Patriots WR Glenn Needs a Tough Coach
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Posted Under: 1999 Patriots Season
HOME > Patriots Blog > 1999 Patriots Season
FOXBOROUGH — To understand Terry Glenn better, you need to go back to his rookie season of 1996 and get all the answers you need.
Glenn’s Patriot career must be salvaged somehow. There is simply no other solution. It has been proved time and time again over the past few years how much better the Patriots are when he is on.
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| Where: | Foxborough Stadium Foxborough, Mass. |
| When: | Sunday 1/2/00 1:00 PM EDT |
| TV: | CBS WBZ TV-4 in Boston |
| DSS: | DirecTV Channel 704 |
| Latest Line: | Ravens by 2 |
| Team Records: | Patriots 7-8 Ravens 8-7 |
The complexities begin when you try and define “when he is on”. And saying that that definition is “when he’s healthy” is far too inadequate, as the last two months of 1999 have painfully shown us all.
This is a strange and complex case. Both parties, meaning Glenn and his ball club, have needs that aren’t being met. The Patriots’ needs are obvious. Glenn’s needs aren’t, if you look beneath the surface.
No one is debating that Glenn needs to grow up. At times, his mood swings and lack of overall dependability are quite bothersome. When Willie McGinest made his “lots of players play with sniffles” remark, it perhaps spoke for the entire team and is incredibly disparaging to Glenn.
Having the flu is one thing, dealing with it is quite another. Roger Clemens once pitched eight innings with the flu before leaving the game. Would Clemens have dared miss that start? The game was Game 7 of the 1986 ALCS. ABC couldn’t interview him after the game because manager John McNamara said, in effect, that Clemens was in the toilet throwing up.
Say what you want about Clemens, but the man was a gamer. Is Glenn not a gamer? You definitely get that impression. His teammates certainly do. Now the fans are starting to think about who we can get in a trade for this lazy bum.
Glenn’s flu bug isn’t the only problem that has sprung up. Glenn was out late on Thanksgiving eve partying it up, was late the next morning for a meeting, and was benched for one quarter that Sunday against Buffalo. Pete Carroll was questioned about the benching, and suffered a halftime embarrassment on CBS. What this incident brought to the surface was the perception that management had been over-tolerant of Glenn’s frequent breaches of team policy, but this incident was the first in which Glenn actually received punishment.
Going on and on about the other little things that Glenn has caused is really a waste of space. It is sufficient to say that Glenn is an immature player with God-given talent, and he lacks the ability to discipline and motivate himself to perform at his very best.
In defense of Glenn, he has good reasons to behave the way he does. The nice thing is that all of this is correctable, if the right people are in place to do the correcting.
This is why we go back to 1996 and find the real answers to all that ails Glenn. And the Patriots happen to be at such a time where they can bring about the necessary changes rather quickly.
Glenn grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the same city where his alma mater, Ohio State is. In an NBC interview prior to the 1996 AFC title game between New England and Jacksonville, Glenn talked to Greg Gumbel about the circumstances surrounding the murder of his mother when he was 12.
Glenn described how some man stalked his mother on her way home from shopping, and then proceeded to kill her. The murderer was apprehended and is in jail for life. Glenn went to live with relatives before settling into the home of Rams running back June Henley, the closest thing to a family Glenn has.
There were a few telling moments from the interview. Gumbel asked Glenn “If you could say something to the man who murdered your mom, what would you say?” All Glenn could say was “I would just ask him, ‘Why’d you do it?'” Gumbel later said “When this sort of thing happens, you react in one of two ways — you either shrivel up and do nothing, or you rise up and fight back.” Glenn said he felt like the first way for a while before the second way kicked in.
Then Gumbel asked Glenn about his dad and what he thought of all this. Gumbel said “Does your father know about this?” Glenn said he did; “He lives right there in Columbus, he knows.” Glenn’s father lives right there in Columbus, but the Henleys are the only family Glenn has?
Losing his mother was traumatic enough. Not having his father around is also bad enough. Not having his father at the worst time of his life has to have done a number on Glenn. When sociologists point to the decay of the family unit as the number one cause for gangs, crime and drugs in today’s youth, they aren’t kidding. This is a perfect example.
Credit the Henleys for keeping Glenn out of that kind of trouble. The Henleys steered Glenn to football, and then to Ohio State. The rest is history, of course. Glenn was lucky to have the Henleys to fall back on, and at last year’s Patriots-Rams game they were impartial.
Gumbel finished the interview by asking how much he misses his mom. Glenn said that the holidays are real tough for him, that when he sees his teammates making plans to see their moms and dads, he isn’t able to do that. After the interview, Mike Ditka said “Now I know why that remark (Bill) Parcells made (calling him “she”) didn’t faze him. This kid’s tough!”
Tough? Perhaps. Football-tough? No.
One feeling you got from this interview were the “passive” responses to the really tough questions. If any of you had a chance to meet your mother’s murderer, wouldn’t your first thought be the old “eye for an eye” deal? Listening to Glenn talk, it’s a miracle he isn’t on the street after the “shriveling up” period, assuming he ever stopped shriveling.
Small wonder why Glenn rarely does interviews. He is a quiet, introverted player in desperate need of direction and someone to light a fire under him. It is fair to say that life has been cruel to Glenn, except for the contract he signed with New England. Glenn is not the kind of person that can just go off somewhere and make himself better all by himself.
Parcells turned out to be, albeit briefly, the best thing for Glenn. Under Parcells, “she” had a fantastic rookie season, catching 90 passes. Glenn himself said that he was “scared of Parcells and what he might do to me”. The hard-nosed coach did get to Glenn, and the results speak for themselves.
Carroll is anything but a disciplinarian, and even worse when he pretends to be one. It is bad enough when you set the pattern of easy-going in the first place, but it is exacerbated when you try and become a tyrant after the fact. Not only did the benching of Glenn in the Buffalo game expose Carroll’s inconsistencies in dealing with Glenn, but dropping the hammer on Glenn because of something that happened on Thanksgiving showed extremely poor judgment.
Glenn is perhaps like many people without family around the holidays — alone, depressed, vulnerable. Despite Shawn Jefferson’s insistence that the team’s “arms are always open”, they are no substitute for the real thing. With someone as sensitive as Glenn, care should be used in dealing with him around the holidays.
To balance that out, Glenn also needs to be driven by someone who would do to him what his old man should have been doing all these years. Even grizzled veterans admit they like a butt-kicker for a coach versus a palsy-walsy type. For someone like Glenn, a butt-kicker literally becomes like a surrogate father, either consciously or subconciously.
Glenn’s career can be salvaged, and it must be. The Patriots don’t want Glenn to be the next Irving Fryar. He can succeed, and he can succeed here. But the right coach has to make that happen.
Parcells’ departure grows in stature with every mistake Glenn makes. Parcells’ disciplined approach was perfect for this team, and not just Glenn. You may not be able to bring Parcells back, but you can certainly find someone who will be a whip-cracker.
The entire team can use a disciplinarian, it’s just that Glenn seems to need it the most. If you can’t bring back Glenn’s mom, you can at least bring back his football excellence. It’s all on Glenn himself to straighten out his personal life, but on the field he owes his team and fans the very best he can give. He needs to grow up and realize that right now.
Get the right coach. Give Glenn a break or two. Then get to work on her in Smithfield in July and get her back to 1996 form. Let the revival of Theresa Glenn start with yours truly.
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