azdad1978
Championship!!!!
History is just that to Cards new coach
By Darren Urban, Tribune
Among the pictures in Dennis Green’s house is a team photo of the semipro football club his father played for in 1939.
Green is fascinated with the shot.
He often wishes he could catch every one of the players in a past moment in time and find out what happened to their lives.
“You can look at the faces on that team,” Green said earlier this offseason, “and every one of them has a story.” There is irony in such a thought, for Green too has a story to tell — and would rather not. He’d rather not dwell on a childhood shaped by losing both his parents at a young age, nor winning a Super Bowl as an assistant on a legendary San Francisco 49ers coaching staff, nor his resuscitation of a pair of hapless college football programs at Northwestern and Stanford.
He may have made history with his hiring and subsequent success with Minnesota as one of the NFL’s first black head coaches, but after a tenure fraught with as much controversy as prosperity, Green doesn’t want to relive his time with the Vikings.
History is just that to Green, no matter how interesting the stories might be. To rehash his life, “I don’t see any benefit at all,” Green said, pleasant but firm.
Perhaps that’s why Green is a good fit for Arizona. As an organization, the Cardinals would like nothing more than to forget about their past. “We try to teach reality, and that’s (the coming) year,” said Green, who takes the Cardinals to training camp in seven days.
“I never worry about regrets. I like, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ ”
NO TIME TO CRY
Turning a negative into a positive is what Green is about. Even the title to his 1997 book — “No Room for Crybabies” — crystallized the way he sees his life. Northwestern was in the middle of a then-record 34-game losing streak when the Wildcats gave him his first head coaching job, and while he never made them winners, he delivered respectability. The Wildcats lost their first 14 games under Green and never won more than three games in a season, but still shed their reputation as a total laughingstock.
Stanford was nowhere when Green was named coach, having posted sub-.500 records in eight of the nine seasons before his arrival in 1989. He upset No. 1 Notre Dame in 1990 and won eight games in his final season in 1991. He also broke in as an NFL head coach in an era when blacks had difficulty getting such jobs and had immediate success in Minnesota.
The Cardinals will be his greatest challenge, but Green has spent much of his life overcoming obstacles.
The youngest of five brothers, Green was only 11 when his father died at age 39 of a ruptured appendix. Less than two years later, Green’s mother was 41 when she fell to cancer. His mother’s death, Green wrote in his book, “almost destroyed me.”
Instead, it pushed the Harrisburg, Pa., native to accomplish things in his life quickly, almost as if he wasn’t sure if he’d have the time. Green politely declined a request to allow any of his brothers to be interviewed, but Green’s wife, Marie, said all the Green men feel obligated to make the most of the time they have.
“It’s like, ‘What right do we have to outlive our parents?’ ” she said. “It’s almost like a fear.”
From that background Green built his life. He earned a football scholarship to the University of Iowa and was already married and a parent by the time he reached the Iowa campus as a freshman. He worked various jobs to support his family and still managed to graduate on time, in addition to playing football. When the Canadian Football League was the only place that wanted Green the football player, coaching became his chosen career. After assistant jobs at Iowa and Dayton, he found his way in 1977 to Stanford and Bill Walsh.
A PROGRAM BUILDER
Walsh tutored Green not only in college but brought him to the NFL for the first time, as an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers both in 1979 and again in 1986. Walsh said his memory is fuzzy when it comes to particular Green anecdotes, but he does remember “there were times he really helped me during games.”
“He’d remind me of things I had wanted to do,” Walsh said. “I could trust what he said. He wasn’t loose with this thoughts. . . . He had a lot of personal confidence, he was an excellent teacher and he impressed me.”
Green also wanted a head coaching job, which is why he had no problem going to Northwestern in 1981 despite the Wildcats’ doormat status. He was only the second black man to be named a Division I-A head coach, after the 1979 hiring of Willie Jeffries at Wichita State. What Green eventually found at Northwestern, and later at Stanford, was that the NFL was set up better for success. The pro game was about parity, about letting teams that are down get back up.
“There is no real reason why any (NFL) team should be at the bottom all the time,” Green said. “In the college game, you are on your own.” Eventually, that dichotomy would draw Green to the Cardinals.
“It’s more rewarding, with a bad (NFL) team, when you get it done that way,” said Cardinals defensive backs coach Richard Solomon, who has known Green since college.
Besides, there was another lure to helping a team that has basically never won. His first NFL job with the Vikings, he took over in a place where winning wasn’t so foreign. Green’s success there was never treasured.
Back in 1992, Green became the second black head coach of the NFL’s modern era. He made eight playoff appearances in 10 seasons. But that success didn’t stop it from being the most difficult job Green ever had.
“I think one of the reasons he doesn’t really want to get into it,” said Green’s wife, Marie, “is because, to us, Minnesota seems a lifetime ago.”
MINNESOTA MESS
Green knows his tenure in Minnesota generates questions, beyond the fact he won 61 percent of his games in the regular season yet couldn’t reach a Super Bowl.
His relationship with the Minnesota media was never good and soured as the years went on. Green felt many media members were unfair — and in his book, wondered if their problems with him were racial. Many media members felt Green not only underachieved in the postseason but ran roughshod through the Vikings’ organization to the detriment of the team. As promised, Green is short on the topic.
“I met my wife in Minnesota, married my wife in Minnesota, my daughter was born in Minnesota, my son was born in Minnesota, I made a lot of money in Minnesota. I don’t think Minnesota owes me anything besides that,” Green said.
But he wasn’t happy that the NFL decided to send the Cardinals to Minnesota for an Aug. 14 preseason game — his first game coaching the Cards, no less — in what promises to be a circus of attention. Green spent almost 10 seasons with the Vikings, agreeing to a contract buyout with one game left in the 2001 season with his team 5-10. It was the only time Minnesota was under .500 while he was there.
The belief now is that Green and the Vikings simply needed a divorce, as seems to happen with long-term coaches in most professional sports. Marie Green said her husband wasn’t hurt by the decision, since by then both he and Vikings owner Red McCombs were ready to move on.
McCombs did not respond to an interview request from the Tribune.
Walsh, the three-time winning Super Bowl coach, said he thought at the time that Green should have left Minnesota a year or two before.
“When I took the 49ers job, someone told me the welcome is for five years, then you have to fight for your job,” Walsh said. “People get bored.
“Ten years is the max. You look at some of the best coaches in this game, some have lasted much longer than that (in one place) but most of their success comes in those first 10 years.”
But Green had a bumpier decade than his record seemed to merit. Multiple reports — including Green’s own book — point to his own introductory press conference as the beginning of the problems. A columnist for one of the newspapers quizzed then-Vikings president Roger Headrick why Green was hired instead of Pete Carroll.
The battles lasted for a decade.
“I definitely felt some of the treatment was unfair,” former Vikings Pro Bowl receiver Cris Carter said. “What he created, there’s no way other people would have been criticized. “People always say, ‘Well, he didn’t win the Super Bowl, he didn’t make the Super Bowl.’ Well, we only had a Super Bowl-caliber team one year, and that was 1998. People kept changing the criteria for what it took to be successful.”
Said Cardinals offensive coordinator Alex Wood, Green’s quarterbacks coach in Minnesota, “They never appreciated (his efforts), at least from a public perspective. That’s their right, but no, he did more for Minnesota than Minnesota probably did for him.”
Green was upset and angry after a front-page article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, printed Super Bowl Sunday in 1995, portrayed him as a coach who had ruined the atmosphere in the organization. It came just a few weeks after the Vikings had gone 10-6 and made the playoffs. The story also detailed sexual harassment accusations against Solomon.
As early as December of 1995, four years into Green’s tenure, a season-ending analysis in the Star-Tribune called for Green’s removal in favor of then-Vikings assistant Tony Dungy. A 1998 book entitled “Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL” devoted a whole chapter to legal problems of the Vikings, rehashing some of the same sexual harassment accusations against Green and Solomon.
“Here is all you need to know about these issues,” Green wrote in his book. “I’ve never sexually harassed anyone in my life. I did make mistakes in my previous marriage. I learned from them and I’ll never make those mistakes again.”
Green said he wrote his autobiography because, “I had something to say. My family can read about what I have to say about me in contrast to what others say.”
The book ended with a stunning chapter about how he might sue the Vikings’ then-splintered ownership group to gain control of the franchise, setting off another firestorm of Green debate.
Carter, who grew close to Green and played in Minnesota during Green’s entire run, said Green probably could have handled some issues better.
Despite all the distractions, however, the Vikings were regular participants in the playoffs.
TIME IS UP
Green’s departure in 2001 had nothing to do with legal issues. It was a culmination of a difficult year that began with the shocking death of offensive lineman Korey Stringer in training camp, after Stringer collapsed during a training camp practice. “We weren’t that good to begin with,” Carter said. “And I think it was understated, the situation with Korey Stringer.
“We had lost a lot of key players to free agency, especially on the offensive line, and then we had the tragedy with Korey. It’s not just a death but that person, and how it happened. We never recovered.”
The Vikings stumbled through the season, winning just five games. Star receiver Randy Moss had an incident where he yelled at some team sponsors on a bus, something that didn’t please McCombs. Reportedly, another of McCombs’ problems was that Green wouldn’t fire Solomon, who by then was Minnesota’s director of pro personnel and Green’s closest confidante in the organization.
Solomon said he didn’t know if he had been in the middle of the friction. “You could blame a lot of different people, make a stand for a lot of different things if that’s what you want to do,” Solomon said. McCombs and Green agreed to their settlement in December 2001. Suddenly Green wasn’t a coach for the first time in almost 30 years.
The Cardinals looked into Green’s history when they interviewed him for the job. In the end, said team vice president Michael Bidwill, the Cards had no problems with his past. “There was a lot of direct evidence — if I can use lawyer terms — that we found to be true, people like Bill Walsh, people like (former 49ers and Browns executive) Carmen Policy, people at the league office that dealt directly with Dennis Green that had terrific things to say,” said Bidwill, an attorney.
“Then there was hearsay, things that were kind of swirling around. It was old, some of the things were true for which he said ‘I am sorry’ and apologized.
“And you know what? I think he deserved that the apology be accepted and move on, but there were some people (in Minnesota) that did not want to accept that apology. For whatever reason they wanted to keep fanning the flames of old issues.”
ON TO THE CARDS
Life away from pro football was good for Green. He had taken a job working for ESPN as an NFL studio analyst. Marie was thrilled with how much time he was able to spend with his two youngest children, Vanessa and Zachary. But she knew he needed to get back to an NFL team.
“TV is a good living but it’s not pure football,” said Carter, himself an NFL analyst on HBO now that his playing career is over. “It’s not with the guys, not being on the sideline, not competitive enough.”
Two seasons away was enough for Green. His name came up in connection with vacant jobs in Washington and Oakland after the 2003 season, but it was the Cardinals job he wanted, something he told Bidwill the first time the two talked. His hiring, $10 million for a four-year contract, was hailed nationally as a coup for the franchise. “A good head coach is hard to find,” Carter said. “I’d treat him like a No. 1 quarterback.”
Green chuckles when it’s pointed out that he has taken over a franchise that has had just one winning record since moving to Arizona in 1988. “People have a tendency,” Green said, “to look at a situation as hopeless.”
Green hasn’t lost a game yet, so he’s still on his honeymoon. His relationship with the media has been good.
Fans have taken a liking to their new coach, praising Green’s public criticisms of underachieving players. When Green and the Cards were recently punished for having “too intense” of offseason practices, public opinion backed Green because fans felt it was necessary to improve a woeful team. Season ticket sales are at their highest point in years (the Cardinals will not release specifics) even if it hasn’t been the bump experienced when Buddy Ryan was named coach a decade ago.
But the offseason has also been a grind, with Green taking what Bidwill called “wide latitude” to overhaul the organization and shaping the Cardinals into his image.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard he works,” Marie Green said. The couple make sure to have “date nights,” or carve out time to play nine holes of golf. Balance is one of Green’s personal buzzwords, between family and job and other interests. Green has already gone fishing a couple of times in Arizona, fulfilling one of his passions. He is also an accomplished drummer. Unlike some of his brethren, Green is a coach but not only a coach.
“I never felt I would be defined by what I did for a living and not who I was as a man,” Green said.
Green thirsts to be the coach who turns the Cardinals into winners. That’s the reason why Green is thinking only of the future.
Raising Arizona from the dregs of the NFL would be his greatest feat. Nothing in his past could match it.
“If anyone can, it’s him,” Walsh said. “I don’t know how you can do better than Denny.”
http://www.aztrib.com/index.php?sty=25285
By Darren Urban, Tribune
Among the pictures in Dennis Green’s house is a team photo of the semipro football club his father played for in 1939.
Green is fascinated with the shot.
He often wishes he could catch every one of the players in a past moment in time and find out what happened to their lives.
“You can look at the faces on that team,” Green said earlier this offseason, “and every one of them has a story.” There is irony in such a thought, for Green too has a story to tell — and would rather not. He’d rather not dwell on a childhood shaped by losing both his parents at a young age, nor winning a Super Bowl as an assistant on a legendary San Francisco 49ers coaching staff, nor his resuscitation of a pair of hapless college football programs at Northwestern and Stanford.
He may have made history with his hiring and subsequent success with Minnesota as one of the NFL’s first black head coaches, but after a tenure fraught with as much controversy as prosperity, Green doesn’t want to relive his time with the Vikings.
History is just that to Green, no matter how interesting the stories might be. To rehash his life, “I don’t see any benefit at all,” Green said, pleasant but firm.
Perhaps that’s why Green is a good fit for Arizona. As an organization, the Cardinals would like nothing more than to forget about their past. “We try to teach reality, and that’s (the coming) year,” said Green, who takes the Cardinals to training camp in seven days.
“I never worry about regrets. I like, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ ”
NO TIME TO CRY
Turning a negative into a positive is what Green is about. Even the title to his 1997 book — “No Room for Crybabies” — crystallized the way he sees his life. Northwestern was in the middle of a then-record 34-game losing streak when the Wildcats gave him his first head coaching job, and while he never made them winners, he delivered respectability. The Wildcats lost their first 14 games under Green and never won more than three games in a season, but still shed their reputation as a total laughingstock.
Stanford was nowhere when Green was named coach, having posted sub-.500 records in eight of the nine seasons before his arrival in 1989. He upset No. 1 Notre Dame in 1990 and won eight games in his final season in 1991. He also broke in as an NFL head coach in an era when blacks had difficulty getting such jobs and had immediate success in Minnesota.
The Cardinals will be his greatest challenge, but Green has spent much of his life overcoming obstacles.
The youngest of five brothers, Green was only 11 when his father died at age 39 of a ruptured appendix. Less than two years later, Green’s mother was 41 when she fell to cancer. His mother’s death, Green wrote in his book, “almost destroyed me.”
Instead, it pushed the Harrisburg, Pa., native to accomplish things in his life quickly, almost as if he wasn’t sure if he’d have the time. Green politely declined a request to allow any of his brothers to be interviewed, but Green’s wife, Marie, said all the Green men feel obligated to make the most of the time they have.
“It’s like, ‘What right do we have to outlive our parents?’ ” she said. “It’s almost like a fear.”
From that background Green built his life. He earned a football scholarship to the University of Iowa and was already married and a parent by the time he reached the Iowa campus as a freshman. He worked various jobs to support his family and still managed to graduate on time, in addition to playing football. When the Canadian Football League was the only place that wanted Green the football player, coaching became his chosen career. After assistant jobs at Iowa and Dayton, he found his way in 1977 to Stanford and Bill Walsh.
A PROGRAM BUILDER
Walsh tutored Green not only in college but brought him to the NFL for the first time, as an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers both in 1979 and again in 1986. Walsh said his memory is fuzzy when it comes to particular Green anecdotes, but he does remember “there were times he really helped me during games.”
“He’d remind me of things I had wanted to do,” Walsh said. “I could trust what he said. He wasn’t loose with this thoughts. . . . He had a lot of personal confidence, he was an excellent teacher and he impressed me.”
Green also wanted a head coaching job, which is why he had no problem going to Northwestern in 1981 despite the Wildcats’ doormat status. He was only the second black man to be named a Division I-A head coach, after the 1979 hiring of Willie Jeffries at Wichita State. What Green eventually found at Northwestern, and later at Stanford, was that the NFL was set up better for success. The pro game was about parity, about letting teams that are down get back up.
“There is no real reason why any (NFL) team should be at the bottom all the time,” Green said. “In the college game, you are on your own.” Eventually, that dichotomy would draw Green to the Cardinals.
“It’s more rewarding, with a bad (NFL) team, when you get it done that way,” said Cardinals defensive backs coach Richard Solomon, who has known Green since college.
Besides, there was another lure to helping a team that has basically never won. His first NFL job with the Vikings, he took over in a place where winning wasn’t so foreign. Green’s success there was never treasured.
Back in 1992, Green became the second black head coach of the NFL’s modern era. He made eight playoff appearances in 10 seasons. But that success didn’t stop it from being the most difficult job Green ever had.
“I think one of the reasons he doesn’t really want to get into it,” said Green’s wife, Marie, “is because, to us, Minnesota seems a lifetime ago.”
MINNESOTA MESS
Green knows his tenure in Minnesota generates questions, beyond the fact he won 61 percent of his games in the regular season yet couldn’t reach a Super Bowl.
His relationship with the Minnesota media was never good and soured as the years went on. Green felt many media members were unfair — and in his book, wondered if their problems with him were racial. Many media members felt Green not only underachieved in the postseason but ran roughshod through the Vikings’ organization to the detriment of the team. As promised, Green is short on the topic.
“I met my wife in Minnesota, married my wife in Minnesota, my daughter was born in Minnesota, my son was born in Minnesota, I made a lot of money in Minnesota. I don’t think Minnesota owes me anything besides that,” Green said.
But he wasn’t happy that the NFL decided to send the Cardinals to Minnesota for an Aug. 14 preseason game — his first game coaching the Cards, no less — in what promises to be a circus of attention. Green spent almost 10 seasons with the Vikings, agreeing to a contract buyout with one game left in the 2001 season with his team 5-10. It was the only time Minnesota was under .500 while he was there.
The belief now is that Green and the Vikings simply needed a divorce, as seems to happen with long-term coaches in most professional sports. Marie Green said her husband wasn’t hurt by the decision, since by then both he and Vikings owner Red McCombs were ready to move on.
McCombs did not respond to an interview request from the Tribune.
Walsh, the three-time winning Super Bowl coach, said he thought at the time that Green should have left Minnesota a year or two before.
“When I took the 49ers job, someone told me the welcome is for five years, then you have to fight for your job,” Walsh said. “People get bored.
“Ten years is the max. You look at some of the best coaches in this game, some have lasted much longer than that (in one place) but most of their success comes in those first 10 years.”
But Green had a bumpier decade than his record seemed to merit. Multiple reports — including Green’s own book — point to his own introductory press conference as the beginning of the problems. A columnist for one of the newspapers quizzed then-Vikings president Roger Headrick why Green was hired instead of Pete Carroll.
The battles lasted for a decade.
“I definitely felt some of the treatment was unfair,” former Vikings Pro Bowl receiver Cris Carter said. “What he created, there’s no way other people would have been criticized. “People always say, ‘Well, he didn’t win the Super Bowl, he didn’t make the Super Bowl.’ Well, we only had a Super Bowl-caliber team one year, and that was 1998. People kept changing the criteria for what it took to be successful.”
Said Cardinals offensive coordinator Alex Wood, Green’s quarterbacks coach in Minnesota, “They never appreciated (his efforts), at least from a public perspective. That’s their right, but no, he did more for Minnesota than Minnesota probably did for him.”
Green was upset and angry after a front-page article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, printed Super Bowl Sunday in 1995, portrayed him as a coach who had ruined the atmosphere in the organization. It came just a few weeks after the Vikings had gone 10-6 and made the playoffs. The story also detailed sexual harassment accusations against Solomon.
As early as December of 1995, four years into Green’s tenure, a season-ending analysis in the Star-Tribune called for Green’s removal in favor of then-Vikings assistant Tony Dungy. A 1998 book entitled “Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL” devoted a whole chapter to legal problems of the Vikings, rehashing some of the same sexual harassment accusations against Green and Solomon.
“Here is all you need to know about these issues,” Green wrote in his book. “I’ve never sexually harassed anyone in my life. I did make mistakes in my previous marriage. I learned from them and I’ll never make those mistakes again.”
Green said he wrote his autobiography because, “I had something to say. My family can read about what I have to say about me in contrast to what others say.”
The book ended with a stunning chapter about how he might sue the Vikings’ then-splintered ownership group to gain control of the franchise, setting off another firestorm of Green debate.
Carter, who grew close to Green and played in Minnesota during Green’s entire run, said Green probably could have handled some issues better.
Despite all the distractions, however, the Vikings were regular participants in the playoffs.
TIME IS UP
Green’s departure in 2001 had nothing to do with legal issues. It was a culmination of a difficult year that began with the shocking death of offensive lineman Korey Stringer in training camp, after Stringer collapsed during a training camp practice. “We weren’t that good to begin with,” Carter said. “And I think it was understated, the situation with Korey Stringer.
“We had lost a lot of key players to free agency, especially on the offensive line, and then we had the tragedy with Korey. It’s not just a death but that person, and how it happened. We never recovered.”
The Vikings stumbled through the season, winning just five games. Star receiver Randy Moss had an incident where he yelled at some team sponsors on a bus, something that didn’t please McCombs. Reportedly, another of McCombs’ problems was that Green wouldn’t fire Solomon, who by then was Minnesota’s director of pro personnel and Green’s closest confidante in the organization.
Solomon said he didn’t know if he had been in the middle of the friction. “You could blame a lot of different people, make a stand for a lot of different things if that’s what you want to do,” Solomon said. McCombs and Green agreed to their settlement in December 2001. Suddenly Green wasn’t a coach for the first time in almost 30 years.
The Cardinals looked into Green’s history when they interviewed him for the job. In the end, said team vice president Michael Bidwill, the Cards had no problems with his past. “There was a lot of direct evidence — if I can use lawyer terms — that we found to be true, people like Bill Walsh, people like (former 49ers and Browns executive) Carmen Policy, people at the league office that dealt directly with Dennis Green that had terrific things to say,” said Bidwill, an attorney.
“Then there was hearsay, things that were kind of swirling around. It was old, some of the things were true for which he said ‘I am sorry’ and apologized.
“And you know what? I think he deserved that the apology be accepted and move on, but there were some people (in Minnesota) that did not want to accept that apology. For whatever reason they wanted to keep fanning the flames of old issues.”
ON TO THE CARDS
Life away from pro football was good for Green. He had taken a job working for ESPN as an NFL studio analyst. Marie was thrilled with how much time he was able to spend with his two youngest children, Vanessa and Zachary. But she knew he needed to get back to an NFL team.
“TV is a good living but it’s not pure football,” said Carter, himself an NFL analyst on HBO now that his playing career is over. “It’s not with the guys, not being on the sideline, not competitive enough.”
Two seasons away was enough for Green. His name came up in connection with vacant jobs in Washington and Oakland after the 2003 season, but it was the Cardinals job he wanted, something he told Bidwill the first time the two talked. His hiring, $10 million for a four-year contract, was hailed nationally as a coup for the franchise. “A good head coach is hard to find,” Carter said. “I’d treat him like a No. 1 quarterback.”
Green chuckles when it’s pointed out that he has taken over a franchise that has had just one winning record since moving to Arizona in 1988. “People have a tendency,” Green said, “to look at a situation as hopeless.”
Green hasn’t lost a game yet, so he’s still on his honeymoon. His relationship with the media has been good.
Fans have taken a liking to their new coach, praising Green’s public criticisms of underachieving players. When Green and the Cards were recently punished for having “too intense” of offseason practices, public opinion backed Green because fans felt it was necessary to improve a woeful team. Season ticket sales are at their highest point in years (the Cardinals will not release specifics) even if it hasn’t been the bump experienced when Buddy Ryan was named coach a decade ago.
But the offseason has also been a grind, with Green taking what Bidwill called “wide latitude” to overhaul the organization and shaping the Cardinals into his image.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard he works,” Marie Green said. The couple make sure to have “date nights,” or carve out time to play nine holes of golf. Balance is one of Green’s personal buzzwords, between family and job and other interests. Green has already gone fishing a couple of times in Arizona, fulfilling one of his passions. He is also an accomplished drummer. Unlike some of his brethren, Green is a coach but not only a coach.
“I never felt I would be defined by what I did for a living and not who I was as a man,” Green said.
Green thirsts to be the coach who turns the Cardinals into winners. That’s the reason why Green is thinking only of the future.
Raising Arizona from the dregs of the NFL would be his greatest feat. Nothing in his past could match it.
“If anyone can, it’s him,” Walsh said. “I don’t know how you can do better than Denny.”
http://www.aztrib.com/index.php?sty=25285
