His due
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CLEMSON -- Normally, Terry Don Phillips is too nervous to watch the games live. He wakes up the next day, his wife tells him the result, and he watches the replay on DVR somewhat comforted by knowing who won. That's the routine.
After midnight a week ago, though, after the ball settled into Hunter Renfrow's grasp with 59 minutes and 59 seconds gone, Tricia Phillips decided to break protocol. She ran upstairs in their Seneca home, shook her husband awake and told him he had to watch this live.
So as they sat in front of the television and witnessed the uproarious celebration of the national title, the vanquishing of mighty Alabama, eventually the microphone went to Dabo Swinney and he celebrated the man who hired him. Then husband and wife were so excited that they decided to watch the entire game and didn't get to bed until around 5 AM.
"Ended up staying up pretty much all night," Phillips said. "You couldn't lay down and not think about it."
Five days later, Clemson fans made a pilgrimage to the small college town to celebrate the coach and the team that brought so much joy -- more joy than there had been in these parts in 35 years. But a story about the present quickly became a story about the past when Swinney, once in the stadium in front of that vast sea of orange and purple, stepped from the stage and went directly from Point A to Point TDP.
Anyone who saw their long embrace would have to agree it was the most indelible, powerful moment of the day. A coach at the peak of his profession paying an emotional tribute to the man who had the guts and the vision to believe in him when almost no one else did. Phillips' wife captured the moment with the photo that accompanies this article.
"When you walk through some rough waters with someone, you either like the person you're walking with or you don't," Phillips said later yesterday during a phone conversation with Tigerillustrated.com. "I think he knows what side of the line I was on."
When Phillips made the decision to step away in August of 2012, Clemson football hadn't achieved enough to bring celebration of his retirement. Yes, the Tigers had won the ACC in 2011 for the first time in forever. But they were also a few months removed from a 70-33 Orange Bowl debacle against West Virginia that was supposed to inflict devastating repercussions. Let's put it this way: Had they arranged for a parade to celebrate that season, that January five years ago, you could've fit everyone into Loose Change with some room to spare.
The jury was still out on Swinney at that point. Thus, the jury was still out on Phillips and the highly unconventional decisions he made in 2008 -- one to promote a receivers coach to interim head coach after Tommy Bowden's mid-October departure, and the next to give him the job for good after he went 4-2 with not one of the wins coming over a team that would finish ranked.
Maybe Gary Patterson or Troy Calhoun or Bud Foster or some other coach on Phillips' list would've won big here had he made a safer play. But would anyone else speak to Clemson fans and unite them the way William Christopher Swinney does? Would anyone else on the planet seem as made to preside over a stadium celebration the way Swinney did yesterday?
The SEC, where Swinney came from, makes a big deal of celebrating itself. The most recent campaign is "It just means more." Well Clemson could swipe that slogan with zero apologies. Because on the streets and inside that stadium yesterday, it just meant more.
This is what Phillips envisioned when he parted with Bowden and saw Swinney as much more a man of the people who could do more than just recruit and coach receivers. He knew there'd be some struggle, but he didn't know that just two years after promoting Swinney he'd walk into president Jim Barker's office thinking he was about to be fired.
When things go wrong quickly with a head coach from the previous staff, as they did in 2010 when Clemson finished 6-7, the fan base and the heavy hitters are going to be quicker to call for change and demand answers. It's not necessarily fair, but it's reality. So even after the ACC division title in Swinney's first full season, the dip in his second season brought extreme emotions. And as a vocal fringe element rallied support for billboards of protest, they weren't going after the head coach as much as they were going after the man who hired the head coach.
Yesterday, after he and Tricia had returned home from the stadium, Phillips recalled an article that associate AD Billy D'Andrea showed him back in 2010 that said the Swinney hire was "laughable."
"A lot of people at that time thought it was an idiotic hire," he said. "And I could see how some people would feel that way. I knew there would be some push-back and apathy, because he didn't have the credentials."
It wasn't just assorted fans who were angry. Powerful people, including some trustees, were bringing heat. It was so tense that, after the loss to South Carolina in 2010, Swinney thought Phillips was going to fire him when Kathleen Swinney told him his boss was waiting in his office late that night. As it turned out, Phillips surprised him by telling him he was more convinced than ever he was the right guy. Phillips said Barker stood strong behind his convictions, never vacillating in his support of Phillips and Swinney amid all the scrutiny.
At various points back then, Phillips would tell his head coach: "If this doesn't work out, I'll come help you pack up your office. And then you can come help me pack up mine."
Phillips, now: "We were very close during that period of time, because you had to be close. You had to watch your backside."
In recent years, Phillips has watched it all blossom from a distance. His successor, Dan Radakovich, has presided over a much-needed modernization of the athletics department with new, aggressive approaches to facilities and fundraising and communications. The administration, including president Jim Clements and the Board of Trustees, is all-in with football and has achieved extraordinary synergy and camaraderie up and down the chain of command.
The infrastructure of the football program and athletics department and everything around Clemson is almost unrecognizable from the days when Phillips occupied that corner office in the McFadden Building. The entire school, not just the football program, seems to be taking that next step.
But this step wouldn't be possible without that first step in 2008. The step of promoting the man who is now the face and the voice and the thrust of an entire culture.
When Phillips announced he was walking away in August of 2012, there was no grand celebration. There wasn't much of a celebration at all beyond those in the athletics department who wished him well. At that moment, Clemson under Swinney was 29-19. Since, the record is 60-9.
It wasn't merely appropriate for Phillips to receive his due last week, the most blissful week in Clemson football history. It was necessary. And leave it to the man he hired to deliver that full-throated, passionate recognition -- first in front of a national-television audience, and then before all those fans in Death Valley yesterday.
"Words really can't describe how I felt," Phillips said. "That's a very, very special moment in my life. And for Tricia, because she had to go through a little bit of the heartache we all went through.
"We're all a lot smarter retrospectively. The people that had some discontent, they can see the history and recognize how far we have come and recognize it was a good decision. But I thought it was a good decision then. I never thought it was a bad decision. Not to pat myself on the back, but..."
Phillips didn't need to pat himself on the back Saturday. His former interim coach did it for him.
At long last, the man who walked quietly into the sunset gets to bask in the light.
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