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| Lou Holtz overlooking NC State's practice field. |
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This story was originally published in the Greensboro News & Record prior to Lou Holtz's first game at South Carolina, which was against Carter-Finley Stadium on Sept. 4, 1999. It was also reprinted in the NC State Alumni Magazine.
It has been updated at the end to reflect the end of Holtz's career following the 2004 season.
By Tim Peeler
© Landmark Communications, 1999
COLUMBIA,
S.C. — Fittingly enough, it was after a South Carolina game that Lou Holtz made an eternal
impression on one of his NC
State stars.
It was November
1974, and the third-year coach had just beaten the Gamecocks, as they did
all four times when Holtz was the Pack’s coach from 1972-75. Seventh-ranked Penn State
was on its way to town for the first time ever, and in nine previous meetings,
the Wolfpack had never really come close to beating the Nittany Lions.
Holtz, who had
taken the Wolfpack to the top 10 earlier in the season, was disappointed that
back-to-back losses to North Carolina and Maryland had ended his team’s chances for a second consecutive ACC Championship, but he held out hope that the Wolfpack
could return to the Top 10 with season-ending wins over the Nittany Lions and Arizona State.
"When we got into
the lockerroom after the South Carolina game, he sat us all down and told us
all we had to do was do our own jobs to the best of our ability," said Dave
Buckey, the Wolfpack quarterback at the time. ``He said not to worry about what
anyone else was going to do, just do what you had to do to beat your man.
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Joe Paterno and Lou Holtz
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"Then he added, 'Because I guaran-damn-tee you, I’m going to go out-coach Joe Paterno next
week, and we’re going to win that game.'"
With that, Holtz
stormed out of the lockerroom and the place erupted in cheers. Those cheers
echoed for a long time, too, because the Wolfpack ended its nine-game losing
streak to Penn State
with a 12-7 victory, perhaps the biggest win in Holtz’s four seasons with the Wolfpack.
"I will believe to
the day I die that we won that game when Coach Holtz told us that," Buckey
said. "He is amazing. I think he is the best underdog coach in America,
hands down. You don’t want to be playing him when you are the favorite."
In his new job, as
head coach at tradition-poor South
Carolina, Holtz will be a perpetual underdog. It’s a
challenge he will savor when he makes his return to college football tonight at
7:30 in Carter-Finley Stadium, when the Gamecocks face the No. 24 Wolfpack.
Rebuilding The Ruins, Part VI
A master motivator
and part-time magician, Holtz admits he’s never been asked to pull off a bigger
miracle than turning South Carolina
into a consistent winner. The Gamecocks are coming off a 1-10 season that ended Brad Scott's tenure here.
"I have never had
a team with a bigger challenge than this, I need not tell you that," Holtz
says. "It doesn’t mean that it’s insurmountable. It doesn’t mean it can’t be
accomplished. It just means it won’t be easy."
But, then, it never
has been. It wasn’t easy at William & Mary, where he guided the school to
the Tangerine Bowl in his second season.
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The sidelines of Carter Stadium
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It wasn’t easy at N.C. State,
where he took a team with a 9-21-2 record in the three previous years under Earle Edwards and one-year interim Al Michaels, to four
consecutive bowl games.
It wasn’t easy at Arkansas, where he took
over for legendary coach Frank Broyles and immediately pulled off one of college
football’s biggest upsets in the 1977 Orange Bowl in his first year at the
helm.
It wasn’t easy at Minnesota, a team that
went 1-10 the year before Holtz arrived, but was invited to play in the
Independence Bowl after his second year.
And it wasn’t easy
at Notre Dame, his dream job, where he was hired to knock the dents out of the
Golden Dome left by Gerry Faust. Two years later, the Fighting Irish won the
national championship.
At every one of
those stops, Holtz has taken over a team with a losing record, then guided them
to a bowl within two years of his arrival. He’s won over fans and players alike
with his well-rehearsed aphorisms and ice-breaking magic tricks, though he
almost always wears out his welcome with the administration.
Holtz left coaching
in 1997, tired of fans expectations and tired of fighting the ghosts of Notre
Dame’s coaching legends, not to mention his spoiled relationship with his boss,
Notre Dame athletics director Mike Wadsworth. He spent two years working as a
television commentator and giving motivational speeches at $20,000 a pop,
before he decided he needed one last rebuilding challenge. His wife, Beth, was
progressing in her treatments for throat cancer, and Holtz kept finding himself
in first-class airplane seats with nothing to do but fidget. All that space to
stretch out, and no strategies to plan.
"I talked with him
when he resigned, and he said he might want to get back into it," Florida State coach and long-time friend Bobby
Bowden says. "For me, there were two good bits of news: No. 1, that he came
back to coaching.
"And No. 2, that he ain't in my conference."
So it wasn’t
exactly a surprise when word spread that Holtz was looking into several
coaching opportunities last fall.
"Anybody who knew
anything about Lou, knew he wasn’t going to stay out of coaching," says Virginia head coach
George Welsh. "He missed coaching big-time college football."
This Is the Big Time?
So how did Holtz
wind up here, the land of the ``Chicken Curse,’’ with a team that lost to
Vanderbilt just last year?
Gamecock athletics
director Mike McGee, who never had success beating Holtz’s Wolfpack team when
McGee was the coach at Duke, made a strong pitch to lure Holtz back to South Carolina. The
coach spent two years as an assistant to Paul Dietzel in Columbia in the late 1960s.
Holtz claims to
have turned McGee down three different times, before finally relenting after a
bad day at the golf course.
"I am a teacher,’’
Holtz says. "What talents I have are geared to helping people realizing a
dream and helping them achieve it. I didn’t think I would coach again after
Notre Dame, because where do you go from there except straight to heaven and
sit beside the pope?
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Champions of the 1972 Peach Bowl
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"It wasn’t my
intention to come here and prove anything. But I finally accepted it, because
it’s a challenge. It’s rewarding to work with young people."
So Holtz cleaned
out his warehouse full of motivational tricks and shipped them to South Carolina, where he
had to change the perception both inside and outside the program. He was
welcomed by 4,000 spectators at his introductory press conference at
Williams-Brice Stadium, then by a roomful of glum faces on his players during
the spring.
"I would just like
to see our guys smile," Holtz says. "It’s not like we are about to enter
into a Death March."
But for most of its
105 years, South Carolina has been the Bataan of college football. Only once has the school
won more than eight games in a season. Only three times in its history have the
Gamecocks put together more than three consecutive winning seasons. In nine
bowl appearances, the Gamecocks’ only victory came in 1995 when they beat West
Virginia in the Carquest Bowl, a postseason futility of laughable proportions
for a school that wants so badly to do well in football.
"You can’t win the
national championship by winning the Carquest Bowl," Holtz says.
Among the first
things Holtz did was try to improve the Gamecock’s Chicken Strut with cosmetic
changes. It’s the same thing he did at NC State
when he took over for Michaels in 1972. Holtz brought back white helmets
with a block-letter S on side, made the uniforms look more traditional and
removed players’ names from the back of their jerseys.
"We went 1-10 last
year and it seemed like every game we got lower and lower on ourselves to where
we felt we can’t win anyway," says senior running back Boo Williams. "We have
a new attitude, new team. We started completely over.
"Our confidence
level is totally different."
Holtz made more
substantial changes, too, like extending practice time, improving off-season
training and cleaning house of some problem players, including the team’s
leading rusher the last two years.
"In the past, we
haven’t always had confidence in our preparation and we haven’t always had
confidence in our system," says senior tight end Trey Pennington. "With Coach
Holtz, right or wrong, you know everybody is going in one direction, and when
everybody does that, you can’t help but do right.
"I think 80
percent of football is mental and 20 percent is physical, and he has helped the
mental part of our game. Just having him on the sidelines brings a lot of
confidence to our team."
When Holtz walked
into the team meeting room on the first day of fall practice, he still saw a
lot of diverted eyes and downcast looks. After a clamorous attitude adjustment,
in which he told his players to get a smile on their face and a song in their
heart, he had the players looking squarely in his eyes.
"It’s almost like
you are in a dream," says senior safety Ray Green. "He’s one of the greatest
coaches to ever coach the game talking to us. He chose South Carolina, to make us better."
And that’s no small
challenge.
Remembering NC State
Holtz will never
forget the day he met NC
State athletics director
Willis Casey. The two were supposed to meet in secret at a gas station in South Hill, Va.,
for an informal interview. Both showed up early and waited for the other to
arrive.
After waiting for
an hour, Casey wandered over to a scrawny, accountant-looking fellow who was
about 5-8, 130 pounds.
"Are you Lou
Holtz?" said Casey, who had seen Holtz’s team play, but had never met the
coach.
"That’s me,"
Holtz said.
"You sure don’t
look like a football coach," Casey said.
Looking over his
glasses at the pudgy Casey, the 33-year-old Holtz shot back: ``Well you don’t look much like an athletic director,’’ Holtz said.
It was the
beginning of a successful, stormy relationship.
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Willis Casey and Lou Holtz in December 1971
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Casey had tried to
hire Holtz after Earle Edwards suddenly resigned in the summer of 1971, but Holtz didn’t want to back
out of his contract with William & Mary. Casey elevated Michaels, who had been the Pack's defensive coordinator under Edwards since 1954, to interim head coach to wait for Holtz. That fall, Casey saw
William & Mary nearly upset North Carolina
in Chapel Hill with a wide-open, high-scoring offense and it solidified Casey’s
desire to bring the little bookworm to Raleigh.
The Wolfpack was
3-8 under Michaels, but it had won two of its final three games and was hardly
devoid of talent, with a returning backfield that consisted of running backs
Willie Burden, Roland Hooks, Stan Fritts and Charley Young, collectively known
as ``The Stallions.’’
Sprinkle in an
All-Conference quarterback in Bruce Shaw, an offensive lineman, Bill Yoest, who
would become an All-America and a recruiting class that included twin freshmen
Dave and Don Buckey, and Holtz had a lot to work with.
"No matter who N.C. State
had hired, he would have been successful," Holtz says.
It wasn’t that
Holtz was just successful. It was how he made the Wolfpack win. The ACC played
defensive football back then, with little offensive imagination. Holtz’s
twin-veer attack was exciting and daring, with long down-field passes that
eventually packed Carter-Finley Stadium.
Holtz has developed
a reputation as a conservative offensive coach in the years since then, but his
first edition of the Wolfpack scored 409 points and gained 4,758 yards in total
offense, a record that still stands.
"Until then, [the
ACC] was a throw-if-you-had-to league," says Darrell Moody, a former NC State
player and a graduate assistant to Holtz in 1973. "Lou brought option football
and he also brought a good passing game off of that.
"At that time, NC State
fans were not used to seeing a lot of points scored. They were used to winning
a lot of low-scoring games, then they stopped winning. When Lou came in, it was
a great marriage for NC
State."
He won over the
fans in his third game when he went for a game-winning two-point conversion against North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The attempt failed, but he left the field at
Kenan Stadium that afternoon to a standing ovation from the Wolfpack fans in
attendance.
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Frank Weedon and Lou Holtz in 2006.
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"For me, that was
a huge moment in our program, because it got all the people behind this new
coach,’’ says Frank Weedon, the retired associate athletics director at NC State.
``He could have gone for the tie, but we had just tied Maryland in the season opener.
"He wanted the
win, and I think people appreciated that.’’
Eventually, Holtz’s
relationship with Casey began to sour, as the two head-strong individuals were
frequently unable to reach compromises regarding staff salaries, recruiting, long-awaited upgrades to Carter Stadium and other
aspects of running the football program. He was courted by other schools,
including, ironically enough, South
Carolina.
It wasn’t until the end of the 1975 season,
not long after Holtz embarrassed the school by having an NC State mathematicsprofessor arrested for jogging around the school's public track during a closed practice, the
coach found a challenge big enough to lure him away. He became the head coach
of the NFL’s New York Jets, where he lasted less than a full season before realizing
his motivational gimmicks didn’t work on the professional level.
Holtz never leaves
a town with the same love he receives upon arrival.
At Arkansas, he resigned after seven years after his
relationship with Broyles deteriorated. The final straw came when Holtz filmed a
campaign announcement for North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms’ 1984 re-election
campaign on public property.
At Minnesota, he left
behind bitter fans with his departure for Notre Dame, the one school he had
always wanted to coach. The Golden Gophers got a two-year probation after Holtz
left for violations that included two by the coach himself. He was an immediate
hero with the Irish, winning Rockne-like devotion after he won the 1988
national championship.
When no others
followed, Lou’s golden shine faded in South Bend, with further allegations of NCAA improprieties, a
disdain for his Machiavellian, sometimes abusive, coaching tactics and a
strained relationship with AD Wadsworth. Current Notre Dame coach Bob Davie
even questioned Holtz’s mental stability during court proceedings involving
assistant coach, who fielded an age-discrimination lawsuit against the school.
The theme of
Holtz’s career is common: He turns programs around, until he strains his
relationship to a breaking point. That might not be a problem at South
Carolina, where he has a long-lasting friendship with AD McGee.
"Besides, I’m
62," Holtz said. "This won’t be an eight-year rebuilding project."
How Soon Is Soon Enough?
When Holtz lost his
assistant’s job at South Carolina
in 1967, he sat down and re-evaluated his life. He wrote down all the things
that he wanted to accomplish before he died. When he finished, there were 107
items on the list and he showed them to his wife.
She reviewed them
and told him he might want to think about adding one more goal: "Get a job."
Holtz had no
trouble with that, and so far, he’s ticked off 102 of his original goals, which
included coaching at Notre Dame, winning a national championship, having dinner
at the White House, appearing on Johnny Carson and jumping out of an airplane.
He never did run with the bulls in Pamplona
and he’s never mastered a second language, but he should have some time for
those things when he finally retires for good.
For now, he’s
spending his vast reserves of energy trying to do what some people think is
impossible: getting the Gamecocks to the top of the Southeastern Conference.
Ever the optimist,
Holtz isn’t intimidated. After all, he has plenty of support from McGee and the
fans, who continue to flock to Williams-Brice Stadium, even if they have no
real reason. According to NCAA statistics, South Carolina ranked 15th in attendance
last year at over 77,000 per game, for a team that won only once.
"I am not worried
about winning in the long run," Holtz says. "We have all the support we could
ever need. What I am worried about is winning quickly. I believe we can win
here. I just don’t know how soon."
If history is any
measure, soon enough.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Holtz's six-year stint at South Carolina began with a rain-soaked 10-0 loss to the Wolfpack at Carter-Finley Stadium during Hurricane Dennis and an 0-11 inaugural campaign. The Gamecocks eventually bounced back, winning back-to-back Outback Bowls in his second and third seasons and compiling a school-best two-year record of 17-7. His last three years with the Gamecocks, however, ended with two 5-6 records, a 6-5 final season, swirling allegations of improprieties and an on-field brawl against Clemson in his last game that cost the coach one last chance at winning a postseason game. He finished his career with a 12-8-2 bowl record.
He finished his career with a 249-142-7 record before handing over the reins at South Carolina to Steve Spurrier following the 2004 season.
