Dick MacPherson, Scottish not Irish, heads back to Syracuse to helm the St. Patrick’s Parade

The New Times Interview 

Even though it’s been 20 years since he last coached a game at Syracuse University, like his counterpart Jim Boeheim on the basketball sidelines, Dick MacPherson’s name remains synonymous with SU football. Actually, all you have to say is “Coach Mac” and the memories of one of the best damn times in the school’s athletic program come roaring back.

After attaining his first head coaching job with the University of Massachusetts in 1971 and holding that position until 1977, the Old Town, Maine, native accepted a job as linebackers coach with the Cleveland Browns, a position he also held with the Denver Broncos between 1967 and 1970. But in true Field of Dreams spirit, something built in Syracuse in 1980 carried enough attraction to lure MacPherson from across Lake Erie to the Salt City: the Carrier Dome. As a matter of fact, during a recent phone conversation with The New Times, Coach Mac went as far as saying that the Carrier Dome “was the missing link for success.”

He mentioned how the Carrier Dome turned Boeheim into a national figure—from two NCAA championship games, the national championship in 2003, and the basketball team’s recent game against Villanova. That contest at a rockin’ Dome broke the national record for the largest on-campus crowd in the history of college basketball, and the 34,616 people in attendance became the biggest sports story of the week.

The Dome helped establish Coach Mac’s legacy, as well, as he amassed a 66-46-4 record while at the helm of the Orange. During those 10 years, he took the team to the Cherry, Hall of Fame, Peach, Aloha and Sugar bowls, tallying an impressive 3-1-1 mark in those contests. His straight-shooting quick-wit personality once made him one of the more affable characters in the public eye of Syracuse, and beyond. In 2009, 55 years after he first began playing varsity football for Springfield (Mass.) College, the 79-year-old was finally inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame; he is also a member of the Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame.

This weekend, he’ll be able to add another prestigious honor to his storied career, as he was asked to be the Grand Marshal of the annual St. Patrick’s Parade, which will head down South Salina Street on Saturday, March 13. And in typical Coach Mac fashion, after congratulating him on the honor, he quipped, “As soon as we find out what {Grand Marshal} is, then we’ll know if I should be congratulated or not.”

Coach Mac usually skips town during the arctic Syracuse winters and heads with his wife Sandra for the warmer climate of Melbourne, Fla., but he spoke over the phone about how the current 60-degree Florida weather felt a little chilly, as well as his first encounter with Jim Boeheim, Doug Marrone, the erstwhile “Coach Mac’s” sports bar in the Hotel Syracuse, and of course, that damned 1988 Sugar Bowl tie against Auburn.

Q: Did it catch you off guard when you were asked to be the Grand Marshal of the parade?

A: I was kind of shocked, to be honest with you. And now what we have to do is have this thing on Saturday, and my dream is for everybody to leave that and go to the finals of the Big East Tournament and Syracuse is playing for the championship. You can be damn sure I’m not flying back on Saturday because I want to make sure I see that.

Q: Did the parade organizers know your family’s heritage traces back to Scotland? Or did they think you were Irish?

A: Everybody that knows that I’m a “Mac” not a “Mick.” {Laughs.} My father was from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and Antigonish, Nova Scotia, is home to Saint Francis Xavier University, and it’s called the Notre Dame of Canada. One of his brothers, my uncle Steven, was a Jesuit priest there at Saint FX. We have a lot of claims that Saint Patrick thought he was going to Canada but he ended up in the United States.

Q: Do you usually go down to Florida to avoid the Syracuse winters?

A: When I went to Syracuse University, the football coach, Ben Schwarzwalder, who was a great guy and a great coach, said, “Mac, I want to tell you something: Syracuse, New York, is the best place to live in the United States, but one piece of advice: Get the hell out December first and don’t come back till May the first.” {Laughs.} And that’s what Ben used to do. He used to go down to Tampa, where at the Air Force base there, he was a silver star ranger, and his wife will tell you, that was the happiest time of his life outside of football, being down there with all his old cronies. She’s still there and she’s a wonderful woman.

Dick and Don MacPherson

That championship season: Scenes from the 1987-1988 football campaign show Coach Mac celebrating an undefeated Big East record (above), an embrace with quarterback Don McPherson, and Mac holding a sugar cube to acknowledge the Jan. 1, 1988 trip to the Sugar Bowl. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS

Dick MacPherson

Q: Have you been able to follow the {SU} basketball team this season down in Florida?

A: Down here in Florida, there’s so many doggone Syracuse people, they’re all over the place. People down here in my crowd are rooting like heck for Syracuse.

Q: What was your relationship like with Boeheim while you were coaching at SU? And do you still keep in contact with him these days?

A: I think the fun thing about Jim Boeheim and me is that I was the head coach at UMass, and Jim was an assistant at Syracuse and they came in to play us at UMass, and Dr. J {NBA Hall of Famer Julius Erving} was on our team, and {Boeheim} still talks about that being one of the best individual performances he’s ever seen. Syracuse beat us but not by very much, but the funny part about it is that from a basketball standpoint Rick Pitino {current head coach at Louisville} was one of the players on the UMass team and so was Al Skinner, the current head coach at Boston College. Jim was an assistant at the time, and one of the great stories was they said, “Oh, what a buzzsaw to get into,” because when Dr. J was there, in those days, you used to have a freshman team play in the pre-game, then the varsity would come on and by the time of the freshman game, they’d attack the place by 5 for an 8 o’clock game.

It wasn’t a very big gym in those days; they’ve got a beautiful one now at UMass, it only held about 6,000 in the old cage, but it was a hell of a game. We go all the way back to there, but I think the thing is that when they want to talk about an impact one team can have on a university and an area, I think this is maximized {with this year’s basketball team} because they’re able to enjoy it more than the New Orleans one. The great joy about the New Orleans one {the Superdome} is that the basketball team went in March {1987, losing to Indiana 74-73}, then we went back there for the Sugar Bowl {Jan. 1, 1988}. My daughter was a student in law school there at the time and she was very happy to have survived both events.

Q: The football team took a downward spiral during the Greg Robinson era. What are your thoughts on the program since that time and what did you think of Doug Marrone’s first year? And do you think he’s the guy to turn the program around?

A: I think that he’s blessed to have that job and he was continued to be blessed when he got Greg Paulus there. I think Greg Paulus gave us the credibility and kept us alive for a year and I think it was a good year for Doug. The program had a terrific setback, and now that Doug Marrone is at the helm, the effort seems to be there and everyone is doing the right things that Doug Marrone has them doing.

Q: Being that you coached Marrone while he was a player on the SU football team, did you see any traits that might have carried over to his coaching days?

A: He was a guy with unlimited physical ability. Then he had to learn, because of his huge size and speed, to put it up to another level. The thing that impressed me about him was the way he played basketball and the way he hit a baseball; he’s one hell of an athlete. The only reason he’s not a top golfer is because he likes to coach football. And you have to remember what Bear Bryant said about golfers: “Show me a football coach who is a five-handicap and I want him on my schedule.”

Q: What do you remember most about your coaching days in Syracuse?

A: I was with the Cleveland Browns, and it was a hell of a job, but when you see the Carrier Dome, that was the missing link for success, and all we needed was time. And that’s what the people have to understand with Doug because you said it, and I don’t have to, that the program had taken a step backward. And now, Doug Marrone has to do a little bit of a tango to get that thing going again, and I think he’ll do it.

Q: What impact do you think the Carrier Dome has on SU athletics?

A: There’s no doubt in my mind, that with Mel Eggers as chancellor, and the guy that ran Carrier, and when they got together with the governor of New York {Hugh Carey}, that’s what made Syracuse: the Carrier Dome. And now, a week ago, we see the whole damn nation watching Syracuse play basketball at the Carrier Dome {against Villanova on Feb. 27} and all of a sudden, Jim Boeheim became a national figure because of the Carrier Dome. He did a hell of a job in Manley Field House, and then really topped it off with the Carrier Dome. It used to be Connecticut and Duke, but right now, Syracuse is getting all that press and I think it’s fantastic.

Q: How about that 1988 Sugar Bowl game against Auburn? What were your thoughts when Auburn head coach Pat Dye decided to tie the game with a field goal as time expired?

A: The thing about it was that was the last year before they changed that rule. When you think of Auburn, and the mean, tough, nasty and real great hard-nosed football players, Pat Dye epitomized that and that’s the last guy you’d think would go for a tie in the ball game. It was a shock to me. But on the same token, if I had ever known that, there were a lot of other things I could have done. The thing that {Dye} always said was you had a fourth-and-6 that could have put us in the bag and he was right. But I think a lot of people in Syracuse were very unhappy. And it was the same old story: {Dye} didn’t last too long after that, but he was the king of the world going into it.

Q: You recently said that you wished you would have stayed coaching Syracuse than have gone to the pros to coach the New England Patriots. Looking back, why do you think you would have been more content in Syracuse?

A: I think the thing about it was when I really start to think of who was hiring me, that was the most important thing. The reason why I was so attracted to the Syracuse job was there was no better way they could show a commitment to football than erecting the Carrier Dome. So it was visible that they wanted to be successful. And the thing that I loved about the character of our chancellor, Mel Eggers, was that he said this to the student body: “The further away from the campus that a football stadium is built, the further away football will be from academia.”

And I think we’ve stressed the point all across the nation, that right in the middle of campus, is the Carrier Dome. It’s great for the students, because they all walk by it all the time, and it was the perfect situation and I think that it gave us all the things we needed to be successful, and we were. And as far as me leaving for the Patriots, from a financial standpoint, it’s something I had to do for my family. In the days that I was there, the salaries weren’t very good. Boeheim’s salary wasn’t much more than tuition, and in fact, with his intelligence, he could almost count all the way up to how much he earned. {Laughs.}

Athletics have come a long way and to be honest with you, in an academia world, they’re making too much money. But at the time, when I was coaching the young men, we weren’t making enough money. A football coach in my day would end up as a tenured professor and he would end up either in charge of parking lots or fund-raising.

Q: Your grandson, Richard MacPherson, a junior center at Christian Brothers Academy, recently committed to play for Syracuse. How does it feel to pass the baton, of sorts, and see him play for your former team?

A: He grew up there, he’s never lived anywhere else, he’s always been a little further than a half-mile from the Dome. We lived in the house that {Clarence} “Biggie” Munn lived in when he coached there {1946}, and that’s where they live now. He gives everything he has to the game of football and what more can you ask. The thing about it is that I feel bad for him because there’s a lot of pressure on him just because of his name. I think that people are going to love him.

Q: A while back, the Hotel Syracuse had a bar called Coach Mac’s. How did that come to be and what did you think of the place?

A: One of the things that people should understand is I did that because they had a promotion in order to get people to go back downtown and they asked me if they could put a sports bar in the hotel {MacPherson and his wife lived in the hotel before it was shut down}. And to be honest with you, what people don’t understand is that I never owned or got a penny from the bar. I did that on purpose because I didn’t want people to think I was running a barroom. If you ask anyone that went in there, I think they liked it. We had a lot of hockey games, and pre-game and post-game football was a lot of fun and the radio used to have pre-game and post-game for basketball and football and I thought that it had a purpose. I want the people to know that I didn’t get anything out of that money-wise.

Q: Are you still going to do pre-game and post-game analysis for the Orange football team this season? And any chance you’re going to move back into the booth during games?

A: I don’t think I’ll be doing anymore play-by-play because I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing while the game is on. I don’t think I was very good at it because I think a couple of times I swore. I think the people liked it but my wife didn’t. {Laughs.}

Q: What do you have planned while you’re back in Syracuse?

A: I’m coming back in Thursday night, then Friday, I’ve got to paint something green around Clinton Square, then the bishop and I are going to have a mass. I don’t know it in English, but from my altar boy days, I know the Latin one pretty well. I’m looking forward to coming back and all I know is that my wife’s not coming and she’s sick and worried to death that I won’t keep my mouth shut. {Laughs.}