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During his 46-year football coaching career, Marv Levy gained a reputation for delivering pithy quotations. His so-called “Marvisms” could be motivating, funny and educational — occasionally prompting players and sportswriters to groan or scramble for a dictionary or encyclopedia.
"If Michelangelo wanted to play it safe,'’ Levy once mused, “he would have painted the floor of the Sistine Chapel."
Levy will never be accused of playing it safe. And, at age 95, he's still looking for chapel ceilings to paint.
Peter Brouillet/Getty Images
Peter Brouillet/Getty Images
Few football coaches have enjoyed more interesting second acts than Levy, who has spent the last quarter-century putting pen to paper. After leading the Buffalo Bills to an unprecedented four consecutive Super Bowls and more victories than any coach in franchise history, Levy retired in 1998 at age 72. He's tied with Chicago's George “Papa Bear” Halas as the oldest coach in National Football League history.
For several years, Levy kept his hand in the game, working as a national studio analyst for Fox Sports and even returning to Buffalo to serve briefly as Bills general manager.
But since retirement, his main focus has been on writing. The 2001 Pro Football Hall-of-Fame inductee published his first book — a memoir titled Where Else Would You Rather Be? — at 79, and it earned a spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Five years later, he coauthored a book about the greatest plays in Bills history.
At 86, Levy wrote his first novel, a mystery called Between the Lies. And three years ago, at 92, he penned his first children's book, a never-give-up tale about his beloved Chicago Cubs finally winning the World Series after a 108-year drought. He's also compiled a still-unpublished collection of poems.
War injury spurs reading
Levy's mother, Ida, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was a voracious reader, and her love of storytelling rubbed off on him. Still, it wasn't until he was serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, as an 18-year-old, that the reading bug bit him. “I had injured my leg badly and was in the hospital for a stretch, and one day I hobbled down to the tiny library,'’ he says. “There was only one book available: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.”
