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Saturday, January 17, 2009
Whisenhunt showed poise from his days at Tech
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Now the National Football League championship moves into the penultimate stage. And no, the Falcons are not in it, dismissed by the Arizona Cardinals, a team usually at leisure this time of year. Naturally, interest in the game between these Cardinals and the Philadelphia Eagles is not exactly a-boil in these parts because a sports fan is one whose interest is gauged by one factor: Does he have a dog in the fight, so to speak?
Naturally, Atlantans resent the Cardinals because they eliminated their Falcons, who had come to be beloved in our midst. So who cares how the Cardinals and Eagles make out in this fowl fight? If they were real birds of the feather, an eagle would always be a serious over-match for a cardinal. But let’s not be too swift to declare tepid interest, for as time has played out, our precinct does indeed have a “dog in the fight,” or in this case, a bird.
Ken Whisenhunt is in his second season coaching the Cardinals, which at first glance appeared to just what it was — a job in a desert. The Cardinals, when they resided in Chicago, haven’t reached such a peak in the NFL since the late ’40s. They beat Philadelphia — ah, yes, the Eagles — 28-21 in old Comiskey Park and became 1947 NFL champions, behind the skilled performance of a $100,000 rookie out of Georgia, Charley Trippi, who scored two touchdowns, one on a 75-yard punt return. The next season they lost the championship to the Eagles in Philadelphia 7-0 and have never had a whiff of such a lofty state until this moment.
Our interest in this crucial moment is heightened — or should be — by the fact that “our dog in the fight” is home-bred and trained. Ken Whisenhunt was born in Atlanta in 1962. True, he spent his growing-up years in Augusta, but he was back in Atlanta not long afterward. Bill Curry was the new coach at Georgia Tech, and he was attracted to any athlete who had a pulse and was breathing. Those were dismal times at Tech, and wouldn’t improve right away, by which time Whisenhunt was part of it.
“There was a kind of calmness about him that impressed you,” Curry said, “made him seem older than he was. It didn’t take much recruiting because he had been injured and missed most of the season and other coaches had lost interest.”
In his first two seasons here, Tech won just two games — but did tie Notre Dame, then No. l — in that historic game his freshman year, with Whisenhunt at quarterback. He became a tight end, and with John Dewberry at quarterback, finally beat Georgia his senior year. Then came four seasons with the Falcons, all losers and a merry-go-round of coaches. He played his last with Washington, then kind of dropped off into the obscurity that befalls assistants, then emerged as the coach directing the offense when Pittsburgh beat Seattle in the Super Bowl. You could feel then that the die was cast — he would soon be somebody’s head coach, and so it was that he wound up in Arizona.
There were those who had anticipated a better fit, for wherever the Cardinals had landed, they inevitably bedded down with defeat. Whisenhunt never wavered, through tragedy and the vagaries of adjusting to a new employ on strange ground. He is married to the daughter of the late John O’Neill (and Lucia), a former associate athletics director at Georgia Tech who died suddenly shortly after Whisenhunt was hired. There is that calmness about him, a sort of John Wayne-ish bearing, and a kind of comportment quite fitting on the Arizona desert. Something about him seems to build a wall against deterring influences.
He’ll need it this week, for the Eagles are tough as a bunch of longshoremen, and just as ill-mannered. “A pain to play against,” Whisenhunt said, and he should know. “I’ve has been directing offenses at Jim Johnson’s defenses for a long time.” On Thanksgiving Day, the Eagles ran up 48 points to the Cardinals’ 20. It’s not so much Donovan McNabb as it is the Eagles’ blitzes that Kurt Warner and his crew must engage. So, if you’re looking for a team upon which to feast your favor this weekend, I can’t recommend them personally. I would say they are the most civil, but beside that, they have a coach who was born and trained among us, and who has the look of a western kind of folk you’d prefer to have on your side in a gunfight.
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