Friday, February 04, 2005
today's papersClerical Era?By Eric UmanskyPosted Friday, Feb. 4, 2005, at 1:07 AM PT
The New York Times leads with partial vote returns in Iraq showing the main Shiite coalition with an even larger lead than expected. Meanwhile, a piece inside the Times suggests you ignore that: Only 10 percent of the vote was counted, and it's not a representative sampling. Most Sunni areas weren't included nor, more importantly, was the Kurdish north. Election officials refused to add up the numbers they released. Asked why, an official snorted, "You mean, why haven't we made it easy for you to do an analysis that we consider unsound?" The other papers heed that advice.
The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with the Senate confirming Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 60-to-36. All but six Democrats, and no Republicans, voted against him. The WP says that's the lowest support by a minority party in decades. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox and USA Today lead with Bush hitting the road to sell his Social Security plans. Forty-three of 44 Democratic senators signed a letter saying his proposal would blow a big hole in the budget and thus is "immoral, unacceptable, and unsustainable." (The holdout: Sen. Ben Nelson.) The Journal says the White House is "quietly assembling a coalition of allies—most notably many Wall Street firms," who will raise an estimated $35 million to push the plan. Meanwhile, another powerful Republican rep, this one in charge of the subcommittee that oversees Social Security, said the president's plan is probably DOA.
Insurgent attacks picked up again in Iraq yesterday. An ambush west of Baghdad left two police dead and, says the NYT, 36 missing. Two Marines were also killed in the separate attacks in the Anbar province. The Post says another dozen civilians were killed in assorted attacks, some reportedly targeted for having voted.
The WP fronts the Pentagon saying it will send about 15,000 GIs home, bringing the troop level to 135,000, the same as it was before the election ramp-up.
USAT fronts and others mention SecDef Rumsfeld telling Larry King yesterday that he submitted his resignation—twice—when the Abu Ghraib abuses broke, but the president told him to stick around.
Everybody mentions Pentagon officials acknowledging that most Iraqi troops aren't fully trained—and that about 40 percent of them often don't show up for work.
In yesterday's Post, reporter Jonathan Weisman said the president's privatization plan envisages benefits being decreased by the amount taken out for market accounts plus 3 percent interest. In other words, one (Democratic-leaning) analyst told Weisman, "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan." Weisman does a row back today, saying the paper "incorrectly reported Thursday that the balance of a worker's personal account would be reduced by the worker's total annual contributions plus 3 percent interest." But he also says, "Workers who opt for the accounts would lose a proportionate share of their guaranteed payment from Social Security, plus interest equal to the amount that money would have earned if the government had invested it in Treasury bonds. They would recoup those lost benefits through their accounts if their investments realized a return equal to or greater than the 3 percent." This all makes TP very sleepy. But is there a substantive difference between the two scenarios?
While the Post's coverage is confusing, the NYT's is simply lacking. It buttonholes the young, the old, and the middle-aged. Who's missing: independent-minded experts dissecting the plan. And no, former Kerry advisers don't qualify.
The NYT and WP front the independent investigation of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program finding evidence that the bureaucrat who was in charge appears to have been on the take and lied about it to investigators. The Financial Times says former U.N. chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali also seems to be implicated.
The NYT fronts, and others note more gently, that a day after President Bush said the U.S. is "working with European allies" to keep Iran nukes-free, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. won't work with European allies on their plan to offer carrots to Tehran. She also described Iran's human-rights record as "something to be loathed," apparently the kind of rhetoric Europeans don't find helpful.
The papers go inside with an internal EPA report saying the agency, as the Post puts it, "ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols" in order to come up with a mercury proposal to the White House's liking. The administration accused the author, an apparent Democrat, of being partisan. But the Post gets corroboration from a few EPA employees. "Everything about this rule was decided at a political level," said one.
The NYT says inside the administration announced plans to consolidate and cut by about a third community development grants, currently worth about $6 billion annually. The administration said it's just cutting some "overlap," while the paper quotes Democrats going bananas, with one saying, "It would be more honest if the federal government simply said, 'We don't care about these poor people.'" And again, what the paper doesn't do is offer adjudicating facts or quotes from a solid observer.
The LAT says mortgage lender Ameriquest, which fancies itself the cream of the crop, appears to be a bit of a boiler room, where employees said "they forged documents, hyped customers' creditworthiness and 'juiced' mortgages with hidden rates and fees."
In a NYT op-ed, two writers talk about what they learned during an investigation of medical practices at Abu Ghraib: "The hospital lacked basic supplies, according to members of the clinical staff, and at times it maintained a surgical service without surgeons. Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization." The shortages may help explain, though not excuse, that photo of a leashed prisoner:
[A] doctor, Maj. David Auch, told us that some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were psychotic and out of control. One, he said, would repeatedly strip off his clothes and smash his head against the wall. After handcuffs and a helmet failed to stop him and with straitjackets unavailable, some soldiers suggested the leash. Major Auch granted their request.
The soldiers who snapped and posed for the photos of abuse are being called to account. But the focus on their culpability diverts attention from the causal relationship between the Pentagon's priorities and the hellish conditions that both prisoners and their captors endured. This larger story, of conditions that ensured neglect and invited cruelty, is being ignored.Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113152/
The New York Times leads with partial vote returns in Iraq showing the main Shiite coalition with an even larger lead than expected. Meanwhile, a piece inside the Times suggests you ignore that: Only 10 percent of the vote was counted, and it's not a representative sampling. Most Sunni areas weren't included nor, more importantly, was the Kurdish north. Election officials refused to add up the numbers they released. Asked why, an official snorted, "You mean, why haven't we made it easy for you to do an analysis that we consider unsound?" The other papers heed that advice.
The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with the Senate confirming Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, 60-to-36. All but six Democrats, and no Republicans, voted against him. The WP says that's the lowest support by a minority party in decades. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox and USA Today lead with Bush hitting the road to sell his Social Security plans. Forty-three of 44 Democratic senators signed a letter saying his proposal would blow a big hole in the budget and thus is "immoral, unacceptable, and unsustainable." (The holdout: Sen. Ben Nelson.) The Journal says the White House is "quietly assembling a coalition of allies—most notably many Wall Street firms," who will raise an estimated $35 million to push the plan. Meanwhile, another powerful Republican rep, this one in charge of the subcommittee that oversees Social Security, said the president's plan is probably DOA.
Insurgent attacks picked up again in Iraq yesterday. An ambush west of Baghdad left two police dead and, says the NYT, 36 missing. Two Marines were also killed in the separate attacks in the Anbar province. The Post says another dozen civilians were killed in assorted attacks, some reportedly targeted for having voted.
The WP fronts the Pentagon saying it will send about 15,000 GIs home, bringing the troop level to 135,000, the same as it was before the election ramp-up.
USAT fronts and others mention SecDef Rumsfeld telling Larry King yesterday that he submitted his resignation—twice—when the Abu Ghraib abuses broke, but the president told him to stick around.
Everybody mentions Pentagon officials acknowledging that most Iraqi troops aren't fully trained—and that about 40 percent of them often don't show up for work.
In yesterday's Post, reporter Jonathan Weisman said the president's privatization plan envisages benefits being decreased by the amount taken out for market accounts plus 3 percent interest. In other words, one (Democratic-leaning) analyst told Weisman, "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan." Weisman does a row back today, saying the paper "incorrectly reported Thursday that the balance of a worker's personal account would be reduced by the worker's total annual contributions plus 3 percent interest." But he also says, "Workers who opt for the accounts would lose a proportionate share of their guaranteed payment from Social Security, plus interest equal to the amount that money would have earned if the government had invested it in Treasury bonds. They would recoup those lost benefits through their accounts if their investments realized a return equal to or greater than the 3 percent." This all makes TP very sleepy. But is there a substantive difference between the two scenarios?
While the Post's coverage is confusing, the NYT's is simply lacking. It buttonholes the young, the old, and the middle-aged. Who's missing: independent-minded experts dissecting the plan. And no, former Kerry advisers don't qualify.
The NYT and WP front the independent investigation of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program finding evidence that the bureaucrat who was in charge appears to have been on the take and lied about it to investigators. The Financial Times says former U.N. chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali also seems to be implicated.
The NYT fronts, and others note more gently, that a day after President Bush said the U.S. is "working with European allies" to keep Iran nukes-free, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. won't work with European allies on their plan to offer carrots to Tehran. She also described Iran's human-rights record as "something to be loathed," apparently the kind of rhetoric Europeans don't find helpful.
The papers go inside with an internal EPA report saying the agency, as the Post puts it, "ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols" in order to come up with a mercury proposal to the White House's liking. The administration accused the author, an apparent Democrat, of being partisan. But the Post gets corroboration from a few EPA employees. "Everything about this rule was decided at a political level," said one.
The NYT says inside the administration announced plans to consolidate and cut by about a third community development grants, currently worth about $6 billion annually. The administration said it's just cutting some "overlap," while the paper quotes Democrats going bananas, with one saying, "It would be more honest if the federal government simply said, 'We don't care about these poor people.'" And again, what the paper doesn't do is offer adjudicating facts or quotes from a solid observer.
The LAT says mortgage lender Ameriquest, which fancies itself the cream of the crop, appears to be a bit of a boiler room, where employees said "they forged documents, hyped customers' creditworthiness and 'juiced' mortgages with hidden rates and fees."
In a NYT op-ed, two writers talk about what they learned during an investigation of medical practices at Abu Ghraib: "The hospital lacked basic supplies, according to members of the clinical staff, and at times it maintained a surgical service without surgeons. Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization." The shortages may help explain, though not excuse, that photo of a leashed prisoner:
[A] doctor, Maj. David Auch, told us that some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were psychotic and out of control. One, he said, would repeatedly strip off his clothes and smash his head against the wall. After handcuffs and a helmet failed to stop him and with straitjackets unavailable, some soldiers suggested the leash. Major Auch granted their request.
The soldiers who snapped and posed for the photos of abuse are being called to account. But the focus on their culpability diverts attention from the causal relationship between the Pentagon's priorities and the hellish conditions that both prisoners and their captors endured. This larger story, of conditions that ensured neglect and invited cruelty, is being ignored.Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113152/
PHILIP JOHNSON died last week without ever having seen Yoshio Taniguchi's completed expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. Confined to his Connecticut estate, he was too frail to travel to the museum's opening event and had stopped offering ideas to the Modern's curators. But the architect's presence still haunts the museum. Whatever you thought of Johnson's aesthetic agenda or impish charm, he never lacked a strong point of view. And it is hard to imagine that Johnson, the founding director of the Modern's department of architecture and design, would have been much impressed by the reinstallation of the department's main galleries more than 60 years after he organized its inaugural show in the museum's old Fifth Avenue home. Under his guidance, the department's early exhibitions on architecture and industrial design not only marked significant shifts in architectural thought, but also made the museum the nation's most powerful platform for changing the way Americans viewed design. That role continued through the 1960's and the museum's publication of Robert Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," the first sign that cracks were appearing in the Modernist narrative. The new installation, by comparison, is unlikely to burn a hole in our memories. Nor is it likely to shake up our view of the world. Tucked away on the third floor of Mr. Taniguchi's elegant monument to classical Modernism, it is a surprisingly lifeless mix of design objects, often-superb drawings and architectural models. The bulk of the installation feels haphazard and lackluster; when it strives for a little originality, it stumbles. Even more deflating is the general sense of complacency. Whether because of a loss of imagination or the distraction of a high-profile $858 million building project, the department was already losing momentum before the museum closed for renovation five years ago. The reopening of the architecture and design galleries was an opportunity to reclaim, even trumpet, the museum's role in shaping the conversation about architecture. Instead, the department has limited itself to passively documenting current architectural trends. The biggest disappointment is the south gallery, which focuses on the museum's collection of architectural drawings and models. A scaled-down version of the Modern's "Envisioning Architecture" show, which first traveled to Frankfurt in 2003, it includes a handful of well-known masterworks by early Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier - including the famous charcoal and graphite drawing of Mies's soaring 1921 Friedrichstrasse skyscraper proposal in Berlin, which looks as fresh today as any of the drawings in the collection. From there, the show skips along most of the fashionable architectural movements of the ensuing decades, putting particular emphasis on the theoretical works of the 1960's and 70's, like Ron Herron's 1966 "Walking City," which evokes a gigantic mechanized beast, and Superstudio's 1969 Continuous Monument project, an infinite building of mirrored glass. That sequence is punctuated by designs from the profession's current big guns, including a stunning painting of the dynamic, splintered forms of the Peak, an unbuilt 1983 design for a country club in Hong Kong by Zaha Hadid of London. Over all, the drawings are first rate, but the point is lost. The layout rarely veers from a mainstream view of architectural history, or serves up the kind of surprises that might have breathed life into the show. You get the impression that the curators were more intent on being inclusive than on telling a compelling story. In its unapologetic worship of machines, a 1992 airbrush and ink drawing by Neil Denari of Los Angeles, for example, seems almost a reactionary echo of 1960's fantasies by Archigram, but the installation never nods to that. Instead, the drawing hangs near a small sketch by Frank Gehry and another by Greg Lynn, one of the profession's most promising young talents. The drawings have no meaningful relationship to each other that I could discern, other than the fact that all three architects are based in Los Angeles. The few unexpected moments, on the other hand, are a bit baffling. It's hard to imagine what two large watercolor, graphite and ink drawings by Lauretta Vinciarelli are doing there. The compositions, layers of luminous orange and brown planes, seem out of place and fail to measure up to the other work. And they hint at a conversation between art and architecture that is never really explored. (By contrast, check out the second-floor contemporary art galleries, where a series of drawings for Rem Koolhaas's "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture," a theoretical work from 1972, and a 1973 film of a performance piece by Joan Jonas capture that era's distrust of an older generation's visions of utopia.) The design galleries are not much better, although there's a treat or two: to get there, for example, you cross a narrow bridge past the sprightly buglike form of the 1945 Bell-47D1 helicopter, one of the most beloved objects in the old Modern. And a lovely narrow space with an enormous window overlooking the sculpture garden gives you the sensation that you are floating in Midtown Manhattan. That space is dominated by the luscious red enamel body of the Modern's 1943 Cisitalia 202 GT sports car; nearby is the recently acquired flip-panel departure board from the Milan airport and a sensuously curved titanium-edged airplane blade by General Electric. These objects, all masterpieces of industrial design, support a vision that could have been conjured by an old hard-core Modernist but updated for the computer age. Deftly arranged, these works have just enough room to breathe; you see them with a clarity that is sharpened by their context, just as you would expect in a thoughtful museum exhibit. But the moment doesn't last. The rest of the design galleries are so cluttered with trinkets that they soon become exhausting. A cluster of objects - among them Fernando and Humberto Campana's 1993 knotted red-cord armchair, Shiro Kuramata's transparent 1988 acrylic chair, a rubber wet suit and a plastic wastepaper basket - are planted on an oval plastic display platform in the middle of a room. There's more: a Swatch watch, a 1992 Ingo Maurer lamp with goose feather wings, an Apple keyboard, a robotic dog, and classics like a Marcel Breuer chair, a 1950's Charles and Ray Eames storage unit and an inflatable armchair from the 1960's. The feel is that of a high-end furniture and design showroom like the MoMA Design Store itself across the street, where many of these objects are for sale. Taking its cue from the retail world, the objects in the installation are tightly packed together, as if the aim was to offer consumers a wealth of choices rather than draw them into an atmosphere of contemplation. It's as if you have entered a storehouse for the irredeemably trendy. It's hardly surprising. To cater to status-conscious consumers, stores like MoMA Design, Vitra or Moss have long designed their showrooms to resemble museum spaces. Blurring the boundaries between art and commerce helps justify a high price tag. Unfortunately, it has also had the effect of giving museum exhibitions the feel of shop displays. (Although Moss and Vitra allow you to browse without paying a $20 admission.) If the gallery installations are flawed, however, they are also a symptom of a deeper problem at the Modern: its lack of leadership. Under Terence Riley, the department created a number of memorable shows in the 1990's, among them important retrospectives of the works of the New York-based Bernard Tschumi and the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and the "Un-Private House" show. Since then, the department seems to have settled into inertia. It produced an exhaustively researched retrospective of Mies's Berlin works in 2001 and the more recent "Tall Buildings" show at MoMA QNS. But neither show generated the energy of Mr. Riley's earlier efforts or focused on the corners of the profession where new ideas tend to flourish. With the exception of its current self-serving exhibition of Mr. Taniguchi's museum designs, for example, the department has not organized a major show on the work of a rising talent since the Koolhaas show in 1994. Worse, that torpor has coincided with a decline in the quality of architectural exhibitions in general. The popularity of high-end architecture and design has led to a boom in second-rate shows organized by curators with little scholarly background or critical detachment. Even at serious museums, such exhibitions are often sloppy and superficial. Typical is the recent "Glamour" show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - a checklist of vintage clothes and postwar and contemporary architectural landmarks that could have been more intelligently thrown together by the editors of Vogue. It would be impossible today, of course, to recapture the sense of mission that fueled the old Modern. And why would we try? Johnson was born into a world that still believed in the notion of revolutionary progress, aesthetic or otherwise. It was that faith that spurred him to promote everything from the International Style to Postmodernism with the zeal of a true believer. Architecture, thankfully, no longer has a dominant center - the age of dogmas and manifestos is gone. Even so, Johnson's best shows always managed to convey a sense of urgency. The Modern has lost that sense of purpose. Surely curators know that "good taste" is not enough to give coherence to an all-important installation, let alone to turn an audience on. The museum needs to find a bolder mission than defining who or what constitutes the mainstream. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The Patriots' Rodney Harrison and the Eagles' Brian Dawkins are the hard-hitting, often-fined leaders of their secondaries. They are also big fans of each other.
February 5, 2005
With These Safeties on the Loose, Receivers Tread at Their PerilBy DAMON HACK
ACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 4 - Brian Dawkins once visited the headquarters of Marvel Comics in New York so artists could dream up what he might look like as a member of the X-Men.
They rendered Dawkins, a safety with the Philadelphia Eagles, with the body of Wolverine, three blades exploding from each set of knuckles and puncturing a pair of footballs. At his feet lay a dozen more balls, impaled and emitting smoke that seemed to curl into wings above him.
"I take the field," Dawkins said this week, "with a warrior's mentality," a notion that his counterpart, New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison, endorses.
If there were one player in the N.F.L. to put on a pedestal or to receive an autograph from, "It would be Brian Dawkins," Harrison said.
No players on the field for Super Bowl XXXIX at Alltel Stadium on Sunday will set the physical tenor of the game more than Harrison and Dawkins, whose brutal styles have left a trail of fallen bodies behind them.
Separated by two conferences but joined by the pleasure they share in knocking a receiver to the turf, Dawkins and Harrison have grown up together.
They entered the league two years apart but soon were spying each other on television, Harrison a big thumper first with the San Diego Chargers and now the Patriots, Dawkins the hard-hitting soul of the Eagles.
"He's a crazy man," Dawkins said of Harrison. "I love the way he plays the game."
This season, Dawkins, 31, and Harrison, 32, the premier safeties in the N.F.L. over the past decade, have had to guide young defensive-back units through rough patches to reach this moment.
Dawkins, who was born in Jacksonville, has been credited with mentoring safety Michael Lewis and cornerback Lito Sheppard (also from Jacksonville), who each made his first Pro Bowl. Cornerback Sheldon Brown perhaps could have made the Pro Bowl, too.
Like the Patriots, the Eagles have been smart salary-cap managers, occasionally jettisoning relatively expensive players near the height of their powers instead of on a decline.
When Philadelphia did not re-sign the veteran cornerbacks Bobby Taylor and Troy Vincent after the 2003 season, the secondary was expected to suffer. Instead, it has continued its tradition of ball hawking and helmet knocking, led always by Dawkins.
"Of course, Dawk is the leader of this group, but myself, Lito and Mike all want to outdo each other," Brown said. "That's just the bottom line. We are competitive."
The deference to Dawkins, who has appeared in more games (125) as an Eagle than any player on the roster, is more than just talk. Dawkins's tackles sometimes echo through the stadium, inspiring his secondary to further mayhem.
Dawkins was fined $50,000 in 2002 for misusing his helmet on a hit that dislocated the shoulder of Giants wide receiver Ike Hilliard.
Such hits inspire teammates, according to Lewis. "When you see a fellow safety hit someone and the air comes out, it's huge for me," Lewis said. "To lay somebody out makes you want to lay somebody out."
Dawkins, who is 6 feet and 200 pounds, understands how his intensity crackles through the Eagles' defense but also how Harrison's moxie provides a compass for New England.
At 6-1 and 220 pounds, Harrison moves around the field with the edict to inflict pain. Dawkins has watched, at times in awe.
"Almost every play, you see him getting into it with somebody, some kind of altercation," Dawkins said with respect. "He's always been that way. When he takes the field, you make sure you know where he is because he is either going to hit you, or he's going to tell you where he is."
Harrison, whose play has helped ease the loss of the injured cornerbacks Ty Law and Tyrone Poole, intercepted a Ben Roethlisberger pass and returned it 87 yards for a touchdown in the American Football Conference championship game. But his reputation comes from how he uses his helmet and shoulder pads.
"I think any time you send a message, sometimes people listen and sometimes they don't," Harrison said. "It just depends on how hard you send the message."
Eagles receiver Freddie Mitchell, the loose-lipped, part-time Hollywood showman, dared to jab Harrison verbally during an ESPN interview leading up to the Super Bowl, saying he "had something" for Harrison, perhaps hinting that he could take Harrison's punches and dish out some of his own.
Mitchell did not back off his statements. Harrison said Mitchell was probably joking, then guessed that Mitchell might have been drinking and finally decided that Mitchell was a jerk.
Dawkins said Mitchell erred in tweaking Harrison.
"You get in trouble saying things like that," Dawkins said. "That's why it's better to just keep it clean."
Like Dawkins, Harrison has been known to catch the eye of the league officials who hand out fines for excessively brutal hits. Harrison said this week that he had probably been fined about $350,000 "after taxes" in his career.
"They FedEx you an envelope," Harrison said. "I just got fined $7,500 last week. They said I ripped off Hines Ward's face mask, his helmet or something. I don't even challenge them now. I just throw them in the garbage."
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The Patriots' Rodney Harrison and the Eagles' Brian Dawkins are the hard-hitting, often-fined leaders of their secondaries. They are also big fans of each other.
Andy Reid, during this year's N.F.C. title game, helped the Eagles reach the Super Bowl in his sixth season at the helm.
February 4, 2005
Eagles' Reid Is More Than Meets the EyeBy LEE JENKINS
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Feb. 3 - Somewhere in the middle of all those sweatsuits and stopwatches, all those buzz cuts and bullhorns, is a football coach who writes poems, paints portraits and can restore a classic car.
Philadelphia Coach Andy Reid should be easy to find, even in the crowd of coaches that has descended here for Super Bowl week, because he weighs about 300 pounds and is usually surrounded by colleagues who are laughing at his string of self-deprecating fat jokes. He likes to say that if a chili burger is placed under his nose, he can identify the chain that produced it simply by its scent.
Reid developed his taste for chili burgers growing up off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and eating at Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers. He honed his subtle comedic timing serving meals backstage at the "Tonight" show. He learned how to use a paintbrush and write in verse from his father, Walter, an artist who created sets for movies, musicals and plays.
But even at 300 pounds, even with chili on his mouth and a personal diary in his hands, Reid is difficult to spot. At Super Bowl media day, Reid sat low in a makeshift throne, gripping both sides of a lectern, scowling at no one in particular and speaking so softly that Terrell Owens, even at some 20 yards away, managed to drown him out.
He made no mention of paintings or poetry, Tommy's Burger or the "Tonight" show. Asked about Los Angeles, he said, "I have a lot of memories." Asked about his other interests, he said, "You have to budget your time and take care of your business." Asked about the journals he keeps, he said, "It's worked good in a couple of cases when you can go back and look at a couple of things as references." Even next to New England Coach Bill Belichick, hardly a standup act, Reid could have put a classroom of kindergartners to sleep.
While most players and coaches use Super Bowl week to enhance their profiles, Reid has shown the world no more than he has already shown Philadelphia, hiding behind his bushy red mustache and his ubiquitous index cards. That this 300-pound poet/painter/tactician can come across as the most boring man in football is exactly what makes him one of the most intriguing.
The 1928 Ford Model A that sits in Reid's garage serves as the symbol for just about every philosophy he has ever had. When Walter died, he left his son the Ford that he had bought for $25 and driven for nearly 50 years. To resuscitate it, Reid needed to formulate an extensive plan requiring time and patience. He had to follow instructions, but he also had to trust his creative instincts. He went about his business quietly but passionately. One year later, he had taken the car completely apart and put it back together again.
"I saw that car before he started and I thought it should be in a junkyard," said Marty Mornhinweg, the Eagles' assistant head coach, who has been with Reid on three coaching staffs. "What he did with it is amazing. I know the perception of Andy is that he is a little stoic. But he's also incredibly worldly. Most people don't know that about him. I think he hides it on purpose."
At Glendale Community College in California, Reid started on the offensive line, but he was best known as the beefiest place-kicker in team history. When he transferred to Brigham Young University, he protected quarterback Jim McMahon. While at B.Y.U., he learned about the Mormon Church, and he later converted.
"He was never your typical jock," said Jim Sartoris, the athletic director at Glendale Community College, who coached Reid on the college's football team. "He was never flamboyant, never said too much. He was just very intellectual and extremely meticulous about every little thing."
For much of his college career, Reid thought more about writing than coaching. He was a part-time sports columnist for The Provo Daily Herald, studied the work of the former Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray and dreamed of writing for Sports Illustrated. He liked talking about other athletes more than himself. He liked seeing his name in print, but only at the top of articles.
"I know him best as a football junkie who would always beat you to the office in the morning and always stay later than anybody else at night," said Dirk Koetter, the Arizona State head coach, who worked with Reid at three colleges. "But I also know that there are many sides to Andy Reid."
Reid was a coach even if he did not necessarily yearn to be one. He would report to the football offices at B.Y.U. by 4 a.m. and either leave after midnight or sleep on the couch. When instructing offensive linemen, he would tell them to control their "three-foot by three-foot box." He mapped out his schedule every day on index cards and littered the campus with them.
"He was always on the cutting edge, always inventing new techniques, never leaving anything to chance," said Bob Stull, the athletic director at the University of Texas-El Paso, who hired Reid when he was the university's football coach. "The way Andy prepared, he never left a detail uncovered."
When Reid interviewed with Stull, he talked for 45 minutes about how a guard should position his hands while pass blocking. At one point, the other assistants in the room started giggling. When Reid interviewed to become the head coach in Philadelphia, he used a similar tack, explaining to the owner, Jeffrey Lurie, every detail of the art of long snapping. Lurie did not laugh once.
"He has intellectual capital with no ego," Lurie said. "He is comfortable with himself. He's not paranoid or worried about what others think. He's genuine and people follow that."
Lurie hired Reid even though he was just a quarterbacks coach in Green Bay who had the plush assignment of working with Brett Favre and shadowing Mike Holmgren. As the story goes, Holmgren once threw away a binder filled with schedules and diagrams, only to have Reid dig it out of the trash can and copy some of its contents.
At his first news conference in Philadelphia, Reid pleaded with the fan base to "hang with me." He opened his first training camp with what he called "three days of hell." He wrote an agenda for the future, known as The Plan, then made players read it and take detailed notes on how they were going to realize it.
The Eagles started calling their coach "Big Red," joked about his dry pregame speeches and wondered if he could handle such a demanding sports city. When Reid wanted to open up, he wrote in the personal journal that he has kept since he was a teenager. When he wanted to convey his feelings to his family, he wrote poems.
In the Reid house, everyone is expected to create. All five children have to play a musical instrument until they are at least 18. Reid builds cabinets and cupboards, cooks family dinners and still commemorates each birthday or holiday with a poem. When the kids were younger, he went outside while they were sleeping on Christmas Eve and threw pebbles on the roof to make them think reindeer were coming.
"He laughs all the time," his wife, Tammy, told The Philadelphia Inquirer this season. "But this is a business and he has to keep it a business at work. I always say, 'If he'd cut loose, oh my gosh, these people would die.' "
If Reid does have a lighter side, he has not felt the luxury to show it. He went 5-11 his first season with the Eagles and no worse than 11-5 in his next five, but he never made the Super Bowl until this season. When he came to Jacksonville this week, it seemed like an overdue opportunity to open that journal and share some pieces of his past. But Reid has apparently found The Plan that works for him, and it is doubtful he will ever deviate.
Players rarely give Reid an impassioned endorsement, but they do hail his honesty, respect his conviction, and say that he has scored a few cool points recently. Tight end L. J. Smith said of his coach, "I haven't even got yelled at this year." Linebacker Jeremiah Trotter said, "I've looked at him in a whole new light." And receiver Freddie Mitchell said, "He's actually pretty chill."
There may be no two people in the N.F.L. more different than Reid and Owens, but this season, Reid promised to appear in Spandex tights if Owens caught 15 touchdown passes. When Owens fractured his right fibula on Dec. 19, still stuck on 14 touchdowns, Reid and his thighs seemed safe. But this week, Owens said he would play in the Super Bowl and mentioned that he had packed a postgame outfit for Reid.
"Believe me, I brought those tights," Owens said. "A black pair and a white pair."
That's about as much as any coach can be expected to reveal of himself.
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