The Long Drive to CSUN : It’s Been a Long Hard Road, and Burt is Happy to Have Finally Arrived

Bob Burt was introduced as Cal State Northridge football coach at a news conference Friday, then proceeded to say all the right things and shake the hands of all the right people.

He seemed perfectly comfortable at the center of everyone’s attention, his deep-set eyes sparkling and cherubic face smiling the whole time. He fielded questions with all the polish of a politician and the confidence of a good used-car salesman.

The people who know Burt best wouldn’t have been surprised at his performance. Gene Murphy, football coach at Cal State Fullerton, describes his former defensive coordinator as a person who gets along with everyone and is at his best under pressure.

“When the chips are down, he’s a guy you want on your side,” Murphy said. “If he has a forte, it would be making good decisions during the game. He seems to have a knack for making the right call at the right time. That can come in very handy in a football coach.”

Burt’s latest move is choosing to accept the challenge of rebuilding a program that has had only five winning seasons in the past 16 years. He is also dropping down to the Division II level after spending most of his career as a Division I coach.

But he has accomplished a major goal by becoming a college head coach.

Burt, 44, was the coach of U. S. International University in San Diego in 1975, but he downplays that job’s significance when discussing his background.

“I took that job for the experience, and that’s about it,” Burt said. “I had been a finalist for the coaching job at UC San Diego and was told by the school’s president that I didn’t get it because I didn’t have any college coaching experience.”

Burt paid a price to get the needed experience.

The USIU job did not include a full-time teaching position, so he kept his job as a typing and business teacher in the Garden Grove School District and commuted to USIU each day, 175 miles round trip.

Burt’s first class at La Quinta High started at 7 a.m. He left the campus after his last class at 1:30 p.m., arriving at USIU about 3:15 p.m. Depending on the length of practice, he returned to his Huntington Beach home sometime between 9:30 p.m. and midnight.

Burt says that he got only one $25-dollar speeding ticket, but paid his dues in loss of sleep.

“Thank goodness for those Botts’ Dots,” he said in a 1975 interview with The Times. “They wake me up when I start to drive into the next lane.”

All that for a job that paid only $750 a month for the length of the football season.

Burt left USIU to become the defensive line coach at UCLA in 1976. A year later, he became the defensive coordinator at Hawaii. He left Hawaii in 1980 to become defensive coordinator at Cal State Fullerton.

Burt was a finalist for the head coaching job at Fullerton, and so impressed Titan administrators during interviews that they offered to pay him as an assistant coach if he would stay.

At Fullerton, Burt received national recognition as the mastermind of a Titan defense that in 1984 led the nation in interceptions, ranked second in turnover ratio and fifth in rushing defense.

He also received recognition from his players as a motivator and good friend.

Sean Foy, a three-year starter at outside linebacker for the Titans, said that Burt called him in his office early this week and told him that he would be leaving.

“It was an emotional moment,” Foy said. “There were a lot of hugs and tears. He’s helped me not only as a football player, but as a person. We were like family. We’re going to miss him.”

Foy described Burt as a “Sgt. Carter type.”

“You always knew where you were with Coach Burt,” Foy said. “You were either right or wrong. There was no gray area.”

Foy said that he will remember Burt especially for a speech he gave before the Titans’ game against Wyoming last season.

“We were sitting in the film room on a Friday night in Wyoming, the night before game,” Foy recalled. “We had lost our first two games of the season and Coach Burt just sat in his chair after films and didn’t say a word. The whole room was silent. You could see tears welling up in eyes when he began to talk. He said, ‘We’ve worked so hard to develop a program up from the cellar, and we’re not going to stop now. You can be as good as any team in nation if you stick together and want to be.’ His voice was cracking during the whole speech.

“We lost the game the next day, 31-0, but the defense played really well. The offense had a couple of fumbles that made the score look lopsided, but we came together as a unit. From then on, we played much better as a unit, and I think it can be attributed to that talk we the hotel room. He made us believe in ourselves.”

Fullerton rebounded from an 0-3 start to finish 6-5 in 1985.

Marijon Ancich was the first coach to recognize Burt’s coaching potential.

Ancich, coach of Tustin High in Orange County, hired Burt as an assistant at St. Paul High in 1962. He says he did so because he had a “gut feeling”--and Burt was from San Pedro, where Ancich grew up.

“He was a Pedro guy, and he just fit right in with the rest of the coaching staff immediately,” said Ancich, who had a record of 190-31-5 in 18 years at St. Paul. “Some coaches are hired because they have tons of experience and a great coaching ability. I hired Bob because my gut told me that someday, if he got the chance, he would become a great coach with tons of experience.”

It was Ancich who stuck Burt with the nickname “Beagle Man” after a character in a popular Walt Disney comic book.

“The Beagle Bros. were sneaky little guys who always seemed to get into mischief,” Ancich said. “Bob was the kind of guy, that if you were out together having a couple of beers and had to reach down to tie your shoe, when you came back up the check would be staring you in the face and he’d be gone.”

Sounds like the perfect man to deal with state university budget constraints.