Goodbye, Coach Stewart, and thank you
Published: 5/22/2012 7:53 AM
Last Modified: 5/22/2012 9:07 AM
A bunch of folks went on Twitter to memorialize Bill Stewart Monday. The consensus was he was about the nicest football coach you'd ever hope to meet.
I have proof of that personally. Only, I need more than 140 characters to tell you about it. Here's my story...
A couple days after it was announced that Oklahoma would play West Virginia in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, I submitted some story ideas to my editor. One of them was a piece on the relationship between Stewart and Kevin Wilson, OU offensive coordinator's at the time. Wilson once played under Stewart at North Carolina. Then he became his grad assistant. To say the two were close, well, when Bob Stoops offered Wilson the OU O-line job in 2001, Wilson called Stewart for advice.
Anyway, I called West Virginia with an interview request after the story was OK'd. Right about then Rich Rodriguez left the Mountaineers to take over at Michigan. It quickly became a mess, and Stewart was left to clean it up as interim coach.
I stuck the story on the shelf, figuring there was no way I was going to hear from Stewart in the midst of the post-Rich Rod madness. You have to juggle hatchets while spinning plates on the tip of your nose just to get a one-on-one with a major college head coach anymore. And that's when things are calm.
So it's late afternoon Christmas Eve, one week into Stewart's tenure as head coach, and my cell phone rings with a call from a West Virginia area code. I figure it's WVU sports information. Instead, and I typed this out for a magazine column I wrote at the time, here's what I heard:
"Guerin? Bill Stewart here. Listen, I'm so terribly sorry to be calling you today. I got your message all right, but then got sort of sidetracked with all this going on up here. But you want to talk about Kevin Wilson, and I want to tell you about him. So if you're ready I'll give you all the time you need."
For the next 30 minutes, Stewart gave me a terrific story.
He told me about the time he wanted to make North Carolina center Harris Barton a tackle. Barton wasn't sold on the idea. Wilson, then in his first year as a GA, intervened. Barton became a tackle. Made All-American at Carolina, All-Pro with the 49ers and won a few Super Bowls.
Stewart told me about basically adopting Wilson with his wife, and the two of them taking the college grad to Chapel Hill's version of Applebee's, feeding him burgers and nachos and talking for hours.
He told me about that phone call Wilson made after Stoops' offer, when he wasn't sure he wanted to leave his job as Northwestern OC.
Stewart recalled saying: "Dammit, Wil, if you don't take it, I'll call Bobby Stoops and I'll go. That's a pretty good school down there. Randy (Walker, then Northwestern's head man) will understand. Hell, if I was your head coach, I'd fire you just to make you go."
"Wil" went.
Pretty soon I brought up OU and the challenge facing the somewhat-shellshocked Mountaineers.
"My god, what a power," Stewart said. "They're so good… Geez, we shouldn't even show our players film of these guys. Just a juggernaut. No weakesses, I mean none."
He might have been sandbagging, but I sure bought it. I had no choice, as nice and genuine and warm as he came across, even over a cell phone.
Stewart got to talking about the Sooners, and got to talking about Stoops. Or the Stoops family.
"Back when I was at William and Mary in 1981, 2 and 3, M in 1981, 2 and 3, I recruited Ohio," he told me. "I didn't make much money in those days. My wife would make me cookies and fudge, and I would take a jar of peanut butter and loaf of bread on the road. So I'm in Youngstown recruiting my fanny off. I remember recruiting Mike Stoops. I'd go into the high school and Ron Stoops and I would just sit and talk."
He's on the phone with a reporter he doesn't know outside an interview request. It's Christmas Eve. And he's about to launch into another story of recruiting Youngstown for Dick Crum at North Carolina a few years later, running into Ron Stoops again, and the family patriarch/Cardinal Mooney defensive coordinator inviting him home for dinner.
A few days later, I flew out to Arizona for the Fiesta Bowl and watched Stewart cast his homespun spell over the reporters there. West Virginia whipsawed the juggernaut Sooners. Stewart was named permanent head coach in the aftermath.
A lot of you no doubt felt pretty blue about the whole experience. Not me. I came away sort of feeling like I'd made a friend. Judging from Twitter Monday, that's no different than a million others felt after spending a half-hour with Bill Stewart.
You were rare indeed, Coach. Rest in peace.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
