She’s Truly the Star of This Team

Dick Tomey, coach of the Arizona Wildcats football team and a man used to being recognized, demonized, idolized and many other things, went with his wife, Nanci Kincaid, to a book fair and was asked more than once, “So, are you Mr. Kincaid?”

“I kind of laughed,” Tomey says, “and thought, ‘So that’s what it’s like.’ ”

Nanci Kincaid, 48, has written three books, the most recent titled “Balls,” and she was a little delighted to see that happen.

For Kincaid spent the 23 years of her first marriage--to another football coach, Al Kincaid--as something more than an appendage of her husband but as something less than a full-fledged partner in a marriage. At least that’s how Kincaid felt as her husband went from being a high school coach to assistant positions at Alabama and East Carolina and finally to a head coaching job at Wyoming, where he was eventually fired.

“Along for the ride,” is how Kincaid felt during those 23 years. As a child of the football-crazed South, raised in Tallahassee, Fla., and a homecoming queen at Virginia Tech, Kincaid was torn between living a life that some Southern women would have been honored to have and finding her own creativity stifled under the burden of being the smiling hostess, the silent helpmate and the acquiescent marriage partner.

When she and Kincaid, who is now an assistant coach at Temple, divorced in 1992, Nanci Kincaid said that she decided “that if I ever got married again there would only be two requirements. That the man not be a career criminal or a football coach.”

So what exactly is Kincaid doing in San Diego this week, accompanying her husband, the highly successful football coach at Arizona, which is playing in the Holiday Bowl against Nebraska on Wednesday?

“Don’t ask me,” Kincaid says, laughing. “I don’t know how this happened.”

In the world of college football coaches, you do not find many wives who have acquired fame on their own. It is not that many football wives are not smart, accomplished, ambitious people. But the world of football is so all-consuming.

If the coach is not recruiting, he is watching tape of potential recruits or on the phone talking to recruits or their mothers or their brothers. If the coach is not drawing up game plans on his own, he is in meetings. Or at practice. Or watching film. Or grading film. Or taping a game. Or a player. He is out of the house before the wife and kids wake up. He isn’t back until the wife and kids are sound asleep.

His family vacation turns into a golf outing with some boosters for him and a trip to the beach for the wife and children. Without him.

This is the life of Dixie Carraway Gibbs, married at 19 to the star quarterback, Mac Gibbs, who is an Alabama hero and eventually the tortured coach of Birmingham University. Dixie and Mac are the two main characters of “Balls.” Dixie and Mac are Nanci and Al Kincaid. Dixie and Mac aren’t Nanci and Al Kincaid.

“A little of both,” Kincaid says. “I’m not totally Dixie. Mac isn’t Al. Exactly. But some of my life is in that book.

“I loved my husband just like Dixie and I lost myself in that life. Between the football and running what was, in essence, a one-parent family. You know the terrible thing in the coaching profession? Men, without meaning to, prove to their wives that the wives can get along just fine without the husband. So, why not do it? Why not get along without him? I loved Al, but the career had been so brutal and the marriage had just reached the point where there weren’t that many differences between the highs and lows.”

Even as she raised two daughters and moved around the country, Kincaid wrote. Notes, letters, journals, diaries. She went back to school to finish her English degree without exactly knowing why. After the marriage ended, Kincaid found her soul in writing.

She has had published a book of short stories--”Pretending the Bed Is a Raft”--and another novel--”Crossing Blood”--but it is “Balls” that makes Kincaid most proud.

It is the story of the coach and of the male world of football but told in the voices of 16 women. Wives and mothers, girlfriends and daughters. It is also the story of breaking away. Dixie does it in the novel just as Nanci did it in her life.

Even as she was growing up, Kincaid said, “I always dreamed of being on Johnny Carson and having Johnny saying ‘Let me introduce you to our latest best-selling author, Nanci Kincaid.’

“I always wrote kind of secretly, to stay alive. Football can silence you. Both the coach and the wife. You have to be so careful about what you say. So many coaches get down to a core vocabulary. They don’t always speak freely because of the press and the alumni. And that translates into the marriage. No communication.

“The wonderful thing about sports to me always had been that sports taught people to have dreams. But that was only for guys. Writing was teaching me to have dreams.”

Kincaid had met Tomey once through her first husband at some coaches’ gathering. And if Kincaid hadn’t thought much about that meeting, Tomey had not forgotten Kincaid.

About four years after Al and Nanci Kincaid had divorced, Tomey ran into Al Kincaid and asked about Nanci. Kincaid told Tomey about the divorce and a few weeks later, Tomey, divorced himself, gathered up the courage to call Nanci.

“I didn’t think Dick was courting me,” Kincaid says. “He did say something nice about ‘Balls,’ but I didn’t even know he was divorced. But I finally figured out he was calling me way too many times for it to be a coincidence.”

Nanci was in Boston when Tomey had come East to see a son play minor league baseball and asked Nanci out.

“I was so impressed,” Kincaid says. “Dick didn’t talk sports at all. He talked about his children, his family, his relationship with his ex-wife. He told me who he really was. He talked to me the way women can talk that men usually can’t talk.

“Next day, we went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Kennedy Library and a Red Sox game. That was it.”

Tomey categorizes that day together as “magical.” After Nanci urges Tomey to tell of a singular moment in the library, Dick tells Nanci to relate the story.

“We’d been in the museum about 30 minutes,” Kincaid says, “and a bunch of kids, teenagers, come barging into the museum dressed for a drive-by shooting, at least it could look that way. I get this shiver because I’m so afraid Dick is gonna say the cliche coaching thing about kids needing discipline or something and I didn’t want him to ruin the moment with some football coach remark.

“Instead, Dick looks at me and says, ‘It must be awful to come into this museum and this building and every face on the wall is white.’ It was sports and lightning, like lightning had struck the building. I started to cry. It was a powerful moment. I knew then that Dick was completely remarkable.”

Nanci Kincaid married her second football coach on Valentine’s Day 1997.

Tomey asked Kincaid to speak to the Wildcats this year. “I thought Dick would be there,” Kincaid said, “but it was just me and the team.”

“I didn’t know how that would turn out,” Tomey says. “I thought the meeting would last about 40 minutes and it went two hours.”

Kincaid said she talked to the team about relationships between men and women. She told them how it would drive her crazy when her first husband would talk about the team as his family. “The team is not the family. Your wife and your children are your family,” Kincaid told the men. “Your team can be like a family but it is not your family.”

Tomey says that the first time he read “Balls,” he realized that “nobody who has been around college football or the coaching world could possibly mistake the people in that book. They’re all composites of many people I’ve known. It helped me realize the difference between men and women. I’ve grown a bunch. Nancy’s helped. She calls me a work in progress. I call myself lucky.”

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HOLIDAY BOWL

Nebraska (9-3) vs. Arizona (11-1)

Wednesday, 5 p.m., ESPN

Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com