When older guys who played for Lou Holtz talk about him, in my experience they don’t mention the scheme or the X’s and O’s. They bring up the speech of the prickly but legendary coach, TV commentator and Lara Man, who died Wednesday at the age of 89. No, this is not hateful political speech. Football speech.
“The man could talk,” says Bruce Hanson. He played for Holtz at William & Mary from 1969 to 1971, his first three seasons as the college’s head coach. Hanson remembers that Holtz, a 32-year-old rookie who had previously held only assistant positions at W&M, Iowa, Connecticut, South Carolina and Ohio State, was as good a motivator as he had already seen in the game.
“When he finished his pregame speech, he probably wanted to beat the Chicago Bears,” Hanson said.
Holtz’s team has never played the Chicago Bears. However, he performed poorly against almost every other NFL team he faced in 1976. At the time, Holtz was 3-10 with the New York Jets in games without a complete inning as an NFL head coach. Holtz’s methods and griddle know-how didn’t work so well for adults. It didn’t help that Joe Namath was well past his prime as the starting quarterback. Namath posted a career-worst passer rating of 39.9 that season and was exiled from New York. Holtz was already gone by then, leaving the Jets to return to college when his team still had one game left.
Holtz quickly proved again that his routine definitely worked with the kids. Warren Winston, Hanson’s roommate at W&M and a defensive back during Holtz’s three years at the school, is one former player who will say Holtz rose to the pinnacle of coaching beyond play design. Winston recalled an early interaction with Holtz to emphasize that point. His position coach at W&M was future San Diego Chargers head coach Bobby Ross. Winston remembers one day at the start of summer camp when Ross, who had recently been promoted to defensive coordinator, began installing a new defensive scheme. While Ross explained each player’s role, Winston did not understand. His confusion also became apparent to Holtz, who was acting as his offensive coordinator at the time but watched the defense from the top row of field-side bleachers and only intervened when things went south.
“I think I just got a weird look on my face,” Winston said. “And Holtz saw it and came down from the bleachers and said to me, and I said it sounded like Coach Ross wanted me to cover a tight end that could cut across the middle of the field and a wide receiver that could run a post pattern. He also wanted me to cover a running back in the flat. He said, ‘That’s three receivers,’ and Holtz looked at me and said, ‘Cover the guy who threw the ball!’ And that was it! ‘Then coach!’ I said. “I think Coach Holtz was closer to an offensive genius than a defensive genius.”
But he really was a genius, Winston insists.
“And he’s a hero to me,” Winston said.
Winston was the first black scholarship athlete in the history of W&M, which was founded in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1693. He was originally recruited there by future Buffalo Bills head coach Marv Levy, before leaving for the NFL and making way for Holtz. Winston was the only black person in his recruiting class during his first year in college. Holtz’s future Despite the poor politics, Winston remembers the coach’s emphasis on recruiting black players, which accelerated the school’s emergence from the dark ages of the late 1960s. In his introductory speech to the W&M players, Holtz interrupted a conversation about how team rules were strictly enforced and took a few minutes to make sure everyone on the roster was aware of the special place Winston, the only Black man in the room, held in the history of the program and the university. Then he never brought it up again. “I appreciate that,” Winston said. And he remembers getting a touching phone call from his father in Richmond. He said he wanted to review a handwritten letter that had just arrived in the mail, written by Holtz.
“I’m like, ‘What did I do wrong now?’ And he started reading the letter and started talking about how important I was to the team, what a great person I was and how he knew I would grow up to be a great citizen. All the things a parent wants to hear about their son, he just laid it on thick. The coach didn’t tell me he was writing that letter. It was special. I love that guy.”
In his second year at historically academically rich but football poor W&M, Holtz took the team to a Southern Conference title and an appearance in the 1970 Tangerine Bowl. They lost 40-12 to Toledo. Holtz was hired a year later by NC State of the Atlantic Coast Conference, a relatively large league.
Danny Meier, who was a defensive lineman at NC State during Holtz’s years in Raleigh, also likes the guy.
“Playing for him was like growing up in a religious family,” Meyer said. “You heard the same message over time and it finally solidified and gave you the confidence that you can succeed no matter the situation. And you can beat anyone.”
The proof in the pudding: Meier was a member of the Wolfpack team under Holtz that brought NC State to the ACC Championship in 1973. And the teams that beat Penn State in 1974 and 1975 are the only two wins over the Nittany Lions in school history.
Then came the Jets’ bankruptcy. Holtz returned to the college game and soon took the head coach of Notre Dame, a dream job in his career, taking Arkansas and Minnesota to great heights.
Back to me: I saw Holtz speak at an insurance convention in Atlanta around 1990. All in all, the meeting was physically boring, at least as it seemed on paper. Then Holtz stood up and gave the keynote address. He was at the peak of his commercial powers at the time and wasn’t far behind leading the Fighting Irish to a perfect 12-0 season and a national championship. A friend of mine who is in the public speaking business told me that Holtz gets paid $50,000 per speech. When he first began speaking, with a heavy West Virginia drawl and a tongue so heavy, he seemed almost affected when he spoke of being born with a “silver spoon” in his mouth or of “the lessons my parents taught me were priceless.” I wondered what all the fuss was about. But soon I was fascinated by the whole motivational idea and why young people were willing to jump through walls for the man. Damn, I would run through a wall for that guy. (This Holtz speech, about 20 years after the Amazing Car Race speech, has all the corn gags and goshdarnit charm I remember, but the decades have taken away some of the charm. I’ve only passed through a really thin wall about the guy.)
Long before I met him in person, Holtz had already played a very indirect but strangely profound role in my life. National celebrity emerged in his first year at Arkansas when his Razorbacks advanced to the 1978 Orange Bowl against heavily favored Oklahoma with coach Barry Switzer and future Heisman winner Billy Sims. In the build-up to the game, Holtz suspended several players, including two key offensive starters, for what was originally called a ‘violation of team rules’. It was later revealed that they had been charged with assaulting another student in their dormitory. Before the severity of the allegations became public, some players threatened to boycott the game if he did not reinstate his teammate. Holtz let the punishment stand anyway. Then his diminished Razorbacks shocked the world by crushing the heavily favored Sooners, 31-6. No charges were filed against the accused players and they were invited back to the team for the next season.
A youth version of the same story hit my high school team the following fall. Several of his much more talented but less manipulative Falls Church Jaguars teammates, including a top receiver, a senior running back and a future All-American kicker, were caught drinking after a thank-you dinner at an assistant coach’s house just days before their season-ending game against their crosstown rivals. Unfortunately, our head coach, Wally Ake, was another of Holtz’s students in high school and was a star linebacker on his first William & Mary team. (My junior varsity coach, Bob Herb, also played for Holtz at W&M. And Meier and Hanson also coached high school football in Northern Virginia at the time. Yes, Holtz’s local coaching tree was outrageous.) And Coach Ake took a page out of his mentor’s handbook and busted everyone, including Star.
Before we took to the field for the final game, he spoke to the team about how life is bigger than the game of football, that rules are rules and must be followed, and that punishments apply equally to stars and back bench players. If it means we’re going to play short-handed, we’re going to play short-handed and do our best, he said. It was a righteous speech.
So we rushed out of the locker room, just as busy as we had been all year. And we lost 16-6. I had to look up the score for that game right now, but I think very clearly about what happened that week, and I’ve pondered that lesson every time I’ve thought about Lou Holtz over the past few decades, and I did it again when I heard he had died. Despite the giggles from that nostalgic beer angle, I think Coach Ake, who left our school a few months later to join Holtz’s staff at Arkansas (and begin his own illustrious college coaching career), did the right thing for the team. If we were playing the Chicago Bears.
