NORTH BY NORTHWESTERN

Gary Barnett doesn’t look like a man who has committed career suicide.

Northwestern’s football coach is smiling and saying all the right things, mainly that he’s happy to be here for the Wildcats’ Citrus Bowl game against Tennessee on New Year’s Day.

That he’s here at all is a surprise to cynics and to everyone conditioned by years of abject failure to think of Northwestern’s football program as a coaches’ graveyard.

Barnett, 50, turned down a chance last month to be considered for the Notre Dame coaching job, widely considered the pinnacle of the profession. Last year, after he made good on his 1992 vow to take the long-downtrodden purple to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, he rejected offers from UCLA and Georgia. He also rebuffed overtures from an NFL team he won’t identify.

Now, his name is mentioned whenever a top-rank college or pro position opens.

Yet, he’s still at Northwestern, still demanding the best instead of expecting the worst and putting integrity first in a world where commitment too often lasts only until something better comes along.

Why?

Why not?

“The next thing is I want to win a national championship at Northwestern,” Barnett said. “Can it be done? Oh, yeah. Why couldn’t it? Absolutely. Sure it can be done.”

Remember, no one thought he could take the Wildcats to the Rose Bowl, but he accomplished that last season with a 10-1 record going into the Rose Bowl defeat to USC. And that overall 10-2 included an 8-0 Big Ten Conference sweep.

This season, the Wildcats were 9-2 and shared the Big Ten title, their first successive conference championships since 1930-31.

Capitalizing on that, Barnett has assembled what several recruiting services judge an exceptional class that will enter Northwestern in 1997.

“And now he can say, ‘I turned down Notre Dame,’ ” Wildcat quarterback Steve Schnur said. “That’s a big recruiting tool.”

Why stay?

Why not?

“He’s made Northwestern a dream job,” said Rocky Walther, Barnett’s attorney and a friend since they roomed together at the University of Missouri. “He’s getting recruits right and left. He’s made it notable. People are so aware of it now.

“What do you have to sell now? ‘We have one of the finest academic institutions in the country, a mecca for education in so many fields, and, by the way, we play great football.’

“Northwestern is a pretty cool place to be. Why do you walk away from that?”

Barnett’s impact on the school is staggering. Season tickets soared from 6,000 to 21,000, records were set for athletic gifts and total university donations in a year and applications have increased 20% each of the last two years. Athletic Director Rick Taylor even sees a correlation between the Wildcats’ success and a 15.5% increase in law-school applications.

“We’ve reeducated people about what to expect. People feel good about Northwestern,” Taylor said. “It’s always been a great university and it continues to be, but people just feel good about every aspect of it. The front porch looks as good as the rest of the house.”

Barnett didn’t leave the house, but that’s not to say he never will. There are buyout provisions in the 12-year, $500,000-a-year contract he signed last spring after protracted negotiations.

Walther isn’t sure what it would take to lure away Barnett, who Walther said has no burning desire to coach in the NFL.

“A long time ago, he wanted to coach Missouri, his alma mater, but I think that passed him by. That’s the only dream job I know of for him,” Walther said. “Any time there was an opening and he was an assistant, he hoped, but they never interviewed him. Any other school? Not really. He was in Colorado for a long time [as an assistant to Bill McCartney] and I’m sure the lure of going back would have some interest. But he says, ‘I’m going to look at whatever opportunity comes up.’ ”

The attraction for Barnett at Northwestern is it’s a place where he has made a profound difference. He breathed life into a moribund program, redrew the landscape of the campus by leading a drive for new facilities and taught young players about trust, pride and realizing potential they didn’t know they had.

“I’ve always lived and always coached that the best job I could have is the one I have now,” he said. “When I was a high school coach, I didn’t think I’d ever leave. And when I was at Colorado, I didn’t think I’d leave. Circumstances change, and they could change again for me here. Right now, I think I’m in a great situation. If I thought Notre Dame was a better job, I would have taken it, but I didn’t think it was. That’s my perception, and I know what’s good for me better than anyone else.

“I’m sure if anyone else had a choice, they might do something else. They don’t know what we’ve got and what’s gone into building what we have here. . . . Everybody I know in the coaching profession told me to take the job. Everybody outside the coaching profession told me not to.”

His wife, Mary, reportedly was among the naysayers. Barnett won’t discuss her sentiments, but it’s known the Barnetts recently bought a new home in Evanston. It’s also believed that Mary Barnett, who met her husband when they shared a seat in physical education class as high school sophomores in St. Louis, feared that South Bend couldn’t duplicate the rich cultural offerings of Evanston and Chicago.

Walther said he didn’t have the impression Mary Barnett--who shuns interviews--kept her husband from going to Notre Dame.

“They always said they would make decisions based on what felt right. Northwestern treated them right,” Walther said. “They had nothing bad to say about Northwestern. They came up with a long-term contract and they were happy. Mary supports him 100%.

“I know that wasn’t his dream job. It’s not something where we used to lie around and drink a few beers and he’d say, ‘I want to coach Notre Dame.’ He has no religious ties there. It’s a unique situation. Half the world hates Notre Dame and the other half loves it. He likes Northwestern.”

Their larger family--the assistant coaches, their wives and kids--also may have figured into his decision. In his book, “High Hopes, Taking the Purple to Pasadena,” Barnett wrote that he wanted to accept UCLA’s coaching offer last December but one reason he declined was Mary’s concern that high real estate prices would have kept his assistants from living near the school. He also felt he would have been going back on his word to kids he brought to Northwestern and made part of his family.

“If it were just me, personally, by myself, I probably would have gone to UCLA. But it wasn’t just me,” he wrote. “If you’re going to have any integrity, you must follow through on what you say. I teach a sport that is the epitome of team, and I ask my players to throw away selfishness. I must do the same.”

Walther knew Barnett came close to leaving for UCLA. Still, he wasn’t surprised when Barnett left a message on his answering machine saying it just didn’t feel comfortable.

“Money is not a particular main thing with him. If it really was that, other schools would get some interest. He doesn’t even use money to leverage things,” Walther said. “Northwestern gave him his first job as a head coach and after a few years he did something people said can’t be done. People at Northwestern said it couldn’t be done. He’s done some great recruiting and they love it there. To him it’s a matter of, ‘Hey, I’m happy here.’ ”

Barnett wasn’t always sure coaching would make him happy. Nor was he the polished, witty speaker he is now, able to quote the perfect parable to fit any situation and motivate his players beyond what they thought was possible.

The son of a traveling salesman, Barnett grew up in tiny Mexico, Mo. Sports were his escape, he wrote, “because I was terribly uncomfortable for a long time. It was almost traumatic in some ways. I was chunky and wore glasses, but my real distress came from being a bed-wetter . . . I never did find out why it happened. I survived it, but I was pretty fragile for a long time.”

The family moved to St. Louis before his sophomore year in high school. A growth spurt and contact lenses fortified his self-esteem; the bed-wetting stopped as his athletic career began. He won a scholarship to Missouri, but played little under Dan Devine, and when he graduated he had no ideas about his future. He tried selling insurance and vacuum cleaners, but the only vacuum he sold was the demonstration model he had to buy.

Remembering his high school coach, Jack Wells, he decided to follow Wells’ path by studying counseling and education. Those classes changed his life, shaping a philosophy that trust, faith and desire can overcome all obstacles.

At Northwestern, he expressed that by picking a theme for practices and games. He used props and tricks, such as designating one side of a scale as Notre Dame and putting 19 pennies on that side--one for each day of practice before the teams’ 1995 opener--and adding or removing pennies from the Wildcats’ side according to the team’s practice performance.

He brought in a motivational speaker dressed as Moses, ready to lead the team out of the wilderness of football failure, and somehow got them all to sing the song “High Hopes” and believe in its optimism.

“He’s very innovative. He’s not afraid to do something new or try the unexpected,” Taylor said. “His ego is such that he’s not going to force the kids into his system. He’s going to bend and flex the system to fit the kids. Not all coaches do that.”

“High Hopes” became their rallying cry through victory after victory. When they lost, as in this season’s opener against Wake Forest, he was ready for that too. He showed them a slingshot and told them they had put themselves on a pedestal after last season’s success and were like a bird on a wire that got shot down. They responded the next week by pounding Duke, 38-13.

Against Illinois, he appealed to their pride by lighting a candle and telling them it could be extinguished by external forces but not from within.

“He put a little more responsibility on the team this year,” senior linebacker Pat Fitzgerald said. “He had to lead us in the past, but this year we had more understanding of what it takes to win. He was more like a father figure, maintaining rather than pushing and really driving.”

Maintaining the Wildcats’ new excellence is Barnett’s new challenge. Schnur believes that’s why Barnett didn’t go to Notre Dame.

“I originally thought, ‘What an opportunity for a coach,’ but then looked at it from the same standpoint he looked at it,” Schnur said. “He’s happy here and I don’t think he feels his job here is done. He wants to see it through.”

He will consider the job finished only when he takes the Purple back to Pasadena and wins. Northwestern’s 41-32 loss still weighs heavily on him.

“That’s pretty important. That’s more of a personal thing,” he said. “In a coach’s life, bowls are what it’s about. It sort of validates you as a coach. . . . Coming down on the plane [Wednesday] my wife said, “Back-to-back New Year’s Day bowl games against USC and Tennessee. It doesn’t get much better than that.’ She’s right. This is the kind of gas that makes you go.”

Or, in Barnett’s case, makes you stay.