The Associated Press
The words that Jerry Glanville used with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April of 2015 were that at the age of 74, “I got one more good coaching job in me.”
Fast forward to the present day and Glanville, now 76, has that job in front of him. One of his lifelong football connections, Hamilton Tiger-Cats coach June Jones, named Glanville the team’s defensive coordinator on February 23.
“People always ask me, ‘What’s the best job you’ve ever had?’” Glanville said on the phone from his home in Atlanta on Monday. “Really, what I always tell them is it’s the next one. I just think you get better with every job. You get smarter, you learn more, you teach better. I think this will be my best coaching I’ve ever done because I coach every job like that.”
There’s a book, a movie, maybe a Netflix mini-series waiting to be put together about Glanville’s life. A college football player turned coach whose career took him from Western Kentucky in 1967 into the NFL from 1974 until 1993, then to a 12-year pitstop as a NASCAR driver, drag racer and NFL broadcaster before going back into the college game (at Portland State and Hawaii from 2005 to 2009), Glanville has been a competitor for 55 years now.
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Ticats head coach June Jones knew Glanville before he was named defensive coordinator (CFL.ca)
He’s never been able to shake the coaching bug, though. When he was tied to his TV contracts as a broadcaster, working for Fox then CBS and in the racing world, he enjoyed the work but missed being personally attached to the outcomes of games.
“Even though I stayed in TV, I never liked it like coaching,” he said.
“So what I did was I’d coach the coaching staff of three teams every year. While I was not coaching, I’d go to a college and coach the whole staff and they’d end up coaching me. I would implement schemes and then I’d go home and watch how they did. One year, my three teams all won nine in a row.”
Throughout our conversation, he laughs at the good memories of his career. It’s not just a quick single chuckle. It’s the hearty, belly-driven laughter of someone revisiting each moment, re-connecting with the joy those times brought.
Through all the years he was in TV and while he was racing, he says he was doing that extra-curricular coaching work. Along the way some high-profile programs would approach him and he’d turn them down. “You’ll win 10 games whether I come help you or not,” he said, “I’m not looking to help you.”
In 2007 he worked with the staff of the Indiana Hoosiers, who reached their first bowl game in 14 years. Last year he went to a Division III program that only had walk ons.
“I don’t care, none of that means anything to me,” he said. “We teach kids to be two steps better. I had as much fun doing that when I was coaching with the Buffalo Bills or anybody else.”
Racing, he said, came close to duplicating the game day feeling that football gave him.
“When we open up and we’re doing kickoff, I tell my teams this: If the hair on your arm isn’t standing up, then you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “(When you’re racing and) you come out of turn four and you’re in second gear and you’re waiting for your spotter in your ears to holler ‘Green, green green green!’ The hair on your arms is standing up and it’s like being at kickoff.
“Racing allowed my competitive juices to keep flowing when I wasn’t coaching.”
Those years spent in cars — he was taught how to race by Dale Earnhardt Sr. — didn’t come without risks. Glanville said he was hurt badly three different times. He was airlifted out of a car and off of a track twice. He underwent a skin graft after he was burned in one accident. There were broken bones and concussions. There are back spasms that doctors have told him will be with him for life.
Glenville may look to Orlondo Steinauer for advice as the newly appointed assistant head coach held the DC role previously (Ticats.ca)
Still, he said the racer lives on inside of him, which has made civilian driving life a challenge. “You have police chasing you all the time,” he said with another big laugh.
He’ll try to make his way to Hamilton without police sirens in his rearview mirror. On Monday, he was lining up an apartment, leaning on the expertise of Jones and his new fellow coaches to get him into a neighbourhood he’d like. Canada’s not an entirely new thing to him. He was a guest coach in the Ticats’ training camp last year and as a lifelong motorcycle lover, he’s biked up to Quebec and through the Canadian Rockies in the past, when he was the head coach at Portland State.
While it’s his game plan that the defence will follow, Glanville admits he’s starting out slightly out of his element in the CFL, despite watching it for years. It’s why he was lining up his apartment a few days after getting hired.
“We’re going to start a month earlier than normal because (the defensive coaches) haven’t been together and they know the players,” he said. “People always say, ‘Wherever you went, you were No. 1 in defence. It must be a great scheme.’
“The scheme changes by what your players can do. I’ve talked to every assistant. They have to tell me the strengths of the player. I won’t run a defence if what we’re running isn’t to the strength of that player.”
When you’ve been around the game for over 50 years, there’s always a reference point, always a word or situation that triggers a story. Glanville looks at his newest job and thinks back to the NFL strike in 1987. Replacement players came in for the two weeks the work stoppage lasted. Glanville won both those games. Why?
“I’m the best high school football coach in pro football,” he said. “In high school you don’t get to go out and recruit them, you’ve got to coach them. I was a high school coach, I was a college coach…I always coached the same way. How I coached seventh-graders is how I coached the Atlanta Falcons or the Houston Oilers or the Detroit Lions.
“I will not force feed our program into what players cannot excel at.”
His winding lifelong journey has taught Glanville who he is, what he’s good at and how to do it.
“I tell everybody: preachers preach, coaches coach and racers race,” he said. “You take that to the box. You’re going to the grave with that inside of you.”
