Beloved Bills coach celebrates 100th birthday and his legacy is still going strong

Marv Levy, the winningest coach in Buffalo Bills history, turned 100 years old Sunday.

So, what do you think a man who is exactly one century old would be doing on a momentous day like that? Well, the still sharp as a tack Levy left Canton, Ohio early Sunday morning where he was honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame - of which he is an enshrined member - to return home to Chicago because he’s doing an autograph signing.

On his 100th birthday. Simply put, the man is amazing.

“I guess I’m okay, but I’m not running any marathons anymore” Levy joked when he appeared with me and Adam Benigni, my co-host on the BLEAV in Bills podcast, last January when we had him on our show.

In the six-plus months since that episode, nothing has changed. No marathons, but he’s still OK. No, check that, he’s incredible for a man who was born just seven years after the end of World War I and when the New York Yankees had only one World Series championship on their resume.

“He uses the walker now, but he still has his faculties and he’s still telling his Catskills jokes, still does his vaudeville act,” said Chuck Lester, one of only three assistant coaches (Bruce DeHaven and Rusty Jones were the others) who were on Levy’s Buffalo staff for its entirety starting with his first full season in 1987.

Marv Levy's birthday party attended by Bills greats

Lester made the trip from his home outside Buffalo to Canton for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, during which Levy’s 100th birthday was recognized and the crowd inside the stadium sang Happy Birthday. Saturday night, Lester also attended Levy’s birthday party at the Doubletree Hotel in Canton along with several of the Super Bowl era players Levy coached including fellow Hall of Famers Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, and James Lofton.

“It was a chance to wish him a happy birthday and a chance to see him,” Lester said. “It was good. I think he was really humbled by it.”

Like so many who have been touched by Levy, Lester reveres his old boss.

“He’s like a father to me,” Lester said. “One thing he’s taught me is how to treat people, always treat people with respect. He has such dignity, and you would say he’s got class. It’s hard to define, but once you see it, you know it as class. That’s the one thing about him that stands out.”

If Sean McDermott continues on his current path, he will soon become the winningest coach in Bills history, but for now, Levy stands at the top of the list with 123 victories counting the postseason, six AFC East division titles, and four AFC championships.

Marv Levy's path to the Buffalo Bills

Levy came to Buffalo at a time when the franchise was in dire straits, even though in 1986, eventually pillars like Kelly, Reed and Bruce Smith were already on the team. He took over when Hank Bullough was fired in November of that season, but his hiring did not elicit much faith.

He had been coaching for more than 30 years, and he’d spent time in the NFL as an assistant with the Eagles, Redskins and Rams, but he didn’t get his first head coaching job in the pros until he went north to run the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League.

He won two Grey Cup championships in five years, and that led him back to the NFL for his first head coaching job with the Kansas City Chiefs, but that was an uninspiring five-year term that yielded a record of 31-42.

People in Buffalo shrugged when owner Ralph Wilson - on the advice of general manager Bill Polian - chose Levy to get things turned around at a time when, since the start of 1984, the Bills had lost 35 of the last 41 games.

It took the rest of 1986, and most of 1987, but those shrugs turned into cheers starting in 1988 when the Bills began what remains the greatest epoch in their history, one that the current team led by McDermott and Josh Allen is trying to emulate, but despite its own wild success has not done so because it still has zero AFC titles.

But Levy’s tenure as coach in Buffalo was about so much more than just victories.

“He always had the absolute perfect touch and grace and intelligence and perspective, all the things that you would expect,” kicker Scott Norwood once told me. And Norwood would certainly know something about that given how Levy consoled him after he missed the kick in Super Bowl 25. “It’s no mystery as to why the team had so much success under his leadership. He came in and things really started turning around and it was in large part because of him.”

Levy was one of the great orators the NFL has ever known and he would share anecdotes with his players - whether it was in a team meeting, or in a speech before or after a game, or maybe just in a quiet one-on-one moment - that left them either deeply moved, or just plain confused.

Kent Hull, the Pro Bowl center in the middle of Buffalo’s no-huddle offense during the Super Bowl years, once said, “My vocabulary improved tenfold playing for Marv. There was a whole lot of head-shaking going on when Marv used those ten-dollar words you’ve never heard of. Heck, for all I knew, he could have been making those words up.”

“I roomed with Phil Hansen for nine years,” special teams ace Mark Pike once said, “and I can’t tell you how many times we’d go back to our hotel room after Marv’s Saturday night speech to the whole team and just be blown away. We’d be like, ‘Wow, did you hear that?’ The stories he would tell made you feel so motivated.”

Linebacker Darryl Talley said before Levy was inducted in the Hall of Fame in 2001, “I want to be there just to see what new words I can learn by listening to Marv’s speech.”

Great quotes from Marv Levy

Of course, the greatest Marvism - as we liked to call them - is “Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?” which lives on today and probably will for as long as the Bills franchise exists. But here are a few of my other personal favorites:

• “World War Two was a must-win.”
• “What you do should speak so loudly that no one can hear what you say.”
• “Everyone wants to win. The special person has the will to prepare to win.”
• “Adversity is an opportunity for heroism.”
• “Expect rejection, but expect more to overcome it.”
• “If Michelangelo wanted to play it safe, he would have painted the floor of the Sistine Chapel.”
• “The coach who starts listening to the fans winds up sitting next to them.”
• “If you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.”

They were all great, but there was always meaning behind the words. The learned graduate of Coe College and Harvard University wasn’t speaking just to show off how smart he was. Everything Levy said had a purpose.

“He would always talk about General Eisenhower,” Lester said. “You know, he’s big on Winston Churchill, but he always talked about Eisenhower, like how he made sure the troops would eat first before he would eat, the troops would sleep before he would. He always put people in front of him.

“And the one thing about Marv, he has never been one to beat his own drum. Look at me, look at me, look at me. With all his accomplishments … he’s never, never wanted to be a braggadocio person. He’s very humble. He’s just the best. You look at some of these guys today and they haven’t done anything, and they’re out there skywriting their name”

Like McDermott and Allen today, Kelly and Levy were joined at the hip in Bills history, and for all his talent, and grit, and toughness, Kelly will forever believe that it was Levy who pulled all of that out of him.

“He pretty much made me what I am today as far as a professional player and a person,” Kelly once told me. “Marv knew exactly the right words to say at the right times. He knew how to handle the players and everybody would do anything to help him and the team.’’

“He means the world to me,” McDermott said. “He means the world to a lot of people, what he’s done, what he’s accomplished in Buffalo. He’s a true man. And I have a ton of respect for him and admiration for him as a coach, certainly, but also him as person.”

It’s incredible to think that we’re nearly 30 years removed from the last game Levy coached in Buffalo, but his presence has never really left One Bills Drive. He’s always there in spirit, and even though he’s not around much anymore, Buffalo, and the Bills, are never out of his mind for long.

“Our hearts are always with the Buffalo Bills,” he told Benigni and I on our show. “I’m pulling for them, and when I’m pulling for them, I’m also pulling for all those magnificent Buffalo Bills fans who’ve been so supportive and who are so deserving of a Super Bowl championship.”

Happy birthday Marv, and here’s to another century.

Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.