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Saturday, July 12, 2008
Curry had itch to coach again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At various intersections in Bill Curry’s developing life, when he needed counsel, he turned to Bobby Dodd. Curry had been recruited by Dodd at Georgia Tech, and though that was no great coup first off, it had developed as such. Curry would become an all-star center, captain of the team and the kind of leader coaches turn to, and so it was that coach and player had a special relationship.
“I told Coach Dodd I wanted to get married,” Curry said. Dodd approved.
Near graduation time, Curry came to Dodd again. “This time I told him I wanted to be a football coach. He nearly exploded. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got a degree from Georgia Tech. You’re capable of being an executive. Go get a job running an airline or something.’ As you can see, that time I didn’t take his advice.”
Then came the consultation that Curry feared most of all. He had been offered the job as head coach at Alabama — Alabama! — at one time Georgia Tech’s most violent rival. Curry was surprised.
“You’ve got to go,” Dodd told him. “You’ll never have a chance like that here. I love Georgia Tech, but I love you more.”
There the story began to develop horns. Many of the old Alabama guard considered Curry an intruder. To say that the Roll Tide congregation didn’t press him warmly to their bosom is severe understatement. Even winning an SEC championship — and in the course of it, the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award — never calmed the waters. He still couldn’t beat Auburn, and he still bore the scent of Georgia Tech, and when the Kentucky job became open after some recruiting shenanigans, that offered the perfect escape from Tuscaloosa, a convenient solution for both the Crimson Tide and the harried Currys.
They still pumped up the footballs and basketballs with a different grade of air at Kentucky. Football ate with the servants. Curry never had a winning season, and there were other complications. While we stood together at the British Open one summer, one of his players was shot dead on a porch where he lived back in Lexington. Curry’s days at UK were already numbered, and it was a little later that he walked away from coaching, presumably for the last time.
He had known the highs and lows of football, and had sipped the nectar of it. It must not be forgotten that he was a 20th-round — rock bottom — draft choice of the Green Bay Packers, played 10 seasons in the NFL, one as president of the Players Association — not one of the more joy-filled gigs of his life — snapped the ball in three Super Bowl games, returned to Green Bay as an assistant, whereupon he was called home to Grant Field to take over a sickly program in 1980. The turnaround wasn’t the snap it might have seemed from his cockeyed upside-down position as a ball-snapper. His first two teams won a total of two games, but the major moment was a monumental tie with Notre Dame, then the No. 1-ranked team in the country. One of his teams won a bowl game and twice he beat ranked Georgia teams, but then came the Dodd equivalent of, “Get out of town before they get after you,” and he was off to Alabama.
In between Kentucky and today, Curry has worked in television, prominent on the public speaking circuit, been an educator, lived here and in North Carolina, never really dropped anchor in any field or location. George Plimpton, who did an inside look at Curry while he was a coach at Green Bay, agreed with Dodd on this level: “I always thought he should go into another line of work, like communications or politics. He is articulate, thoughtful and observant,” all of this from Plimpton’s book, “One More July.”
Curry remained, however, the restless voyager. He doesn’t say this in a precise manner, but inside there appears to have been an emotional tug of war going from the time he last hung up his whistle. “I thought a long time I’d like to coach again, but that would be unfair to Carolyn. We had grandchildren here, this was home and where she liked to be. I could hear her say, ‘Fine. Go ahead. I’ll miss you.’ “
When Mary McElroy, the athletics director at Georgia State University, called one day, he was surprised when she told him, Georgia State is about to field a football team. Fine, Curry thought, and he encouraged her.
“A huge campus in a major city with a large student body, over 100,000 alumni in this area alone, already a conference member in basketball and other sports — why, it was a natural, I told her. ‘I’ve got some good prospects for you,’ I said, thinking she was calling me about recommending a coach.’”
“No, not that,” she said. “We’d like you to be our coach.”
Dan Reeves had been called on as a consultant, “and he says we need a college guy, and you’re that guy,” McElroy said.
“I was shocked,” Curry said. “I told her I’ll call you back.”
Carolyn had to be consulted. “Oh, wonderful,” she said. “You found something you know how to do, and we don’t have to leave town.”
Curry was talking from his “headquarters,” a handy-dandy office in the athletics department. He is surrounded by veterans of the sports-intelligence trade. Charlie Taylor was Falcons information director for years. Allison George did years of service on the same level at Georgia Tech. A staff of coaching assistants is yet to be hired, if Curry can find business time away from the interviewing callers.
Where he has coached before, an athletics department has been in play for years; here, he starts at ground zero, though he suggests that the situation he walked into at Georgia Tech with Homer Rice in 1980 was barely a shade higher. At least there was a stadium, full-time facilities, a seasoned backup of alumni and student body, and a history in the game. At GSU, it’s like building an athletics program from the jockstrap up.
Where does the money come from? “There are over 100,000 alumni within a phone call, the student body has voted to share their extracurricular fee, and from this base we shall build,” Curry said.
The first class of recruits arrives next February. GSU is already a member of the Colonial Athletic Association, which means a schedule is there for the making, with such teams as Delaware, James Madison, Massachusetts and a membership aged in football, and a schedule to be filled for a season opening in 2010. But we get ahead of ourselves. Give the coach some time so he can get on with his groundwork.
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