The Fella Expects To Win

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."