George o leary assistant coach of minnesota vikings, George O'Leary is less than 48 hours away from the start of training camp and can't wait for the familiar sound of clashing pads.
He is the defensive line coach/assistant head coach of the Minnesota Vikings making approximately $250,000 instead of head coach at Notre Dame making closer to $2 million, but the sound will soon help muffle that thought.
I love when football is going on because I'm so busy," O'Leary said Thursday. "It's those weekends when you're not doing anything and you say, `What if?'"
He could have quietly sold real estate to escape the nightmare of the lies on his resume that cost him his dream job after only five days in South Bend last December. He could have retired to his home in Atlanta where he coached at Georgia Tech.
Instead he's the fallen cowboy jumping back on the horse, the stumbling actor climbing back on stage. Nobody gets knocked down more--or gets up more--than a football player.
So when his former high school quarterback Mike Tice, newly named head coach of the Vikings, called to offer a job, O'Leary didn't hesitate.
O'Leary told his wife Sharon: "There's still some chapters to be written in the book."
He doesn't know how the book ends, but told Tice: "I'd like to get back to being a head coach again, but if that's not in the cards, then I'm happy coaching and doing what I love to do."
Tice asked only one thing of the coach he both revered and feared: "If you're going to yell at me, don't do it front of anybody."
O'Leary said he went to the Twin Cities airport where fellow passengers couldn't help snickering.
A sympathetic Irish fan told O'Leary to notice the sign overhead: "Flights to South Bend start in February."
O'Leary did a quick soft-shoe and everybody laughed. It was one of the first times O'Leary had quit kicking himself for writing on a resume 22 years ago that he lettered three years at New Hampshire and earned a master's degree at NYU.
He apologized for the lies, but cannot think of himself as a liar any more than he thinks of one of his mentors, the late Woody Hayes, as a lunatic for the lunacy of slugging a rival player on the sidelines in 1978, Hayes' last game at Ohio State.
"He was so sorry that he did that and he couldn't take it back," O'Leary said. "I think if you put all his positives on one side and the negatives on the other, they're not even close. That's how I look at people."
If people don't ever again look at O'Leary and see honesty, they will have to see candor and, yes, even humor because O'Leary has turned the same hurtful sticks and stones thrown by comedians and columnists into healing crutches.
He smiled a lot Thursday, sometimes through gritted teeth as he recalled his December ordeal.
"I told Notre Dame I wasn't going to embarrass them. I said I made a mistake," O'Leary said. "It seemed like an awful penalty. It had nothing to do with football and it followed me in my biography and it got to a point where it didn't matter because nobody ever asked me for it.
"At one point you say to yourself, `I should get that out of here; it has no purpose.' All of a sudden you get hit like that."
Although he said Thursday he never seriously contemplated such a drastic remedy as suicide, O'Leary said he sat and "pretty much stared at the lake for a week."
When one of his brothers visited and started crying, O'Leary told him, "I don't need you to come down here and cry. That's why I like my dogs. They look at me and know something's wrong but they don't cry."
Finally it occurred to O'Leary he had become the type of person he used to love to hate.
"You keep going, you don't quit, you don't feel sorry for yourself, which I did that first week," he said. "That first week it was like I attended my own funeral but I was alive. Everybody was saying, `I know how you feel,' and I would say, `No you don't know how I feel.'
"I grew up in New York. I think the two best jobs coaching in America are [managing] the Yankees and head coach at Notre Dame. I just have to keep going. I'm very thick-skinned."
As he sat alone in his small office Thursday, he pulled an engraved Gaelic sign from his mother out of a drawer and placed it on his desk.
"It says, `A thousand smiles,'" O'Leary said.
His mother told him: "God doesn't close the door unless he opens another."
"I said, `Mom I believe that, it's just that the door came down hard.' It was hard because my mom had to see [Jay] Leno and everybody making fun of the whole thing," O'Leary said. "I felt bad for my family."
The Vikings' media guide came out Thursday night including this start to one biography: "George O'Leary comes to the Minnesota Vikings after a very successful tenure as the head coach at Georgia Tech."
It's the truth but not the whole truth. Vikings linebackers coach Brian Baker, who played for O'Leary, told his old coach:
He is the defensive line coach/assistant head coach of the Minnesota Vikings making approximately $250,000 instead of head coach at Notre Dame making closer to $2 million, but the sound will soon help muffle that thought.
I love when football is going on because I'm so busy," O'Leary said Thursday. "It's those weekends when you're not doing anything and you say, `What if?'"
He could have quietly sold real estate to escape the nightmare of the lies on his resume that cost him his dream job after only five days in South Bend last December. He could have retired to his home in Atlanta where he coached at Georgia Tech.
Instead he's the fallen cowboy jumping back on the horse, the stumbling actor climbing back on stage. Nobody gets knocked down more--or gets up more--than a football player.
So when his former high school quarterback Mike Tice, newly named head coach of the Vikings, called to offer a job, O'Leary didn't hesitate.
O'Leary told his wife Sharon: "There's still some chapters to be written in the book."
He doesn't know how the book ends, but told Tice: "I'd like to get back to being a head coach again, but if that's not in the cards, then I'm happy coaching and doing what I love to do."
Tice asked only one thing of the coach he both revered and feared: "If you're going to yell at me, don't do it front of anybody."
O'Leary said he went to the Twin Cities airport where fellow passengers couldn't help snickering.
A sympathetic Irish fan told O'Leary to notice the sign overhead: "Flights to South Bend start in February."
O'Leary did a quick soft-shoe and everybody laughed. It was one of the first times O'Leary had quit kicking himself for writing on a resume 22 years ago that he lettered three years at New Hampshire and earned a master's degree at NYU.
He apologized for the lies, but cannot think of himself as a liar any more than he thinks of one of his mentors, the late Woody Hayes, as a lunatic for the lunacy of slugging a rival player on the sidelines in 1978, Hayes' last game at Ohio State.
"He was so sorry that he did that and he couldn't take it back," O'Leary said. "I think if you put all his positives on one side and the negatives on the other, they're not even close. That's how I look at people."
If people don't ever again look at O'Leary and see honesty, they will have to see candor and, yes, even humor because O'Leary has turned the same hurtful sticks and stones thrown by comedians and columnists into healing crutches.
He smiled a lot Thursday, sometimes through gritted teeth as he recalled his December ordeal.
"I told Notre Dame I wasn't going to embarrass them. I said I made a mistake," O'Leary said. "It seemed like an awful penalty. It had nothing to do with football and it followed me in my biography and it got to a point where it didn't matter because nobody ever asked me for it.
"At one point you say to yourself, `I should get that out of here; it has no purpose.' All of a sudden you get hit like that."
Although he said Thursday he never seriously contemplated such a drastic remedy as suicide, O'Leary said he sat and "pretty much stared at the lake for a week."
When one of his brothers visited and started crying, O'Leary told him, "I don't need you to come down here and cry. That's why I like my dogs. They look at me and know something's wrong but they don't cry."
Finally it occurred to O'Leary he had become the type of person he used to love to hate.
"You keep going, you don't quit, you don't feel sorry for yourself, which I did that first week," he said. "That first week it was like I attended my own funeral but I was alive. Everybody was saying, `I know how you feel,' and I would say, `No you don't know how I feel.'
"I grew up in New York. I think the two best jobs coaching in America are [managing] the Yankees and head coach at Notre Dame. I just have to keep going. I'm very thick-skinned."
As he sat alone in his small office Thursday, he pulled an engraved Gaelic sign from his mother out of a drawer and placed it on his desk.
"It says, `A thousand smiles,'" O'Leary said.
His mother told him: "God doesn't close the door unless he opens another."
"I said, `Mom I believe that, it's just that the door came down hard.' It was hard because my mom had to see [Jay] Leno and everybody making fun of the whole thing," O'Leary said. "I felt bad for my family."
The Vikings' media guide came out Thursday night including this start to one biography: "George O'Leary comes to the Minnesota Vikings after a very successful tenure as the head coach at Georgia Tech."
It's the truth but not the whole truth. Vikings linebackers coach Brian Baker, who played for O'Leary, told his old coach:
