CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE FOOTBALL: A QUESTION OF ATTITUDE : Tom Keele : He’s Found a Greener Life as an Assistant in Utah

Outside of the fact that Tom Keele was at one time the brains behind five losing seasons, a woeful transgressor of NCAA bylaws, a peeve who too often took a gloomy whatsa-matter-with-you-guys stance with his players, and unemployed, some think he really is a helluva football coach.

Keele’s wife for one. Keele, himself, for another.

They live happily on--there is life after Cal State Northridge--having that much in common, a new home, an altogether altered state (mentally and geographically) and another coaching job.

You are either a successful coach or you are unsuccessful. If you are successful you have nothing to worry about. If you are unsuccessful you have only two things to worry about--you’re either in good health or you’re sick. If you’re in good health you don’t have anything to worry about. If you’re sick you only have two things to worry about--you’re either going to get well or you’re going to die . . .

--”Why Worry, Coach?”

a Keele literary favorite

When we last saw Tom Keele, he looked like he wanted to die. The man who took over the Northridge football program after Jack Elway jumped ship in 1979, and who subsequently went on to win more games than any coach CSUN has ever hired, was fired.

It took Keele seven long seasons to win 30 games. Losses, though, came with ease--43 in the same stretch. Nobody had lost as many at CSUN since Sam Winningham dropped 43 games in the 1960s.

During his last two seasons, Keele’s teams lost 15 times in 21 games, unimpressive even by Northridge standards. Adding to the problem, the NCAA announced that Keele broke rules when he held a tryout for punters a year earlier. Things worsened in December, when school officials let Keele know he wouldn’t be home for Christmas. And, by the way, they told him, no more paychecks after New Year’s.

At 52, the former coach was hustled into a midlife crisis.

After 25 years of coaching, he didn’t know if he wanted, or even if he would be given the chance, to coach college or high school football again. “I thought maybe I should go into real estate,” he said.

A lot of people agreed.

Nevertheless, Keele jumped on the phone trying to sell himself, not Florida swampland. He called coaches he considered to be close friends who happened to be employed and in a position to hire him as an assistant. I know this coach, see, beautiful coach, Keele’s pitch might have gone. Offensive genius, defensive craftsman, a load of experience, never mind the head coaching record and those cockamamie NCAA rules.

“I called guys that understand,” he said. “I just wanted to let them know I was available. And that I’d do anything.” And remember all the good times we used to have . . .

Keele wasn’t begging but he wasn’t swamped with offers, either. As it turned out, Mike Price, a young coach at Weber State, a Division I-AA school located in this northern Utah community, had worked with Keele more than a decade earlier at Washington State. He was in the market for an inside linebacker coach who wouldn’t mind looking after the equipment, watering the field and, most important, baby-sitting a coaching staff whose average age was about 30. With those 50 years behind him, Keele was Price’s man.

It is a sunny, October-orange Saturday afternoon on the campus of Weber State College. The Wasatch Mountains dwarf a modern but modest Wildcat Stadium where the Weebs are taking on the dreaded Idaho State Bengals. “We hate their guts,” said one Weber fan before the opening kickoff. “Last year we beat ‘em, 46-45. Offensively, we can really light ‘em up like the Miami Dolphins.”

Defensively, though, Weber normally gets blown out like the Vienna Boys Choir. Keele emerges with his troops--he actually coaches only four players--but the grass looks real green and everybody’s shoulder pads seem to fit just swell.

After warm-ups, Keele makes his way to the coaches’ room located at the north end of the press box atop the bleachers. In a cubicle no bigger than a hallway closet, Keele and a handful of other coaches keep track of the down and the distance an opponent needs for a first down, and relay the information to defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer on the sideline.

Early on, Idaho State goes ahead, 9-0, without much of a reaction from Keele. At halftime, the Bengals lead, 26-22. Nothing much happening by way of emotion from Keele. In the second half, the Wildcats jump ahead and coast to victory, 63-33. Is he alive?

“I don’t get too excited,” he said. “In fact, when I was at Northridge, I used to get really sleepy before games.”

In the locker room, Keele quicksteps around, patting his players on the back, grinning, looking for all the world as if he at long last is genuinely content. “He doesn’t feel the pressure here that he felt at Northridge,” said Nancy Keele, his wife of 34 years. “His responsibilities are fewer. He doesn’t have to look after 70 players. Now he has to worry about just a few things and a few players.”

Besides coaching the inside linebackers, taking care of the team’s equipment and making sure the fields are kept up, Keele’s only other official duty is recruiting for Weber in Southern California. He no longer drags solitarily under the weight of a football program he couldn’t lift.

“When I took the job at Northridge, I thought I’d have no trouble winning. Obviously, I did. I didn’t get it done to their satisfaction or mine. I thought I wanted to stay. I did not want to stay and lose football games. Looking back, I’m glad I’m here. I spent so much time with fund raising and other little things that winning is the only thing that would’ve made it worth staying.

“Losing took the fun out of my life.”

Getting caught breaking NCAA rules was no romp in the park, either.

The subject is one Keele still shies away from. Since it came to light that he illegally held a tryout for a group of punters, Keele had refused to comment about the incident. Now he is a little more open. “I did it because it seemed so minor,” he said. “One of my assistants told me I shouldn’t do it. It was stupid. I was wrong. It was not like my character.”

Keele believes he was fired because of his failure to win games, but had he fought the dismissal, he said the Northridge administration would have used the incident as ammunition against him. “Because,” he said, “they wanted to get rid of me.”

There is a trace of hurt shielded in Keele’s voice as he talks about his seven years at CSUN. In 20 years of coaching at colleges, it is the only head position he has held. And, unless Weber State wins a national championship, which is unlikely, he will probably remain an obscure assistant. It is a thought Keele is aware of, and, by all accounts, is able to live with.

“When I was young, I thought I was on my way to coaching at Notre Dame,” he said. “But I’ve lost that ego to take over. I have no hang-ups with shoveling dirt. I don’t care, I’ll do whatever they want me to. I have no hang-ups with being an assistant.”

All this willingness to subordinate and serve stems from the fact--even Keele agrees--that he is a better worker than boss. “One of my weaknesses as a head coach was I wasn’t as demanding on my staff as most head coaches should be. I’m not real good at getting on people’s cases.”

And his Mayberry RFD personality is anything but charismatic. “I call him Touchdown Tommy,” Price said. “That flashy name is a joke though because he’s not flashy at all.

“He’s kind of like an absent-minded professor. He gets involved in something and forgets about everything around him. All the coaches laugh about it. The building could fall in and he’d never notice.”

Whether he’s out-to-lunch or not, fellow staffers and players say Keele is easy to put up with, an intelligent strategist who understands the technical aspects of football. Even though Keele admits he has been too critical of players in the past, those around him say he has learned to communicate with and relax around his players.

“He pushes us, but he doesn’t dwell on the negatives,” linebacker Dave Hogan said. “He likes to quote people like Vince Lombardi and Dick Butkus a lot. People who were really motivated.

“The players like him. Every couple of weeks, he pulls me aside and we just sit and talk.”

Said Mike Zimmer, Weber’s defensive coordinator: “He’s been through enough, both good times and bad, to help the rest of us keep things in perspective. If it’s not going well and the rest of us want to slit our wrists, he helps calm us down.”

With the exception of Price, who is 39, Keele is old enough to be the father of the other coaches. And while he has periodically handed out paternal advice, the young bucks seem to have had at least as much effect on the old man as the other way around.

Beyond the fact that he needed a job, Keele said he wanted to work for Price because, “I didn’t want to work for some raving maniac.”

Price is just a low-level wild man. He and his assistants have at one time or another done all of the following: Painted their faces the school colors of their next opponent, tackled each other in the end zone to “psyche up the players,” and dressed up like the mascot of their next opponent. Can anyone imagine Bo Schembechler parading around dressed as, say, the Wisconsin Badger?

Before Weber State’s game with the Montana State Bobcats, a coach, dressed in hunting garb, brought a normal, house-pet variety cat to the team’s weekly meeting. He took the poor feline into a neighboring room, screamed “We’re gonna skin those cats,” turned on a recording of a cat screeching its guts out, tossed the cat aside and brought out a bobcat skin borrowed from a local museum.

How Keele, who at CSUN was known as a stick in the mud, would relate to such behavior was anybody’s guess. The world found out the Monday before the Idaho State game when it was Keele’s turn to conduct the team meeting. Holy Moses! He appeared--we’re not making this up--in a bathrobe and sandals, walking stick in hand, bearded and wigged like the famed parter of the Red Sea himself.

Looking more ridiculous than dignified, according to many of the assembled, he preached to the gridders of Israel--who were busting their bowels with laughter--explaining allegorically how the good Lord has often picked ordinary men to perform great and glorious deeds. He figured that beating the Bengals fit in along those lines. And the final triumphant score of 63-33 confirmed his status as prophet.

Even though Weber has since been wiped out by the Babylonians of the Big Sky Conference, due in large part to a defense that gave up 32 points a game, Keele says he and his coaching career are fading comfortably away. “I like it here,” he said. “I don’t look to go anywhere else. I may stay here until I retire.”

Or until he’s fired.

Only when he is pressed does the coach admit to looking back at the Northridge years. He has kept abreast of the Matadors and said he isn’t surprised by their winning season. “It’s natural for people to praise Bob Burt and to knock me,” he said. “But I think I’m as good a coach as he is. It’s just that sometimes change is good.”

Last summer, Keele returned to the school to meet Burt and visit friends, including the administrators who fired him. “It’s foolish to be bitter about anything that happened to me. I have no regrets. I don’t harbor any ill feelings.

“There are times when I think back and maybe I would’ve done some things differently. But then I think, whatever happened, happened for the best.”

Keele then told a visitor he had to get to his chores. There was coaching to do. The equipment had to be attended to. And the grass needed watering, even though it had never been so green.