Head Cozza No More

Long before Yale presented him with a new tractor, and Pennsylvania Coach Al Bagnoli would comment “Carm Cozza is the Ivy League,” and well-wishers would shower him with plaques and platitudes, Carmen Cozza was scared.

Decades before 31 of his 32 team captains would return to honor him before his last home game at Yale Bowl, and this year’s captain Rob Masella would remark, “He has the ability to stop rain,” Cozza was a 34-year-old nervous wreck.

Years before he would coach five Rhodes scholars, the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke; football great Calvin Hill, “Dateline” anchor Stone Phillips and enough doctors to staff the Mayo Clinic, Cozza would lose his first game to the University of Connecticut.

It was Sept. 25, 1965.

Perhaps Yale had erred in not hiring the other candidate it had in mind, a young Penn State assistant named Joe Paterno.

Yale had opted for Cozza, a nobody from Parma, Ohio.

After the Connecticut defeat, Cozza wasn’t thinking about gold watches.

Charley Loftus, then the team’s sports information director, jokingly informed the beat writers that Cozza had received a telegram from the alumni association that read:

“There’s a train leaving for New York at 4 o’clock. Be under it.”

Yale, which had all but invented football, finished 3-6 in 1965.

“It was devastating,” Cozza says. “No one knew who I was. Here’s a guy coming in, losing to Connecticut, and Yale’s never lost to a school in the state. It was a hard thing. I was very worried, because football is important to a lot of people here. I didn’t have any idea what was in store for me later on.”

Thirty-one years later, against Harvard in Cambridge on Saturday, Cozza will coach his 303rd and final football game at Yale.

What was in store, it turns out, was beyond Cozza’s imagination.

Deftly managing to meld competitive football with academic successes, Cozza exits as the winningest coach in Ivy League history, with a record of 179-118-5, with 10 league championships.

At 66, he can’t believe the end is near.

“I’m hoping I’m really busy around the house, because I’m afraid if I’m not, I’m going to have such a sick feeling in my stomach,” Cozza says.

Since becoming Yale’s 32nd coach, there have been 40 coaching changes in the Ivy League. Cozza has outlasted six Yale presidents and five athletic directors.

In today’s win-or-else climate of collegiate athletics, Cozza is a rarity. He always knew when the checks were coming. He arrived in New Haven with his wife, Jean, and raised three daughters in the same town. His job was never in jeopardy, even though he has suffered five consecutive non-winning seasons and hasn’t won an Ivy League title since 1989.

And Yale wants to thank him?

In 32 years, Cozza considered two other job offers and turned down both.

“I would have lost out on experiences I’ll treasure all my life,” Cozza explains. “I can’t believe there are better people on this Earth to work with.”

Those who have watched Cozza over the years could sense the tranquillity.

“What Carm was able to do was remarkable in the coaching profession,” says Ara Parseghian, the former Notre Dame coach who coached Cozza in the early 1950s at Miami of Ohio.

More than most, Cozza understood the Ivy League, where football scholarships are unavailable and academic shortcuts are unacceptable.

“He realized the players who came here had different goals in mind,” says Yale receiver coach Don Martin, who played running back for Cozza in 1969 and ’70.

Martin, a Cozza assistant for 16 years, graduated from Yale with degrees in math and economics, and later earned master’s degrees in business administration and international economics development at Stanford.

Brian Dowling, Yale’s star quarterback on the 1967 and ’68 teams, remembers there was never a doubt about the order of priorities.

“My freshman year, we had four tackles,” says Dowling, immortalized as the character “B.D.” in fellow Yale graduate Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” comic strip. “On Thursdays, they all had labs, so we just lined up without tackles, on offense and defense. That wouldn’t happen at Ohio State or Michigan.”

Yet, Cozza’s teams still won.

Parseghian remembers doing television commentary for a 1981 game in which Yale upset Navy, 23-19.

“He was able to take personnel that was not equal of his opponent, align them and have them perform beyond their level of playing capabilities,” Parseghian says of the game. “He won a ballgame he should not have won. I started calling him ‘Carm the Miracle Man.’ ”

More than the championships, and the NFL players he has coached--Calvin Hill, Gary Fencik--Cozza prefers to brag about one particular statistic.

Of the estimated 1,500 players he has coached since 1965, only seven who remained in his program failed to graduate.

“I’ve thought about them,” Cozza says, “because wouldn’t it be nice to have 100%?”

Cozza will graduate 35 seniors after this season.

“Every guy I recruit I tell, ‘If you don’t have a thirst for knowledge, don’t come here,’ ” Cozza says.

From this well, founded in 1701, Cozza has ladled the best and the brightest.

“I can go to any city of any size and I’m taken care of by a doctor and a lawyer, and that’s no joke,” Cozza says. “No one has as many doctors and lawyers as I’ve got out there. Like I tell the alumni, I’ve got to be the best premed, prelaw coach in the nation.”

Cozza doesn’t stop coaching after his players leave.

When Fencik suffered a collapsed lung while playing with the Miami Dolphins, he called Cozza from his hospital room and said he wasn’t receiving proper treatment.

“I made three phone calls the next morning to three Yale doctors,” Cozza says. “I said, ‘Get your rears there to help him.’ No questions. No bills. No nothing. Done.”

Another time, a former player was seriously injured in a beating in Hawaii. Cozza called two former players who lived on the islands. One went straight to the hospital, the other offered the player’s family the use of his home.

“You say what’s special about it?” he says of his job. “That’s special. No questions asked. It was ‘What can I do?’ No one knew this kid from Eve. That’s what’s special about this job. It doesn’t happen everywhere. It happens here.”

*

Cozza went through his last pregame routine this week trying to pretend it was like any other.

“I’ve tried all year not to think about ‘the last time,’ ” he says.

For 32 years, he has held his weekly press luncheons at Mory’s, a New Haven restaurant established in 1849 and celebrated in “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

Tuesday, Cozza took his regular seat at the table--clad in gray tweed jacket, blue vest with white Yale insignia--and held court one last time.

Later, he led his 2-7 team through Tuesday paces on a dimly lighted practice field silhouetted by sets of teetering, “H-shaped” goal posts that may be older than Cozza. The posts, painted white, are nailed, double beams of two-by-fours secured at the crossbar with metal brackets.

Cozza pointed to a flock of Canada geese that had gathered on the main practice field. He was going to miss those geese.

Cozza is so synonymous with Yale football that a typographical error in the team’s media guide years ago ended up making perfect sense.

What was supposed to be the headline “Head Coach,” was mistakenly type-set “Head Cozza.”

“It was probably very appropriate,” Yale sports information director Steve Conn says. “He is the Head Cozza here.”

All that remains is a second chance to rewrite his ending. Last week, in his final home game, Yale was ignominiously defeated by Princeton, 17-13.

Friends say they have never seen Cozza so despondent over a loss. The coach’s spirits were lifted only after he was honored by his former captains at ceremonies in the Yale Commons, where he was presented his tractor.

Cozza’s career will end, as it seems fit, with the 113th meeting of Yale and Harvard, known to all concerned only as “The Game.”

Cozza is 16-14-1 against the Crimson. Of all his memories, the Harvard games endure.

In November 1963, when he was a Yale assistant under John Pont, Cozza remembers standing near those same goal posts when he received news of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.

It was Harvard-Yale week and Kennedy, a Harvard grad, was supposed to have attended.

“I remember my first loss to them, I remember my first win, I remember that ’68 tie that no one will ever let me forget,” Cozza says. “I remember some of the tight games we had up there that we lost, some of the big victories we had against them. It seems like the losses tend to stick with you more than the wins, for whatever darn reason.”

Agony has no respect for elders.

Last season’s 22-21 loss to Harvard was as tough to take as any of the previous 13.

The 1968 game will remain Cozza’s albatross, as Harvard rallied to tie Yale, 29-29. It was Cozza’s best team (8-0-1), yet the tie denied the Yale coach his only perfect season.

In an effort to keep emotions in check, Cozza is trying not to peer beyond Saturday’s game.

If he did, he would worry himself sick about his future and those of his assistants, who under Cozza have enjoyed rare stability in a profession of high turnover.

Seb Laspina, Yale’s offensive coordinator, has been with Cozza 32 years.

Cozza said: “When you have good strong, loyal people working for you for so many years, it’s hard to say, ‘This is it, take a walk.’ It’s very difficult for them as well as me.”

Cozza hopes to remain at Yale in some capacity, perhaps to lead the transition for his successor and oversee a blueprint that might return Yale to football greatness. There are more than 100 applicants for the job.

It disturbs Cozza that his program has struggled in recent years. He isn’t pleased that the history of Yale football has been diminished since the Ivy League was reclassified into Division I-AA in 1982.

“To me it’s a big shame,” Cozza says. “I would hope they’d do everything they can to make strides to get back in I-A, even though only the image is important, not the classification. You’re still going to play the same people. But the image is important, because you lose top recruits because they don’t know anything about Yale, and they don’t want to know.”

Cozza is disheartened that many kids growing up are unaware that Yale, not Notre Dame, essentially begot the game of modern American football under legendary Walter Camp in the late 19th century.

In fact, when people used to ask Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne where he got his ideas, Rockne would respond, “Where everything else came from in football . . . Yale!”

Associates have assured Cozza, who announced his retirement Sept. 7, there will be life after football.

It remains to be seen.

“I haven’t had Labor Day off in 52 years, since I was a freshman in high school,” he says. “[Reporters] said, ‘What are you going to do on Labor Day?’ I said, ‘Probably go down and watch practice.’ ”

No one expects that Cozza will ever really leave.

“I think he’ll be around,” Martin says. “The players will feel his presence.”

Dowling says it will be enough for Cozza to walk into the room.

“Some coaches have cliches hanging on the wall in the locker room,” Dowling said. “He didn’t have to, because he lived them. Perseverance, hard work.”

When shadows last fall on Saturday, win or lose against Harvard, Cozza will walk away from a resplendent past into an uncertain future.

“I think a lot of unknowns are in front of me,” he says. “People keep asking me, ‘How do you feel?’ I don’t know. I really don’t know. How am I going to feel Monday? I don’t know. I wish I knew that answer. Then maybe I wouldn’t be as concerned. I think I have a feeling how I’m going to feel after the last game, win or lose.

“I’m going to be sad.”