TAMPA, Fla. — Clyde Christensen was asked to review the play sheet to see if anything was missing.
Less than a week after retiring as Bucs quarterbacks coach, part of the purge of nine assistants from Todd Bowles’ staff on Jan. 19, Christensen received a text message and follow-up phone call from Peyton Manning, who is the AFC coach for the NFL’s first Pro Bowl flag football game.
“Peyton said, ‘Hey, look through this and see if there’s anything I forgot,” Christensen said. “He said, ‘We’re going to have one practice and one meeting. You think I have too much or too little?’”
Earlier in the afternoon, Christensen read a message from former Colts quarterback Andrew Luck announcing the birth of his second baby girl.
A few days before that, Tom Brady checked in to see how Christensen was doing following the end of a 43-year college and pro coaching career that included seven playoff appearances and a Super Bowl win during separate stints with the Bucs.
It’s about the relationships
Christensen, 66, said the relationships with players always have been the reason he has coached. During the past three seasons, the bond between Brady and Christensen grew strong. Quarterbacks look to their position coaches to help them thrive, and in the case of Brady last season, maybe also survive.
Christensen said Brady was somewhat blindsided a few days into training camp when he learned his wife, Gisele Bündchen, had decided to end their marriage of more than 13 years. Brady took off for “personal reasons” on his birthday. The next week, Bowles announced that Brady would be away from the club until sometime after the second preseason game.
“To watch Tom have to leave training camp for 11 days to take care of some personal problems, it was heartbreaking stuff,” Christensen said. “A divorce. Worrying about his kids. Hard stuff. But then you’re still expected to do your job when you get back. No one cares. And you’ve got a team. You have everyone depending on you. The show goes on.”
Things got worse before they got better. Only a few days into training camp, Brady lost center Ryan Jensen for the regular season to a knee injury.
Having ended his retirement in March after only 40 days only to be faced with personal and professional crises, the stress obviously was taking a toll on the quarterback, Christensen said. It also was evident by Brady’s 15-pound weight loss.
“Yeah, I worried about him,” Christensen said. “He lost that weight. It was very stressful. And he battled and he hurt, but he put on the brave face and did it again. You’ve got a bunch of folks depending on you. I have an unbelievable respect for what Tom did this year. Off-the-charts amount of respect for him just managing things.”
Christensen has had to manage things, too. He was disappointed prior to the start of the 2022 season when the Bucs denied permission for him to accept a job with the Miami Dolphins as their offensive coordinator, an opportunity that came with a significant pay increase. He also was surprised he was part of the changes to Bowles’ staff last week. He opted to retire but will be paid the final year of his contract.
On Wednesday, however, the only pain Christensen was feeling was from dental surgery that would prevent him from eating solid food for a few days. Seated at The Cheesecake Factory and sipping on a milkshake just a few hundred yards from the site where the Bucs’ old training facility stood when he arrived in Tampa Bay on Tony Dungy’s staff in 1996, he reflected on being part of the best two eras in club history.
“It was my first year in the NFL. It was the losingest team in sports at that time,” Christensen said. “I think we started 1-8 in those orange uniforms. I loved them. Just to watch that thing build. We got close (reaching the NFC Championship Game in 2000). I got a second chance, and we got it done. I don’t know how you put a price on that.
“It was disappointing, because we got so close (with Dungy). We became a perennial playoff team. Went to the playoffs most of those years and turned it into a proud franchise with a packed stadium. It was a fun place, but we didn’t get a Super Bowl. We didn’t get it done here, but I got a second chance to come back here, and sure enough we got one our second year (with Bruce Arians).”
It was during the 2020 season, played under COVID-19 protocols, that Christensen grew close to Brady in meetings and on half-empty team buses to prevent the spread of the virus.
“Tom and I would sit in the bus together, alone,” he said. “No one around could hear anything, and we just talked about football and life and exchanged stories, and we had had so many banters back and forth. Not only do you have a front-row seat to watch Tom Brady, the best of all time, you’re leaving Lambeau (Field after the 2021 NFC title game), and he’s FaceTiming your kids and saying what a great Pa they’ve got.”
‘God had a hand on my life’
As a child, Christensen was left for adoption by his 15-year-old mother at a Salvation Army Hospital for unwed mothers. His faith may have begun there, because he was adopted by a pastor and his wife, who couldn’t have children.
He never knew his birth mom. But after going on a radio program in Tampa to talk about adoption, he received a lot of letters from single mothers who had done the same.
At the prodding of his wife, Debbie, Christensen sought to locate his birth mother while coaching for the Colts. A few years later, they found her living in San Diego. At first, his birth mother didn’t want any contact with him. But she relented, and in the quarterback room players such as Luck and Matt Hasselbeck helped Christensen craft a letter to her.
“I told her I don’t know how it happened, but I had a bunch of pictures of my kids (he has three grown daughters, Rachel, Rebecca and Ruth) and I said, ‘Here’s the result of your decision, and the world is a better place,” Christensen said.
Eventually, he met his birth mother, Roberta Story, and two of his half-sisters at a restaurant in San Diego.
“It was another confirmation of God’s hands on my life that, even at birth, I got a good start and was placed in a great home, great mom and dad and charmed life,” Christensen said. “Right from the beginning, God had a hand on my life, and even now as I go into kind of an unknown period of my life, I just trust he’s got me.”
Where is Christensen headed? He said both of his wife’s parents are 97 and living in North Carolina. After moving 12 times for coaching jobs, he said it’s time to fulfill her wish to take care of them.
The bigger picture
For Christensen, it’s the relationships that endure. Manning used to ask Christensen to meet him at Anderson University, about an hour outside of Indianapolis, at midnight to throw when he was coming back from nerve damage. “He didn’t want anyone to see him throw,” Christensen said. “It was he and I up there to see if he could put this thing back together.”
Manning called him last Sunday from Orchard Park, N.Y., where Manning had taken his 11-year-old son, Marshall, to the Bills-Bengals game.
Christensen said he remains in contact with Brady. He doesn’t know if Brady will play again, but he knows he can. “There’s not one practice I watched that I didn’t go tell somebody, ‘How does a guy that age throw a football like that at 45?’ ” Christensen said. “It’s a Picasso.”
Don’t try to tell Christensen he’s not a coach just because he’s unemployed. He said he will always be coaching, teaching and helping young men achieve their goals.
“People would look at it and say it’s the rings or the money or the trophy, and you would miss the whole story,” Christensen said. “It’s so much deeper than that. It’s people’s lives. It’s watching them develop. You felt like I got a free ticket. I got sideline seats, and I get to watch the whole thing.
“It’s amazing to watch Tom Brady, in the middle of going through all those tough times, somehow keep it in the lane and get to the playoffs and win a division. People don’t see that side of it. Wins and losses are really, really important, but it’s a much bigger picture than that.”
