Culture
The Super Bowl winning coach and his family who have fallen in love with Wrexham
Where does a former NFL coach with a Super Bowl title to his name go on holiday for the new year? Wrexham, of course.
Paul McCord and his family swapped Florida for north Wales to take in the League Two match against Barrow after becoming passionate fans of the club through the documentary Welcome to Wrexham.
It meant leaving behind the Tampa sunshine and daytime temperatures of 22C (71.6F) for highs of 9C but Paul, wife Mindy — a successful coach in women’s lacrosse — and nine-year-old son LJ couldn’t have been happier.
“Being here in Wrexham to celebrate the new year meant so much,” says Paul, a member of the coaching team who took the Baltimore Ravens to Super Bowl glory in 2001. He sports the commemorative ring he received after the 34-7 victory over the New York Giants.
“This is our second visit to Wrexham. We first came over in March 2023, for the Southend United game. Then, we took in the U.S. tour last summer, watching the games in Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, San Diego and Philadelphia.
GO DEEPER
Wrexham, Chelsea and the $20m match
“That was great, as we got to meet up again with people like Wayne (Jones, The Turf landlord and breakout star of the documentary), who we met on that first visit to Wrexham.
“We’ve fallen in love with the place and the people. In a world that can be very cynical, to have a place that’s authentic and full of gratitude makes you want to be here. That’s what drew us back.
“What got us here in March was the documentary but the people are what brought us back.”
Paul and Mindy’s respective careers in elite coaching are what initially drew the couple into watching series one of a show that charts Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s ownership.
“As coaches, we both love watching sports documentaries, like (ESPN’s) 30 for 30 series,” says Mindy, head coach of the women’s lacrosse programme at the University of South Florida.
“Paul was the one who said, ‘Let’s watch this documentary’. He’s writing a book on underdog stories and the show had that element. Straight away, we could both relate to the story.
“I loved the ‘blue-collar town’ element. My dad was an electrician and my grandfather a coal miner, having come over from Yugoslavia. I also loved the community aspect, and particularly how authentic the fan engagement is at Wrexham.
“There’s a real personal element, with the players walking through the fans before every game, posing for pictures and signing autographs.”
The McCord family (back row left to right): Paul, Mindy, daughter Taylor and son-in-law Spencer Zapper and (front) LJ
The McCords spent New Year’s Eve in The Turf pub that sits adjacent to the club’s SToK Cae Ras home, but both Paul and Mindy seem remarkably chipper.
LJ is excited, too, as he’s brought along a present for Paul Mullin, who the youngster enjoyed an impromptu kickabout with after the summer tour match against Chelsea in Chapel Hill.
“The gift is for Albi,” explains Mindy, Albi being Mullin’s young autistic son. “We wanted to thank Paul for being so great with LJ. It’s what we love so much about Wrexham, the authenticity and the welcome everyone has.”
The McCord family will always remember their first visit to Wrexham.
The Southend game only went ahead at the eleventh hour after volunteers and club staff had worked through the night to ensure the pitch was playable. Snow had blanketed the area.
But there was another issue: the tickets Paul had bought online turned out to be in the area reserved for the away team’s supporters.
“We only realised when we arrived at the turnstiles in all our newly-bought Wrexham gear,” laughs Paul, 6ft 6in (198cm) tall and still built as powerfully as you’d expect someone who once signed for Dallas Cowboys to be.
“The gentleman explained we’d erroneously purchased tickets in the Southend section and then looked at me before saying, ‘You’ll be OK, as they won’t give you too much trouble, but I can’t say the same about the other two’.
“It was totally my fault. I’d no idea it was the away section. I just saw ‘Wrexham’ and clicked for three tickets. The club was brilliant. They escorted us to another section in the stand, which turned out to be where all the reserve team players sit.”
Mindy quickly interjects: “The funny thing is we got on season two of the documentary as a result. We were watching at home when suddenly, there we were, on the screen, looking like total tourists in our Wrexham hats and scarves sitting with all these players!”
There were no such mishaps this time around. As international members, the family bought tickets in the main stand through the club for the 4-1 win over Barrow.
A particular highlight came via the second goal of Steven Fletcher’s hat-trick, a far-post header from James McClean’s in-swinging corner. “The stack play on the corner was similar to a set piece we use in lacrosse,” Paul messages after the match.
Crossovers between Phil Parkinson’s methods and the couple’s own coaching experiences are more common than many might think. Certainly, the Wrexham manager’s famous ‘character test’ when sizing up prospective signings — he’ll think nothing of driving to London and back to weigh up a player’s suitability over a cup of tea — is similar to how Mindy runs things in lacrosse.
Along with Paul, she famously implemented the fast-paced basketball doctrine ‘The System’, as pioneered by Paul Westhead with Loyola Marymount University in the late 1980s and featured in the TV show Winning Time. This had a great effect when she was at the helm of Jacksonville University’s lacrosse setup. Building the right culture was key.
The McCords gather the Jacksonville University women’s lacrosse team together (Paul McCord)
“We needed a good locker room,” says Mindy, named Conference Coach of the Year eight times during her spell at Jacksonville. “We got that by those ladies buying into our core values and our mission.
“Where you say Phil interviews the players here, we were interviewing the parents. You’re dealing with 17- to 23-year-olds, so how they are parented is important. Do the parents value coaching and mentoring? That makes such a big difference in terms of how you can move the needle with a young adult.
“There is an art to finding the right people. We were also very transparent and honest about who we were as people and coaches, our styles, our personalities and what they were going to get from us. You have to build trust.”
One coaching aspect that Mindy doesn’t share with the Wrexham manager is what the documentary makers refer to as “Phil’s enthusiasm levels” — the huge number of times he swears during team talks.
She adds: “We do crack up every time he swears on the show. But then LJ was saying to me one day, ‘Mom, they drop the F-bomb so much — can I say it?’ I’m, like, ‘No way, it is just part of the language there’.”
Dad agrees. “I’ve been in dressing rooms like that,” he says. “Maybe not quite as much profanity but certainly a few things were said. It is when the adrenalin and testosterone get pumping. It comes from the heart.”
Paul certainly speaks from experience when it comes to high-level coaching. Having been part of Brian Billick’s Ravens coaching team for that Super Bowl XXXV triumph over the Giants, he later joined the Jacksonville Jaguars in a similar capacity.
“I worked with the kickers, punters, snappers, holders, return specialists,” he explains. “The Super Bowl was surreal. I was the below man on the coaching staff, the assistant special teams coach. But to just be part of it was incredible. You’re on this journey and you know something great is happening.
“You’re so micro-focused on each game. And each moment. We didn’t really think anything about the Super Bowl until we were there. And once there, we felt we’d easily win this game.
“No one was going to score against our defence, which was the best. Our offence also knew what to do, with our field position game also being great. That’s exactly how it played out.
“It was a wonderful experience, with Mindy and the family all there.”
McCord at practice with the Ravens (Sue Bloom)
Along with the book on sporting underdogs he’s writing and helping Mindy’s coaching career, Paul’s goal for 2024 involves helping to spread the Wrexham gospel even further.
“Family and friends all know about Wrexham,” he says. “For our daughter Taylor and son-in-law Spencer (Zapper), we bought Wrexham shirts for Christmas. The plan now is to educate people in Tampa about this great club.
“It’s funny that I wasn’t into Always Sunny (in Philadelphia) when I got into this. Or even a Ryan Reynolds fan. It was the sport element that attracted me — and particularly the underdog story.
“But then I suddenly became this superfan, never missing a game on iFollow (kick-off is usually at 10am on a Saturday in Florida) and shouting so loud all the neighbours know when we’ve scored a goal.”
(Photos: Richard Sutcliffe/McCord Family)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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