KANSAS CITY, Mo. #### Vermeil has been coach of the year at every level of football from Pop Warner to the pros. He's got nothing left to prove.
That may explain why the man who won a Super Bowl with the Rams in 1999 is looking to try something different now that he's retired from the Chiefs, and will take a position with Lifetime Television for Women writing sob-story screenplays.
"Football has been great to me, but it's time to follow my dream," Vermeil said with a lump in his throat at a press conference here today. The emotional California native has worn his emotions on his sleeve throughout his career, often bursting into tears when his defense forces a turnover, or a kick coverage team pins an opponent inside its twenty-yard line.
"Our kids and our grandkids are grown, so this team became my kids," Vermeil said as he fought back sniffles. Quarterback Trent Green came up to complain that Tony Gonzalez wasn't sharing the Legos, and Vermeil warned the tight end to play nice or he'd tell team owner Lamar Hunt to trade him to Buffalo.
Lifetime TV is 50% owned by The Walt Disney Company and targets female audiences with "disease-of-the-week" films, real-life accounts of husbands who forget their wives' birthdays, and other domestic tragedies.
Vermeil, the oldest coach in the NFL until his retirement at 69, holds the state record for the longest distance driven by a senior citizen with a turn signal on according to the Missouri Highway Patrol. Vermeil traveled the length of Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Kansas City, a distance of 250 miles, with his right blinker flashing when he took over as head coach of the Chiefs in 2001.
"I came out of the clover-leaf at St. Charles and just completely forgot about it!"
Another good one, Gerbil! Can't you just envision it now? #### Vermeil, sitting in his home theater with a box on either side of him...the one on the left filled with chocolates, the one on the right with tissues...all setlled in for the sappy movie marathon he has so eagerly awaited...
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
