Never Out to Pasture : Ryan No Longer Has a Job in NFL, but His Horse Farm Feeds Another Dream of Success

LEXINGTON, Ky. —  The sky is gray and muddy, but the breeze is fresh, the air is cool. The horses are restless.

James David (Buddy) Ryan watches as the horses are exercised and washed. At the touch of his fingers they nod but make no noise. Two hundred yards away, they trot through gentle training runs.

Ryan is the owner now, which is probably the way it has to be with him.

“Attaway, girl,” he says, watching his favorite filly twist her head and push to go harder. “This one’s a fighter. Attaway.”

Wearing the clothes of a gentleman horse owner, Ryan, still larger than life, leans forward on the Keeneland Race Track bench for a better view. He gives his training riders a gentle wave and a proud hoo-rah as two of his horses pass.

He walks back uphill to the stalls, talking about breakfast, talking about how relaxed he feels, talking about the building of his dream to race, breed and make millions with his 37 horses, a few of which he keeps stabled here at Keeneland.

“Pretty nice life, isn’t it?” Ryan says. “You know, come out here and watch my horses every day, go to Florida in the winter, come back here in the spring. I could get used to it. That is, if I had a check coming in.”

He doesn’t, of course, not since the Philadelphia Eagles fired him last January. For the first time in his adult life, Ryan, 57, doesn’t have a paycheck.

“If I had a check coming in, that’d make it perfect,” he said.

During the morning, a few people he doesn’t know or remember come up to him, or wave to him, or just shout his name because he is who he is.

They ask, “Buddy, are you going to be back?”

He doesn’t know, of course.

“Buddy, how are you doing?”

“Need a job,” he cracks. “Other than that, life’s great.”

They laugh, he walks on. He likes to leave them laughing.

For his whole NFL life, Buddy Ryan planned to build a team from the ground up, then lead it to two consecutive Super Bowl titles, then retire to raise horses.

He assumed, with the blunt confidence that guides his life, that it would happen with the Eagles, a team he coached for five years and remade in his swaggering image.

Given almost total control of the Eagles, Ryan worked to fulfill his 20-year dream: Running a football team on his own terms. Nothing else mattered but staying true to that.

Because of his stubborn belief in himself and his cocky way of proclaiming it, no other team in football was so precisely identified with its coach.

“Any time Buddy Ryan gets off a bus with a team, people know who the team is,” he says.

No other coach spoke such hard truths so often or taunted gentler souls so mirthfully or laughed so long at the disturbances he created.

“It’s like (recently retired Giant Coach Bill) Parcells told me, Buddy does and says all the things every coach wishes he could do and say but can’t,” says Ronnie Jones, who was Ryan’s linebacker coach and now has the same job with the Rams.”

But two days after the Eagles were beaten in the playoffs by the Washington Redskins, the team’s third consecutive first-round exit, Ryan paid the price for doing things others did not.

He was fired. And his enemies lined up to say he would never coach again in this league. His replacement was his offensive coordinator, Rich Kotite, and implicitly the Eagles were saying that all they needed to do was get rid of Ryan and everything else would be all right.

“All of us felt so bad,” Jones says. “Even though we all saw it coming, Buddy didn’t. Buddy never thought it would happen. And when it happened, it floored him. He handled it like a man, but he was hurt. He was deeply hurt.”

He still doesn’t understand it. Ryan won the NFC East title in his third season, then earned a wild-card berth in the next two. In those three seasons, the Eagles were 32-16.

When he was fired, Ryan was studying films of Tennessee tackles Antone Davis and Charles McRae, and plotting ways to get them. The Eagles, after firing Ryan, ended up trading to draft Davis.

“I must be naive, because I always felt if you worked hard, did your job, were successful, everything would take care of itself,” Ryan says. “That’s what I believed.

“I was disappointed more than mad. If I’d gotten fired for losing, I’d have really been hurt, down . . . But I know that I did a super job.”

He was fired, as owner Norman Braman and other Eagle executives have made clear, because his was a personality that made no allowance for longevity.

Sick of the constant controversy that swirled around Ryan’s Eagles-- the charges that he set bounties on opponents’ heads; his perceived willingness to let certain players get away with practically anything; his nonstop acceptance of the credit for success--Braman simply removed him from the picture.

He was fired because in a league that worships conformity and politeness, Ryan was guilty of being himself.

“It’s Braman’s team, he can do with it what he wants,” Ryan says. “I think he made a hell of a mistake. I don’t think he realized what a great football coach he had there, what a great program we had going.

“And it’s hard to get that set up. It don’t come easy. It took a lot out of me to get the program where it was. I mean, I dedicated a lot of my life to that thing. Of course, they paid me for it. But I did the scouting, I did the drafting, I did the motivating. I did the whole damn thing.

“I’m saying ‘I,’ but it’s true.”

Ryan thinks the problem stemmed from the distance between him and Braman, who lives in Miami and only joined the team on game days.

“I think the problem between Norman and me was, I didn’t talk to Norman enough,” Ryan says. “Probably if I’d have called Norman, talked to him every day, we probably would’ve had a lot better relationship.

“Maybe he was talking to some Girl Scout in the media or the administration that tried to make him think that was the wrong direction to go. I think that’s a bunch of bull. There’s always people trying to rain on your dreams.

“(Team president) Harry Gamble interpreted what was going on. He didn’t have a clue what was going on. If I had a better liaison, I’d have been better off. Somebody who tried to steer him the right way, rather than worrying about covering their . . . .”

Ryan disagrees with the suggestion that he could have done his job in some other way.

“I couldn’t have been different,” he says. “The coaches who change when they get hired are the ones who aren’t successful. There’s two reasons why I was successful. One, I didn’t change, I was Buddy Ryan all the way. Two, I made all the decisions.”

Those public spats with the front office? His headline-grabbing feuds with Tom Landry, Don Shula and Mike Ditka?

“I never would kiss their rings,” Ryan says. “I wouldn’t bow down to them.”

That was how you show your players how to win. If he didn’t back down when he was coaching, why should he back down now?

“The thing is, any time I had a feud, or whatever they called them, it wasn’t started by Buddy Ryan, they were finished by Buddy Ryan,” he says. “Facts are facts. I mean, what am I supposed to do, roll over and take that crap? I’m not going to do that.

“You’re not going to win if your players don’t respect you. And they won’t respect you if you take that stuff lying down. You can’t expect them to come from behind and beat somebody in the last two minutes if they don’t respect you.”

Joan Ryan, Buddy’s wife, gets up from the kitchen table in their home near Lawrenceburg, 30 miles west of Lexington, answers the phone, talks a while, then happily relays the good news: for the third time in the last several weeks, the J. Ryan Farm has a winner, this time in a small stakes race near St. Louis.

After years of work, the Ryans can feel the momentum building at last.

“Things always work out for the best,” Joan Ryan says as she claps her hands, then hands the phone to her husband. “See Buddy? Always for the best. See? “

The Ryans built this 177-acre farm, as Ryan does everything he considers worthwhile, from the ground up. They keep about 15 of their younger horses here--one a son of Bet Twice--a few more in Ocala, Fla., where they have another house, and a few more scattered around the country.

Ryan, who grew up around horses in Oklahoma, bought this land in the late 1970s, when he was defensive line coach for the Minnesota Vikings. He moved to the Chicago Bears, where his defense led the team to a Super Bowl season in 1985, then took the Eagle job in 1986. But the Ryans always made time for quick trips to Kentucky to piece together the dream.

“I had a dream,” he says. “I knew what I was going to do, and I could picture it. My wife couldn’t picture it, but as we started putting it together, she could see it.

“Same way with the Eagles. I knew what we needed, I knew how to get it, I knew how we had to draft, how we had to make things work, and I did. We had a great football team in Philadelphia.”

This is the reason, he says, he can walk away from football and never look back. This is the reason he looks so relaxed, he says, so content, so, as he says with a laugh, “well rested and ready for work.”

‘I’ve got the great anticipation that you’ve got with football with my horses,” Ryan says. “Now, if I didn’t have the horses, I think I’d be missing something. But right now, all that anticipation, all that work ethic, all that void, everything is really focused on the horses.

“I go to bed every night, rather than thinking about winning a ballgame, I think about my horse, my 2-year-old filly coming on and winning. That’s taking the place of football.”

The dream might be different, but his terms, as always, are unwavering.

“Oh, I still have the desire to coach,” Ryan says. “But I can’t do it unless I get the job the way I want it. See, there’s nobody that’s going to come offer Buddy Ryan a job unless he wants to win. If he wants to win, he knows I can win.

“The owner that wants to win will say, ‘OK, this is the way it is.’ And there’s no question the way it’s got to be.”

Ryan was a finalist for the Tampa Bay job that went to Richard Williams last January, but it was said that owner Hugh Culverhouse didn’t want anybody with such a troublesome reputation leading his team.

There are not many NFL observers who think Ryan will ever coach again.

“I can’t believe that people who have made the type of money that owners make, the guys that own football teams, that have been highly successful, that they’re afraid of somebody that can do a job for them,” Ryan says.

“I mean, like (Lee) Iacocca, why would he be afraid of anybody? He’d love to have somebody sell those cars for him, wouldn’t he? All I did was come in and make the personnel decisions, make the decisions that affect the football team. I never went in trying to be a star. I just did the job.

“A coach who wins is tough to find. They’re not as rare as the Hope diamond, but they’re not rolling around in the damn street, either. I think the opportunity will present itself.”

But the chances to restructure a football team from the ground up do not come along very often. What if the opportunity never comes?

“We don’t have any timetable,” Ryan says calmly. “We’re happy right here. We’re going to be right here. This is our address. People have our phone number.

“We’re not going to be disappointed if we don’t get back into the National Football League. We’re happy right here. We were going to retire at 55, stay down here, enjoy the farm. Everything here is paid for. We never had a high lifestyle.

“As Joanie says, things happen for a reason. For me, I was going to be in Philadelphia and win a couple of Super Bowls. It didn’t work out that way. We didn’t cry about it. We’re not going to cry about it because I know I did a good job while I was there. And everybody else in the world knows that that’s got a brain.

“People are going to remember Buddy Ryan.”

His honesty, he says, is what keeps scores of his old players calling him now at the farm, keeping in touch, asking if there is anything they can do for him. Alan Page. Mike Singletary. Reggie White.

“There’s something about the fact that you’re a man, you stand up, that people stay with you,” Ryan says. “They know they can count on you in the clutch. They feel like they should check in on you. They’ve got enough pride to do that. Just go down through the Eagles and the Bears and the Vikings, too. Those people remember Buddy Ryan.”

The Eagles?

“Oh sure, the Eagles all look at themselves as my team,” he says. “No question about who put the team together and who made it what it is.”

So many other coaches, pushed out of football into the world they have never before confronted, seem diminished, lost.

Buddy Ryan, though, is different. Buddy Ryan seems more.