretty damn good player, good enough that the young coach had personally recruited him.
“I was all-conference, all-league, it wasn’t like I’d just shown up and asked to be taught the game of football,” says McCabe, now a private investigator in Rochester, then a young linebacker at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“I had a pretty good ego, I guess. I think we all did when we were young. And the coach, he’d just keep driving us. I wanted to tell him, ‘I know what I’m doing!’ “
But there was a favorite saying that young coach used to drop on him, his teammates and whatever sportswriters might wander over to an RIT game in those first few years of the 1970s. And those words always rang in Mark McCabe’s ears whenever he wanted to lodge a formal complaint.
“Don’t tell me,” Tom Coughlin would say, over and over. “Show me.”
McCabe laughs when he tells the story. He hasn’t followed sports much since he stopped playing them, since he graduated from RIT in 1975, a year after Coughlin left with a 16-15-1 record, bound for an assistant’s job at Syracuse and a long, winding path beyond that will culminate next Sunday on the sidelines at Super Bowl XLII.
But he has followed his old coach, charted his path, kept tabs on Coughlin’s career, the way so many of his old teammates have. Some of them have written Coughlin through the years, and invariably Coughlin has responded, his affection for those old teams and those old players plain and evident in the letters.
It’s why a bunch of them will gather next Sunday to watch the Giants-Patriots game together, either on campus at RIT or in a favored watering hole with requisite big-screen facilities. McCabe will be there, and Mike Devanzo, an old running back, and Dave Nick, and Rick Knack, their captain. Old Coughlin players cheering on new Coughlin players.
“All of us knowing,” McCabe said, laughing, “what they’ve all been experiencing, no doubt.”
No doubt. It doesn’t take much imagination to see Tom Coughlin working at an outfit like RIT, whose football history as a varsity team lasts only from 1971, when Coughlin took over, through 1978, when it was shut down forever after an 0-8-1 season.
There’s a popular shirt on campus now that reads “RIT: Unbeaten Since ’78!” but that only stirs melancholy in former players like McCabe.
“We had a president who didn’t care for football and he never wanted it in the first place, and he ultimately got it shut down,” McCabe said. “Coughlin used to always tell us about that, would say, ‘You guys have to be perfect or they’ll shut us down,’ and we figured that was just him trying to play head games with us. Turns out he was right.”
Coughlin has to be careful with his hands-on bent in 2008, because the pros he works with – even the ones whose careers he rescued, like Tiki Barber – often recoil at what they perceive as a dictatorial style. But in 1972, it was those hands that kept RIT’s program together. Many were the times that opposing teams would hop off the bus and see a powerful man swinging a sledgehammer, pounding fence posts into the ground, then lining the field, then picking up the trash.
Then, a few hours later, standing on the RIT sideline, coaching the game.
“Usually winning the game, too,” McCabe says.
The young Coughlin wasn’t averse to occasionally going over the top, not surprisingly. There were times he would gather his team in its hushed locker room and then blare a recording of George C. Scott as George S. Patton: “Americans will not tolerate a loser! Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge!”
They would look at each other and try not to laugh. Yet all these years later, Coughlin’s old RIT Tigers tend to remember the blarney more than the bluster, the lessons learned rather than the volume with which they were applied.
“We’ll be rooting for the Giants to win next Sunday,” McCabe said. “But we’ll mostly be rooting for our coach to win.”