Six years into his tenure as football head coach, Dick MacPherson found a Long Island teenager to play wide receiver for him.

MacPherson redshirted the prospect, future Pro Bowler Rob Moore, and Moore sat the bench his first season. By the time spring practice rolled around the following March, Moore felt eager to play. That’s when, Moore believes, MacPherson planted a quote in a newspaper to inspire him — a quote that praised Moore, yet questioned his toughness.

‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ Moore said recently, ‘because it was something that I think really was one of those defining moments in life.’

MacPherson coached Moore for three seasons at Syracuse and worked as the Orangemen’s head coach from 1981 to 1990. MacPherson’s time at SU blossomed into a legacy. This summer, that legacy found a tangible form, with a plaque hanging in South Bend, Ind., as he accepted his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.

At Syracuse, that legacy rests on what his players remember. It’s about the program that resurrected SU football, the life MacPherson built here and his roots to the program that still remains.

‘I think they know we fell in love with Syracuse, and we tried to make it better,’ MacPherson said last week.

In March 1987, Moore saw the planted quote for the first time when he came to Shaw Hall for breakfast. He picked up a copy of The Post-Standard and found himself unable to put it back down.

He read the praise MacPherson gave him: that he represented the program’s best wide receiver prospect yet. Then he read the negative: his coach had wondered aloud if Moore would go through ‘the brier patch’ or whether he would simply stick to listening ‘to a cat sipping milk a hundred yards away.’

‘What he was saying was, would I go across the middle and make the tough catches, or would I just be a guy who stayed on the outside and played it safe?’ Moore said. ‘Everything Coach Mac said had a reason. He didn’t just say things just to say them. Everything had a rhyme and a reason.’

From there, Moore tried to prove that he would go for the hard catches. He battled through MacPherson’s notoriously tough spring football practices and into the summer preseason camp — the kind of practices in which fainting linebackers received a cup of water, a shady place under a tree and then were expected to get back out there.

Moore earned quick vindication on the first play of the sixth game that next season. In a romp of Penn State, Moore caught an 80-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Don McPherson.

The pressure from MacPherson remains the reason why Moore’s career flourished at Syracuse, he said. He even figures he owes MacPherson for his NFL career, too. Without MacPherson, Moore says, who knows what would’ve happened.

Six years before Moore showed up, MacPherson came to SU for his head coach interview on a snowy December afternoon. The Old Town, Maine, native ignored the weather and concentrated on the tour.

He saw the Carrier Dome, which promised a place to play great football. He went to a 5 p.m. mass at Hendricks Chapel. Then he went on to an interview with Jake Crouthamel, SU’s athletic director, the chancellor, Melvin Eggers, and trustees.  

He flew back to Cleveland that night to make it to the Cleveland Browns’ game the next day, where he worked as a linebackers coach.

The Dome had won him over as a place to play football. Syracuse, as a city, looked like a place to settle his family.

By this point, his wife had become a master at packing up the family’s home and moving. The family had already moved to be with Dick while he coached with the Denver Broncos and the Browns. Usually the MacPhersons spent time in each town long enough for their two daughters to finish either junior high or high school.

‘It was kind of a chess game, and it wasn’t bad at all for Mac, because I was doing all the work,’ said his wife, Sandra.

So the family moved again, settling in a house on Circle Road in Syracuse. Their youngest daughter went on to undergraduate studies at SU, and their older daughter came to study at the College of Law.

It was the longest time the MacPhersons would ever spend in one place. But it came with a price. MacPherson needed to turn the program, a perennial loser, into a winning football team.

His wife remembers that pressure still today. When he came home from his December 1980 interview, he told her about his meeting with the trustees, the athletic director and the chancellor. She remembers it like this, with her husband asking a question:

‘It’s all well and good,’ MacPherson said, ‘and you might love me now, but will you still love me if we go 2-9?’

‘We’ll still love you, but where will you be coaching?’ Eggers said.

At first, the Orangemen found success fleeting. In 1981, the team went 4-6-1. The next season, 2-9.

Eventually MacPherson turned it around in the late 1980s, when he brought in McPherson, a standout quarterback, to play for him.

In 1987, the Orangemen finished the regular season with an undefeated record and faced Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. In that game, McPherson went 11-for-21 with 140 yards and a touchdown. But the Tigers sacked him five times, forcing the Orangemen to settle for a 16-16 tied final score and an 11-0-1 record.

When Syracuse made its way back to the locker room, former New York Gov. Hugh Carey — the man responsible for the concept of the Dome, the object that fascinated MacPherson — spoke to the team.

‘Listen, I don’t care what everyone else says,’ Carey said to the team. ‘It’s obvious who won this game: You guys did. So I declare you Sugar Bowl champions!’

His former players say MacPherson taught them more than how to win. He taught them ‘life skills’ before some motivational speaker or coach labeled them as that.

As the kind of man who went to 5 p.m. masses while on job interviews, MacPherson expected his players to shape up to his standards. He wanted them to take their place as members of Syracuse’s community.

He once told a hulking SU lineman named Doug Marrone that a local church wanted to feed him breakfast. ‘All-you-can-eat pancakes,’ MacPherson told him.

Marrone turned up at the church, waiting for his breakfast. For his pancakes, Marrone had to give a talk to the collected mass at the breakfast.

‘I kind of got tricked a little bit,’ Marrone said. ‘He said it was all-you-can-eat pancakes, so that got me to do it. But I’ll never forget how scared I was, going up and speaking in front of this church group.’

MacPherson left SU in 1990 to coach the New England Patriots for two seasons before retiring. These days, he lives most of the year away from Syracuse. But some still feel his presence.

Marrone has something to do with that. Now the head coach at SU, Marrone brought back some of the traditions MacPherson started. In his first spring as head coach, Marrone had his players burn their practice shoes, just like MacPherson. The team switched to red and green practice jerseys, with red for the defensive, green for the offensive. Just like MacPherson.

Marrone talks with his old coach regularly when MacPherson is away from Syracuse. But for the times when he needs immediate inspiration, Marrone hung a picture of his old coach in his office.

‘I put a picture of Coach Mac over there to the left of me,’ Marrone said. ‘And I think that every time I look at things, or I look at a decision. I wonder, ‘What would Coach Mac do?”

MacPherson comes back to Syracuse each fall for football season. He and his wife now live in a small house in Jamesville, close to where their grandchildren attend school.

It looks like Syracuse turned out as a good place to settle his family. His eldest daughter now works as an area attorney. His grandsons became ball boys for MacPherson’s successor at SU, Paul Pasqualoni. One of them, Macky, is now a freshman on Marrone’s squad.

Now 79, MacPherson still refuses to escape the pull to the football program he resurrected and the area he called home.

‘This place has everything I want — my family and Syracuse football,’ MacPherson said.

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Published on September 7, 2010 at 12:00 pm