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| St. Louis Rams head coach Steve Spagnuolo admittedly told reporters that he would miss former Cardinals maanger Tony La Russa after the Hall of Famer announced that he was retiring and not returning to the dugout in St. Louis. - Getty Images Photo |
Former St. Louis Cardinals manager and future Hall of Famer Tony La Russa has plenty of famous friends who are coaches in other sports.
It has been well documented over the years that La Russa is quite close with college basketball legend Bobby Knight and has close relationship with football masterminds Bill Parcells and Bill Belicheck.
Evidently, you can add St. Louis Rams head coach Steve Spagnuolo to that group as well.
Even though Spags has really only been in St. Louis for a couple of years, the Rams coach noted that he and La Russa had become close and that he will miss having La Russa around St. Louis.
“I want to congratulate Coach LaRussa and his family on his announcement to retire. Knowing Tony, I know that he is doing it for the right reasons at the right time. I just feel really honored that I had a chance to get to know Tony as close as I did. I look forward to continuing the friendship. I am going to miss the fact he’s not here in St. Louis. He was always great to get together with and bounce things off of. I’m sure he’ll be just a phone call away. I thought that was a pretty good deal.”The relationship really should not come as a surprise considering the public support each showed for the other recently.
Spags brought his football to Game 3 of the World Series when his Rams were in town to play the Cowboys. And just last Sunday, two days after the Cardinals had clinched the World Series, La Russa brought his Cardinals over to the Edward Jones Dome to cheer on the Rams to their first victory of the season.
Spagnuolo and La Russa are clearly in different parts of their career. Spags is in just his third season as an NFL head coach while La Russa has literally just ended a 33 year managerial career.
But Spags said that he and La Russa loved to get together to talk about leadership and managing people.
“The both of us enjoy talking about the leadership part of it. Experiences and who he has talked to and we all know that Tony has a lot of friends in the coaching profession, not just baseball. People gravitate to him because of who he is and what he’s about. You’re talking about the third winningest manager in the history of the league. But it was a lot of things. I was always picking his brain about something. I was just always impressed. And he was always asking questions too. That was one amazing thing. Here I am, I come here and he’s legendary and he’s asking me about our Super Bowl run in New York and ‘what was this?’ and ‘how did that happen?’ and that’s what made him so great he was always looking for ways to get better.”La Russa has clearly influenced many people in St. Louis during his 16 years and the current Rams head coach is clearly not bashful about admitting that he is one of them.
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