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Kansas City king

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 2001 by Joe Posnanski

New Chiefs coach DICK VERMEIL is being hailed by fans as a genius and magician rolled into one, but he faces the daunting challenge of delivering an immediate turnaround

This is something new. You wouldn't think there would be anything new left for Dick Vermeil, who has been around football for more than 40 years, who coached high school and junior college and college and pros, who won a Rose Bowl and lost a Super Bowl and won a Super Bowl at different times in his life, who famously quit coaching for 14 years because he felt burned out.

But this is something completely new.

In Kansas City, they're calling him a savior.

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"It alarms me," Vermeil says. "I've never been through anything like this before. People have all been very warm, very supportive, it's been very nice. But I don't want to mislead or disillusion people. I'm not a miracle worker."

Not a miracle worker? Forget that. In Kansas City, they've got Vermeil pegged as some combination of Anne Sullivan, Moses, St. Nicholas and Bill Parcells. Understand, Kansas City is the hungriest football city in America. The Chiefs have led the NFL in attendance five of the past seven seasons. More than 10,000 people linger on the season-ticket waiting list. Yet the Chiefs have not made the playoffs three of the last four years, and they have not reached a Super Bowl in more than 30. A certain desperation surrounds this team and this city. People want a winner.

So the hiring of Dick Vermeil has set off a kind of frenzy. Kansas City folks saw firsthand what Vermeil did four hours to the east on 1-70, in St. Louis, where he built the Rams into Super Bowl champions and a national phenomenon. Envy raged in Kansas City. Michael McCambridge, a St. Louis-based author who grew up in Kansas City, summed up those feelings last year when he wrote: "When you've suffered for a team like I have--for more than 30 years of ups and downs and agonizing near misses--it's a little hard to sit back and politely applaud while a city that is barely on a first-name basis with its football team takes the fast lane straight to the Super Bowl."

Vermeil retired after that Super Bowl win. He expected to ride off happily into the sunset with his family. In this year's Super Bowl program, there was a fascinating article by Vermeil called "I Don't Miss the Headaches." And while people in Tampa's Raymond James Stadium were reading how Vermeil had no intention of ever getting back into coaching, Vermeil himself already had set up shop in Arrowhead Stadium and watched plenty of film of quarterback Elvis Grbac.

Vermeil's return was the work of his old friend, Chiefs president Carl Peterson, who first tried to hire Vermeil to coach the Chiefs back in 1989, just before settling on Marty Schottenheimer. This time, Peterson refused to be denied, first talking Vermeil out of his second retirement ("You are, at your essence, a coach," Peterson told Vermeil on the recruiting visit.), then firing his old coach Gunther Cunningham (whose wife, Rene, says he found out about Vermeil on the Internet), then finally wrestling Vermeil away from the Rams' grasp (by giving up a second-round pick in 2001, a third-round pick in 2002 and $500,000). It was a harsh process that left hurt feelings scattered everywhere, particularly the feelings of Cunningham, who still has not made a public statement.

But Kansas City fans have moved on from all that. They had some great teams that fell short in the 1990s. They have dealt with mediocrity the past two seasons. Forget the draft picks. Forget Cunningham. Forget everything else. They frantically want to see Vermeil work his magic.

"I truly hope people are not buying their Super Bowl tickets and reserving their Super Bowl rooms," Vermeil says.

But they are.

You will get many different views about how Vermeil turned the Rams from perenial losers into world champions. The trendiest view these days is that Vermeil was basically a Mr. Magoo-type character, bumping into walls, stumbling around and walking blindly into good luck. The cynics will tell you he wanted to keep quarterback Tony Banks; instead, of course, he ended up with that grocery-stocker-turned-MVP Kurt Warner. They will say he was reluctant to hire offensive coordinator Mike Martz, who since has assembled one of the highest-scoring offenses in NFL history. Finally, they will throw in that Vermeil thoroughly was opposed to acquiring Marshall Faulk because of rumored poor practice habits by the running back. There's no doubt Vermeil was blessed in St. Louis.

Here's what you find about Vermeil, though. He doesn't care about any of that. "I never wanted the credit, and I never needed the credit," he says plainly.

"Of course," he adds, "those people don't know what the hell they're talking about."

Vermeil says the world champion Rams were built over three years, step by step, practice by practice, and that only a coach could appreciate that. Other coaches and NFL executives tend to agree.

Kansas City king

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 2001 by Joe Posnanski

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