Failures shape Pete Carroll
RENTON — Pete Carroll is a great success because he used to be a great failure, and if that seems goofy, it’s because you’ve never been a dead man.
Carroll was hired by the New York Jets in 1994, at age 43. He was seen as a hot young talent until his first season ended, and the Jets fired him. The New England Patriots hired him three years later — still hot enough, apparently — and Carroll chalked up his failure in New York to conflict with the team’s owner. He lasted the next three seasons with the Patriots until, again, he was canned.
He spent the next year in forced exodus. He searched for answers. He solidified his coaching philosophy, and he might have even written it down, though he’s always been vague about that nomadic year.
When USC rescued him from unemployment in 2000, fans sent foaming comments to the Los Angeles Times. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this appears to be a net loss,” one fan wrote, “but then Mike Garrett is not a rocket scientist. A rocket scientist would at least make sure the rocket was pointed up, not down, before lighting the fuse.”
That was Pete Carroll: a rocket pointed in the wrong direction. Hindsight makes it easy to connect the dots. But in 2000 he hadn’t yet made USC into the most dominant team of the decade, so there was nothing irrational about calling his hiring boneheaded. Carroll’s coaching buddies and players say the Seattle version of him is no different than the New York or New England versions. It’s just that he has total freedom.
This is hard to believe, even when all the interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest it’s true. This item published in the New York Daily News in 1994 just as easily could have been written in 2014: “And here comes Pete Carroll. Now there’s a basketball hoop outside the locker room. Carroll plays three-on-threes with his staff — and with his players. That’s not very coachlike. Then again, neither is a family barbecue in the middle of training camp. Neither is a boss who plays catch with the locker-room attendants during practice. Neither is the guy who prowls the sidelines with the exuberance of High School Harry.”
Carroll, you’ll recall, caught hell after the Super Bowl last season. Somebody asked him this summer how he kept his confidence in the face of that, and his response was strange and beautiful.
“Go get fired three, four times in your life and see how you like it,” he said. “There’s a freedom that comes from that, you know? Dangerous, once you have been dead already.”
Dead. That’s the word he uses.
He didn’t change in style after his firings, but in ways that are far more abstract and important. Failure motivates, but it also paralyzes. Carroll’s failure played out in the most public arena, and no matter how secure he was, that had to be embarrassing.
As it turns out, it changed him.
The Carroll that came out the other side was stripped of fear. Even if his methods didn’t change, his resolve to do things his way and only his way did.
The late Steve Jobs, at his famed Stanford commencement speech in 2005, talked about his own encounter with failure after he was fired from Apple, the company he built.
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,” Jobs said. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
This isn’t to compare Carroll with Jobs, but to contextualize Carroll’s arc. He built a culture at USC and then in Seattle that reflected his own beliefs: embracing expectations, relishing attention, expressing individuality. Carroll’s USC teams were said to play their best in big games, and that’s because few coaches in recent memory enjoyed the spotlight more than Carroll. He was never afraid.
He brought that freedom to Seattle, but freedom rarely coexists with security. One of life’s improbable quests is achieving both, and Carroll has.
This is what makes Carroll unique — and why Seahawks players say so little changes no matter how bad the season gets. Carroll has broken the code. He has both the freedom to do things his way and the security to not look over his shoulder.
NFL veterans who have played for other coaches will tell you that’s not the norm. Coaches feel the pressure, they’re human, and that tension trickles down. It is with something close to amazement that people who have played for Carroll insist he doesn’t show unease. Not when the Seahawks were 3-3 last year and not when they’ve wobbled this season.
So, naturally, when he talks about what’s important for players, he talks about fear and freedom.
Here is how Carroll explained freedom at USC: “Think of a dancer. Dancers work and they work and they work and they master their skill — or singers — they master their skills so far that improvisation just comes flowing out of them. Their natural expression of the best they can possibly be comes out of them because there is no boundary to hold them back. If you take an authoritarian group as far as you can take them, they can go to the very top and be champions. If you take people in the other style that we’re talking about, you can take them to places where you don’t know where the top is.”
And here is Carroll discussing fear earlier in his Seahawks tenure: “Because without the confidence and belief in yourself, that’s where the uncertainty creeps in and that’s where the fear comes from. We try to get to a place where we know we’re OK and we work our tails off to try to get to that point. I try to prove it to them and orchestrate the process so they’ll understand they’re OK, so they’ll trust themselves and trust each other, so the fears of failure, the concerns of not being worthy, just drift away. … When it comes time to play, we want them not to be worried about anything.”
At the Super Bowl last year, against New England of all teams, Carroll enjoyed going back in the time machine, at one point joking about his failures, “My therapist tells me I should always talk about it and that I shouldn’t hide from it.”
It was hard to blame him for relishing his redemption.
Life is funny that way. Sometimes dead men do tell tales.