Dabos world, p.8
Dabo's World, page 8
Days later, Dabo stood in the driveway of his new Birmingham mansion with his homebuilder when his cell phone rang. On the other end of the line was Bowden, the son of Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, who would compile more wins (377) than any coach other than Penn State’s Joe Paterno. The elder Bowden possessed many of the same characteristics of a young Swinney—they both were folksy storytellers who loved to talk about any subject at any time of the day. Even though Tommy was more reserved and plainspoken than his famous father, he sure could see a little bit of his dad in Dabo.
Once he got Dabo on the phone, Tommy Bowden offered him the job. Dabo said yes. Bowden later revealed that he likely never would have hired Dabo if he hadn’t taken the time to hear him speak at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa.
As Dabo and family packed up their belongings and their life in Alabama to move to Clemson, Dabo made sure to bring along the architectural blueprints of the dream house he was just finishing building in Birmingham. He planned to construct an identical mansion in his new home in Clemson. Know this about Dabo: When he loves something—when he truly loves something—he will not let go of it.
On March 17, 2003, Bowden announced Dabo’s hiring in an eight-paragraph press release that mostly detailed Dabo’s background, without mentioning that he had been leasing real estate for the previous two years. “[Dabo’s] resume as a recruiter is most impressive,” Bowden said. “He signed 30 players in his career at Alabama.”
At Clemson, Bowden received several emails from coaching friends telling him that he was flat out nuts for hiring a guy who had been out of football for two years. But Bowden was adamant that Dabo would quickly assert himself as not just one of the best recruiters on his staff, but also as one of the top in the nation. The way Bowden viewed it, Dabo’s previous two years in real estate had honed—not hindered—his ability to sway young high school kids.
Dabo’s experiences as a shopping center leasing agent would always stay with him. Today the sign CALL DABO SWINNEY hangs in his garage, not far from a box of business plans and property files. The keepsakes from his past are a constant reminder of a valuable life lesson that Dabo is quick to share with nearly anyone:
Never give up.
Chapter 5
Dabo Comes Back
to Carolina
On an otherwise ordinary workday in March 2003, Bill D’Andrea, a senior associate athletic director at Clemson, took a phone call that would change the course of Clemson Tiger football history. If there was a genesis moment in the birth of a twenty-first-century football dynasty—a program that in just over a decade would rival Alabama for supremacy of the sport—this was it.
On the other end of the line was Danny Pearman, who had played tight end at Clemson from 1985 to 1987. D’Andrea had been an assistant coach for the Tigers during Pearman’s playing days, and the two had remained friends. On this day, Pearman, now an offensive tackles coach at Virginia Tech, wanted to tell his old coach about a young man named Dabo Swinney who was living in Alabama.
Pearman knew Dabo well. The two had spent seven years together in Tuscaloosa when Dabo was both a player and a coach. Pearman—who had been an assistant coach at Alabama from 1991 to 1997—gushed over the phone to D’Andrea about Dabo, going on and on about how different Dabo was, how he was able to forge deep, meaningful relationships with his players, and how his receivers played their hearts out for him. Pearman told D’Andrea that Dabo had been out of football for about two years, and now he was interviewing for the wide receivers coaching job at Clemson. This was the first time that D’Andrea had ever heard of this thirty-three-year-old former coach at Alabama, and he listened intently as Pearman rhapsodized about Dabo, about his tough background, his agile mind, and his aw-shucks demeanor. Pearman swore to D’Andrea that Dabo would be a perfect fit at Clemson. Without ever saying a word to him, Dabo now had an advocate in D’Andrea, which in a few years would factor in a decision that would radically alter Clemson’s football fortunes.
In the spring of 2003, ever since his telephone conversation with Danny Pearman, Bill D’Andrea grew intrigued with Dabo. He wanted to see for himself just what kind of coach he was and how he interacted with the staff and his players. So not long after Dabo was hired, D’Andrea asked Terry Don Phillips, Clemson’s first-year athletic director, to come with him to watch spring practice. There, on the sideline, D’Andrea often leaned in close to his boss and advised, “Make sure you look over there and watch the receivers and watch Dabo.”
The two power brokers at Clemson would then lock eyes on Dabo. He challenged players. He got into their faces and yelled instructions. No detail was too extraneous or too small. He explained and explained again the right way to do everything. But rather than merely telling players what to do, he showed them how to run various routes and perform certain drills. Talking, yelling was secondary to demonstrating, teaching, and displaying what he wanted by running the routes and doing the drills himself and then having the players mimic what he had just shown them. All football players—in college and the NFL—more than anything want to get better. After a few practices, improvements by wide receivers on the roster were clearly evident.
Once practice ended, Dabo would often put his arm around his players and tell them how much he cared for them. Phillips and D’Andrea kept their eyes on Dabo. They didn’t expressly say it, but Dabo embodied the philosophy of Bear Bryant, who believed in “coaching them hard and hugging them harder.” The influence of the Bear, who Dabo had worshipped as a kid and never missed watching his Sunday afternoon television show, was unmistakable.
Dabo had a difficult task from day one. He was replacing Rick Stockstill, an assistant coach for over a decade and a legend at Clemson. Stockstill was known as an elite recruiter—especially in Florida—and a superb developer of talent. The only reason he left the staff was to take a promotion as the offensive coordinator at East Carolina.
In recent years, the Tigers had put plenty of players in the NFL—in 1999, Clemson had six players drafted and in 2001 wide receiver Rod Gardner was picked No. 15 overall by Washington—but the team hadn’t finished higher than ninth in the final AP Poll since 1988. Clemson also hadn’t won an ACC title since 1991, when head coach Ken Hatfield led the Tigers to a 9-2-1 record. Despite boasting rosters that featured NFL talent season after season, the program had underachieved for years. It was part of Dabo’s duty to make sure this trend changed.
Before Dabo’s first practice, the players were skeptical of him. They knew that he had hawked real estate the last few years, and many thought there wasn’t much of anything this guy could teach them. Dabo was well aware that the first thing he needed to do was prove to the players he was competent and more than ready to do the job. If he didn’t earn their respect, he knew he wouldn’t last long at Clemson. Some of the wide receivers believed Dabo would be “road kill,” as one player put it, as soon as they got out onto the field.
Once Dabo stepped onto the field, the magic began quickly: He helped ordinary players improve, whether it was in doing a little thing like perfecting a blocking drill or a big thing like improving catch radius. Only a few practices into the second act of Dabo’s coaching career, his players started to gravitate toward the man, carefully listening to his advice, taking to his coaching. After a few weeks, players could be seen hanging out in his office, talking not only about football, but also about life, girlfriends, or whatever was on their minds.
Phillips and D’Andrea—athletic director and associate athletic director—watched it all.
And it was extraordinary.
For Dabo, there was a downside to coaching and it was at times devastating: He had far less time to spend with his family. Back when he was at AIG in Alabama and carrying a briefcase filled with business plans to work each morning, Dabo had most of his nights and weekends free. He could spend hours with Kathleen and the boys. But now that he was back in the grind of coaching, his time was no longer his own—his time now belonged to Clemson first and his family second.
Dabo tried to be as engaged as possible with his three sons. His two older boys sometimes attended practices, watching their dad from the sidelines, filled with pride that their father was a college football coach. Kathleen was something of a maternal figure to the wide receivers who were under Dabo’s wing, bringing them home-cooked sweets and asking them about their families. She didn’t know it, but she was now in training for a larger role at Clemson almost as much as her husband was.
Because of the long hours at the office, the practices, the competitive football season, and the extended recruiting trips, Dabo started to miss events and games in which his older boys, now in grade school, were participants. Dabo wanted his kids to have as much of a normal life as possible, given how traumatic and transient his own late childhood had been. But now that he couldn’t be the dad he aspired to be, he nearly walked away from coaching.
The low point came when Dabo was in Florida trying to convince a high school player to come to Clemson. He called Kathleen that evening to get an update on how the day had gone for the kids. She told him that Will had hit a homerun in his baseball game and was very proud of himself; Drew played with friends and didn’t want their fun to stop; and baby Clay, well, he was currently pitching a fit and crying. It was a typical family day in the Swinney household—the kind of day that was a thing of beauty to Dabo.
The fact that Dabo the dad was missing these kinds of family activities broke his heart. He had been away from his wife and three boys for about a month—either in his office, his head buried in paperwork late into the night, or out on the recruiting trail—and now Dabo lost it. The last thing he wanted was to be an absent father. He told his wife, “Kath, I can’t do this anymore.”
As soon as Dabo returned home, he gathered his boys on his bed. He lovingly looked at them and the words then flowed—words from a man who didn’t want to repeat the sins of his own father. “Listen,” Dabo said, “I just want y’all to know, y’all are the most important thing in the world to me. I love y’all, and your dad can do a lot of things. And I’m going to get out of coaching and I’m going to get a job where I can coach your teams and be home on the weekends.”
The boys looked at their father, confused and concerned. One of his sons said, “But, Daddy, if you’re not a coach, we won’t get to know the players and we don’t get to ride the bus.”
Another son said, “Dad, we love you being a coach. And Mom videos anyway.” It was true: Kathleen shot videos of his children’s events that Dabo missed. Then, often with his kids by his side on the couch, Dabo would watch his sons’ sporting events or activities that he hadn’t seen in real time. It was fun for the boys to relive the action again, often offering their own commentary and analysis to their dad. More than anything, though, the father-sons talk showed the boys how much he had missed them and how deeply he cared for them.
This on-the-bed conversation with his boys was a life-changing moment for Dabo. He had been fully prepared to quit coaching, but now he realized that he could be a great coach and a great dad. He started to think of all the things he could do with his kids because he was coach, rather than focusing on the things he couldn’t do with them because of his job. He started bringing them around the office more for dinner, to practice more, on Friday nights to the Hilton Garden Inn in Anderson, South Carolina, the team hotel where the team stayed before home games. And he always made time to watch the videos that Kathleen had taken. In this moment on the bed, he finally realized that he needed to cherish and embrace and appreciate what he had—not focus on what he was missing.
This was one reason why the Clemson football offices, in a few years, would become a playground for kids.
On November 1, 2003, Clemson traveled to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to play Wake Forest. At the time, Clemson was 5-3 while the Demon Deacons were 4-4. The Tigers were heavily favored, and no one knew better than Bowden that the quickest way to get fired as Clemson’s head coach was to lose to Wake Forest. That’s exactly what happened in the final season of earlier Tiger coaches such as Ken Hatfield, Tommy West, and Red Parker. The Demon Deacons were the one team on the Clemson schedule that the Tiger fans demanded be demolished each and every season. If Clemson fell short in this game on this autumn afternoon in 2003, the coaches knew Bowden could be forced to walk to the gallows and be fired, which in turn could likely mean all the assistants would lose their jobs. That cold realization had a startling impact on Dabo, who was only coaching in the ninth game of his first year on the Tiger staff.
Within minutes of the ball flying through the air to open the game at just past 3:30 p.m. EST, the outcome seemed preordained. Nothing worked on offense, defense, or special teams for the Tigers. By the end of the third quarter, it was a full-on bloodbath, with Wake Forest leading 45–0. The Demon Deacons ended up obliterating Clemson 45–17, one of the most embarrassing defeats in the school’s history.
Dabo didn’t ride on a team bus back to Clemson. Instead, wanting to spend time with his family who had come to the game by car, Dabo drove home with Kathleen and their three boys. For four hours, steering the car through the Southern darkness, Dabo didn’t have much to say—a rarity for him. He quietly reflected on the state of his life. Just months earlier, he had left a stable and stout salary in Alabama. He had left behind family and friends. He had left a beautiful house. Yes, he had prayed and prayed for this chance to coach again, but what if the decision he recently made was in fact the wrong one? He feared that the entire Clemson coaching staff was on the verge of being let go. Then what would he do? Go home to Alabama and ask Rich Wingo for his job back? Try to find another gig in coaching and move his family for the second time in less than a year? As the miles clicked off the odometer, these questions haunted Dabo like ghosts in the night.
Dabo and Kathleen’s new house at 104 Sycamore, the one that was a replica of what they had built in Birmingham and was only five minutes from campus, was about to be finished. A few days after losing to Wake Forest, the homebuilder asked Dabo, “I don’t really know how to put this. But if things don’t go well, I’ve got a lot of people that want to buy this house.”
“I don’t know if we’re getting fired,” Dabo said. “But I know I’m moving into this house…for a couple of months anyway.”
Dabo’s fear of being fired was allayed the following Saturday against Florida State. Clemson athletic director Terry Don Phillips had essentially decided that, if the Tigers lost to the third-ranked Seminoles at home, he would fire head coach Tommy Bowden. But Phillips never had to wield the ax and have that difficult conversation with Bowden. Playing its best game of the season in the Bowden Bowl, Clemson beat Florida State 26–10. Tommy Bowden—and Dabo—were safe.
For now.
On Mother’s Day the following year, 2004, Dabo called his stepmother and told her the news: He was moving her and Big Erv—whom Dabo had long ago reconciled with—out of the trailer they had lived in for seventeen years and into the 6,400-square-foot house he had built in Birmingham. Telling his dad that he was now providing for him was one of the happiest moments of Dabo’s life.
And, continuing to promote a theme now many years in the making, Dabo urged Erv to forsake both the bottle and the smokes. Three years later, Big Erv finally honored his son’s wishes and his promise to his second wife, Phyllis: He quit smoking and drinking.
Dabo was oh-so proud. The skills that had made him such a talented recruiter—his charm, his relentlessness, his optimism for the future—had finally taken hold and guided Ervil to the light that Dabo wanted him to see. It wasn’t always easy for Erv, but like his son, once he committed to something, he was going to fight like heck to honor what he had promised. And so Big Erv did, never again picking up a drink or taking a drag for the rest of his life. This was the most important sales job of Dabo’s life.
Recruiting was Dabo’s signature skill. He was a good coach—everyone on the Alabama and Clemson staff attested to that—but he was an elite recruiter. And it was his pursuit of one player that would ultimately change the path of Dabo’s career and the future of Clemson football.
Dabo met running back C.J. Spiller in 2005. Dabo had traveled to Union County High School in Lake Butler, Florida, to speak with Kevin Alexander, a linebacker who had scholarship offers from Auburn, Tennessee, Maryland, and Louisville. But as Dabo watched tape of Alexander, he became more focused on his teammate C.J. Spiller. Dabo viewed hours of film featuring the talented tailback. His play mesmerized and seduced him. Spiller possessed all the ingredients: agility, cutting ability, boundless raw power, and breakaway sprinter speed. He was the kind of player Clemson had never had in the Bowden era, a player whose singular talent could change the fortunes of the Clemson program.
But Dabo—now also the team’s recruiting coordinator—didn’t have an appointment to meet with Spiller, then a junior at Union County High. With nothing to lose, Dabo asked a staff member at Union County if he could talk with Spiller, who at the time was in class. The staff member entered Spiller’s classroom and said, “The coach from Clemson wants to see you and talk to you.” Within minutes, Spiller and Dabo were chatting in the field house.
Dabo asked Spiller if he’d come to Clemson for a recruiting visit. Spiller—impressed by this smiling, brazen, confident young coach—said yes. To make sure that Spiller wouldn’t back out, Dabo grabbed his wallet and plucked out a business card. On the back he wrote a short, to-the-point contract. It read: I, C.J. Spiller, agree to visit CU on the 13th of January. Dabo told Spiller, I want to make sure you’re going to follow through. Spiller signed the card contract.
Virtually every school in America wanted Spiller, who most recruiting services ranked as the top overall prospect in perennially talent-rich Florida. In his senior season, he rushed for 1,840 yards and thirty touchdowns. Urban Meyer at Florida went after him hard, telling Spiller that he could be the first great back of his coaching regime in Gainesville. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, the father of Tommy, tried to lure him to Tallahassee, describing to Spiller how he could help the Seminoles win ACC titles—Florida State was the reigning conference champ—and national titles.
