Simply, Simms : 27,000 Yards and He’s Still in Shadows

Phil Simms, 34, can look back on a Super Bowl championship and an assortment of other triumphs in his 12 years at quarterback for the undefeated New York Giants.

In a recent triumph, for instance, Simms, with three blockbuster passes, led the Giants past the Washington Redskins, the team that will be at Giants Stadium again Sunday, resuming a storied rivalry.

Simms, though, scored his pivotal personal triumph long ago--long before he turned pro.

It happened during a television interview, of all things, in the winter of his senior year in high school.

Talking about it the other day, the Giants’ quarterback, a Kentucky tobacco farmer’s son, recalled that with one game left, he not only had not won a college scholarship anywhere, he had not even been recruited by anybody.

Arriving in Louisville for the state final as the quarterback of his high school team, Simms was interviewed on local television the night before his last game.

And after the program, as he tells it now, he got a telephone call at his hotel. The caller was an assistant coach at nearby Morehead State, Vince Semary, who asked him where he was going to college.

“I may not go to college,” Simms said. “I haven’t been recruited.”

Said Semary: “I’ll be honest with you, we’ve never seen Phil Simms play football. But you showed so much poise in that interview that we’d like to have you here. How about it?”

And that’s how it happens that Simms owns a college letter jacket or two. The letter is M.

“We played our hearts out that year in the state finals, but we lost,” he said. “I never did get another college offer.”

But he has never lost his poise, either.

It still identifies him both as a person and as an athlete, Giant center Bart Oates said after a recent game in which the veteran quarterback was blitzed by a linebacker and all but knocked out.

Returning to the huddle on rubbery legs, Simms looked at his teammates through glazed-over eyes.

“I think we better call time out,” Oates said.

“Never,” Simms said. “I wouldn’t give that . . . linebacker the satisfaction.”

Instead, Simms called an audible on the next play, and threw for a first down.

“Yes, sir, he’s everything you’d want in a quarterback,” said the club’s assistant general manager, Harry Hulmes.

The Giants--the players as well as management--are dismayed that Simms is so often booed at Giants Stadium. For, beginning in the early ‘80s, they became a conspicuous winner only after having passed up Joe Montana and other All-Americans to draft Simms first in 1979.

“This is one of the NFL’s historic teams,” Hulmes said. “But as everyone knows, we weren’t a 1970s power.”

To the contrary, the club experienced eight consecutive awful seasons before the arrival of its big three: George Young, general manager; Lawrence Taylor, linebacker, and Simms.

The most famous of these is Taylor.

“When you think of the 49ers, you think of Joe Montana,” Simms said. “When you think of the Denver Broncos, you think of John Elway. When you think of the New York Giants, nobody thinks of the quarterback; you think of Lawrence Taylor.”

Despite the dozens of touchdown passes that Simms has thrown for the Giants in 12 years, despite the 27,000 yards he has gained passing, despite the bunch of games he has won, he has lived in Taylor’s shadow--and it hasn’t seemed to bother him at all.

“Phil knows who he is,” Young said.

“Put it this way,” Simms said. “Taylor couldn’t have done it without me.”

That’s poise.

THE NEW MAN

Super Bowl XXI was memorably lopsided. To this day, many Giant fans remember the final score as Lawrence Taylor 39, John Elway 20.

Even so, Simms somehow completed 22 of 25 passes for an NFL record that could last into the next century. And so, afterward, he was hot stuff for a while in New York.

One day, a prosperous Manhattan firm offered him $5,000 to make a 15-minute appearance at an office party.

“Sold,” said Simms. “On one condition. Give me $4,000, and let me bring one of my teammates, (nose tackle) Jim Burt. Maybe Jim isn’t as notorious as me, but he played as well as me, and you can give him the other $1,000.”

“Sure, bring him along,” the company president said. “But you pay him--anything you want.”

“No, that would be demeaning to Jim,” Simms said. “You pay him, or it’s no deal.”

And, said Simms’ agent, David Fishof, who tells that story, “They did it that way--because that’s the way Phil is.

“He always puts the team first, and I don’t say that about all my clients. I’ve seen the time that Phil turned down a $10,000 appearance (fee) just because it interfered with his off-season workout program.”

Said Young: “Phil’s secret weapon is the way he pushes himself in the weight room. There isn’t a tougher quarterback, and that’s because no quarterback works harder. We only have one other (player) who spends as much time (with the weights) as Phil does.”

One consequence of the workouts is that he has built himself into a new man. Once a gawky, 170-pound college quarterback, Simms, who stands 6 feet 3, is now a firm 220.

Steve Valencia, who trains boxers and football players in New Jersey, said: “Phil is so tough and flexible today, he’d be a killer in karate.”

If Montana and Simms are the game’s two most successful quarterbacks--they have a showdown coming up Dec. 3 at San Francisco that could be a matchup of unbeaten teams--they aren’t much alike physically.

Montana, 195, looks frail in or out of his clothes. He doesn’t even appear to be 6-2.

Simms, who appears to be more than 6-3, is probably the NFL’s best-built quarterback, although, seated across from him at a dinner table, you’d never guess he was even a professional athlete.

Fair-haired, fair skinned, youthful for his many years in a stressful calling, he has the look of a kid singing in a choir in Oslo, Norway.

Though his background is Irish-English, the features are Nordic. The manner is serious, the aptitude for football extensive.

“(Simms) can throw every pass there is,” Giant Coach Bill Parcells said. “A good quarterback is a guy who (is so consistent that) the defensive backs over in the other hotel can’t sleep.

“They’re all scared of Phil now.”

RIGHT MODELS

Long before he became a pro quarterback, the Giants’ passer picked the right role models--Terry Bradshaw and Roger Staubach, two of the toughest--which might be one reason that his opponents have trouble sleeping.

“The best compliment I ever had, I got in high school,” Simms said. “A teammate told me, ‘You throw like Bradshaw.’ ”

Riding the team bus in Washington earlier this month, Simms was discussing quarterbacks with team chaplain Dave Bratton, who remarked that Staubach’s comebacks were even more impressive than some of Montana’s.

“Let me tell you about a Giant-Cowboy game back in the ‘70s,” the chaplain exclaimed as nearby passengers listened in. “We had Dallas beat by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, and Staubach brought ‘em back to win. Can you imagine that?”

“Imagine it!” Simms said. “I was there. That was 1979, and I was the rookie that Staubach did it to. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Simms remembers standing entranced on the sideline in the late afternoon.

“I’d say, ‘Oh, look at that pass,’ ” he recalls. “I’d say, ‘Man, look at that one.’ There I was, losing to Staubach, and all I could do was admire him. He made it look so easy.”

So did Bradshaw.

And now Simms.

Shortly after he and Bratton got to the stadium that day, Simms easily carved up the Redskins, whose coach, Joe Gibbs, winner of two Super Bowls, has lost five straight to the Giants going into Sunday’s series renewal.

“A great quarterback is a guy who makes everyone around him better,” Gibbs said. “And I think that’s the best way to describe Simms.”

Taylor has another way.

“Simms is a natural leader of this team,” the all-pro linebacker said. “He holds the offense together. He’s a cocky son of a gun. That’s what makes him great.”

That isn’t quite the way Simms sees it.

“I’m just a lunch-pail kind of a guy,” he said.

ANCIENT LINE

One hard thing about growing up on a tobacco farm is that the fields have to be plowed.

The Giants’ quarterback was in first grade when he learned that, he said on a quiet recent evening.

“I came home from school one day and my father said, ‘Let’s go,’ ” Simms remembers. “He started off on the tractor, and I trudged along behind.

“It was a two-man job--two persons. He sat there comfortably on the tractor plowing up the weeds, and I crawled along in the dust behind him, on my hands and knees, keeping the plowed-up weeds off the tobacco plants.

“We worked until dark, and we did it all summer--every summer. You’ve got to believe me, football is more fun.”

The family, however, has been in tobacco longer than football. In fact, Simms is the only pro athlete in a long line of farmers.

His forebears came over from England in the late 18th Century to grow tobacco in Maryland, his father, William, said.

After moving to Kentucky, the Simms family had a little trouble with wild turkeys first, and then with another wild bunch, Quantrill’s Raiders, a Civil War guerrilla band.

“There were turkey crossings all through the county in those days, and the turkeys had the right of way over the farmers,” William Simms said from his home in Louisville. “It was the law in Kentucky, you can look it up.

“So my granddaddy took to trading. He was a successful mule trader and horse trader when Quantrill’s Raiders came through on a surprise raid and stole everything he had. They even took his clothes, and left him standing there in his underwear.”

Back on the farm, the Simmses dug in and stayed until after Phil’s parents had produced five sons and three daughters.

Because replacements were far away on other farms, Phil’s three older brothers needed him, at age 3, to fill out the sides for baseball. Not surprisingly, he ruined every game by failing to hit the ball, so to avert a family crisis they took to rolling it up to him.

“The first time Dominic rolled me the ball, I hit it, and I’ll never forget the feeling I had running to first,” Phil said. “It was sweeter than a touchdown pass.”

At 8, the year he was promoted to pitcher, the family suddenly left the homestead.

“My father and his father were in the farm together, and they were making a go of it before they had a run-in,” he said. “That same day my father packed up and moved us all to Louisville.”

Through the rest of his school days, his parents worked for the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co., his mother as a machine operator on the night shift.

“The (night job) was easier than running a house with eight kids,” Barbara Simms said. “But I did get a lot of help at home from all eight of them.”

Phil’s chore was to keep the bathroom clean.

“He wiggled out of it when he had to pitch or something,” his mother said. “But if you could get him in there, Phil was the best I had on the bathroom shift. The toilet was always the cleanest when he scrubbed it.”

The Simms’ back yard was adjacent to the schoolyard in the Okolona section of Louisville, and Phil only had to walk across the football field to school, fantasizing all the way.

“I see my kids in the lap of luxury today,” he said of sons Christopher and Matthew and daughter Deidre. “And it’s sometimes necessary to remind them how lucky they are. All I need to say is, ‘When I was your age, I had to walk to school.’ ”

RIGHT MODEL

Matthew Simms was the baby of the family a few years ago when he fell ill one afternoon and worried Phil sick.

Though both recovered in a day or so, Phil, fretting miserably the first night, kept taking the child’s temperature every hour or so.

Diana Simms, Phil’s wife, remembers being roused from a sound sleep at 3 in the morning.

“What is it, Phil?” she asked.

“Matthew is too hot,” he said. “I think we better get him to the hospital.”

And, though it turned out to be only an inconsequential virus, they all rushed off in Phil’s car.

“Maybe any other father would have done the same, but I couldn’t help but admire the way he took over,” Diana said.

Up close and personal, she has concluded, Phil is, basically, an asset around the house.

“He’s understanding and gentle--such a gentleman--and he’s a darling with the children,” she said. “But he doesn’t like to cut the yard, and he has to be reminded to take out the trash. He’s a country boy who acts like he’s from a very wealthy family.”

A graduate of Marymount University in Arlington, Va., Diana is a tall, blonde former model.

“It was runway modeling--designer show lines and all that,” she said of her first career. “I loved it because it was a fast way to good money. But after I met Phil, well, I don’t think he’d care to be married to a working girl.”

As do many of the Giants’ families, the Simmses live in New Jersey, near the team’s practice field. Theirs is a two-story colonial house on a cul-de-sac in Franklin Lakes, a village that Phil calls “a nice little town with a nice little Main Street--very New England.”

Their vacation home is on a golf course near Palm Beach, Fla., where Phil tries to improve his putting enough to keep up with Lawrence Taylor.

“Golf is OK, but taking the kids to the ocean is the best,” Diana said.

Are they contemplating retirement from football to Florida?

Not immediately, his wife said, then added: “I think he’ll stay in football long enough to say, ‘I’ve had enough, I can’t take it anymore.’ ”

THE CATALOGUE

Party time at the Simms house is whenever Dec. 31 falls in the middle of the week.

And the guest list typically includes their close friends and neighbors, many of them Manhattan commuters: the contractor who lives across the street, the man next door who runs a fresh-fish store and goes to market every morning, the former minor league ballplayer who specializes in dishware, a jeweler, a stockbroker, and others on the block.

They were celebrating as usual a few years ago--playing charades after a big dinner--when Diana, noticing that midnight was approaching, signaled Phil.

“I’ve been blessed with a very supportive wife,” he said, recalling that evening. “With a big game coming up, she knew I should be in bed, and very soon I was.”

His can be a hard life.

“I didn’t drift off for 15 or 20 minutes,” he said. “Downstairs they were laughing and joking, and I lay there envying them.”

He is more familiar with lying in pain, but something as minor as the sprained ankle that forced Simms out of last week’s game is not even worth mentioning. He’s expected to play Sunday.

“Phil has practiced all week,” a Giant spokesman said. “He hasn’t limped at all. He’s played with a lot worse (injuries).”

The thing that makes Phil tick, in Diana’s view, is his self-control.

“I’d be very surprised if there’s a more disciplined player in the league,” she said.

For a quarterback, self-discipline is essential.

What are the additional requirements? What sets Simms and Montana above most other NFL quarterbacks?

“Our teammates,” Simms said. “And coaching.”

What else?

“It takes so much (to play quarterback) that you don’t want to hear it all,” he said. “But I could mention four things that I think are important.”

So he mentioned them: confidence, competitiveness, few and minor injuries, and what he calls “the minimum physical equipment.”

The Simms catalogue:

Ability--”You don’t need the world’s strongest arm to play in the NFL, or overpowering size, or sprinter speed, but when you fall below the average in those (areas), you’re in trouble.

“If your arm is suspect, you can’t take advantage of the opportunities that come up for a quarterback--and you can’t build the confidence you’ve got to have to play well.

“I see young guys every year (in the exhibition season) who are good quarterbacks, good leaders, but don’t quite have what it takes physically.”

Competitiveness--”Every veteran NFL quarterback I’ve ever known has been extremely competitive.

“(To) quarterbacks, football isn’t just a pastime (in which) they take pride in throwing or (scrambling) brilliantly. They’re really only out there to win.

“That isn’t true, incidentally, of every guy in the league. Many NFL players aren’t that competitive. Some of them are just out there putting in time, making a living, enjoying it.

“Pro quarterbacks are all competitors.”

Confidence--”You’ve got to have confidence in yourself because that’s what relaxes you.

“I’d say that confidence is the single biggest factor in (quarterbacking). The game is very hard to play if you don’t feel good about yourself. You tighten up.

“It almost always takes a supportive coach to make you feel confident. If they don’t say anything, or say the wrong things to (a reporter), they’re not going to have a confident quarterback.

“The funny thing is that, one little supportive sentence is all it takes--maybe only one a year, or one in your lifetime, or one every now and then. Not many coaches realize that.

“The one certain way to gain confidence during the game is to complete your passes. Especially the first pass or two.

“It isn’t so important if the team is planning to win with their running game that day. But if I were a coach and knew I was going to need some passing, I’d make absolutely sure that my guy could complete at least his first two, even if they lost 10 yards.”

Physical condition--”You need a strong constitution to be a quarterback because you’re always bouncing back from a beating.

“The only thing you fear is being incapacitated--being out, benched with an injury. Our first Super Bowl season, I was beaten up a lot but never incapacitated, and I think that was a key.

“Monday and Tuesday are the most important days of the week. You do whatever it takes to get well enough to participate when practice starts Wednesday.

“The league is so much more physical than it was 10 years ago that it doesn’t feel like the same game. The (problem) isn’t so much that the defensive players are bigger and stronger, it’s that they’re better football players.

“They also gamble more now. They don’t mind giving you a big play once in a while if they can beat you up on the next play. The name of the game was always get the quarterback, I guess, but they’re getting better at it.”