Denny Stolz Turned SDSU’s Tenement Into a Penthouse

You have an old house with leaky pipes, peeling paint and tattered carpet? Call Denny Stolz, the fixer upper.

You have an old car with leaky exhaust, peeling paint and tattered upholstery? Call Denny Stolz, the fixer upper.

You have an old television with, OK, a lot of problems? Call Denny Stolz, the fixer upper.

You interested in urban renewal or downtown renovation or one of those euphemisms for cleaning up a mess? Don’t waste money on some highfalutin architect. Call Denny Stolz, the fixer upper.

This man is amazing. You don’t get charged for new parts, because he hardly uses any. He gets it all done with labor.

He is known hereabouts as the head football coach at San Diego State. He took this assignment just less than a year ago, 51 weeks to be exact, and declared he wanted to win immediately.

Cynics said, sure, he might get a win immediately--but not eight of them. Not in the first season.

“We came on pretty hard,” Stolz said Monday night at the Aztecs’ postseason banquet/celebration, “but we had to. We had to wake this place up. We had to do like they did downtown.”

The word is renovate . Stolz took over college football’s version of a run-down tenement. It looked like at least a five-year project, but Stolz would have none of it. He wanted a penthouse right away. His idea of a five-year plan was the Taj Mahal.

The Aztecs reached the Western Athletic Conference penthouse Saturday night with that 10-3 victory over Brigham Young University. This was a remarkable way to do it, because the Aztecs had lost to that same opponent by scores of 63-14 and 58-8 in the best of their previous eight years in the WAC.

Yes, Denny Stolz, the fixer upper, has San Diego State headed for a Holiday Bowl date with Iowa Dec. 30 in his very first season.

He was certainly the man of the hour Saturday night. The television cameras were on him constantly. They caught him pensive, angry, anxious, smiling and finally jumping with glee. He rode his players’ shoulders with his fists clenched and his jaw firmly set but with a grin on his face.

Stolz’s look was not one of ecstasy, but rather of intense satisfaction and fulfillment. His demeanor was a reflection of accomplishment in the face of far more modest expectations.

If looks talked, Stolz was saying: “We did it. Darn it. We did it.”

Yes, the Aztecs had beaten those villains from BYU. Good things like this had never happened to the Aztecs. This was success at a higher plateau.

And it seemed like such a long time coming. . . eight years, in fact. Boston Red Sox fans will grumble that eight years is hardly an eternity, but all those stompings at the hands of BYU made it seem longer than it really was.

And, as I noted earlier, this fixer upper did it without running out and getting a bunch of new parts.

Indeed, this was not really Denny Stolz’s team. By the time he was hired last December, the recruiting rat race was under way . . . and he was still in the gate. He came from Bowling Green University in Ohio, which hardly gave him the background on the talent available in this corner of the continent.

It was as if Stolz walked into a poker game after the hands had been dealt.

“That’s your hand,” one of the other players would say, barely disguising a snicker.

Stolz would look at them, and yawn: “I’ll play these.”

Essentially, Stolz was being asked to play cards good for only a 5-6-1 record in 1985. No one in the WAC figured he’d last through the first raise. . . if he even came up with the ante.

It turned out that Stolz’s cards had faces on them. He was looking at Levi Esene, Todd Santos, Brett Farynairz, Richard Brown, Robert Awalt, Anthony Conyers, Steve Lauter and Randy Kirk. There were a lot of others, too many to list.

None of these faces were familiar to Stolz, and they might have been jokers for all he knew. However, he sat down and made himself comfortable. He was Paul Newman taking Robert Shaw for a ride on that train trip in “The Sting,” except Stolz did not belch and scratch and generally offend everyone in sight.

Denny Stolz was congenial. Everyone thought he had maybe a pair of fours, except that he was smiling. The guys with the pencil-thin mustaches and garters on their sleeves and well-chewed cigars drew to their hands, but Stolz declined.

“I’ll play these,” he said jovially.

And he won.

Never mind that he was playing someone else’s hand with a foreign deck. It turned out that Esene, Santos, Awalt and Co. were the best the deck had to offer. The key was that Stolz knew enough not to fold when the stakes got so high.

Of course, there might have been a time when he was antsy.

There was a fellow standing behind him named Fred Miller, and he was newly in place as San Diego State’s athletic director. He probably noted the satisfied smile on Stolz’s face, so he came up with a guarantee of sorts.

Fred Miller guaranteed that season-ticket holders would like what they saw in the opener against Cal State Long Beach. Anyone who was not pleased could get his or her money back.

Early in that game, Stolz looked like a man who really was holding a pair of fours and wondering if he should have drawn. He was standing with Tim McConnell, his defensive coordinator, and looking at some sinister numbers on the scoreboard.

“I’ve never been under that kind of pressure,” Stolz mused Monday night. “I looked up at the scoreboard and it was 14-0, Long Beach. I told Mac, ‘We’re going to have to give back the money for all those tickets . . . and we’re gone.’ ”

He was wrong, and I suspect he knew it.

San Diego State won, 27-24, and only one person asked for a refund. It was probably a person with a bad heart. If that was the case, it’s a good thing the defector bailed out when he did.

Renovation is never easy, especially when it’s all labor and no parts.