BORN TO COACH

As a coach, he always seemed too young.

Too happy.

Too interested in having fun.

In his first try as a head coach, at the University of Colorado, Rick Neuheisel was mockingly referred to as “Slick Rick” and “Coach Kumbaya.”

Not enough wrinkles, not enough frowns, not enough bags under the eyes from all-nighters behind a film projector.

But that’s not Neuheisel. Never has been. He has managed to keep the smile and easy manner he had when he started coaching 28 years ago.

Twenty-eight years ago? Isn’t Neuheisel 39? That would make him 11 when he started?

Exactly.

While his teammates on his youth baseball team in Tempe, Ariz., went off to just be kids after their games were over, Neuheisel switched caps and became the manager of the Saber Cats, a baseball club of 6- and 7-year-olds.

That team finished 23-0.

A career was born.

It took awhile, however, to reach fruition. There were the years spent playing, law school, the learning years as an assistant, the maturing years in Colorado and, finally, a Rose Bowl year in Washington.

When Neuheisel steps onto the field Monday as the coach of the Washington Huskies, leading his team into the Rose Bowl game against the Purdue Boilermakers, he will have come full circle.

It was in the Rose Bowl that he achieved his greatest glory as a player. It was there he decided he wanted to be a Pac-10 coach. And now, it is there he can crown his coaching career by winning another Rose Bowl game.

“If we win, it will be a great day for Washington,” Neuheisel said. “As for me personally, I will have to wait until I retire to decide what it means to me.”

That figures to take awhile. Finishing his second season at Washington, Neuheisel is just reaching his prime and loving it as much as ever.

“I got into this business because of the relationships,” Neuheisel said. “I very quickly knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The hours fly by. You never look at a clock.

“The people are the best part. It’s like a class in sociology. You meet so many different kinds of people. When you’re recruiting, you go to a house where they have to take the light bulb out of the kitchen and screw it in in the living room because they have only one, and you go to a house where you have to go through three gates just to get inside. The ideal is to have some impact on all these kids. Athletes are placed on a pedestal. My job is to teach them there is give and take in life, not just take.”

UP AND DOWN AT UCLA

Neuheisel was a walk-on quarterback at UCLA. Wouldn’t that give him a special bond with then-coach Terry Donahue, who also had been a walk-on in his playing days?

Yes and no.

Donahue liked Neuheisel. But first, Donahue liked winning.

Neuheisel threw only 23 passes in his first two seasons as a Bruin, but, in his third year, 1983, he won the starting job.

But the team wasn’t winning.

Donahue told Neuheisel, “When the team is playing poorly, you either change quarterbacks or change coaches. And I’m not ready to be changed.”

Have a seat, Neuheisel.

Come on in, Steve Bono.

But before the season was over, Bono was knocked out with a shoulder injury and Neuheisel got the job back. And then took the Bruins all the way to the Rose Bowl game against Illinois.

Neuheisel was excited beyond words. He had butterflies the night before the game.

Wait a minute. Those weren’t butterflies. Those were pains. Gut-wrenching pains.

Nightmare of all nightmares, Neuheisel, and about half of his teammates, came down with food poisoning.

Donahue put the healthy players on the team bus for the ride to Pasadena and put the ailing players in cars.

As the caravan made its way into the Rose Bowl, Neuheisel’s father, Dick, spotted his son and went rushing up to wish him well. When he saw his son was anything but well, constant vomiting having left Rick ashen, the senior Neuheisel reacted.

With sympathy?

Not a chance.

“Pinch yourself in the . . . and get going,” Dick told his son. “This is no time to get sick.”

He didn’t have to pinch himself.

“Once I ran onto the field, it was magical,” Neuheisel said. “I was floating. I never felt sick again. It was an amazing experience.”

And he had a day that would have been amazing even if he hadn’t spent the preceding hours in the throes of illness. Neuheisel completed 22 of 31 passes for 298 yards and four touchdowns in a 45-9 victory over the Illini.

For his efforts, Neuheisel, who had trouble walking steadily when he arrived at the Rose Bowl, walked out with the game’s most-valuable-player trophy.

IN AND OUT OF FOOTBALL

Neuheisel tried pro football, playing two seasons with the San Antonio Gunslingers of the short-lived United States Football League, and split another between the San Diego Chargers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

He found time between seasons to go to law school, and football might have soon forgotten Rick Neuheisel, had it not been for Donahue, who remembered his young quarterback.

“I felt he would make a good coach,” Donahue said. “He was a really smart player. He wasn’t the most gifted in terms of mobility, but he hit so many passes because of this amazing, innate quality to always know where to go with the ball. He was plenty bright, personable, real confident, all qualities characteristic of a good coach.”

So when Donahue had a quarterback who was redshirting, he thought of Neuheisel as the perfect tutor.

Neuheisel agreed to work with the kid, whose name was Troy Aikman.

Aikman’s talent and Neuheisel’s knowledge proved a perfect match. Having given up pro football after the 1987 season, Neuheisel came to work for Donahue as a full-time assistant and stayed six years.

Then, Colorado beckoned.

HOT AND COLD AT COLORADO

Neuheisel was an assistant under Bill McCartney for a year.

When McCartney left, Colorado officials, in a stunning move, promoted the 33-year-old Neuheisel to the top job, making him the youngest head coach in Division I-A.

He looked like one of the players. And, some thought, he acted too much like a player.

He took his team skiing, inner-tubing down a river and played guitar for his players.

“Bill McCartney was a straight-laced disciplinarian,” Neuheisel said. “I was perceived as a young, devil-may-care guy. I actually knew what channel MTV was on.

“But I believe that every team has good players. What defines a team is the chemistry. If the relationships are made stronger, it can help players when they have to face adversity. By inner-tubing with them, or playing volleyball, I thought I might be able to create a little more glue.”

People bought it, as long as he won. The Buffaloes went 10-2 his first season, the victories being the most for a first-year coach at Colorado, and came back with the same record his second season.

But in the third year, the Buffaloes were 5-6. And Neuheisel’s unorthodox approach was being questioned.

“As soon as we fumbled, it was because of the inner-tubing, not because we made a mistake,” he said. “There is no correlation between a guy going down a river in an inner tube and a guy going offside.”

Nevertheless a Denver newspaper cartoonist depicted Neuheisel wearing a propeller beanie, playing a guitar and pulling a wooden wagon.

People were having doubts about the boy wonder.

BIG AND BIGGER IN WASHINGTON

After going 8-4 in his fourth season at Colorado, Neuheisel was back in familiar surroundings at the Rose Bowl, not coaching but there to be inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame.

“The sun was setting over the stadium in the third quarter,” he said, “It was so pretty. I looked at my wife Susan and said, ‘We’ve got to get back to the Pac-10.’ ”

He didn’t have long to wait. Washington fired its coach, Jim Lambright, before the start of the next season and Neuheisel was offered the job.

Things had soured in Colorado and he didn’t see a big financial commitment there for the future. But he told Washington’s athletic director, Barbara Hedges, that he would need a big financial offer to justify leaving his Colorado players.

Neuheisel got it--$997,000 a year for five years with a two-year option.

He started poorly, losing his first two games, and the doubters were again out in force.

But it was then that he won over his new players, according to safety Hakim Akbar.

“He didn’t get down on us,” Akbar said. “There was no screaming or yelling. He gave us love, a positive attitude. He treated us like men.

“Now I will go out and lay it on the line for him.”

The team went 7-5 in his first season and lost a Rose Bowl berth because of an overtime loss to UCLA.

Then came Neuheisel’s second season, and the ultimate test of how far he had come as a coach.

On Oct. 28, in a game against Stanford, Washington safety Curtis Williams injured his spinal cord while making a tackle and was paralyzed.

“Seeing that kid lying on the field was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through,” Neuheisel said.

He quickly realized, however, that his own sorrow would have to give way to his team’s concerns. He found the inner strength, rallied his troops, somehow pulled out a 31-28 comeback victory and, more important, guided his players through their shock and tears while also finding the time to be there for Williams and his family.

Just a carefree kid? Nobody can ever say that again about Rick Neuheisel.

He may still look like the boy who won a Rose Bowl game. But he has come back a man.