This was back in 1990 during Buddy Ryan's final season as Eagles coach. I was appearing on a half-hour TV sports talk show hosted by Lou Tilley, then sports director at Channel 3. I was seated in the studio audience with another newspaper columnist who had been invited to discuss what we had written about Buddy Ryan. To explain the look Andre Waters gave me is to understand what I hated about Buddy Ryan, as fat and pompous a fraud as ever got away with being loved for lying out his ass.

Andre Waters was a Buddy guy. A true believer. I could almost feel holes being burned in the back of my head as I spoke my piece about his boss. When I finally turned and noticed him staring me down from the back of the room, I was, frankly, amazed. I supposed I should have been scared or something else. But the look on Waters' face was so theatrically over-the-top, like Mister T doing a "You're dead meat." grimace. As surly and threatening as his hostile expression seemed at that moment, I sensed something else. I remember feeling not so much that Andre Waters wanted to tear my head off, but that I had hurt Andre Waters feelings.

Here's the background: The Eagles had just opened the season with two losses, the second to a team they were supposed to spank, according to oddsmakers, by two touchdowns (sound familiar so far?) In my daily Inquirer column, The Scene, onSept. 17, 1990, I wrote the following that appeared under the headline

BUDDY: WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS

"Good!"

That was the last thing I expected to hear yesterday from an Eagles fan who had just heard the news about the home team losing to a football team they were supposed to cream.

Cardinals 23 - Eagles 21.

"Good!" he said when I mumbled the radio report of the score in his ear at a wedding reception in South Philadelphia. Sure, he'd bet the Cardinals with 14 1/2 points, but that wasn't the beef behind the "Good!" It was something about the Eagles that made him glad they lost. It was the dictionary definition of hubris that bugged him, the "wanton insolence or arrogance resulting from excessive pride." So Buddy's Birds got beat by a bunch of freaking Phoenix underachievers.

Good!

I'll bet you there's a lot of that going around today because I think that whatever line Buddy Ryan crossed long before he ever became the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles is finally becoming painfully clear - even to Eagles fans who would back a serial killer as coach if he took the team to the conference title game.

Like a deep bruise, the ugly purple-yellow truth is rising to the surface. It's hard to like the Eagles because Buddy Ryan is a mean man.

I don't know how else to put it. He's just mean. He lies proudly and publicly and is contemptuous of those who believed him when the lie is revealed. He blames everyone but himself, and when he does accept responsibility, he says that he's doing it to take the heat off his players. Then he ruthlessly humiliates individual players to the media, reducing them to subvertebrate, let alone subhuman, status by NFL standards. When Buddy Ryan cuts a player, he's as subtle as salt on a slug.

So now here are the prideful Eagles winless after two games, and I sense joy among many fans, joy because now the salt shaker is in their hands. You've seen what Eagles fans have done to losing coaches they like; imagine what Buddy Ryan is in for.

Believe me, watching Buddy melt is going to be one of the great participation sports in Philadelphia this season.

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AND IT WAS FUN, after I wrote that in 1990, watching Buddy Ryan get his just desserts. Lou Tilley quoted extensively from my column during the TV interview. That's when I began to feel the laser beams from behind burning my scalp. I remember saying that Philadelphia would tolerate a serial killer as coach of the Eagles if he took us to the Superbowl. But Buddy Ryan had become a serial loser. And I was happy to butter his toast.

Ironically, after the taping the friendliest unexpected person to approach me in the studio was a Buddy Guy -- Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham -- who disagreed with me with a smile. "Clark, you gotta understand Buddy," he said. By that I took his meaning to be " Buddy's bluster is show biz. He's really not so bad." Randall wasn't a true believer. Andre was.

I blame Buddy Ryan for Andre Waters' suicide the same way people blame the sins of society for betrayal, greed and poverty. I do not like or respect what Buddy Ryan represented -- his values, his personality, his "style". And since Andre Waters was a true believer, I cannot help but wonder what happened during that dark hour of the soul before he pulled the trigger. Which false god disappointed him most.