N.Y. Times Article: Mangini

Mangini Is a Taskmaster Who Waddles and Hums

By KAREN CROUSE

Published: September 17, 2006

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y., Sept. 15 ? Eric Mangini, the Jets? first-year coach, was nicknamed the Penguin by a player during training camp because he waddles as he works and can freeze a football superhero with his glacial stare.

The stout Mangini was easy to cast as a villainous character, his modus operandi including but not limited to making his players run laps for mistakes and taking their money for not weighing in or for publicly weighing in on verboten topics.

The nickname spread among the players, and stayed among the players ? or so they thought until the day in a second-floor meeting room when Mangini posed a question to his team, ?What bird do you think you can learn from??

The room fell silent. So Mangini dimmed the lights, and scenes from the Oscar-winning documentary ?March of the Penguins? soon appeared on the screen. When the lights came back up, Mangini pointed out some attributes of the penguin: its attachment to its young, its toughness, its adaptive communication skills.

He mentioned some prominent penguin look-alikes, like Winston Churchill and Alfred Hitchcock, and some famous cartoon penguins. He did not have to mention that he was wise to the sobriquet.

By the time the meeting let out, everybody was chuckling, most of all receiver Laveranues Coles, the nickname?s originator.

When he was hired by the Jets, Mangini was billed as the triplicate of Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, his football mentors. But as his players have come to discover, there is much more to Mangini than his pedigree. He can be as unyielding as Parcells and as tight-lipped as Belichick. At the same time, Mangini exhibits a warmth that takes the edge off.

Coles, a seventh-year receiver, said that since the unmasking-of-the-penguin incident, he has viewed Mangini in a softer light.

?It showed that he has a sense of humor and that everything we?re doing is not personal,? Coles said. ?It?s about football for him. It was like he was saying: ?You can make fun of me. You can joke about me. But when we get down to business, you know what I?m about.? ?

On Sunday, when the Jets play host to the New England Patriots, Mangini will exchange chess moves with Belichick, the man from whom he learned N.F.L. strategies, coaching survival skills and Super Bowl victory speeches. He served under Belichick for 10 years, the last 6 in New England, before leaving the nest in January, two days before his 35th birthday, to chart his own course with the Jets.

In an interview, Mangini bristled at the notion that he was a tough, taciturn, flavorless Belichick clone. ?Don?t you think a little bit of that is association?? Mangini said. ?I think some of that stems from the fact that I?ve been inside that bubble.?

Before Mangini could show his players that he was different from Belichick ? that he can be, as his older brother Kyle asserts, the funniest man in the room ? he had to gain their attention. That explains his two-and-a-half-hour training-camp practices in 90-degree heat, his laundry list of punishments, his unsmiling visage.

?There?s a whole process of them getting to know me and me getting to know them,? Mangini said. ?I thought it was important that I be as clear as I could be as to what my expectations were, philosophically. How I think practice should operate, how meetings should operate, how all those things should work. I wanted to make sure there was no uncertainty as to what the expectations were.?

Mangini?s meticulousness is easy to trace. ?I?m sure a lot of it stems from my dad,? he said. ?He was the kind of guy, when you did a job, you did it right. And if it wasn?t right, you went back and did it again.?

Carmine Mangini was an energy consultant and high-wattage father to his five children. He died of a heart attack at age 56 when Eric, the youngest child, was 16.

?Dad was very firm but very fair,? said Kyle Mangini, a 39-year-old investment banker who lives in Melbourne, Australia. ?When he said something, he meant it.?

Along with his father, if there was a single person who was like a compass to Eric Mangini, it was Kyle, whom he followed to Bulkeley High School in Hartford and to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He followed him into the Chi Psi fraternity and planned to follow Kyle into banking until he visited him in Australia, was roped into coaching a semipro football team and discovered his true-north calling.

After college, Mangini accepted a job as a low-level assistant to Belichick, another Wesleyan graduate and Chi Psi fraternity brother who was then the Browns? head coach. It was the beginning of an apprenticeship that spanned a decade and spawned a friendship that became especially close in the late 1990?s, when Belichick and Mangini were assistants on Parcells?s Jets staff.

In those days, Belichick and his family were frequent visitors to the house that Mangini and his future wife, Julie, rented within a beach ball?s throw of the ocean in Point Lookout, a 15-minute drive from the Jets? practice facility at Hofstra. When Belichick left the Jets to become coach of the Patriots in 2000, he took Mangini with him to work with the defensive backs.

Their socializing became less frequent after that as their personal relationship cooled. But their business relationship thrived, with the Patriots winning three Super Bowls in the first five years of the Belichick era. In 2005, Mangini was promoted to defensive coordinator. After the Jets and Herman Edwards parted company in January, the Jets quickly zeroed in on Mangini, whom they saw as the nearest thing to an Ivy League legacy that exists in the N.F.L.

A gulf has opened between Mangini and Belichick, who offered a chilly assessment this week when asked about Mangini. Belichick said that Mangini had worked hard but that he did not know if he had ever regarded him as head-coaching material.

Mangini considers it a great compliment to be compared to Belichick, but he would much rather talk about his own legacies. He and his wife have two sons, Jake, 2, and Luke, 7 months, and if the players want to see Mangini?s softer side, all they have to do is watch him interact with his children during their daily visits to Hofstra.

In Point Lookout, Mangini lived in a house in which a father?s benign neglect was the elephant in the room. A piano left behind had belonged to a former occupant, Harry Chapin, the singer-songwriter best known for ?Cat?s in the Cradle,? a ballad about a workaholic father who realized too late that he never took the time to forge a relationship with his son.

?I don?t want to be that guy,? said Mangini, who goes to great lengths to be there for his children the way his father was for him.

He reads his children their bedtime stories from his office via a videophone, and last month he used his pull as the Jets? coach to score backstage passes to an evening performance of the Wiggles, the wildly popular Australian group that entertains children with song and dance.

The group was giving two performances Aug. 17 at Nassau Coliseum, across the street from the Jets? facility. That afternoon, Mangini worried that his players would practice poorly and that they would force him to keep them late. ?The whole time I?m desperately hoping I don?t miss the Wiggles,? Mangini said.

He made it to the show on time, and for the next few hours, the Penguin?s smile could have melted an iceberg.