Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan and his family cope with a tough realization

The Baltimore Sun

This isn't the typical Mother's Day story, but that's OK because theirs was never a typical mother-son relationship. When you're talking about a coach's family, nothing is really normal.

So today, Rex Ryan will remain in Maryland with his wife and two children. He sent flowers to his stepmother and says Joanie won't be far from his thoughts. She never is.

And similar to most Sundays, Joanie, 76, is supposed to be picked up by her husband of 37 years. Buddy Ryan will take her to a Louisville, Ky., church, and as they chat, she'll surely ask how Rex is doing and how his twin brother, Rob, is doing, too. Buddy will tell her they're both good, but inevitably, just a few minutes later, she'll forget and will ask again.

"I don't know how you just accept that this is the way it is now," says Rex Ryan, the Ravens' defensive coordinator.

Long before Joanie Ryan started misplacing her purse and keys, before her twin stepsons became two of the NFL's most successful defensive coordinators, before her husband sold the family farm and the shine had worn from the couple's golden years, Buddy Ryan was a recently divorced assistant coach for the New York Jets.

When he met a young woman who happened to live at the same Bayside, N.Y., apartment complex, his sons were living with their birth mother in Toronto.

The twins were more than a handful. As Rex tells it, "we weren't always in trouble, but we were always around it." They shared a couple of newspaper routes and regularly skipped school, spending more time throwing papers than writing them. Both boys loved sports but were kicked off the youth football team after just three games because of their "temperament."

"We were much different then," Rex says.

A change was needed and Buddy thought the twins would benefit from a different environment. So as they were set to begin high school in 1976, Rob and Rex moved to Minnesota, where their father was defensive coordinator with the Vikings and lived with Joanie, whom Buddy had wed in 1970.

The Ryan boys weren't eager to leave Canada, but Joanie, who had no kids of her own, was thrilled to have an instant family.

"I don't think she had a clue what she was getting into," Buddy says today with a chuckle. "She would've run away as soon as she could, if she knew."

New beginnings

Life changed for everybody. The twins were suddenly following rules, going to class, attending church regularly and growing closer and closer to their stepmother.

It's difficult for outsiders to fully understand the dynamics of a coaching family. The coach spends so much time on the road, in team meetings and studying film that a special bond often develops between mothers and sons. Buddy always remained close with his sons - both twins served as ballboys for their father's teams - but they each saw much more of Joanie.

"During football season, Dad had to miss some [games] but Joanie was always right there," Rex says.

Buddy tried steering his sons away from the coaching life, but after they both turned down a management program in the food services industry, Buddy checked his boys into an Oklahoma hotel room and didn't let them leave until they'd learned all there is to know about Buddy's feared 46 defense.

As Rob and Rex rose through the coaching ranks, they often turned to Buddy and Joanie for advice and for comfort. Buddy was practical, reminding each of his sons of similar experiences and hardships he'd endured. And Joanie was always the optimist. She always spoke about "God's game plan."

"If anyone ever thought they really needed something, you go straight to Joanie and ask her to pray," Rex says. "She was such a saint. You just assumed she had a direct line."

Rex can't help but notice how his wife, Michelle, happens to embody many of Joanie's qualities, and Michelle can't help but be grateful that in Joanie, she had a coach of her own.

"Rex would be gone and miss something, and Joanie was the one who I'd call and say, 'Argh! Rex is gone and the basement is flooded,'" Michelle says.

Both Rex and Rob moved from job to job before receiving a call to coach in the NFL - from their father. When Buddy Ryan became head coach of the Arizona Cardinals in 1994, he hired his twin sons as assistants.

The families all lived near one another in Phoenix, and Joanie was thrilled to be a full-time grandmother. Rex and Michelle's oldest son, Payton, was a toddler and Seth was just a baby at the time. Joanie would visit the preschool, take them to the park to feed ducks in the pond, attend Halloween and Christmas school functions.

"All these things," Michelle says. "This is how I'd like the boys to remember their grandmother. Not like now."

Turning point

Who even notices the first signs? The Ryans certainly didn't. Initially, they thought nothing of it when Joanie would forget to pay a bill or forget something that was just told to her. That's just part of aging, right?

No one was really worried until the February 2002 Super Bowl. Buddy and Joanie were in New Orleans, where the Patriots were to meet the Rams. Rob was an assistant with the Patriots and was days away from winning his first Super Bowl ring.

While Buddy slept, Joanie wandered off to a store. About an hour later, in Maryland, Rex's cell phone rang. His stepmother had gotten lost and couldn't remember much of anything. A store clerk found Rex's cell number in Joanie's purse, and the Ryans were forced to admit that these "senior moments" were occurring far too frequently.

Doctors diagnosed Joanie with Alzheimer's disease, a degenerative brain disorder that results in memory loss and cognitive impairment, rendering even the best and brightest with development and often a temperament resembling that of a child. The Alzheimer's Association estimates that there are 5.1 million Americans living with the disease.

The Ryans weren't familiar with the disease and didn't really know what to expect.

"I think there was some denial involved," Rex says. "It's like, eh, she's forgetful - that's part of aging. But suddenly, we just knew there was more to it."

Rex wouldn't know just how much more there was to it until the following year. In October 2003, Buddy was planning a 10-day trip to Florida for some business and some golf. He'd arranged for his wife to fly to Maryland and stay with Rex and Michelle.

"When I picked her up at the airport, she seemed like the old Joanie," Michelle says.

When they got home, Michelle turned on the TV to watch football. Rex's Ravens were playing in Arizona. The woman who wouldn't dare miss one of her stepson's high school games couldn't sit still for five minutes to watch the Ravens. And she kept repeating the same questions: Where is Buddy? When will Rex be home? When do I go home?

"The really hard part was she could not remember that her dad had died about 20 years before," Michelle says. "In her mind, her father was still alive and she needed to check on him. She picked up the phone and dialed a number she remembered from 50 years ago in Long Island. She could remember that childhood phone number but couldn't remember her father was dead."

The nights were especially bad. Rex still gets choked up thinking about it. Two o'clock in the morning and Joanie was fully dressed, packed and ready to leave. She refused to accept that there was nowhere to go.

Rex got a glimpse at the frustration his dad dealt with every single day. Buddy would later explain that Joanie often woke him in the middle of the night, holding a suitcase and insisting that they go to the airport to visit her father. Buddy would usually manage to calm her down and get her into bed, only to be woken up again an hour later. She'd be wearing a completely different outfit, her bags freshly packed.

"Looking back, I think in a way, that trip was my dad wanting us to see what he was going through every day and for us to realize that he could no longer handle it," Rex says. "For us, that's when we realized, geez, this isn't going to get better. I mean, it's only going to get worse. And you can't imagine it getting worse, but you know it will somehow."

Shortly after, Joanie moved into an assisted-living facility in Louisville, and the Ryans were forced to accept that things would never be the same. These strong football men - a trio that has six Super Bowl rings among them - leaned on one another for support, knowing full well that before Joanie would have known exactly what to say to bolster spirits. She had always been the family backbone.

"I remember when Rex and Rob went to college," Buddy says. "They called back five times a day, homesick and crying. They never wanted to talk with me. It was always Joanie."

'It's her, but it's not'

To children, parents can seem invincible, immune to any physical, mental or emotional hardship. Even when you age and should presumably know better, childhood imagery trumps adulthood reality.

"This isn't how you'd ever imagine it," says Rex, 44. "I know there's no good way to die. People have cancer or something like that, and you can see the body going. You're able to accept it because they look sick. Here, with this disease, they look like you and me. Physically, they're fine, but their head, my God, it's sad and painful."

In 1976, Buddy was on the staff with the Vikings when he took his playoff bonus money and bought a 176-acre dairy farm in Lawrenceburg, Ky. Together he and Joanie would dream - and then build - their retirement home on sprawling Kentucky bluegrass. Rex, Rob and the rest of the family would help, too. They were out there every offseason, literally building a working horse farm from the ground up. Buddy and Rex still say those hot summers are some of their fondest memories together.

"She'd worked all her life for that dream house," Buddy, 73, says of his wife. "But she only got to live in it about 10 years. It's sad, but I guess that's life."

Buddy needed to be closer to Joanie's assisted-living facility, so last year, he sold the farm and moved to nearby Shelbyville, Ky. To the Ryans, the farm had always been a symbol they all shared together.

"If anything happened in coaching business, you lost your job, times were tough, you knew there was the farm and we could go there and work and it would feel like home," Michelle says. "There was a sense of security for all of us. It's gone now, but we all understood why he had to do it: When she wasn't there, it was just not the same."

Rex and his family see Joanie every summer, usually bringing along new shoes and clothes, certain to write her name on everything so nothing gets misplaced. Admittedly, the visits aren't always easy. "It's her," Rex says, "but it's not her."

And that's what seems to be so tough about the disease, the way it makes you refer to a loved one in both the past and present tenses, struggling to distinguish between the two and having to constantly remind yourself - just as Joanie often had - that this all is part of "God's game plan."

"I know we're all going to die. We all have that in common, and I understand that," Rex says. "But you still wish that the people you love, that they're able to ride off into the sunset, that they're able to die the same way they lived, with dignity and class. Because that was always Joanie - she was all class."

rick.maese@baltsun.com

online

For previous columns, go to www.baltimoresun.com/maese

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°