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Zaven Yaralian has spent 11 years of his life coaching in the NFL, but at this
particular moment he is talking about when he was a mere lad, and he was walking to
school.
Think back to your own childhood experiences doing the same. What do you picture?
If you grew up in the suburbs, perhaps you recall passing a park on the way to school.
A crossing guard at an intersection. Nice cars. Beautiful houses. Maybe even the
proverbial picket fence.
If you grew up in this setting, you grew up in a different world than Yaralian.
Comparatively speaking, you grew up in the lap of luxury, harmony and security.
If you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, perhaps you recall passing gang
members. Graffiti on the sides of buildings. Metal bars on the front of stores.
If you grew up in this setting, you still grew up in a different world than Yaralian.
Comparatively speaking, you grew up in the lap of luxury, harmony and security.
Take a walk in the shoes of young Zaven Yaralian, and you’ll gain a greater
appreciation for your own childhood, no matter how rough you think you had it.
Zaven is not even 10 years old in a very specific memory of his in which he is walking
to school. What did he see?
He did not see a well-manicured park. He did not see a crossing guard. He did not see a
white picket fence.
He saw a dead body. Perhaps the most jolting aspect of that vision is that it did not
seem out of place.
"All I remember is going to school in the middle of a war," Yaralian said.
A civil war to be more specific. Yaralian grew up in Lebanon while civil war raged in
the late 1950s, pitting Muslims against Christians. Not to take growing up in the
gang-infested neighborhoods of some undesirable United States cities lightly, but that is
nothing compared to what Yaralian faced.
How often would he see a bloody, dead body on the way to school?
"It wasn’t every day," Yaralian said. "Just once in a while. But
you could hear the guns going off all the time. Machine guns going off. And tanks all over
the place. We went to a private Christian school, it was an Armenian school, and we had to
walk about a mile and a half to get there. And so we had to walk through some bad areas.
(Bad) in terms of the conflict and the city and the war going on. You had to find your way
to school.
"It was dangerous. It was frightening. You don’t see people going to school
(in the United States) every day with machine guns going off or hearing guns or seeing
somebody dead in the street."
You half expect Yaralian to say, "If I had a dollar for every time I heard
gunfire, I’d be a rich man." Instead, money was tight for Yaralian’s
family. Eight members of his family lived in a bottom-floor, two-bedroom apartment. His
parents had one bedroom. Everyone else squeezed into the other. It was a sardine can
without the fish smell.
Eluding financial shortfall was not the biggest problem for Yaralian and his family.
Eluding the war was a far greater concern.
Try as it might, the family was not able to stay one step ahead of the civil war.
One day, one of Yaralian’s brothers, John, was late coming home from work. Very,
very late. Finally, John showed up a bloody mess. He had been grabbed by the
anti-Christian faction of the civil war and beaten to a pulp. At one point, a gun was
placed to his head. John was going to be shot, but someone from the abductors’ group
recognized him and let him go since they had played together when they were much younger.
It was a rare bit of mercy in the middle of a war. It was as unlikely as compassion
from a loan shark.
Not that Yaralian’s brother emerged unscathed. He had his life, but not his
health. His face was a bloody mess. His hip was broken. He was taken to the United Nations
Hospital, where he stayed for quite some time.
After that, Yaralian and his family moved to the mountains. His father moved to the
United States, and a year later the rest of the family followed after they sold their
ancestors’ farm near the Mediterranean Sea for $7,000.
The journey was long and tiring. They flew all the way to New York. From there they
took a three-day bus trip to Los Angeles.
Initially, the Yaralian family lived in a part of Los Angeles now known as Watts. This
was before the Watts riots would make it infamous for racial tension and violence, but
there was gang activity at the time.
"I thought that was heaven," Yaralian said of his new home. "It was a
tough time in the streets, but it wasn’t anything like it was in Lebanon."
Heaven is all a matter of perspective, of course. Yaralian and his family had no money
upon reaching the United States. Eight of them were still squeezing into two bedrooms.
Whereas the adults had to fight for financial survival, Zaven had to fight for his own
honor.
Literally fight.
At his new school, Yaralian was getting into fights at least once a week
"I had to earn their respect," Yaralian said. "I got in a lot of fights
when I came here because I didn’t speak English. They didn’t understand me, and
I didn’t understand them. We got in a lot of fights."
One day, a letter was sent home from the school pinned to Yaralian’s shirt,
explaining that the youngster was in trouble.
"Nobody understood," Yaralian said. "My parents didn’t speak
English. So they didn’t understand what it said. They asked me what it was. I said I
was doing really good in school."
That worked for a few weeks until the school’s principal showed up at
Yaralian’s home.
"Then I got my butt kicked by my parents," he said.
Of course, getting his butt kicked was all in a week’s work for young Yaralian. He
was getting clobbered on a fairly consistent basis during his schoolyard scraps. Then one
day the tide turned.
"I got my butt kicked quite a few times until I finally ended up beating up one of
their leaders," Yaralian said. "And then the next thing, they took me in after
that."
Finally the violence was over. War in Lebanon was in the rearview mirror. So too was
the schoolyard fighting.
Given his rugged childhood, however, it should come as no surprise that Yaralian would
eventually start playing the not-for-the-timid sport of football.
"I was quick and fast," Yaralian said. "I always ran, because, heck, I
played soccer back in the old country, and then you had to be quick to get away from
danger. I liked contact, and I never shied away from contact, and football was something
that I just naturally fell in love with."
His parents did not want him to play football. Needing a parent’s signature to
play high school football, Yaralian improvised.
"I had to lie about signatures," he said.
He signed their name. The first two years, his parents didn’t even know he was
playing.
"They thought I was in the library," Yaralian said. "Until they saw my
grades. It was bad the first year. And then actually one day all of a sudden my dad showed
up at a game."
Despite not understanding the game of football at first, Yaralian was naturally good.
By his sophomore year he was playing on the varsity.
Any big-time plans he had, however, were derailed in his senior year when he separated
his shoulder in the fourth game of the season.
A football injury is nothing compared to what his brother endured when he was almost
killed during the civil war, so Zaven took the setback in stride and went to El Camino
Junior College for two years.
He had a couple of strong seasons, and suddenly he was being recruited by the big boys
— Nebraska and Alabama among them.
The Nebraska program and head coach Tom Osborne dazzled him, and Yaralian was soon
wearing a Cornhuskers uniform. He was a two-year starter at cornerback for Nebraska. He
tried out for the NFL’s Green Bay Packers in 1974 and played for the Philadelphia
Bell of the World Football League in 1975.
Then it was time to begin his coaching career. If his path to a coaching career by way
of Lebanon is unconventional, the roads he has taken as a coach have been very much within
the norm. In other words, these roads have taken him all over the map in this nomadic
profession.
He built his résumé with full-time college coaching jobs at Washington State,
Missouri, Florida and Colorado. He has had pro coaching jobs with Denver, Chicago, New
York (Giants) and New Orleans.
"He has been a great coach at both the college and professional level, and he has
been a coordinator on both levels," Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan said. "He
had one of the best defenses in the NFL at New Orleans at a time when the Saints were
having some struggles on offense. An outstanding coach."
In many ways, being a child of war has made its mark on Yaralian the coach.
For starters, like just about anyone who has ever coached at a big-time level, Yaralian
has been on staffs that have been fired more than once.
"Once you get into a business like the NFL, I’ve had to adapt," Yaralian
said. "I’ve had it where I’ve done well, and then I’ve had it where we
all got released and I had to start again looking for a job. I’ve adapted. To me,
more than anything you’ve got to survive. That’s what it is. It’s
survival."
It’s hard to imagine a coach in the NFL who learned more about survival as a kid
than Yaralian.
When asked to describe his coaching style, Yaralian said "aggressive," which
again makes sense when you consider he grew up with machine gun fire all around him in
Lebanon.
Passive is not a word associated with war. Passive is not a word associated with
schoolyard fights. Passive is not a word associated with a coach named Yaralian.
He certainly is not passive in his expectations of his players.
"He is a very demanding coach, which I admire," said Falcons head coach Dan
Reeves, who previously was the head coach of the Giants when Yaralian was an assistant
there. "He is very thorough in getting his players ready for the game."
Nor is he passive in his expectations of himself.
"I used to love to hear him talk about how he was raised and all of the things he
went through," Reeves said. "Growing up had to be tough for him, so I can see
why he is so determined."
Saints assistant head coach Rick Venturi, who worked alongside Yaralian for three years
in New Orleans in the late 1990s, said, "He’s a very intense guy. He’s very
dedicated to the game and in that sense consumed with it. And I guess all that together
defines intensity.
"He’s a profile of somebody that really had to work hard. You come out of
situations like (growing up in the middle of a civil war), you take nothing for granted,
you develop a very good work ethic and an appreciation for life as it is. … It’s
why guys become successful, because they’re forced at an early age to overcome things
and develop a work ethic to get them over the top.
"He’s a bulldog. Determined. If he wants something, he’s going to go
after it. He’s going to push for it. I say that all complimentary. A bulldog to me is
a guy who is kind of relentless and is not going to let little things stop him."
Of course, a full-speed-ahead, never-hit-the-brakes, hell-bent approach can also get
you killed in war and beat in football. Yaralian is more than a pure testosterone rush.
His brain comes into play, too.
"He is a very good coach as far as schemes are concerned," Reeves said.
"He is also very good at teaching the players the fundamental techniques of the game.
… I thought he had great ideas. When he was the defensive coordinator for New
Orleans, their schemes were also very good. He is a heck of a football coach."
He is a football coach whose unique experiences growing up in civil-war-torn Lebanon
may be different than that of any other coach in the NFL, but the lessons he learned in
that setting gave him one heck of a message to convey to today’s
constantly-under-the-microscope professional athletes.
"The only thing I always say is, ‘Tough times don’t last,’ "
Yaralian said. "I think even if you’re having a bad year, I say, ‘It
doesn’t last. You can change it. You can turn it around.’ If I can turn things
around like that from childhood, heck, who’d have ever thought I’d ever be in
the NFL from where I was?"
That doesn’t mean it’s been an easy ride in the NFL. His story is typical of
coaches all around the league. He’s been hired. He’s been fired. Hired again.
Fired again. The nomadic life of the coach. Every NFL coach should have a three-car garage
for his car, his wife’s car and a moving van.
This past February, Yaralian had just finished his first season with the Broncos as the
head coach’s assistant, when he was asked what had been his most difficult moment in
the NFL.
"Times where maybe you’re out of work and you call people that you think you
know, that you think are your friends and all of a sudden those same people don’t
return your call," Yaralian said.
A mere three weeks later, buried at the bottom of a story in the Denver Post was the
following paragraph:
"Denver’s former defensive line coach, George Dyer, was appointed the
assistant to the head coach. He replaces Zaven Yaralian, whose one-year contract with the
Broncos expired."
The survivor was on the move again. Another fork in the road for Yaralian to navigate.
At least this time there were no dead bodies on the side of the road.
In fact, the scenery is improving dramatically for Yaralian.
Not only is a civil war in his rear-view mirror, so is the NFL. Yaralian has decided to
change careers. His game plan is to purchase and run resorts in exotic locations. The new
career will require Yaralian to tough it out in the lap of luxury in these sun-splashed
vacation hot spots.
There should be no gunfire heard from a civil war. There should be no massive
up-and-down swings in emotion like NFL coaches must cope with from week to week.
"You know what? It might be a little peace for me finally," Yaralian said.
Part 11: Standing tall
Part 10: Mistaken identity
Part 9: Amazing transformation
Part 8: Commitment
Part 7: Variety is the spice of life
Part 6: The hiring game
Part 5: The glass is half full
Part 4: Difficulties of the profession
Part 3: Coping with defeat
Part 2: The player-coach relationship
Part
1: Setting the tone
Series index
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