Northwestern Will Take Its Time to Enjoy Experience : Rose Bowl: Wildcats make earliest arrival. Barnett near new contract.
The charter flight that carried Northwestern’s football team touched down a few minutes late Sunday night, rolling to a stop on a remote runway at LAX just before 7:30. But what’s 10 minutes when you’ve waited 47 years between Rose Bowl appearances?
Led by Coach Gary Barnett, the Wildcats bounded off the plane like kids let loose in a candy store. Barnett received a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath from the Rose Bowl queen, and each player got a single rose. Never did a flower smell so sweet.
“It’s really hitting me now. It was so far away and now it’s under our feet,” Barnett said. “Things like this really happen. We finally got these roses. What I felt was a sense of fulfillment that we had done this, because so few get here.”
Good things are coming by the dozen for Barnett, who led Northwestern to a best-ever 10-1 season and its first Big Ten championship since 1936. Besides the dozen roses--and taking NU to Pasadena for the first time since January, 1949--Barnett is near agreement on a contract that will keep him at the school for 12 years.
Barnett’s future was the subject of speculation since he visited the University of Georgia, a stop he said was a social call but was widely seen as an expression of interest in the Bulldogs’ coaching job. However, Barnett on Sunday said purple and white will remain his colors for a long time.
“We’ve agreed on the basics of it,” he said of the 12-year deal. “That’s as far as it goes.”
His players were delighted to hear he is virtually certain to stay.
“Knowing that will help us a lot,” said sophomore running back Darnell Autry, who rushed for a school-record 1,675 yards and 14 touchdowns this season. “A lot of us had questions. I didn’t think he would leave, but it’s nice to know for sure.
“He’s done a lot for us. He started us off and after that, he let us take it. He got it rolling.”
To the players, who finished their season Nov. 18 and finished their final exams last week, the flight to Los Angeles seemed almost as long as the season itself.
“When we got on the plane we started acting crazy, but after a couple of hours, some guys started going to sleep,” Autry said. “With about an hour to go, everybody started bouncing off the walls.”
Said senior cornerback Chris Martin: “On the plane, it hit me big time. Now we’re here, and it’s overwhelming. The last hour of the trip, everyone was really giddy as we got closer and closer to the airport.”
Their arrival was the earliest for a Big Ten Rose Bowl team, a move based on the lack of an indoor practice facility at the school’s Evanston, Ill., campus and the possibility that bad weather in the Midwest might have limited their workouts.
They were pampered in transit, befitting their status.
“They started to treat us real nice. We had our choice of meals and they were elegant meals, not peanuts and ice cream bars,” Martin said. “We got the works.”
They enjoyed the royal treatment they received when they landed too. Many players had pictures taken with the Rose Queen and her court, and Autry and Casey Dailey got into the spirit of things by sticking several small rose decals on their cheeks.
“I’m ecstatic, overwhelmed,” said Dailey, a junior defensive end from Damien High in La Verne. “This is a good start right here, having these girls meet us right off the plane.”
Surprisingly, Barnett said he hasn’t given his players a curfew during the first week of their stay. “But what he didn’t tell you,” Martin said, “is we have two practices [today] and they’re going to be very long.”
The Wildcats, who will stay in Newport Beach for the first week before moving to Pasadena, were scheduled to get a 6:45 a.m. wake-up call today for the first in a series of two-a-day practices. Hollywood will have to wait for Autry, a theater major, and his teammates. But that’s fine with them. They’re ready to get back to preparing for the Rose Bowl.
“We don’t just want to show up,” Autry said, “we want to play a great game.”
