The log splitter outside Dick Vermeil’s cabin-style home in Chester County had long since cooled. He had kept it humming early on this recent July morning, but it was near noon now, and he had taken care to drape a dark tarpaulin over it after setting it next to the stand-alone garage, made of tall planks of striated wood, that housed one of his most valued possessions.

The jeans that Dick Vermeil wore were frayed at the knees and splotched with dirt. Tucked into those jeans and tapering at his waist was a navy blue T-shirt with the name of his hometown splayed across his chest: CALISTOGA. When he was 46, coaching the Eagles, he pushed himself to the brink of a breakdown. Now he was 85, just days away from his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, merely busy, still fit, each of his days full.

Vermeil and his wife, Carol, purchased this home and the 100 acres of emerald land that came with it in 1984, and there is always something he can find to be done there, outside or in. Down in his basement, its walls festooned with framed photographs of his friends and family and colleagues and famous acquaintances — there’s Bill Walsh; there’s Bear Bryant; there are Adele and Celine Dion — he keeps a fitness machine and a stationary bike so he can exercise at least three days a week. Routinely awake by 7 a.m., he sometimes stays in the basement for much of the morning, answering emails at his paper-strewn desk, keeping his wine cellar tidy. Even at his age, he doesn’t so much walk as he does bounce and spring. There was a slight rumble when he slid open the garage’s door.

The sprint car inside Dick Vermeil’s garage was built in 1927. As a teenager, he spent three years restoring it. Gleaming black, plated with nickel, it has a Model 8 engine block with overhead valves. “Simple,” he said, as if to himself, as he slipped into the sliver of space between the car and the wall, “compared to the way everything is today.”

» READ MORE: Pro Football Hall of Fame home to numerous Eagles items, including Nick Foles’ helmet and Brian Dawkins’ Bible

The car had belonged to Vermeil’s father, Louie, who was a renowned mechanic in Northern California and who acquired it sometime around World War II. After the Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa, displayed it as an exhibit for 14 months, it has remained here for 15 years — a birthright that Vermeil takes care to keep free from so much as a speck of dust, the shared pastime of Dick Vermeil as an ambitious young man and as a contented old one. Bridging those periods were those years of achievement, during his middle age, for which Vermeil will be honored in Canton, Ohio, on Saturday: his resurrection of the Eagles, his Super Bowl victory with the St. Louis Rams, his solid half-decade with the Kansas City Chiefs. Those years sated his ambition. Those years made his contentment possible. Those years nearly ruined his life.

» If you value this kind of journalism, please subscribe today.

The Dick Vermeil whom most Philadelphia football fans picture, when they think of him, is a pared-down version of the man. They think of an image of him that is accurate and faithful but that is still incomplete and, worst of all, a cliché.

Their Dick Vermeil grabbed the Eagles by the scruff of the neck in 1976, yanked them out of 15 years worth of embarrassment and incompetence, and whipped them into good enough shape to beat those bastards from Dallas in the 1980-81 NFC championship game. Their Dick Vermeil was on their televisions every day and on the billboards they zoomed past on their morning commutes while he was an NFL and college football color analyst on CBS and ABC and a spokesperson for Independence Blue Cross and Cadillac. Their Dick Vermeil can’t buy a cup of coffee without welling up over the generosity and commitment of the barista. Their Dick Vermeil is beloved by his former players and his former coaches and everyone who has come in contact with him. The edges of the real Dick Vermeil, in full, have been softened or shaved away.

“There was no balance in my emotions at that time.”

Those edges were often sharp as blades, and remembering them, acknowledging them, and recognizing their value to Vermeil is necessary to understanding the contradiction at the core of his coaching career and his Canton induction: To become the best coach he could be, he first had to come close to destroying himself. He was the canary in the coal mine for the vital public discussion of mental health in sports, citing “burnout” as the reason he stepped down as the Eagles’ head coach in January 1983.

The withering pressure that he placed on himself to win, the tears pooling in his eyes during a pre- or postgame speech and the loyalty his words engendered among the men in that locker room, the midnight oil to which he set fire throughout his seven years with the Eagles: They were part of Vermeil, huge parts of him, but they were not all of him. Here was a coach whose players, after he first arrived in Philadelphia, called him “The Little Dictator” and “High School Harry.” Whose training-camp practices were long and brutal even by the standards of the National Football League of the 1970s. Who had to take a razor to his own persona for some of the shaving. He allowed passion to morph into obsession, he once said, which is perhaps the kindest way to describe someone so immersed in his work that he slept at home one night a week and, to save time, took to eating hoagies for dinner while sitting on the toilet.

“There was no balance in my emotions at that time,” he said.

» READ MORE: Hall of Fame coach Dick Vermeil on representing the Eagles: ‘This is my community’

The first group of football players to call him a head coach was the 1960 varsity team at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, Calif., and what a strange development — that a 23-year-old would be a Benjamin Button of perspective, would in many ways be wiser about maintaining that delicate counterpoise of work and life than he would in middle age. This was high school football in 1960. This was You’re hurt, sweetheart? Rub some dirt on your little bruise and get back out there. Yet Vermeil was holistic and modern before holistic and modern were cool.

He ditched the team’s old leather helmets and had his players wear Riddells instead. He introduced them to weight training and 8mm game film, inviting them to his home for barbecues and study sessions. The handbook he created for the program — an inch-and-a-half thick, Carol typing and retyping it on a stenograph — detailed everything from proper pregame exercise patterns to offensive and defensive alignments. He had just one assistant coach, so he’d scout opposing teams himself and prepare seven-page reports … and still be home each night for dinner.

“He had a way of getting into your spirit and character... It was effort transferred into a bigger context.”

One season, Hillsdale lost just one game, by less than a touchdown, and after the game, as the players, sweaty and stinking, waited on the team bus for Vermeil to chew them out, he climbed aboard and told them, I just want you boys to know that I’d go to hell for any of you. Great game. “And there are all these crying kids,” said Bob Christopherson, a linebacker on that team. “This was a different relationship where the coach would be tearful, too.” The following year, Hillsdale went 8-0 and allowed 28 points all season, and before the final game, Vermeil delivered a speech so powerful, about the opportunity to be champions for the first time, that the players tore the school’s glass doors off the hinges when they charged out of the building. He later paid for the repairs out of his own pocket.

“He had a way of getting into your spirit and character,” said Christopherson, who became a college professor and an author of textbooks on geophysics. “How you followed through on your play or workout, that’s how you should feel about your parents and yourself. It was effort transferred into a bigger context.”

But the nature of football is that, as a coach climbs from one level to the next, that context always shrinks, leaving less room for those bigger, broader, real-life lessons, narrowing his focus to little more than himself and his role in the sport’s machinery. Junior college, Stanford as an assistant, a year under George Allen with the Los Angeles Rams as the first special-teams coach in NFL history, a year at UCLA as offensive coordinator, then back to the Rams as an assistant to Chuck Knox: Dinner at home with Carol got rarer.

» READ MORE: Dick Vermeil’s place in Eagles and NFL history is secure

He plopped down at the lunch table with the other Rams coaches one afternoon, listing and bemoaning all the weaknesses and limitations of the team’s running backs, and Knox looked him dead in the eye and dressed him down in front of the entire staff: Listen, if they could do all those things you’re complaining they can’t do, I wouldn’t need you. It was at once the best thing for him to hear and maybe the worst, because it became his mantra: Don’t worry about making the quarterback or the running backs or the tight ends better. Make yourself better first. Take that philosophy to its extreme, and eventually, you don’t just start your search for solutions by looking inward. Eventually, you stop looking anywhere else.

The game that led the Eagles to hire Dick Vermeil was the 1976 Rose Bowl, the last game of his two years as UCLA’s head coach. The Bruins entered as 17-point underdogs to No. 1-ranked Ohio State and trailed the Buckeyes by three at halftime. But Vermeil head-faked Woody Hayes in the second half, having quarterback John Sciarra drop back frequently against Ohio State’s eight-man front. UCLA won, 23-10. Sciarra threw two touchdown passes and was named the game’s MVP.

The next day, Eagles general manager Jim Murray called Vermeil. The team hadn’t had a winning season in a decade, had cycled through three head coaches over the previous five years, and had already traded away so much draft capital that it didn’t have a first-, second-, or third-round pick that year … and wouldn’t have one until 1979. Vermeil agreed to a five-year contract — his annual salary went from $30,000 at UCLA to $50,000 with the Eagles — then stared out the window of the old limousine that team owner Leonard Tose sent to chauffeur him from the airport, caught a glimpse of a gigantic steaming steel junkyard, and asked himself what the hell he had gotten himself into.

“At the time, you go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to kill us.’ But not one guy I’ve talked to who would say they wouldn’t do it again.”

He was 39. He was under no illusions that he would or could outsmart his elder and more-experienced counterparts: Don Shula, Tom Landry, Chuck Noll. What he could do, he reasoned, was outwork them — and demand that everyone around him do the same. When an Eagles player came to him and said, Coach, my legs are tired, his default response was, Looks like you have to be in better shape next season, doesn’t it? He cut the players who couldn’t or didn’t want to keep up with him, brought in and kept the ones who wanted to and could.

“At the time, you go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to kill us,’ ” said Sciarra, who followed up his time under Vermeil at UCLA with six years as a defensive back and special-teams player with the Eagles. “But not one guy I’ve talked to who would say they wouldn’t do it again.”

Why would they? Within three years, the Eagles were a playoff team, their long practices allowing Vermeil to implement and teach his systems, allowing his players to learn them and him. “That made it much better to understand the game and get the game down,” wide receiver Harold Carmichael said. Within five years, they were the best team in the NFC, going 12-4, reaching the Super Bowl for the first time, but throughout that rise, the team’s players and coaches and fans were getting only the slightest inkling of the damage that Vermeil was doing to himself. They weren’t there when Landry approached him during a pregame warmup and told him, Coach, you’re doing a really good job out there, but the seasons are long. You’ve got to learn to find some time to unwind.

» READ MORE: Dick Vermeil, who led the Eagles to their first Super Bowl appearance, is finally in the Pro Football Hall of Fame

They weren’t there with him in the darkness when he dwelled on that 27-10 loss to the Raiders in Super Bowl XV — the tight curfews he established for his team in New Orleans throughout the week ahead of the game, his tight and edgy demeanor, the unspoken messages he sent to his players, the opportunity to win a world championship squandered. In the aftermath, no loss left him. They weren’t with him in his car that Friday morning during the 1982 season. He had spent the night at home for a change, but when he drove to practice, he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car — his body and mind frozen with fear and exhaustion and a swirl of feelings he couldn’t name, hours passing in the Veterans Stadium parking lot.

“I thought I could do everything — not arrogant, just stubborn. It kept growing in me, and I just flat-ass couldn’t turn it off.”

“I’m a self-blamer,” he said. “We’d have a game Sunday. But on Wednesday, I was still thinking about the mistakes I made that could have won last Sunday’s game. All of a sudden, it’s Thursday and Friday, and your mind starts to get fresh again, and you’ve wasted three days of preparation.

“That period of ‘81 to ‘82, I wouldn’t listen to anybody. I thought I could do everything — not arrogant, just stubborn. It kept growing in me, and I just flat-ass couldn’t turn it off.”

Finally, he held a press conference, having lost 13 of his final 20 games as the Eagles’ coach, to announce that he was resigning. At first, he didn’t know how to explain his decision. Tell them you’re burned out, Carol suggested, so he did, and for once, no one was ribbing him for crying so easily.

“It was shocking to see him that way,” Carmichael said.

» READ MORE: Forever great: Harold Carmichael becomes latest Eagle to be enshrined in Hall of Fame

Those years and struggles are never too far away, always vibrating just beneath his membrane of satisfaction, threatening to break through to the surface. He and Carol have watched half a dozen episodes of the popular streaming series Ted Lasso. Its eponymous main character is a former college football coach who, in his mid-40s, takes on a new challenge: moving to England to coach soccer in the Premier League. He hangs placards bearing inspirational sayings around the team’s locker room, and he cares deeply for his players and his family — so deeply, in fact, that he suffers a panic attack that jeopardizes his career. “I pictured what he was going through,” Vermeil said. One of these days, he said, maybe he’ll go back to watching it.

The white binder atop Dick Vermeil’s desk contained his invitation list for his induction ceremony: a list that comprises 400 names, names that he hand-wrote on white pages, names that he entered into grids that he drew himself with a black pen and a ruler’s edge, grids that included home addresses and email addresses and phone numbers, pages separated by colored tabs into different categories: EAGLES, RAMS, CHIEFS, TV. How long did it take to compile this list?

“Two months,” he said, “with a number of hours every day.”

Vermeil’s NFL coaching record, including his 11 postseason games, was 126-114. There are eight coaches with more victories than Vermeil who are eligible for the Hall of Fame but haven’t been inducted, though aspects of his record are particularly outstanding if you look hard enough. Each of his teams, for instance, won 34% of its games in his first two seasons, then 73% in his third. “What other proof do you need,” he said, “that we were doing something right?”

» READ MORE: Eagles fan visiting the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton? Here’s what you need to know.

His selection to the Hall seems as much about who he is as what he did. Wilbert Montgomery sends him long text messages, thanking Vermeil not only for coaching him with the Eagles but also for giving Montgomery his first NFL coaching job, with the Rams in 1997. Roman Gabriel, 81 years old now, whom Vermeil coached with the Rams and the Eagles, called him from North Carolina. He received a note of congratulations from Peyton Manning on Peyton Manning letterhead. Christopherson and six other Hillsdale alumni will fly to Canton to attend the ceremony. Sciarra will be on stage, as will Vermeil’s three primary starting quarterbacks from his NFL career: Ron Jaworski, Kurt Warner, and Trent Green.

Would any of this outpouring and the achievement that inspired it have been possible had Vermeil not pushed himself so hard with the Eagles? Probably not. He acknowledges that he needed that time away to become a better coach. Over those 14 years between leaving the Eagles and joining the Rams, those familiar tingles that had drawn him to coaching and that he had allowed to overwhelm him once he reached the NFL manifested themselves again. The standard speech he would deliver to Fortune 500 companies, management seminars, and athletic-association banquets was more than an hour long, its script 45 double-spaced pages loaded with aphorisms and explosions of exclamation points and capital letters: PLAYERS DON’T CARE HOW MUCH YOU KNOW UNTIL THEY KNOW HOW MUCH YOU CARE. … You COMMUNICATE THE POWER and the DEPTH of your PHILOSOPHIES through the IMAGE in how you PROJECT yourself, IN HOW you recover from a NEAR TRAGEDY!

When he began in broadcasting, he quickly grew frustrated, after spending days gathering insight and information, that the pace of the game wouldn’t allow him to convey all his expertise to the audience. You hired me to do a good job, and you won’t let me do it! You’re snapping the ball! Stop! I have something to say! Those sensations arrived more frequently, in time melding into full-fledged withdrawal. He tangoed with Jeffrey Lurie in 1995, less than a year after Lurie purchased the Eagles, but the two never could get in step, too many questions with too many dubious answers: Would Vermeil be the team’s general manager? Would he be their general manager and coach? And how much power and money should a new owner cede to a local icon who may have spent the previous 12 years watching the NFL pass him by?

“I don’t agree with the word ‘burnout’ because there were no ashes. He put it back together.”

He had been the leader of an NFL organization, involved in influential decisions in one of the world’s most competitive industries. He was no longer that leader. “You feel insignificant,” he said.

Two years in with the Rams, he was the same taskmaster he had been with the Eagles, two-a-days in training camp, always in full pads, and his team went 9-23, and it took a near-mutiny before he understood at last that he was demanding more than his players could ever give. “The third year,” he said, “I recognized what we have is what we have, and they are where I want them to be. I’m not going to make them go to another level that they don’t have. Now we worked hard, but not like we did. It was like giving them a Christmas present every day.”

Two days after the Rams’ 23-16 victory over the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl XXXIV, he resigned again. This time, he regretted it, signing with the Chiefs a year later and, in 2003, guiding them to their first playoff berth in six seasons before walking away for good in 2005 … because he wanted to, not because he had to.

“I don’t agree with the word ‘burnout’ because there were no ashes,” Christopherson said. “He put it back together.”

The kitchen table inside Dick Vermeil’s home is the only piece of furniture that he and Carol took with them from Chester County to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Kansas City, and back to Chester County again. A rich, glistening brown, it is one of his most valued possessions. It was where he and Warner reminisced when Warner visited in February to tell him that he had been elected to the Hall of Fame. It has hosted coaching staff dinners and offensive linemen dinners and defensive backs dinners and tight ends dinners. “Those chairs,” he said, “we’ve had them re-glued three times.”

The table itself, though, has never had to be repaired, and there is a reason, he said, that he and Carol have kept it so long: “It will seat 18 people.” Vermeil has a wife, three children, two daughters-in-law, a son-in-law, and 11 grandchildren. He has 18 people. The table is a fine place for a contented man to stand back and take stock of what he put at risk so long ago. A fine place for Dick Vermeil to appreciate the blessings of a balanced life.