Stolz Still Searching For A Reason Behind His Change of Course : San Diego State: Now a golf coach, he wonders what took him from the joys of college football to the back nine of the Aztec athletic department.

The office is a little bigger than a bus station telephone booth, and no more inviting.

The clock on the otherwise bare wall doesn’t work, and on this chilly March morning the heater remains cold.

There are no secretaries or assistant coaches. There are two desks--one for Diana Falar, women’s golf coach, and one for Denny Stolz, men’s golf coach.

When Denny Stolz came to San Diego State in the final days of 1985 as head football coach, he had a much finer office, and school officials considered that office a blight on the business of impressing recruits.

A 1986 Western Athletic Conference championship and Holiday Bowl appearance by Stolz’s Aztecs helped lead to bigger and better offices for football, but Coach Al Luginbill and his staff now occupy those rooms.

It has been more than two years since Stolz was fired as football coach and banished to coach golf. And he has had little to say since.

He had taken Bowling Green to an 11-0 season and a trip to the California Bowl, and a year later was the toast of San Diego after giving SDSU its first Holiday Bowl berth.

“And like that,” he said with snap of his fingers, “it was over. I’m still kind of shocked over the dismissal. It’s not night and day, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened.

“You got the president of the university in Jack Murphy Stadium hugging you to death and not even two seasons later you’re gone. Damn.”

His wife, Cena, has told him that it was not his fault. His friends and associates have offered support. His record, which includes coach of the year honors in each of the four conferences he has worked, should provide further reassurance.

But Denny Stolz was fired. Fired .

“There were many days in the beginning when they made me golf coach that I would drive by and not come in the building,” he said. “It was embarrassing. It hurts. I remember one morning it was raining. I parked, but I couldn’t even get out of my car. I just sat there. I couldn’t go in.

“I’d go and buy a newspaper, go to breakfast or go visit friends. But they were working and I was just getting in their way. I’d go back and tell Cena I just can’t go in that building. I just can’t do that.”

He earns $70,272 a year to baby-sit a small group of golfers, but good money does not quiet the drive that made him a winner at Alma College, Michigan State and Bowling Green.

“A lot of times coaches say, ‘Well, I’m not bitter,’ ” he said. “I wouldn’t use the word bitter, but it certainly bothers me a great deal.

“Sometimes when I’m driving I pretend, no, I have not coached my last game and I think in terms of what I would say when I get another job. I’ve had tapes of games sent to me. I’ve redone my offense. But chances are, yes, probably as a head football coach I’ve coached my last game.”

Although he is paid handsomely to pass time on the golf course, he has had to regain a grip on his self-esteem. You can tell yourself they were wrong, but they still get their way. And so he is confronted daily by people who know who he was. And what he’s doing now.

“Coaching is something you have done all your life and someone has said you’re not good enough at it,” he said. “I don’t want to be rejected again. When I hear of an opening, I don’t pick up the phone with the same sort of confidence as I did when I was employed. And every time I pick it up it becomes that much more difficult.”

He’s 56, and he owns horses in Florida, but that’s a hobby. He has a passion for yardwork and time to play with his 2-year-old granddaughter.

“She’s a beautiful child,” he said. “She has a serious hearing impairment and wears two hearing aids, but my God, she’s learning how to talk. It’s wonderful. She takes a lot of special training and I get involved with her. She teaches me sign language.”

He has a purpose for each day, he said, and he has found contentment. But it cannot whitewash what has happened to him professionally. Instead of supervising more than 100 football players and a $1-million budget, Stolz is at the helm of a 10-man golf team with $11,000 to spend.

“Professionally, it’s tough,” Stolz said. “People know we won a championship, and then we were fired and they think there’s got to be something more to it than that. They say there must have been some inner politics or something going on, and I let them draw their own conclusions.

“I know it’s a tough damn profession, but what the hell happened?”

His arrival as Doug Scovil’s replacement had been heralded by Athletic Director Fred Miller as a “Return to Glory.”

The deficit-crippled SDSU athletic department needed immediate success from its football program. And Stolz produced. The Aztecs defeated BYU for the first time since 1970, won their first WAC championship and appeared in the Holiday Bowl.

The players carried Stolz on their shoulders after defeating BYU 10-3 on national television, and the administration added another year to the four remaining on his contract.

The championship season gave Miller the leverage he needed to build a $3.5-million, 32,000-square-foot office building. It was the best of times for SDSU until the football team began its own rebuilding process.

“We inherited the most top-heavy football roster I’ve ever seen,” Stolz said. “Doug Scovil left some very fine football players. The credit for bringing that championship team here goes to Doug Scovil.

“But he had a funny way of building a team. We had a huge senior class and a huge redshirt fifth-year class, very few juniors and were just void below that. The roster was screwed up, and I told Fred.”

Miller, however, was positioning SDSU for bigger and better paydays. He was upgrading the schedule, talking TV, raising money, selling tickets and promising success.

“Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable,” Stolz said. “Fred and I did a lot of speaking together, and we had to stay on the same theme to get people in the stands, sell tickets.

“When I was at Michigan State, it was beat Michigan. Here it was money. Everything was focused toward money and seats and season tickets. That’s all it ever was.”

Stolz’s Aztecs played 17 games at home and averaged 25,870 in attendance. Last season, the Aztecs drew an average of 22,060 fans, including 34,201 for national attraction Miami.

“Our football staff was deemed not successful in getting crowds in the stands, but that hasn’t changed really,” Stolz said. “You get people in the stands because you have Magic Johnson or a Dan Fouts, and they had Dan McGwire and you can’t get a better one than this kid. And still it hasn’t changed a heckuva lot.”

Stolz still shakes visibly at the mention of Dan McGwire. Stolz looked upon McGwire as a coach’s delight. He was a quarterback, and Stolz is at his best working with quarterbacks.

“It just kills you,” he said. “That’s like Jim Brandenburg getting a 7-foot center and then not getting the chance to coach him. I don’t think the administration here understood how good McGwire was. The pros have him rated the No. 1 quarterback in the United States.

“He not only is a great physical talent, he has some things that win you championships and take you to bowl games. And when you get to the bowl game, the media grabs ahold of a guy like this and sells your program. But it didn’t happen that way.”

The McGwire-led Aztecs went 6-5-1 in 1989, then 6-5 in 1990.

“I saw us playing in bowl games the two years he was going to be here and winning a WAC championship,” Stolz said. “The schedule was easier, the WAC not so tough. Any time you have a transition, however, like they went through when they fired me, it makes it tough to win.”

In Stolz’s final season the Aztecs slumped to 3-8. They were thumped by UCLA and Wyoming and then humiliated by Texas El Paso. Stolz’s team surrendered 384 points in 1988 amid criticism that he didn’t devote enough attention to defense.

The opposition scored 386 points against Luginbill’s defense last fall.

“They said there was a problem our third year,” Stolz said. “Nothing seems to have changed.”

Stolz has not attended an Aztec game since his dismissal. His relationship with Miller has been “cool. I say hi,” he said. There is no relationship with Luginbill.

Luginbill, who had worked with Miller at Arizona State, had asked Miller to appoint him head coach upon Scovil’s departure. Miller bypassed Luginbill in favor of Stolz, but three years later Luginbill got the job.

“Looking back over it, I should have stayed in the Midwest in the first place,” Stolz said. “That’s the mistake I made. I was 2,000 miles away and didn’t understand the relationship with Luginbill and Miller when I was being interviewed for the job. I didn’t realize how close that thing was. I thought it was athletic director, associate athletic director and football coach, but it was probably an odd man out situation.

“They should have picked somebody they knew from this part of the country or Arizona State. The football coach has to answer to the athletic director. With an intermediary, it makes it that much more difficult. I think Jim Brandenburg has been successful here because he’s had a direct line to Fred.”

Brandenburg has been the Aztecs’ head basketball coach for four years and has yet to produce a winning mark. He has a career record of 50-68 at SDSU. After going 13-16 this season, his contract was extended a year through 1994.

“We were just getting started,” Stolz said. “It was just like writing a book and never getting the chance to finish the last chapter.

“You know what kind of kids you have for next year and the year after. We got beat a couple of times badly at home, but golly sakes, when you look at that over a 10-year period, that seems so insignificant that we would just focus on a month.

“We have all this reform going around the world. College athletics is supposed to be this and that. It comes down to how many games you win, and I really do believe in this case, it was the score in some of those games. To me, that’s just asinine. A loss is a loss.”

It’s like losing a job, Stolz said. If someone provides you with the time you can help explain it away, but it does not matter. “You’re still fired,” he said.

“In football, you always tell your team to play the hand you’re dealt,” he said. “You get a fumble on first down, the defense goes in and you stop them. I live by that. This is the hand I was dealt, and it’s not what you want, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact this might be it. No one is going to drive me out of here. If I leave, it will be because it’s best for me.”

When Stolz was relieved as football coach, he hired an attorney to negotiate his future at SDSU. He lost almost half of his yearly income because of the perquisites he would no longer receive as football coach, so he was given two more years on his contract, which now extends to 1994.

“I remember the first time I went out to the golf course with the team,” Stolz said. “It was probably the most difficult thing I ever did. I’m walking in and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I didn’t know what to do at a golf tournament. It wasn’t like you had been trained.”

While SDSU is not considered a golfing power, there isn’t a golfer on the team who can’t beat Stolz on a daily basis.

“I cannot teach golf,” he said, “but I can teach how to win. I can recruit and fund-raise for them so they have a good experience.”

He has raised almost $20,000 a year to supplement the golf budget and spends each day soliciting practice time from local golf courses for his team.

His golf team finished seventh in the conference his first season, and fourth a year ago. For the first time in seven years, SDSU last season advanced to the NCAA regionals. Wherever he has been, whatever he has done, he has known success.

“In the beginning, I thought it was demeaning doing this,” he said. “But let me tell you, my golf players mean as much to me personally as any football kid I’ve ever had. That would be hard for our football players to understand, and really hard for me to understand.

“But that’s what makes you a coach. You’re dealing with youngsters whose mom and dad don’t give a damn about football. They care about this golfer and what you’re doing for him.”

Denny Stolz, however, still is a football coach. He knows the passing game, he knows how to recruit and develop quarterbacks. He still has something to offer.

“I think my mind now is operating in coaching and adminstrative work about 25% capacity of what it would be working in football,” he said. “I don’t want another quote chance to be a head coach. I’d just like to coach again.”

He was offered the top job at New Mexico State a year ago, but turned it down.

“I didn’t think I could win there,” he said.

He wants to coach, he said, “but I want in now on my terms. Period. Or I’m not going.”

He’s talked to the Chargers in the past, and he aims to talk with friend, Darryl Rogers, who is coaching in the Canadian Football League. He’s also had conversations with representatives of the World League of American Football, but Stolz continues to coach golf.

“I took a gamble coming out here and quite frankly it may have ended my coaching career,” he said. “If there’s one thing I learned from this, I will go with people I trust.

“I’m not going to put my wife, my kids, my grandchildren through this crap again. Man, they see you on television win a league championship and they’re so damn proud. Less than two years later you don’t have a job.”

It’s been more than two years, however, and with each passing day football leaves Denny Stolz that much further behind.

What if he has coached his last football game?

“If I don’t get what I want,” he said, “I’ll just retire from San Diego State some day.”

That’s just what might happen.

“And it bothers the hell out of me,” Stolz said.