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  Copyright © 2021 by Lars Anderson

  Cover design by Eric Wilder. Cover image © Rex Brown/Getty Images.

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: October 2021

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939217

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-5343-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-5344-6 (ebook)

  E3-20210908-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Run, Dabo, Run

  Chapter 2: A Hard Life in Pelham

  Chapter 3: Defying the Odds in Tuscaloosa

  Chapter 4: Dabo in Wilderness

  Chapter 5: Dabo Comes Back to Carolina

  Chapter 6: The Head Coach

  Chapter 7: The Building of Dabo’s Dynasty

  Chapter 8: Religion, Recruiting, and the Right-Hand Man

  Chapter 9: Dabo’s First Title

  Chapter 10: Extravagant Dreaming

  Chapter 11: The Future of Little Ol’ Clemson

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  About the Author

  Photos

  Also by Lars Anderson

  For Erik Robert Anderson,

  my best friend,

  my brother

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  Commitment is what transforms a

  promise into reality.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  Chapter 1

  Run, Dabo, Run

  There he was, alone in his South Carolina hotel room suite at the Hilton Garden Inn, alone with his coaching notes, alone at a desk, his head buried under the amber glow of lamplight. Over the previous quarter century, he had scribbled countless concepts and diagrams and coaching thoughts on pieces of paper that he had stored in folders and three-ring binders, and he dug through his most important pieces of information one more time at the hotel in the town of Anderson. A defining hour of his young life was fast approaching.

  Throughout the day, he had projected an image of confidence and strength—during morning meetings with coaches, his afternoon interactions with players, his exchanges with fans—but now in his suite, surrounded by silence on the evening of October 17, 2008, his heart thumped, a jackhammer pounding inside of his chest. His first game as interim head coach of the Clemson Tigers was slated to kick off the next afternoon, and at this moment, as darkness fell outside his hotel window, Dabo Swinney was a mess of nerves.

  A planner’s planner, Dabo believed he was ready for his head-coaching debut. Just that night at the team hotel—after he had spoken to his players in a ballroom and told them how much he cared for them and loved them—he felt that his offense and defense and special teams were prepared to play at a high level against Georgia Tech. He knew that his well-thought-out pregame speech, one that he had been fine-tuning and waiting his entire coaching life—twenty-five years—to deliver, contained all the fire and passion and inspiration of a preacher in a Southern pulpit.

  But the one thing Dabo hadn’t practiced now really worried him: He had never run down the grassy, steep—and often slippery—hill in the east end zone of Memorial Stadium, a pregame tradition for the players at Clemson’s home field. As an assistant coach, Dabo had always walked onto the field through a different entrance with the other assistants, so he wasn’t fully aware of any invisible booby traps that awaited him, especially because he would be wearing smooth-soled shoes rather than cleats like his players.

  No head coach in Clemson history had ever led his players down that deep green grassy slope, but then again, Dabo was different. He wanted to show the fans his excitement, his passion, his love of the game, and his belief in the power of a singular possibility—that he was the one who would lead the Tiger program, literally and figuratively, to the summit of college football. Yet here he was, fearful of losing his footing and tumbling down the hill, becoming a low-light reel blooper, a football klutz, not to mention a living symbol of the beginning of his tenure at Clemson, which many in coaching circles and in the national media believed was destined to fail. Heck, few outside of Clemson, South Carolina, had ever heard of this thirty-eight-year-old head coach with the quirky first name, a man who had never even been a coordinator for a football team before.

  Just seven years earlier, he was out of football and working as a shopping center leasing agent in Birmingham, Alabama, talking traffic patterns and demographics and anchor stores with potential customers. Then Tommy Bowden hired him to coach the wide receivers at Clemson in 2003 and now—improbably—he was elevated to interim head coach when Bowden stepped down after a humbling 12–7 loss to Wake Forest. How rare was it for a position coach to become an interim head coach and then ascend to permanent head coach? Think of Halley’s Comet streaking across the heavens: about once every seventy-five years.

  Oh my God, thought Swinney in his hotel room on the eve of his first game, I’m going to have to run down that hill in front of eighty-five thousand people and a bunch of people with TV cameras tomorrow. Yes, ready or not, Swinney’s moment of reckoning on that hill was coming.

  Dabo Swinney had been named interim head coach six days earlier on October 13, 2008, and he wanted his players to experience the intoxicating thrill of game day even before they reached the stadium. When he was an assistant, Dabo spent many Saturday mornings before kickoff meeting with recruits in a building away from the stadium. Once these meet and greets were over, he’d stroll through the parking lots, chockablock with orange-clad fans tailgating from pop-up tents and cars and pickup trucks with Clemson flags sprouting from the flatbeds. Underneath the tents emblazoned with Tiger paws, fans grilled burgers and wings, tossed footballs and Frisbees, and sipped adult beverages. The atmosphere was electric—the sights, the smells, and the sounds overwhelmed Dabo’s senses—and that always jolted the assistant coach, spreading a pinch-me smile across his face, filling him with the belief that he was the luckiest dadgum man alive, one who had the best job in America, surrounded every autumn Saturday by the pomp and pageantry and poetry of college football. Now Dabo was determined to have his players feel—really feel, deep down—the full-body shiver of emotions that he always enjoyed during these pregame walks through the parking lots.

  So after becoming interim head coach, Dabo called a meeting in his office with the state troopers who escorted the team buses from the football facility to the stadium on game days. Under Bowden and every other Clemson coach, the buses that ferried the players to
the stadium had avoided traffic by taking a circuitous route using rural roads. But Dabo was adamant: He wanted the buses to drive through the middle of campus, through the beating heart of the tailgating fans, so his players could understand how the game was so important to so many. The team had often played lifeless, listless football through the first half of the 2008 season—a who-really-cares attitude had infected the roster and was a major reason why Bowden was no longer the head coach—and Dabo wanted his players to experience the heat of the fans’ passion, to let it wash over them and, he hoped, inspire them to play the game of their lives.

  At first the state troopers and others in the administration balked at the suggestion, explaining to Dabo that rerouting the buses would create a traffic nightmare. The young interim head coach, who eventually spread out a map on his desk and kept pointing at the campus roads he wanted the buses to travel on, stood his ground. “Y’all are not listening to me,” Dabo said. “You want to win this game? We are not going that way…I need these guys to see the whole pageantry of Clemson.”

  There was more. Dabo told the bus drivers to park a few hundred yards away from the entrance of the locker room. For years the buses had simply pulled up to the door and the players—outfitted in sweat suits or whatever casual apparel they felt like wearing (most also with headphones on)—simply strolled inside, unbothered and unseen by fans.

  No longer, said Dabo. This was his regime: The buses would stop at Lot 5 on Perimeter Road and the players would walk 200 yards through a cluster of screaming, high-fiving fans, providing the shot of adrenaline the entire program needed. What was more, Dabo mandated that his players wear a coat and tie. He also banned headphones, because his players needed to absorb the rush of sensory overload he had enjoyed on his game-day walks across the lots. Dabo instituted these rules to underscore to his players the specialness and seriousness of the occasion. He called this event the Tiger Walk. The reason for creating it was clear: He wanted his players to internalize the excitement and joy and fervor of the fans, to fully understand that they were playing for something that was far bigger than themselves or even their team.

  Does all this really matter when it comes to winning football games? In Dabo’s World, yes.

  About twenty minutes before noon on October 18, 2008, Dabo slid into what would become his normal seat on the lead bus—row 1, seat 1—and gazed out the window as the wheels began to roll. To enter the stadium by running down the hill, the head coach and the players rode buses from the locker room to the east end zone. It was a short ride, only a few minutes, but what a moment this was for Dabo. Outside, late-arriving fans were still streaming through the gates for the noontime kickoff against Georgia Tech, but not even the most ardent Clemson backers knew exactly how far Dabo had come to reach this point.

  His alcoholic father could be abusive, and Dabo spent many nights as a kid in Pelham, Alabama, sleeping in a car with his mom or sitting on the roof of his house waiting for the yelling and banging inside to stop. He was a walk-on at Alabama, making the roster as a slow-footed, overachieving wide receiver, eventually winning a national championship ring as a member of Alabama’s 1992 team. Money was so tight during college that his mother lived with him and a roommate in an apartment in Tuscaloosa—Dabo and his mom even shared a bed—and on many weekends when he didn’t have football responsibilities, Dabo would drive forty-five minutes to wealthy neighborhoods in Birmingham to clean gutters to make a few extra dollars.

  The lead bus rolled closer to the east end zone entrance, and Dabo’s pulse quickened. His dream was unfolding, but as he stepped off the bus, his thoughts quickly turned to what had bothered him the night before: How was he going to get down that hill? If he fell, he knew he’d become a national joke, and even worse, he’d likely be trampled by his players following in his wake, a mass of very large people that could flatten him with startling efficiency and speed, a herd of thundering humans that could stomp the air and life out of a five-foot-eleven middle-aged man.

  Dabo emerged at the top of the hill in front of his players, raising his arms in the air, the crowd cheering. He peered down the hill, realizing it looked steeper now than he had ever imagined. His players behind him were whooping and hollering, but Dabo could only think about how he would have to navigate the grassy, rapid descent in front of him. He focused on his feet. Pick them up and put them down, he thought. Just pick them up and put them down. He looked back out to the crowd and was so caught up in the moment inside Memorial Stadium—also called “Death Valley”—that he bent over and kissed Howard’s Rock, a large piece of white flint imported from the actual Death Valley in California that players touch for good luck before they run onto the field. Watching from the stands, Dabo’s mom, Carol, recoiled at the sight of her son planting a wet one on the rock that had been touched by so many, thinking of the germs imparted to his lips.

  Then a cannon fired, and Dabo took off at full speed, full throttle—no half-assing it now—running like his shoelaces were on fire, sprinting like no coach in Clemson history had done before a game. Stride after stride, he smiled and looked like he was a kid in a footrace, as if he was back in the front yard of his childhood home in Alabama, trying to beat his buddies as they ran from the mailbox to a maple tree. Stride after stride, he gained speed, his players chasing him down the hill. Seeing their coach take off like a Thoroughbred out of the gate, the crowd whipped itself into a boiling froth, producing a roar of noise that resounded several blocks before being swallowed by a brilliant blue autumn sky. Once he reached the field, Dabo’s legs kicked into another gear, and he now ran like he was again a player at Alabama going deep to snare a long ball from his old quarterback Jay Barker.

  Dabo sped across the goal line, the 10-, the 20-, the 30-yard line, still at full sprint. Oh, what a scene this was, the fans in a full-throated frenzy, their coach showing so much joy and spirit and excitement on the field. He wasn’t a coach down there on the field; he was a young man having the time of his life, showing everyone in the stands that even though he may have looked silly, he didn’t care. All that mattered—all that would ever matter to Dabo—was that when he did something, he did it 100 percent, all in with no regrets, and he was going to do it with childlike exhilaration and animation. It was a living example of one of Dabo’s favorite phrases: How you do anything is how you do everything. For Dabo, this meant going all out, all the time, no matter the circumstances, no matter the score, no matter who was watching.

  At the 40-yard line, Dabo kept running through the bright fall sunshine, his legs pumping like pistons. Cheerleaders marched toward the midfield as the band played the Clemson fight song—and Dabo ran past them all. Once he finally stopped, the young coach turned and high-fived his players, jumping up and down, encouraging them, telling them that this was their moment, their time, their game. Fans continued to raise a roar that rolled like thunder through the cool Southern sky.

  This was only a moment that lasted a few seconds, but let’s freeze time here and soak it in, because only in retrospect can we see how important it was, how it revealed the fundamental essence of Dabo Swinney. In his first public appearance at Memorial Stadium as the head coach of the Clemson Tigers, it became clear he believed—truly believed—that anything in life and football could be conquered as long as you are willing to take a chance on yourself.

  There he was, moving up and down the sideline at Wake Forest, a ball of kinetic energy, striding from player to player and coach to coach, talking to them, encouraging them, advising them. It was the evening of September 12, 2020, the season opener against the Demon Deacons, and with less than ninety seconds remaining in the first half, quarterback Trevor Lawrence connected with J.C. Chalk on a 12-yard touchdown pass to give the Tigers a 24–0 lead. The score prompted Dabo to pump his fist in the air.

  For Dabo, this was a special touchdown. J.C. Chalk, a senior tight end, was the grandson of Gene Stallings, Dabo’s former coach at Alabama. It was Stallings who ultimately awarded Dabo a scholarship
after he walked on to the team, and it was Stallings who offered Dabo his first job in coaching as an assistant in the Crimson Tide weight room in 1993. Dabo first met J.C. at a reunion of the ’92 Alabama national championship team when J.C. was in third grade, and soon after J.C. became like family to Dabo—the Alabama connections run deep at Clemson and, in many ways, form the core of the Tiger program. After J.C. scored against Wake Forest, Dabo smiled like a proud father.

  So much had changed since Dabo had taken off down that hill twelve years earlier. Clemson had made it to five straight playoffs, the only team in the country to achieve that feat. The Tigers had won two of the previous four national titles. They’d beaten twenty-two straight ACC opponents, and Dabo had won more total games over the previous five seasons (sixty-nine) than any coach in America, including the Crimson Tide’s Nick Saban (sixty-six).

  During the 2020 Wake Forest game, Dabo took part in both the offensive and defensive huddles, offering his perspective to assistants and players. He was also the team’s most vocal cheerleader, greeting players as they came off the field, slapping backs and high-fiving, constantly clapping and encouraging, even after a play didn’t go as designed. He frequently talked to the officials and rarely stopped moving, acting like a man who realized there was never enough time to accomplish all that he needed to get done.

  Clemson beat Wake Forest 37–13 and was firmly entrenched as the No. 1 team in the nation. The Tiger machine was humming on all cylinders. An hour after the game, as the team buses pulled out of the parking lot and rolled into the warm Southern night, one question loomed larger than all others:

  How did Dabo, in only a dozen years, build this empire?

  Chapter 2

  A Hard Life in Pelham