The Savior of South Bend

When Tyrone Willingham first applied for the Notre Dame coaching job, the school told him he wasn't rah-rah enough. Look who's cheering now

By S.L. Price

Issue date: September 30, 2002

For the faithful, this will be the toughest thing to accept about Tyrone Willingham: He does not do crusades. He is not on a mission. He does not take a college football game played before 75,182 boozed-up revelers, a national television audience and the ghosts of every Notre Dame team gone by and try to make the moment even bigger. With Willingham, football is never a morality play, and it's never personal -- not even when it is. Not even when he arrives at a stadium as he did last Saturday, and the place opens up before him like a palace he once had to beg to enter, all but vibrating with matters as vital to him as his own ambition, his own heart and his own skin.

On Saturday, for the first time since leaving the school where he willed himself to become a scholarship athlete, where he met his wife and began his coaching career, Willingham returned to Michigan State. With his wife, Kim, and their 12-year-old son, Nathaniel, Willingham rolled into East Lansing as the coach of Notre Dame, a position considered by some to be the pinnacle of the profession. He rode down the streets he once walked, past the baseball field where he once played, past the statue where he once posed for pictures. The sun shone. "I don't put much stock on coming into Michigan State," Willingham said in his postgame press conference. "There's no nostalgia. There's no emotional tie."

Before kickoff, Willingham, a 49-year-old black man raised in the segregated South, stood chatting with his Michigan State counterpart, Bobby Williams, a black man who holds the job Willingham once wanted. Soon they would match wits in the highest-profile meeting of two black coaches in the pathetic racial history of college football; never before had two such storied programs met under the leadership of African-Americans. "I don't know if that deserves any comment," Willingham said afterward. "It was a great football game; I don't think it matters who coaches it."

This is why the remarkable renaissance now taking place in South Bend nearly didn't happen. This is why Willingham almost didn't coach at Notre Dame, almost didn't snap the school's streak of five losses to Michigan State with a riveting 21-17 win to go 4-0, the best start by the Irish since 1993. Willingham doesn't gush. When Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White passed him over and named George O'Leary coach last December, it was primarily because Willingham wouldn't demonstrate the proper amount of "Notre Dame zeal," White says. "It's very important here to love this place. This place has an insatiable desire to be loved."

No, it was only after O'Leary had taken the job -- and resigned five days later, once his doctored resume had been exposed -- that White heard what he needed to hear. "You should've hired me the first time," Willingham told him when contacted again in late December. "I was your guy. I would love to be at Notre Dame."

But then, that's typical Willingham: so controlled, so on-message, so intent on keeping himself under wraps that he'll deny even the obvious. Dangling from a cliff, Willingham would wait until he was down to his last fingertip before admitting he might be in a bit of trouble. Of course he understands the social import of Saturday's game. For years he has decried the lack of opportunities for black coaches; the fact that there are but four of them in 117 Division I-A positions, he said on Saturday after all the TV cameras had been broken down, "needs to be brought to the public's attention. It's not right. It's criminally wrong, to be honest about it. In order to help things, I have to do a great job...." He stopped himself. "No, we have to do a great job. It's not about I. This football team is not going to respond to Tyrone Willingham just because of this thing."

Such self-discipline can be almost painful to witness, but it's clear that it also powered Willingham all the way from Jacksonville, N.C., to Notre Dame and now has him steering the program out of the doldrums faster than any shamrock-eyed optimist expected. After toughing out wins over Maryland, Purdue, Michigan and now Michigan State, Notre Dame is ranked 10th, and even with quarterback Carlyle Holiday week-to-week after injuring his left shoulder, the Irish can envision waltzing into their Oct. 26 game against Florida State with a 7-0 record. Yes, it took a few Michigan State mistakes and superb open-field running by Irish receiver Arnaz Battle to give Notre Dame the winning score with 1:15 left, but the players know just how much they owe to Willingham.

"Everything," says senior defensive end Ryan Roberts. "We had a great defense last year, but we've improved. Our offense? He turned it around. We're scoring points, and we're scoring at opportune times. It's about time. I've been working hard for five years. It's time to get the success I expected when I came to play at Notre Dame."

The fact that Willingham and Notre Dame arrived at this moment together is, of course, a happy accident, made even more astonishing when you consider that the man and the university rarely leave anything to chance. Yet because of O'Leary -- the best mistake, perhaps, Notre Dame has ever made -- one of the nation's most hidebound institutions suddenly seems almost cutting-edge, with a new lease for the 21st century. "Divine intervention at its best," White says. "That's what this represents to me and, more importantly, to Notre Dame and Notre Dame football. Tyrone should have been here. Thank God he is here."

If White sounds a tad overexcited, he has good reason. No one was more on the hook after the O'Leary debacle. White had introduced the upbeat Irish-Catholic coach as someone "out of central casting." Notre Dame hasn't won a national title since 1988, and last year's coach, Bob Davie, kept hinting that the Notre Dame way had come to an end: The facilities were too old, the schedule too rigorous, the academic standards too tough. Such chatter is the norm whenever the Irish hit a losing cycle, but this time there was real fear, fueled by the Internet and talk radio, that Notre Dame's mission to be both Harvard and Nebraska was no longer realistic. Rockne? The Gipper? The old mystique was about as relevant to the nation's prep talent as a Bing Crosby flick. O'Leary hardly inspired visions of a new era.

"There was this perception that Notre Dame was a smash-mouth program," says Courtney Watson, a junior linebacker from Sarasota, Fla. "Athletes from Florida, Texas and California don't want to be part of that; they want to run down the field and catch the ball, score 50 points a game."

According to recruiting maven Tom Lemming, style wasn't Notre Dame's only problem. It lost many top recruits over the last decade partly because the program simply stopped competing for the five-star player and partly because rivals harped on the notion that South Bend was an unfriendly place for African-Americans. Willingham has already helped on both fronts. He removed the Irish's biggest competition for academically driven black players -- himself at Stanford, where he coached for the last seven years -- and signaled that he'd go after the nation's best when he began calling the country's top recruits soon after his arrival. Running back Reggie Bush of San Diego's Helix High, considered by some to be this year's No. 1 prospect, lists Notre Dame among his top five choices.

"It's a very big step," says Irish cornerback Preston Jackson of Willingham's hiring. "It's going to bring a lot more talent here. He's a perfect fit."

And not just for the athletes: When, at an alumni dinner in Chicago in April, Willingham said he would scrap the option in favor of a West Coast offense, the crowd stood and gave him a raucous ovation. Since then Willingham has worked to endear himself to alumni, whether by racing to speak at 16 reunion dinners in one night in June or by reaching out to former players with an energy that Davie had lost by the end of his tenure. But more important is that Willingham has, faster than anyone expected, rebuilt the idea that Notre Dame football can still work.

"The tradition of Notre Dame had pretty much broken down," says Ara Parseghian, who came to South Bend in 1964 after the school had endured nine years of futility and was the last Irish coach to have started his first season 4-0. "The circumstances for Tyrone were very similar to when I came here. A lot of people said, 'They're done; Notre Dame can't do it anymore; the admissions requirements are too tough.' But we both believe these are not handicaps."

"Oh, yes, the mystique of Notre Dame can paralyze some people; some get that deer-in-the-headlights syndrome," Willingham says. "Some people don't."

That he doesn't is due entirely, he says, to his parents. Tyrone's mother, Lillian, was a community-minded teacher with a master's degree from Columbia. His father, Nathaniel, was a property manager with a fifth-grade education. School was important in the household, but so was self-reliance. Nathaniel, though hobbled by a leg shortened by a dislocated hip, walked Tyrone to exhaustion on hunting trips, and when one of the houses he managed fell into disrepair, he insisted on tearing it down by hand, by himself -- in his 80s. The parents raised Tyrone and his three siblings to ignore the snubs of segregation in North Carolina. When Tyrone and his brother, Jerome, desegregated their little league football teams, they expected to play quarterback.

Just once, after losing the quarterback job during his junior year in high school to a white kid he'd outplayed, Willingham allowed himself to stir things up. "That was the one time there was an outward ruckus," he says. "I got the job back. But [the disruption] was not the best thing for our football team. That didn't help anything." He didn't indulge the impulse again. Instead, he walked on at Michigan State -- one of only two schools to respond to 100 letters he wrote asking for the chance -- and, though just 5'7" and 139 pounds, he earned a place on the team. He did push-ups day and night, all the while chanting, "Got to be strong, got to be better." Midway through the 1973 season, injuries to the quarterbacks ahead of him threw Willingham into a starting role as a redshirt freshman, and he led the Spartans to wins over Purdue, Wisconsin, Indiana and Iowa -- the last three on the very field where he won again, 29 years later, on Saturday.

An hour after that victory Willingham stood in the shadow of Spartan Stadium, delivering his stern assessment of the day's events. The moment he turned from the press to speak to a player, an equipment manager or an old friend, Willingham's demeanor softened; he became warm and loose, as if cut free of a straitjacket. When two former classmates poked their heads over a wall 12 feet above him, Willingham cackled and yelled to one of them, "Hey darlin'! You know what? I'm doing well!"

After the pack moved away, Willingham went quiet, then said, "I am very emotional. I'll share this: One of the special memories did happen here. It was the time I got the opportunity to start, and on Friday morning of that week, the day before the game, my mother calls me and says, 'Tyrone, I don't know where your dad is, but he's coming to East Lansing.'" Everything has changed since then. Tyrone's mother died in 1984, his father in 1996. But that memory remains. "That is special," he says. "I've been blessed."

Then he walked out of the stadium, amid the shouts of his name, stopping when he found the son he named for his father. Willingham crooked his arm around Nathaniel's neck, then began looking for Kim. "I gushed over my wife pretty good," he had said earlier in the week, recalling their courtship. "They make you work." Now he passed some autograph seekers without stopping, now he headed toward the bus, now here was Kim right before his eyes. "There you go," Willingham said softly, and his wife grinned and said, "OhmiGodddd," and the two hugged and then he looked her in the eyes and kissed her. Nothing fancy, you understand. There's only so much gushing a man can do in a day.

Issue date: September 30, 2002