Word: willingham
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That Notre Dame is anywhere near the top after last year's dreadful 5-6 season is testimony to the wizardry of coach Tyrone Willingham. He has seemingly awakened the ghosts of Notre Dame's past. Yet he got the position by default. He finished second in a job hunt last year to Georgia Tech's George O'Leary. And you would have to be a miracle worker in the land of Touchdown Jesus to beat out a guy with that name. But O'Leary resigned five days into the job because he had fudged his resume...
...Willingham, 48, is the opposite of the rah-rah type Notre Dame thought it was looking for, one reason he wasn't hired in the first place. He's an intense, Bible Belt Southerner who worked his way through a series of coaching positions to the top job at Stanford, where football is only one of many extracurricular student activities. He's also the first black head coach in Notre Dame history, a mantle he wears somewhat warily. "I'm not one of those who likes to be in the spotlight," he says, "although I do recognize that in this...
...number of black coaches in the major sports, especially football, is abysmally small. Currently, there are only four black coaches out of 117 Division I football programs, the most prominent being Tyrone Willingham of Notre Dame, though even he was only hired after the Fighting Irish’s first choice, the white George O’Leary, had to quit due to biographical discrepancies. Even sadder, there are very few black coaches in the pipeline: blacks in prominent assistant coaching positions...
Emily Findlay Brown, 66, and Jerry Willingham, 68, met while roller-skating in Alexandria, Va., at 16 and 18. "We went together one year," recalls Brown, a psychotherapist, "and then he dumped me." "She was going to go to Stanford," explains Willingham, a retired manager of airline mechanics, "and I knew it would be over for us. I was just going to beat her to the punch. It was 19-year-old logic." He had always hoped he'd get a chance to apologize...
...Willingham was happily married before but says this time is different. "I can talk more to Emily. We talk. Gosh, we talk." Paradoxically, late marriages can be better because the spouses are at once more mature and, in a sense, teenagers again. "All the research shows raising children eats into the quality of the marital relationship," says Keith Davis, a University of South Carolina psychologist. "With a new partner, it's just the two of you, and everything else be damned...