Jerry Glanville garage sale reflects a colorful life

“These are from 1980, when we (the Falcons) won the NFC West,” Glanville said, holding up a vintage brown and black pair, suitable for stepping into any big pile of victory. “The Smith family (the owners then) bought boots for everybody on the football team.

“The NFL gave me this pair, pigskins, made of NFL footballs.

“Then you got elephant skin boots. I wore those when I rode motorcycles so if you hit the dirt, the elephant skin will stay on your foot.

“I got Falcon boots made of ostrich. Brown ostrich. Black ostrich.

“This pair — Jerry Jeff Walker is a famous singer in Austin, Texas. He wears unborn-calf-skin boots, like this.”

They’re all size 9 1/2 to 10, for those of a certain size who may be interested.

Glanville is 72 now, but looks years younger thanks to a regimen of weight lifting and walking. He last coached from 2007-09 during a less than prosperous term at Portland State (9-24). He said he would coach tomorrow if he could — and an intermediary recently floated his name for a vacancy at Eastern Michigan, to no avail.

“I miss coaching every day,” he said.

“I miss racing cars every day.”

There are just two of the widely varied interests represented on the tables set up all around the lakeside house that, too, has been sold. It is a collection of hundreds of pieces of eclectic items from an eccentric career. Placing a value on each is the thorny job of a specialist brought in to stage a three-day sale.

Glanville and his wife, Brenda, are simplifying things. He sold his race shop six months ago. They are looking to move either closer to Atlanta or closer to family in Tennessee. The sale is not a matter of financial necessity, Glanville said, as much as it is an act of letting go of a lot of stuff that would just be moldering in boxes.

The sale is scheduled to run May 15-17. Full details can be found at donnadavisestatesales.com.

“Sometimes you have so many items you can’t enjoy them. We’ve been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, might as well share them,” Glanville said.

Parting with the accessories of a lifetime has not been too personally distressing, Glanville said. “May be more difficult for family members than for me,” he said. “I’ve had family members walk through and just cry the whole way, mainly because they were there for just about everything that’s on the table now. My brother looked at one table and said there’s 10 years of your life on that table. Really that’s what it is.”

There always was a complex mix of myth and substance to the Glanville story, as a coach who dressed himself in black, favored Harleys and constructed a slightly outlaw image. (Sale item: Several of the long, dark, high-plains drifter style coats he sometimes modeled at game time).

A testament to the territory that Glanville covered in his life: On one table a pair of sunglasses given him by Richard Petty rests near a gold ornament given him by M.C. Hammer, the mercurial entertainer who was a member of the menagerie that roamed the Falcons’ sidelines during Glanville’s four seasons as head coach.

And the bluster that he brought to the job can still be heard on occasion today. “No one ever had to ask us to get tougher,” he said.

He was a man born in Ohio (Sale item: Ticket stub to the 1957 Browns-Lions NFL Championship game) who dressed like a Texas oilman. (Sale items: Belt buckles the size of salad plates, heavy silver ones that bear the insignia of the teams he coached. Even one sent him by a fan, a Pony Express buckle dating to the 1880s.)

Beginning his coaching sojourn in the late 1960s at Western Kentucky, Glanville quickly climbed the career ladder: Georgia Tech assistant in 1968, bouncing to the Detroit Lions as an assistant and back to Atlanta to coach the Falcons’ Grits Blitz defense. His first year there, 1977, the team set a record for fewest points allowed in a 14-game season. (Sale item: A black-and-white photo of fans celebrating the Falcons’ first playoff victory in 1978).

When he went on to his first NFL head coaching job, with the Houston Oilers in 1986, Glanville became noted for leaving tickets for the late Elvis Presley at will call. He said he stopped doing that well before his stint as the Falcons’ head man between 1990-93. There is not the abundance of Elvis memorabilia that one might expect — just a couple of The Pelvis’ replica driver’s licenses.

At Houston, Glanville also had an assistant on his staff who is fairly active in coaching circles these days, Alabama’s Nick Saban. Glanville jokes now that maybe he showed the kid a thing or two, but, “I didn’t teach him how to smile.”

With the Falcons, Glanville performed as many of their other coaches did, losing more than he won (he was 27-37, 0-1 in postseason). But he at least did it with a unique flair. One item not for sale is the huge “California Championship Trophy” Glanville had made after the Falcons went 6-0 against that state’s teams in the 1991 season. The Falcons proudly brought it to Candlestick Park the next year before the San Francisco 49ers throttled them 55-10. The trophy never made the trip home, and is said to rest in pieces.

For a dozen years after the Falcons dismissed him, Glanville worked for HBO, CBS, and Fox as an analyst. He at the same time indulged his appetite for speed, running cars and trucks on a variety of series. He was serious about it, too, even cashing in his NFL pension, lest he die in a car and his wife be left with no benefit. He has all his old fire suits for sale, none of them singed. (Sales item: A photo of him and Dale Earnhardt running side by side during a practice session).

Over time, the souvenirs from such a long, strange trip tend to pile up. From the classic — a 2007 black Shelby Cobra, 600 horses, that looks fast just parked in Glanville’s garage. To the folksy — a larger than life portrait of him painted by a fan whose studio was his kitchen floor. The value of each item rests in the very subjective eye and the interests of the beholder.

The stories come included at no extra charge.