Dad's Boy

To get to the bottom of Denver Bronco defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, drive west of Houston for about an hour, until you run plumb out of town. Take a left onto a narrow state farm road across from the only restaurant for miles. Weave through a few miles of ranch road, past herd after herd of grazing cattle. Go over the one-lane wooden bridge and follow the dirt road to the end. Finally, with three ranch dogs nipping at your feet, walk into the metal-roofed arena where the cutting horses are being trained. Now, this is Texas.

Here a portly man wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses sits atop a sorrel horse named Mr. San Powder. He's watching a rider teach Sport Court, a 3-year-old chestnut, how to isolate a calf from the herd and keep it separate for a few minutes. This is high-stakes stuff in Texas. Sport Court is being groomed for a $600,000 competition later in the year, and on this muggy morning the horse and his rider are practicing with a single confused calf. Because the calf doesn't have a herd, Sport Court always wins.

"You put the horse out here without the other cattle so he learns to succeed," says the man in the sunglasses. "You don't want him to fail. You want him to win. So you get him some confidence first."

Wade's father, Bum Phillips, 66, pauses to spit tobacco juice. "You know," he adds, "it's like working with young players. Get 'em thinking too much, give 'em too much right away, and it confuses 'em. You've got to get 'em some confidence. You've got to train 'em right, teach 'em right. I've always said, You show me a good teacher and I'll show you a good coach. Coaching is not how much you know. It's how much you can get players to do."

Looking back, what strikes Wade's mother, Helen, most about her son is how he never minded being a nomad. Not that he had much choice. The Phillips family—Wade was born first and then came five daughters—got a new lesson in Texas geography almost every year, as Bum, then a high school and college coach, chased jobs from the Louisiana border to New Mexico. They moved from Beaumont to Nacogdoches to Nederland to College Station to Jacksonville to Amarillo to El Paso to Port Neches to Houston. "You grew up pretty fast in this family," says Helen. "Nothing ever seemed to bother Wade, not even the moves."

The most abrupt move of all came when Wade was in the ninth grade. The Phillipses were living in Amarillo at the time, and he was going to a junior high school right down the street from his house. He was getting good grades. He was playing all the sports. He had his first girlfriend. One morning, the principal sent for him, and on his way to the office, Wade looked out the window and saw a moving van in his driveway. His father, he soon learned, had quit his position at Amarillo High to take the coaching job at UTEP. Within an hour, Wade was off to El Paso, without even getting a chance to say goodbye to his girl. But he didn't protest. No tears. No anger.

"When Daddy would ask if we wanted to go to the Dairy Queen, we wouldn't want to," says Wade, half in jest. "We'd be afraid if we got in that car he'd move us again."

Bum was boss, and no one questioned him. Not even the family dog, Joe. One day, Bum took Joe with him on a trip to water the high school field. He told Joe to sit, then watered the field and went home for dinner. Sometime after dinner, Wade asked, "Where's Joe?" and Bum got a sinking feeling. They hurried back to the field, and in the gathering dusk there was Joe—still sitting.

Wade idolized his father. Indeed, the only time Bum ever took a strap to Wade was when Wade was seven and tried to shave himself with a straight razor, just like Dad. Says Wade, "Wherever we lived, everyone in town loved Dad. I realized if I wanted to see much of him, I'd have to go down to the field house."

Thus began a youth of hanging around locker rooms absorbing football knowledge from his father and other coaches. Says Bum. "Wade wasn't allowed to talk. He was allowed to listen." So that's what he did. When Wade was in the fifth grade, Bum took him to the Gator Bowl, and he heard Bear Bryant, then head coach at Texas A&M, give a pregame speech he still remembers clearly. Around that same time Wade, in his room late at night, would take 11 pennies and line them up in offensive formations and 11 nickels and line them up in defensive formations. He would figure ways for the pennies to beat the nickels, and ways for the nickels to stop the pennies.