Word: holtz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...