TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112789/11278900.031

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.4 KB | 238 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 90

The Fella Expects To Win


Notre Dame coach LOU HOLTZ brings Irish football back to the
top with a salesman's touch, iron will, and players who like to
knock heads

By Paul A. Witteman


    Take a peek at the guy in the baseball cap. Short fella.
Kinda homely. Ears hanging out there like wind spoilers. Talks
with a trace of a lisp. Looks like he'd be at home on the
showroom floor of any Sears store in Middle America, moving
metal. Appliances, that is. Be good at it too. Get you right
into that Kenmore 831 series washer when what you were really
thinking about was the 701 at 56 bucks less. But oh so politely,
so that you later reckon it was your idea in the first place.
Bet he loves to fish and swap tall tales. Family man.
Churchgoer. Never kicked the dog.

    Look again.

    The short fella is not so short, not quite so homely. It
just seems that way because his 5-ft. 10-in., 148-lb. frame is
diminished, standing, as he is, at the edge of a grove of young
Paul Bunyans. He's talking to -- no, he's shouting at -- one of
them. About the option play. How to execute it correctly. As he
plants one foot and pivots decisively, moving his hands in a
precise pattern that he's repeated thousands of times before,
the young man in the football jersey barks, "Yes, sir! Yes,
sir!"

    The lisp is less evident now, and any thoughts one may have
had of this man idling afternoons away over a fishing rod
disappear. Abruptly, he turns away from his quarterback and
stalks downfield toward the defense. Out of the corners of their
eyes, the helmeted giants and his assistant coaches see him
coming. Chests tighten. The execution and speed of the defensive
drills rev up a notch. The simple reason: no one is eager to
receive one-on-one remedial instruction from Louis Leo Holtz on
this or any upcoming autumn afternoon.

    Just plain Lou Holtz. The name doesn't resonate like Knute
Rockne or George Gipp, men around whom the legend of Notre Dame
football has been molded. It doesn't sound larger than life,
like the Four Horsemen or the Golden Boy, players who
subsequently graced the annals of the Fighting Irish. Nor does
it seem of sufficient luster to be mentioned in the same
sentence with Frank Leahy and Ara Parseghian, coaches who won
multiple national championships and were subsequently canonized
by fanatic subway alumni. Holtz would be the first to agree with
all this. "All I ever wanted was a job in the mill, a car, $5
in my pocket and a girl," he says with his sly, lopsided grin.

    So much for aiming low. In four seasons as coach at the
University of Notre Dame, Holtz has returned the school to the
pinnacle of college football from which it had fallen in
mortification under the earnest but inept Gerry Faust. Last
year Holtz drove a young, tentative team to a 12-0 record and
a national championship with a variation of the message that
ugly ducklings can become beautiful swans if they work hard,
love one another and believe they can be great. Holtz fervently
believes that. He also devoutly embraces traditional values,
specifically the importance of having on his side God, ferocious
linebackers and halfbacks who, once they are given the football,
run like scalded dogs.

    This year Notre Dame is 11-0 after last Saturday's 34-23
defeat of Penn State, and two wins away from a second
consecutive national title. The Irish could conceivably stumble
this weekend against Miami or on New Year's night against
undefeated Big Eight champion Colorado. But the 23 consecutive
victories Holtz has directed add up to an achievement unmatched
by any of his more illustrious predecessors.

    How has this self-described wimp done it? Not with mirrors,
although one of Holtz's secondary skills is the ability to
perform parlor magic tricks. First and foremost, he is a
disciplinarian in the Vince Lombardi mold. In his first team
meeting in 1985, he looked around and saw players slouching in
their seats. He ordered them in no uncertain terms to sit at
attention from that point on. Says senior defensive tackle Jeff
Alm, who is almost 1 ft. taller and 120 lbs. heavier than Holtz:
"He's not the biggest guy in the world, but he seems to possess
a lot of power." Last month a furious Holtz told the team he
would resign if they ever fought again with opposing players,
as they did before their game against U.S.C. There was a laugh
from the back of the room. Holtz cast a withering glance in the
direction of the offender, according to someone who was there.
"I'll make sure you lose your scholarship first," he rasped.

    Holtz is a master salesman. Junior defensive back Todd
Lyght was recruited by Michigan, Michigan State and UCLA when
he was a high school senior in Flint, Mich. But Holtz told Lyght
that if he came to Notre Dame he would be part of a
national-championship team. "I looked deep into his eyes, and
I knew he was telling the truth," says Lyght. Holtz also
persuaded quarterback Tony Rice, tailback Ricky Watters and
flanker Raghib ("Rocket") Ismail, players who have been crucial
to the Irish success, to enroll at Notre Dame. Not that Notre
Dame, with its mystique and a virtual farm team of Catholic high
schools providing talent, needs additional help on the
recruiting front. Says Beano Cook, the acerbic college football
analyst for the ESPN television network: "It's easy to win at
Notre Dame. They get enough material to win the A.F.C. West."

    Holtz also possesses the ability to make young people
believe in themselves. His sharply honed self-deprecation is
designed in part to demonstrate to his players that if a 98-lb.
weakling like him can succeed, surely they can. Holtz likes to
tell his coaches, "If you preach something long enough, people
are going to believe it. Especially in our case, where it's
true."

    Then there are his work habits. His days begin with daily
Mass at 6 a.m and end with paperwork at midnight. He will leave
no memo or chart or report unturned that could contribute to
victory. On top of all that, Holtz is widely regarded as one of
the game's finest technicians, along with Joe Paterno of Penn
State and Bobby Bowden of Florida State. Says Bill Walsh, who
was viewed as a tactical genius while coaching the San Francisco
49ers: "Lou has great command of game situations and the game
itself."

    As a result, little Lou Holtz from East Liverpool, Ohio,
looms as one of the biggest men on -- and well beyond -- the
Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Ind. His 35-minute motivational
video, Do Right with Lou Holtz of Notre Dame (price: $595), has
sold briskly. The living, breathing version of Holtz is totally
booked on the lecture circuit through 1990 at an estimated
$10,000 per inspirational pop. Moreover, he has his own
syndicated cable TV show and a national radio call-in program,
and he's featured in magazine ads promoting the Holtz
philosophy, paid for by Volkswagen. These things tend to happen
when you win.

    Ay, there's the rub. A coach is expected to win at Notre
Dame. Win a lot -- while still putting academics first and
observing the NCAA rules of conduct. "If you keep the rules,"
the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, then Notre Dame's president, told
Holtz at his final pre-hiring interview, "I will give you five
years. If you ever cut corners, you will be out of here by
midnight." "We like to win," says the school's current
president, the Rev. Edward A. ("Monk") Malloy, who as a Notre
Dame undergraduate was a varsity basketball player. As a measure
of exactly how much Notre Dame likes to win, Malloy describes
the 17-9 season the Irish basketball team had during his senior
year in the following way: "It wasn't what you would call
successful."

    Holtz, growing up scrawny along a crook in the Ohio River,
where Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania converge and steel
mills and potteries hunker cheek by sooty jowl, was not what you
would call successful either. "Everybody felt so sorry for him,"
says Joe McNicol, a classmate at St. Aloysius Grammar School and
a fellow altar boy. "He was always the last person picked for
teams." When his uncle Lou Tychonievich started a football team
at St. Al's, young Lou learned every position so as to improve
his chances of seeing action. He also studied the playbook, such
as it was, and occasionally tugged at his uncle's sleeve. "He
would try to tell me what play I should call." Sister Mary
Roberts, the principal at St. Al's, broadcast Notre Dame's
victory march over the loudspeaker each afternoon as school
adjourned, perhaps because she belonged to the Order of Notre
Dame. No wonder Holtz subsequently told his family that he would
some day coach the Fighting Irish.

    Holtz avoided a lifetime sentence in the mills and went off
to Kent State, where he played as a lightweight and
little-noticed linebacker. After graduation, he learned his
craft as a ubiquitous assistant coach in a succession of
schools: Iowa, William and Mary, Connecticut. But it was after
accepting a job at the University of South Carolina, only to
watch helplessly as the position was temporarily eliminated,
that Holtz began to lay out the rest of his life with some
purpose. He made a list of 107 things he wished to accomplish,
naturally including leading the Fighting Irish and being chosen
coach of the year (others on the list: having an audience with
the Pope, landing on an aircraft carrier, scoring a hole in
one). To date, he has achieved 89 of the 107.

    That was in 1966. Four years later, as the young head coach
of William and Mary, he took that school to its only bowl game.
Seven years after that, he suspended three star players from his
Arkansas squad for violating team rules on the eve of an Orange
Bowl showdown against heavily favored Oklahoma. Arkansas still
managed to win, 31-6, another example of Holtz's turning
adversity into unlikely advantage.

    The Holtz ability to crack wise, usually at his own
expense, has kept his teams loose. But the self-deprecation also
allows him to ward off praise, which he feels is the father of
complacency. "When it's over, maybe I'll sit down and say, `Gee,
we did something pretty terrific,'" he says. "But it's just not
my nature." "He doesn't really accept compliments," says his
son Kevin, a student at Notre Dame law school. When Notre Dame
beat Pittsburgh 45-7 in October, Kevin called to congratulate
him. What did Dad say in reply? "Kevin, did you see that S.M.U.
won 35-9?"

    Holtz had even less reason to fear S.M.U., whom his team
eventually trounced 59-6, than he did Pitt. But like most
coaches he dreads games against "cupcake" opponents because of
the danger that his own heavily favored players might lose
concentration and intensity, and hence lose in an upset. Before
the Pitt game, he assured reporters that Pitt was only slightly
less dangerous than Rommel's Panzers. Yet at practice he was
telling his players that Pitt was more like the army of Grenada
and that he expected the Irish to beat the bejabbers out of
them. When this inconsistency is raised, Holtz is only
momentarily at a loss. "We just point out the problems to the
public and the press," he says. "We tell the players the
problems and the solutions."

    The 18-hour days that Holtz habitually puts in on the
problems and the solutions are beginning to wear on him. In
addition, he is doubtless feeling the stress stemming from
accusations that he gave money through a third party to a player
at his last school, Minnesota. Holtz emphatically denies it. Now
one hears the word burnout in South Bend. "Football encompasses
his whole life. It's everything," says Kevin Holtz. Says Ara
Parseghian, who quit, worn out, after eleven successful years:
"I told him all summer, `Please pace yourself.'" When asked what
lessons he draws from the experiences of Parseghian and Leahy,
who also was totally consumed by the job, Holtz merely says,
"I'm a slow learner."

    That's because goal-oriented Lou Holtz is on a mission. He
wants to win his second consecutive national championship,
although he would never freely admit it. But he quietly asked
coaches like Bill Walsh how they tried to avoid a letdown after
their teams won championships. How long can he keep it up? His
answer is pure Holtz, all deceptive diffidence and then steely
follow-through. "I don't think we can win every game," he says
carefully. "Just the next one."