Free Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game by Rex Ryan, Don Yaeger Page B

the graduates who made high honors. We were standing up there with all the brains, smiling these big, shit-eating grins, and my dad was in the audience laughing along with a bunch of people. It was a pretty good joke. Both Rob and I planned to get through college and land in the family business of football.
    Now, obviously, we weren’t the Ryan & Sons Coaching Firm. It doesn’t really work that way. There are some sons who have followed their dads into coaching and have gotten a pretty good boost in the process. David and Mike Shula both got to be head coaches pretty fast at the NFL and college levels because they were Don’s sons. David didn’t last, but Mike is still working in the business, and he’s a good quarterback coach from what I’ve seen. Brian Schottenheimer works for me and I’m sure it helped him being Marty Schottenheimer’s son, but Brian is a damn good coach in his own right. The fact is, he’s an offense guy and his dad was more of a defense guy, so whatever Brian learned for his specialty wasn’t just from watching his dad work. I think Brian is going to make a great head coach someday, and I hope he will be with me until that day comes. Kyle Shanahan is working for his dad, Mike, in Washington. I can tell you that Kyle is a terrific offensive coordinator, just like his dad is a great offensive coach. Those guys know how to call plays.
    There’s no question for my brother and me, too: It helps more than it hurts to be Buddy Ryan’s son. First of all, we fell in love with this job from the time we knew what our dad did. By age six, we were hooked. Then there’s the stuff we learned just by watching our dad. I remember seeing him with a pad of paper, watching the TV or the tapes and drawing up schemes. Sometimes he’d draw up formations on napkins at the dinner table. He was always doing all sorts of stuff like that.
    It was a little different for our older brother, Jim. He’s six years older than us and he took our parents’ divorce a lot harder thanRob and I did. I think he saw what coaching did to the relationship between Mom and Dad, and as a result, he’s a little more resentful about what the coaching job did to the family. He still loved sports. In fact, he studied journalism in college and wanted to be a sportswriter. He was a ball boy for the New York Jets in 1968, the Super Bowl season, and he got really close to Joe Namath. After he went to law school, he tried to be a sports agent, but that job is almost as hard as being a coach. Chasing college guys around all the time and trying to get them as clients—there’s nothing easy about that.
    The fact is that our dad told us time and again that he didn’t want us to go into coaching. He kept telling us to do something else, that coaching is a hard life. Sure, it looks glamorous, but the truth is, it’s not an easy way of life. Don’t get me wrong—it’s fun to be on the sideline during an NFL game. I mean, that’s as great as it gets. You’re competing at the highest level of a sport. Everybody is watching you. Everybody is talking about what you do, talking about the players and talking about the team. Then there’s the Super Bowl; trust me, that’s an awesome experience. When I went to the Super Bowl with Baltimore in 2000, when we beat the snot out of the New York Giants in Tampa, my brother Rob was in the stands. He hadn’t been in one yet (he won two after he joined New England and Bill Belichick), and he told me after the game about how he started getting all choked up, all emotional that I was out there. Believe me, Rob isn’t the kind of guy to get all emotional and open about his feelings. I might do that from time to time, but that’s where these twins start to go our own directions.
    But what makes coaching such a tough profession is what you don’t see on TV. What you have to understand is that no matter who you are in this profession, you have to pay your dues. You have to prove yourself at a lot of levels