He is 65 now, has been one of those coaches of legend for a long time now, someone whose career one day will live forever in the Hall of Fame.

But these are not the best of times for Bill Parcells.

And it's more than the fact that it's been eight years now since he won a playoff game, or that he's taken the Cowboys to one playoff appearance in his first three years there. It's that a lot of the luster has now come off the Tuna, as though the glory years are all gone and he now tries to get by on his rep, like the once toughest kid in the schoolyard trying to get by on his stare.

Maybe that's because, in many ways, he's been eclipsed by his former assistants. Not only has Bill Belichick become the coach of his generation, in many ways supplanting Parcells, there's also the perception that maybe, just maybe, a percentage of the Tuna' success was because Belichick was his defensive coordinator. Charlie Weis, another one of the Tuna proteges, is the highly visible coach at Notre Dame. As though the kids have left the house and the old man now sits in the chair in the living room wondering what happened.

Monday night the Cowboys were playing the Giants on Monday Night Football and there was Parcells with his big blue Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt on.

The Tuna as a Cowboy?

Somehow it doesn't look right, the archetypal "Jersey guy" right there in "Big D" dealing with Jerry Jones and T.O.

This is what it's come down to for the guy who wanted to be able "to buy the groceries," kowtowing to an intrusive owner and having to deal with with the penultimate NFL brat, the one guy whose initials are synonomous with self-absorption, the one guy the Tuna of legend would have run out of Dallas as quickly as you could say J.R. Ewing?

Say it ain't so.

Maybe that's just the way it is in sports, the sense that people belong to a certain time, a certain era. With Parcells it was the Giants, back when he was the right guy at the right time, the Jersey guy winning big games in the Meadowlands, along with the two Super Bowls, then talking trash with the New York beat writers afterwards.

Was there ever a guy more suited to coaching football in New York then?

It didn't seem so.

That's the cachet he brought to New England in 1993, giving a struggling franchise instant credibility. In retrospect, he was the perfect coach for the Patriots then, a star for a franchise that so desperately needed one. The run the Pats are on now? The emergence of this as a serious football town? The reality that the Patriots could be just as good as all those franchises imbedded in football lore, all those ones that used to seem as far away as the moon from Foxboro?

That all started with Parcells.

Yet something happened when he left here, as though something got left behind that he's never been able to recapture, like the summers of childhood. Maybe it started with his squabble with Robert Kraft, the infamous line about wanting to buy the groceries. Maybe it started with the tawdry way he left, in negotiations with the Jets while he was supposed to be coaching his team in the Super Bowl.

Whatever, it hasn't been the same for him since. Not really. Yes, he turned around the Jets, taking them from pathetic to respectable in just one year, and winning the AFC East in his second year. Yes, he won a playoff game with them. But that was in 1998, and coaching is all about the present tense, however unfair that might be.

Ah, the present tense.

Which brings us back to Dallas.

This is Parcells' fourth year, and it's as though someone forgot to put the magic in his suitcase when he moved there. The first year he was 10-6, lost in the first round of the playoffs. The last two have been forgettable.

Now?

Now he's got a mediocre team, and a quarterback controversy to boot, complete with him saying after Monday night's loss, "I'm ashamed to put a team put there that played like that."

Vintage, Tuna.

No pretense. As direct as a forearm shiver.

The Tuna of legend, right?

Until you remember that he now puts up with Terrell Owens' nonsense. Until you remember he now works for Jerry Jones. Until you realize that this is Parcells' team, and it's not what it was supposed to be. Just as the Tuna himself is no longer what he's supposed to be.

For it all seems like just bombast and bluster now, rants from a coach who senses it's all getting away from him, the emperor with no clothes. That's the sense you get now, that it's all about memories now. Memories and rust, and a Jersey guy standing on the sidelines in a Cowboy sweatshirt, just another coach without a whole lot of answers, looking like he's a long way from home.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340