The blunt lessons son learned from father hardened him for the top rung of the NFL.
This week, Pettine Jr.’s Father’s Day gift is sharing the Browns’ three-day mini-camp with his tough-love father.
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Junior consults Senior on football matters frequently. The two broke down practice film together Wednesday morning. Even when Senior is not at the Browns’ training facility, he’s often on his iPad watching practice tape.
“Of the nine or 10 issues we have in practice,” Browns defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil says of the elder Pettine, “he finds at least nine.”
It’s like two Mike Pettines for the price of one.
O’Neil also played for Senior at Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown, Pa. That’s where Senior compiled a 326-42-4 overall record between 1967 and 1999, winning four state championships and capturing national attention, including as the subject of the documentary The Last Game about his final game there.
“My father is very much the voice of reason,” Pettine Jr. said. “And for the most part, what he says is right.”
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Father and son sat down with USA TODAY Sports this week in Junior’s office, finishing one another’s stories with familial ease. Truth is, things weren’t always so easy between them. They tell about one overheated August day 32 years ago when Junior almost quit the sport.
There was a teachers strike at the time, and Senior shouted instructions from behind a picket-line fence as players ran their own preseason practice. Senior demanded his son, who was also the quarterback, lead the team in a demeaning duck walk. Junior squatted step by step in the heat until he boiled over and marched off the field, dropping equipment piece by piece every 10 yards — helmet, jersey, shoulder pads — in a sort of striptease of protest.
“It just got to the point where I said, ‘That’s it,’ ” Junior says. “I was almost down to nothing. By the time I got to the other end of the field, luckily a teammate tackled me and said, ‘You’re not going to quit on us.’ ”
They laugh about it now. But Junior says the most vexing football riddle he ever had to solve was Senior — deciphering where old-school coach ended and supportive father began.
“That’s when I knew I had to change my approach,” Pettine Sr. says.
Conversations between the two can still get heated, O’Neil says, no different than their high school days. They were not allowed to take their arguments home when Junior was in high school.
“My mom finally said, ‘That’s enough,’ ” Junior says. “She kicked us out of the house and said, ‘Either football goes, or I go.’
“My dad was smart. He stopped on the way home from practice, and he and I would have it out in an elementary school parking lot.”
Managing Manziel
Eleven years ago, Pettine, Jr. left his head coaching job at North Penn High School in Lansdale, Pa. — where he went 45-15, including 0-5 against his father — to join the Baltimore Ravens as a video operations assistant, cashing in his 401(k) to cover the $30,000 pay cut.
With the Ravens, Pettine hit it off with another famous coach’s son, Rex Ryan (son of Buddy), who would later hire Junior as his defensive coordinator for the New York Jets from 2009-2012. The Buffalo Bills hired Pettine in 2013, and his attacking unit set franchise records with 57 sacks and 23 interceptions.
Now he is tasked with resurrecting the serially disappointing Browns, who have one playoff appearance — a loss, naturally — since their 1999 rebirth.
How good can Pettine’s Browns be?
“My dad and I are realists: It’s a good story, but it comes down to wins and losses,” Pettine Jr. says. “We’ve changed the culture. And I know we have people in Cleveland cautiously optimistic about the fall. But this team is nothing if we’re not winning.
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“We’re not going to carry the weight of history.”
And what of the weight of Johnny Manziel mania?
“People say now, ‘Isn’t this whole Manziel mania bothering him?’ ” Pettine Sr. says. “He’s been in enough situations where it doesn’t seem to faze him.”
Pettine Jr., 47, faced widespread criticism for banning national media from the Browns’ rookie minicamp, perceived as an attempt to shelter Manziel. Last weekend his celebrity quarterback was captured drinking from a bottle lounging across an inflatable swan at a Texas nightclub.
When Pettine Jr. meets with reporters, he is often asked about Manziel’s latest social media images.
Manziel said last month he would “live life to the fullest,” and Pettine Jr. says he will not micro-manage any of his Browns.
“He didn’t need to tell me every time he’s going out of town,” Pettine Jr. says. “I joked with Johnny and said, ‘I’ll find out soon enough.’ ”
‘The Family Business’
The instinct to embrace players as family appears to have rubbed off from father to son.
Three Browns coaches played for Pettine Sr. — Pettine Jr., O’Neil and linebackers coach Chuck Driesbach, whom Pettine Jr. hired in January after he was fired by the Bills without explanation.
Driesbach recalls how Senior rescued him when he was a defensive end at Central Bucks West in the early 1970s.
“He found out I ran away from home the winter of my senior year and was sleeping in the War Memorial (Field) press box,” Driesbach says of the stadium in town. “He was like a father to me. And I had a father, who had no interest in sports.”
Pettine Sr., 74, later helped Driesbach land a scholarship to Fork Union (Va.) Military Academy for a postgraduate year before he spent three seasons as a receiver at Villanova. After college, Driesbach began 37 years as a coach.
“If it wasn’t for Senior, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now,” says Driesbach, who got Junior his 1993 coaching start, as a University of Pittsburgh graduate assistant. “Senior directed me in my life in the areas I needed to be directed.”
Pettine Jr.’s son Ryan turns 17 on Father’s Day. Unlike his father and grandfather, Ryan is not planning a career in football.
“Ryan calls it ‘the family business,’ ” Pettine Jr. says. “He didn’t want to get involved.”
The same goes for his name. Ryan’s first name is Michael, but he prefers to go by his middle name. That pains his grandfather, who sometimes tells Pettine Jr., ” ‘You named him Michael, call him that.’ ”
“We wanted to keep the line of Michaels going,” Junior says.
North Penn coach Dick Beck played one season with Pettine Jr. under Pettine Sr. at Central Bucks West.
“Mike isn’t near as hard (on Ryan) as Senior was on Mike Jr.,” Beck says. “Senior has said to me he would have taken it a little bit easier on (Junior, given another chance), but not too much.”
Pettine Jr., who also has two daughters, hasn’t given up all hope Ryan might one day get into coaching. But he says his son is smart enough to do whatever he wants in life.
And he has never asked Ryan to do a duck walk.