He Can’t Stay Away : Saban, 69, Puts Down Retirement Ax, Returns to Coaching at Tiny Peru State

Last June, the president of tiny Peru State College in Nebraska, Bob Burns, asked to see a list of applicants for the vacant football coaching position.

He read down the list . . . and his gaze stopped abruptly on a name:

SABAN, Lou.

“I thought someone was pulling my leg,” Burns said recently.

“Then, the more I got to know him, the more I liked the idea of having him here. So we hired him.”

Tucked away in southeast Nebraska, on an oak-shaded hilltop by the Missouri River, is 69-year-old Lou Saban’s 18th stop on a trail of football coaching jobs that began during the Truman administration.

And finally, in his 46th football season, Lou Saban, who was O. J. Simpson’s NFL coach at Buffalo, is starting out with a winner.

Last season, Peru State’s Bobcats went 12-0-1 and won the championship of NAIA Division II, the smallest classification in college football. But Coach Tom Shea resigned to take another job.

Resigned abruptly? Now there is a phrase Saban has heard before. . . .

Lou Saban’s resume is spectacular. It is four full pages, double-spaced. He has coached at three high schools, eight colleges--among them Maryland, Miami and West Point--and the Buffalo Bills (twice) and Denver Broncos. Last season, he coached a semipro team called the Georgia Heat Wave.

Through much of his later career, he developed a reputation for abrupt departures. “The Sultan of Sayonara,” one writer called him. He quit as athletic director of the University of Cincinnati after 19 days on the job.

In his Peru State office recently, he dismissed his job-hopping reputation, saying with some vagueness: “Maybe I let some things bother me more than they should have. . . . I don’t know, it’s all in the past. What matters to me now are these kids.”

And so, into the heartland he has come, this old coach.

He has come to a gorgeous little campus of meandering sidewalks that take you on a journey under old English oaks full of noisy birds, past ornate lamp posts with fresh, black paint, and old brick and stone buildings, garnished with ivy.

Peru State’s football stadium--capacity 1,800--seems somehow out of place, as if it should be in New Hampshire or Vermont. It’s at the bottom of a natural bowl whose hillsides are dense with oaks. It is called the Oak Bowl.

Nebraska highway 67 rolls eastward, by fields of corn growing from horizon to horizon. At the Peru city turnoff, visitors are greeted by a billboard, across the street from Casey’s general store:

PERU STATE COLLEGE

1990 National NAIA

Football Champions

Until last year, Peru State had never won a national championship in anything in its 123 years. Folks in Peru were ready to start naming buildings after the football coach. But then Shea resigned, moving on to the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D.

And so here was little Peru State, suddenly a national champion small-college power with 45 lettermen returning, and no coach. Seeing this one day in a newspaper at the other end of Nebraska, in Chadron, was Saban’s 39-year-old son Tom, an administrator at Chadron State College.

“I knew Dad was helping some people trying to put together a spring pro football league in Florida but wanted to coach again, so I called him,” Tom Saban said.

“But first I called the interim Peru president, Bill Snyder, and asked him if they’d found a coach. I learned they were down to the final three candidates, close to choosing someone.

“I told him my dad might be interested, and he told me to have him fax them something within hours, because the search committee was meeting that afternoon.

“Dad got his letter in on time, made the list of three that day and was hired shortly afterward.”

Peru State has only 1,600 students but is nonetheless bigger than Peru, which has 1,000 residents. The town, which lies beneath its college on the hill, has a two-block downtown district.

Peru, on the Missouri River, is 65 miles south of Omaha and, for the coach, 41 years from a coaching career that began in 1950 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

He is best known for his years with the Buffalo Bills--1963-65 and 1972-76--when he coached the Bills to two premerger American Football League championships and, in a second stint, for the best years of Simpson’s NFL career.

Simpson, who had his record 2,003-yard season in 1973, ran for more than 10,000 yards in nine seasons. He still calls Saban “Coach.”

“Coach is the kind of guy who, once he comes into your life, has an effect on you--you never forget him,” Simpson said.

“He has a way of communicating directly to you, never leaving any doubt where you stand with him. You can differ with him, but you never misunderstand him.

“And he’s very approachable. Many times the team would ask me to talk to Coach about something, and it was never a problem.

“One year, we had a cornerback named Tony Greene who the players felt should be playing, but the coaches had him as the No. 3 cornerback. So they sent me to talk to him.

“Coach said he agreed, Greene started playing, and later became an AFC defensive player of the year. And Coach was happier about it than anyone.”

Asked for his theory on why Saban has left so many jobs, Simpson said: “He’s a builder. He’s challenged by hopeless cases. If he wasn’t coaching, he’d be working for the Salvation Army.

“It’s true he’s had a lot of jobs, but he’s never left a program that wasn’t in better shape than when he started. Howard Schnellenberger, for example, always got a lot of credit for turning (the University of) Miami’s program around, but it was Coach who did it, not Schnellenberger.”

When Saban was hired to coach Miami in 1977, the Hurricanes had finished 3-8 the previous season. He produced 3-8 and 6-5 seasons, but left in 1978, citing a lack of support by the administration.

Schnellenberger arrived in 1979 and began with a 5-6 season. Later, he had 9-3, 9-2 and 11-1 seasons, including a national championship in 1983.

Said Saban: “When I took the Miami job, they told me I had five years, and if there wasn’t a winner by then, they were going to drop football.”

Of his numerous starts and stops, Saban said the one that hurt the most was at West Point, where he was hired in 1979 but left after one season.

“I loved West Point,” he said. “Just walking through that main gate every day made me feel seven feet tall. I learned a lot about my country that year, and why we have a U.S. Military Academy.

“And what great kids--a coach couldn’t ask for better kids than you get there. You’re talking about young men who’ve committed themselves to literally laying down their lives, if necessary.”

Asked to recall a memorable moment at West Point, he spoke of a small, brave woman. This, from a man who has played and coached football for more than 50 years:

“Women had just been admitted to the Academy, and they had to pass the same physical endurance tests men did,” he said.

“One day all the Cadets are going through a summer obstacle course involving live fire, barbed wire, mud, logs. . . . It was designed for men, but the women had to pass it, too.

“Anyhow, at the end came this small girl, really struggling. She was literally staggering when she finished. She was the last one, but she made it. The entire company (about 50 cadets) stood and cheered. There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. I’ll never forget it.”

Tom Saban says his father has a special need for support.

“He’s pretty close to being a perfectionist, and when he gets so committed to a task like coaching a football team, he needs people around him to feel the same way he feels about it,” Tom Saban said.

“If he doesn’t get it, then he feels alone. I was a teen-ager when Dad was coaching in the NFL, and I can assure you that he’s as genuinely happy about this job as any he’s ever had.”

Any coach might get excited by Lou Saban’s prospects in his 18th coaching assignment.

Of his 45 returning lettermen from a 12-0-1 national championship team, 15 are starters. NFL scouts, Saban says, already have files on his 6-foot-6, 275-pound defensive end, Tim Herman, and a linebacker who doubles as a summer prison guard, Bob Hansen.

Peru State, Saban says, is the first program that he has coached that didn’t require rebuilding.

“I’ve never come into a winning program, ever,” he said. “Every place I’ve been, I had to rebuild. There are good players already here.

“These are what you’d call good, solid hard-core American kids,” he said. “They’re all from homes where there are hard-working parents and they’ve had tough summer jobs themselves.

“They’re not necessarily great athletes, like you’d see at a Division I program, but they’re bright, learn quickly, prepare well, work hard. . . . These are the kind of kids who make things happen on a football field.”

Saban is no stranger to hard work.

“My father was a manual laborer all his life,” he said. “He and Mom raised five kids in the Depression. My two brothers and I slept in the same bed.

“My first job was digging the Chicago subway tunnel from LaGrange. I lied about my age when I got the job, when I was 14. I worked the midnight-to-5 a.m. shift, for $1.10 an hour.

“I’ve never seen human beings work like that, to complete exhaustion. We followed a mechanical wedge machine, picked up the mud and muck the machine forced through holes, and carried it in our arms to carts.

“My parents were Croats, from Yugoslavia. I spoke Croatian, not English, until I started the first grade.

Fearing stateside duty early in World War II, he volunteered to go to the Army language school. At the University of California, he learned Mandarin Chinese in seven weeks--seven hours day, seven days a week--and served in the China-Burma theater.

“One time at halftime in Buffalo, just to get everyone’s attention, I started ranting and raving in Chinese,” Saban said.

“(Simpson) looked at me like I’d gone mad. Most of the players didn’t know I spoke Chinese. No one said a word.”

Recruiting is much different at the small-school level, Saban has learned.

“We have only three or four kids on a full-ride scholarship, and we must be certain ahead of time that a kid can cut it academically, because he must perform in the classroom here.

“If we grant a kid a full ride and he flunks out, we don’t get the scholarship back.

“And you know what? I think if the big schools functioned on that basis, you’d see much less problems in college athletics today.”

Why isn’t this 69-year-old at home in his house-in-the-woods, in Hendersonville, N.C.?

“I tried to retire, I really did,” he said.

“We have a beautiful home there in the woods, nice and quiet. I couldn’t stand it. I said to my wife, Joyce, one day: ‘Honey, I’ve got to find something to do. I’m going crazy.’ “She left, and came back with a power saw. She gave it to me and said: ‘Here, go out there and start cuttin’ and stackin.’

“So I did, but all I could think of was coaching a football team again. Then my son called, with the Peru State news. It just goes to show you: When the old man’s in trouble, make sure you got a son out there somewhere who can get you a job.”

Saban’s wife said that Saban’s tree-cutting exercise was borderline deforestation.

“He cut down seven acres of trees before we could stop him,” she said. “It was about 200 fir trees. Then he cut them up into firewood, and he had stacks of wood all over the place. Then I noticed after he stopped cutting down trees, he started moving the stacks around.

“He really, really needed to coach again. I thought he’d get over being out of coaching, but he didn’t. He just loves coaching, and it really doesn’t matter at what level.

“He loves that hands-on contact with a lot of young players. Before he went to Peru, he just couldn’t sit still.”

Coaching at the NFL level and the small college level is simply a difference in teaching intensity, Saban said.

“When a pro screws up in a game, it’s generally an error of concentration,” Saban said. “At this level, if a player screws up, chances are he simply didn’t know what to do. So you have to teach.

“At practice, I work out with my players. I’ve always felt a coach should be right in the middle of practice, not sitting on top of some tower or riding a golf cart.”

Saban, who lives in a small apartment in Auburn, Neb., about 10 miles from campus, didn’t return to college coaching for the money. His Peru State salary is $25,000.

His apartment, he said, will be “a place to eat, sleep and read.”

“I just finished reading ‘Sleepwalking Through History,’ ” he said.

“I’ve enjoyed my coaching career, but I never had the time I wanted to pay attention to the other arts. I’ve missed a lot of great books in my life, but I try to keep up on my reading.”

Saban began recruiting for Peru State on April 19, the date he was hired. He contacted 40 high schools in Florida, looking for prospects, then visited every high school within 100 miles of Peru State.

He passed through Stella (population 289), Neb., one day and learned that the local high school, which had 80 students, needed a guest speaker for its sports banquet that night.

“The women’s basketball coach from the University of Nebraska was the speaker, but she canceled on short notice,” said Vince Henzel, the Peru State sports information director. “Lou volunteered, went to the banquet, told O. J. Simpson stories for 40 minutes, and they loved it,” he said.

He is a man who believes coaching is a noble profession, a calling rather than a job. And he doesn’t forget.

“I had a great high school coach, a man named Chuck Bennett, at Lyons Township High in LaGrange,” he said.

“He was there for 25 years, until diabetes got him. I asked him once why he’d never moved on to college football, and I’ve never forgotten what he told me: ‘Lou, in my mind, it’s where I can serve best.’ ”

What will be Saban’s future at Peru State?

There might be one precedent. In 1933, Amos Alonzo, 71, Stagg became the football coach at College of the Pacific. Stagg coached at Pacific until 1946, when he retired at 83, but continued to coach at Pacific as a volunteer assistant until he was 98. He died at 102, in 1965.