Charlie
Weis, a 1978 Notre Dame graduate, has a fantasy football league
all his own. In it, he hobnobs with the likes of Bill Belichick
and John Madden, calls plays for the New England Patriots and
sports two Super Bowl rings. Weis is the classic sports junkie,
a diehard fan fighting the battle of the bulge while blurring
the lines, sometimes loudly, between athletic fact and fantasy.
As an undergraduate dreaming of becoming another Marv Albert,
Weis sat in the stands at Fighting Irish football games offering
unsolicited play-by-play and commentary, sometimes to the chagrin
of those around him. "I knew I wanted to be involved in sports,"
says Weis, "but I didn't want to be just a jock sniffer hanging
around those people."
So, after graduation, Weis reinvented himself and became a high
school English teacher and assistant football coach. He then worked
his way up the coaching ladder, stopping off at the University
of South Carolina for four years in the '80s en route to the National
Football League.
For real, Weis is in his 14th NFL season, his fourth as the
Patriots' offensive coordinator. He owns two Super Bowl rings:
one from 1991 with the New York Giants, the second from 2002 with
the Patriots. All this despite a resume with no mention of college
or pro playing experience, real or fudged.
"Gaining credibility with the players you coach is very simple:
You earn it through success," says Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.
"And Charlie has been successful throughout his career."
Weis has pulled off a professional coup equivalent to parlaying
a love for woodwinds, brass and Music Appreciation class into
wielding the baton for the Boston Pops.
"Anyone who knew Charlie at Notre Dame -- and he knew a lot
of people around campus -- had him pegged as a P.R. guy," says
Jim Benenati '78, a Florida radiologist who remains one of Weis'
best friends. "He's a great schmoozer who can talk sports with
anyone. He would be a terrific college coach, able to talk the
pants off of recruits' parents."
A schmoozer? In his only year as a head football coach, he went
to Franklin High School in Somerset, New Jersey, as an outside
hire, sidestepped a mutiny after cracking down on classroom requirements
for his student-athletes and rallied his team to a state championship
-- all in a span of four months. Then came a call out of the blue
from Bill Parcells, offering Weis his first NFL job, as a Giants
assistant.
"My second year in the league," Weis says, "Giants' running
back O.J. Anderson told me, 'You know you're going to be a good
coach, but let me give you some advice: Work hard, make sure the
players know what to do, be honest with them and don't try to
be their friend.'
"Even though I didn't play in college or the pros, I do have
a clue. Football has become a very intellectual sport. That dumb-jock
stereotype went by the boards a long time ago. If you're not intelligent,
there are a lot of systems you can't play in."
Weis' NFL apprenticeship is an ongoing crash course cramming
on the game's complex strategies and nuances by studying film,
memorizing playbooks and breaking Xs-and-Os codes masterminded
by coaches under whom he has worked.
Mistakes have been made. As an NFL rookie assistant, he once
ambled over to Parcells at a private, post-Super Bowl victory
party and told the notoriously unfunny head coach, "I thought
you said this was tough."
Tough? Try brutal. Hundred-hour workweeks. Countless office-cot
sleepovers. Tons of travel. Bizarre eating habits. It's a lifestyle
at odds with personal fitness, as Weis can attest to. Overweight
much of his life, he was packing more than 300 pounds on his 6-foot-1
frame by the time the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Mindful of
his dad's death at 56 from a second heart attack, Weis in June
2002 underwent a gastric bypass, the same surgery that gave Al
Roker something other than the weather to talk about.
Excessive internal bleeding during the operation nearly killed
Weis. Twice he was given last rites. He recovered but with a temporary
loss of feeling in his legs. Although doctors suggested a year's
sabbatical, Weis missed only three days of training camp. During
the Patriots' 9-7 season in 2002, he progressed from motorized
cart at practices to walker to four-pronged cane to regular cane,
which he threw away that December. A year after his surgery, he
had shed more than 100 pounds.
"My family is the reason I fought to stay alive," says Weis.
He and his wife, Maura, have two children, Charlie, 10, and Hannah,
8. "Once I got past the stay-alive phase, it was football that
kept me from getting depressed." The dream lives on.
* * *
Mike (Monte) Towle, a classmate of Weis' at Notre Dame, covered
college football and the NFL for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and The National. He is president of TowleHouse Publishing
in Nashville and author of more than a dozen sports books.
(January 2004)
