He had gone out on his shield.

After the University of Kentucky announced head coach Bill Curry was finished — with four games to play in 1996 and two years left on his contract — his team stood up. Stripping the K's off their helmets in reprisal, the Wildcats won three of those four games for their lame duck staff. Still, Curry had failed to record a single winning season at UK.

AJC File (ENLARGE)

Bill Curry resigned after three years as Alabama coach following a 1989 season in which he won the SEC title and finished 10-2.

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His wife Carolyn's life had been threatened in an anonymous call to the UK football offices. One of his players had been murdered the previous summer. His winning percentage was barely .333. Seven years after he won the Bobby Dodd Award (at Alabama) for running the nation's top program on and off the field, Curry had had enough.

"About a month after the season, Carolyn said, 'You're not calling anybody [about a new job],' " he said. "And I said, 'I'm not going to. We're going to live another way. I'm not sure how it's going to be but we're going to do something else. At least for a while.'?"

Twelve years later, Curry is at a table in Georgia State's athletics department, which doesn't quite have a football program yet but will come July 1, when he officially becomes its first coach. And if those who know him best are still pondering how he has come to do this — four months shy of his 66th birthday — sometimes he sounds that way himself.

Then he recalls a long-ago conversation he had with Bill Walsh, after the Pro Football Hall of Fame coach tried retiring at 63. Lamented Walsh, "It's terrible. You can only go to the Caribbean so many times."

"There are moments," Curry said, "where I think, wow, there's so much to do. But my age and the idea of retiring is not something that's in our vocabulary. I'm not saying there's anything particularly noble in that. That's just who we are."

Return to the sideline

He has told the story of taking the call from GSU athletics director Mary McElroy, thinking she was seeking his recommendations for a coach while she was actually calling to hire him. Though he found his heart racing at the notion of coaching again, Curry had also being living "another way" for more than a decade. Life was pretty good.

He turned to his wife.

"He said, 'What do you think?' " Carolyn said. "And I said, 'If you will do it in a rational way.' Meaning, 'Use common sense.' I think the thought of building it and encouraging people and things like that, it's such a natural thing for him."

Besides broadcast duties at ESPN and some writing — his book "Ten People You Meet in the Huddle" will be out in August — Curry has remained a popular public speaker, which doubtless played into the hire. The new coach will need to raise money.

He will tell people of being a native Atlantan, of working summers as a teen at Thom McAn, vending shoes just three blocks from campus. A College Park High graduate, he was co-captain of the 1964 Georgia Tech team. Yet his cachet, due in part to his television work, remains nationwide.

Between 5 p.m. on June 10 when news of his hiring broke and noon the next day when GSU made its official announcement, 34 prospects filled out online recruiting forms on the school's Web site. Those prospects filed not only from Georgia, South Carolina and Florida but from Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah.

"He still scares the hell out of me," said Atlanta attorney Steve Mooney, a linebacker on Curry's first team at Tech in 1980. "I was at a restaurant a month ago and was sitting there when I hear this 'Hello, Steve.' I immediately stood at attention. He has that aura about him."

As a broadcaster, Curry found it difficult to cover a game without connecting with the programs themselves. Michigan became one adoptive school. He covered Tom Brady's first start, once doing four UM games in one season, often beating ESPN's advance crew just to catch up with the team.

"He would always want to go early, so he could go to Thursday practice," Carolyn Curry said. "Well, I knew part of that was, he would go hang out with the teams and the coaches. He just loved being with the guys. It's getting to know those individual kids."

New era, challenge

This can only help a reconstituted coach who hasn't been recruiting in a dozen years. Even if Georgia State is Division I-AA and Curry simply won't have access to some elite high school prospects, he finds himself pitching his program before it has begun.

"No football coach has any excuse for not graduating a vast majority of his players," he said. "Because they want to play. It's that simple. So, yeah, I'll have to learn some things about this generation and we got more majors here than we had at some of the other schools.

"And that's fine. We'll find a way to use that. It's all learning. And I enjoy learning. I've always enjoyed challenges they tell me that aren't possible."

His critics have knocked Curry for highhandedness almost since he returned to Tech in 1980 and made his "bring the cheaters to their knees" speech, a veiled reference to NCAA problems at Georgia. He then in turn offended many in Tech's old guard with his 1986 decision to leave for Alabama.

Once there, after he had made a point of re-erecting Bear Bryant's old coaching tower at the Tide's practice fields, he never found a connection with the 'Bama following, who regarded him as an outsider and game-day lightweight. Going 0-3 against Auburn was unforgivable, even if he won the SEC in 1989 and was voted conference coach of the year.

For his trouble, he got the infamous brick thrown through his office window, although, amazingly, debate endures on 'Bama blog sites over whether that brick was thrown from inside or outside. When the school offered a contract extension that removed his authority for staff hires, Curry resigned to take the job at Kentucky, where for decades careers have gone to die.

"There were hard years and we had hard times," Carolyn Curry said. "But there were always great people. The people who were irrational, you didn't really know them that well. They were always outside, looking in, being critical. But there were so many other good people."

Naturally, his choice to come to GSU left many to wonder what might have happened if he had never left Tech in the first place.

"He'll tell you he was full of himself," said Mooney, the former Tech player. "That's a big 'If,' something he's asked himself a million times. I can envision that he probably would be or would have been the athletic director at Tech. Probably would have done what [University of Georgia coach Vince] Dooley did."

Minutes after he had been introduced at GSU, Curry found himself talking to Jamall McMillan, a sophomore from Dallastown, Pa., who came to GSU never knowing the school might field a team. McMillan had waited an hour before Curry was introduced before introducing himself, asking if he needed a 5-foot-9, 170-pounds wideout/defensive back and wondered if he would like to see the playbook he had drawn up for GSU's club team. Hence came the first recruit.

"I told him he was accepted," Curry said.

'Football Ph.D.' still handy

There was a time he owned the blueprints to the game. When he was breaking in at Tech, Dodd, his old coach, would drop by on Monday with legal pads filled with his critique of the previous Saturday.

"I don't have them," Curry said, shaking his head. "[Vince] Lombardi sat down with me my first week at Green Bay and drew up the entire Packers system on a yellow legal sheets. And I don't have those."

But what he does have, thanks to his second career at ESPN, is an analytical grasp of some 200 games he has broadcast, which he jests is his "Ph.D. in football." He has a notion Georgia State will play a 3-4 or even a 3-5 defensive scheme, even if an offensive system hasn't yet come to mind. He will coach special teams himself.

He remembered one of the darker days at Kentucky, when he came out of the terminal at Blue Grass Airport to find Carolyn waiting to pick him up, sound asleep in the driver's seat.

"And I looked at her pale face and saw the exhaustion," Curry said. "I got in the car and looked in the mirror and saw the same thing in my face. I just realized we were just killing ourselves. It's not a smart way to live. And yet I didn't know any other way to do it."

Twelve years later, with a team that is yet to exist, he gets one last chance to find another way.