YoungCoach inGoldenYears

Rick Neuheisel is still golden.

He still has blond hair and a tan. His smile is still “boyish.” That’s how it’s always described. He is 40 now. He looks 30. He is the football coach at Washington. He got a raise this year to $1.4 million a year. Before incentives. He looks out the window of the Don James Center on a Monday afternoon and sees Lake Washington sparkling in a peek-a-boo sun. He sees boats bobbing and mountains in the distance.

The view is golden.

His Washington Huskies are 4-0 and ranked No. 10. They were supposed to be rebuilding this year. Reliable quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo was gone. The man who won the job, Cody Pickett, separated his shoulder early in last Saturday’s game against USC. So Taylor Barton, a junior college transfer who once thought Carson Palmer was in another universe, led the Huskies to a 27-24 comeback win.

The Huskies are golden.

And now Neuheisel comes to the Rose Bowl, where his golden reputation was earned, where he won a Rose Bowl as a player, an improbable one-time walk-on who came from nowhere to throw the Bruins past Illinois. Last year, his Huskies won the Rose Bowl.

The Rose Bowl is golden when Neuheisel is in it.

“I know what people think about me,” he says. “That I’m lucky and that things kind of fall in my lap. I am lucky. And I work hard. And I’ve had some hard times.”

So golden is he that the hard times didn’t stick.

The hard times came in 1999.

Under cover of darkness, under the guise of taking a recruiting trip, he came from Boulder, Colo., where he was the hippy-dippy coach of the Colorado Buffaloes, to Seattle. He was the guy who played guitar and sang goofy songs, of his own composing, during team meetings and news conferences. He was the Gen X coach who took his players on inner-tubing outings and ski trips. He played Jimmy Buffett music during weightlifting sessions. He was guileless and stream-of-consciousness honest in his speeches.

He was not, in other words, a big boy, cutthroat, Dennis Erickson-type college coach who would abandon a job and his players for money.

Yet in a period of four days, Neuheisel interviewed for the Washington job, was offered a million-dollar salary, went back to Boulder and quit.

Barton, Saturday’s hero, was in Colorado, sitting in Neuheisel’s office when his coach, the man who’d persuaded him to leave Beaverton, Ore., abandon the Pacific Northwest, turn down scholarship offers from Oregon and Washington, told him the news.

“It hurt, no doubt about it,” Barton says now. “This was the man I wanted to play for and he was leaving.”

Barton, the kid quarterback, understood.

Others didn’t.

Colorado’s new coach, Gary Barnett, accused Neuheisel of improperly luring Buffalo players to Washington with phone calls from Seattle. Neuheisel said he was only calling to say goodbye.

Barnett and some Pac-10 coaches reportedly turned Neuheisel’s new Washington staff in, during the first week Neuheisel was on the job, for making improper visits to the homes of high school recruits.

When all the tattling was done, Washington received minor sanctions, a hand slap, a loss of a few scholarships. The school also said it would accept no Colorado football transfers. Neuheisel lost his first two games and has gone 18-4 since.

And Barton left Colorado, went to junior college in San Francisco, hired an attorney and persuaded the Washington president to step back from the agreement and accept him, a former Colorado player.

“That’s how much I wanted to play for Coach Neuheisel,” says Barton, who probably will start against UCLA Saturday. “He got a bum rap at Colorado and he didn’t deserve it. More than anybody, I understand why he left.

“Who could say no to this place? All the resources are here. All the things you need to do a good job. When Coach told me on that Saturday morning that he was taking the Washington job, I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re going to the NFL.’ When Coach told me it was the Huskies, at first I couldn’t believe it. But I understood then and I understand more now.”

Jerry Nevin, who met Neuheisel at UCLA when the two were Sigma Nu fraternity brothers, is his director of football operations and best friend. Nevin went to Colorado, at Neuheisel’s request, to work in the football office. Nevin saw Neuheisel grow up during the nasty bitterness after his abrupt departure.

“Rick wants to be liked by everybody,” Nevin says. “Up to that point, Rick was used to being liked. Let’s face it. Until the Colorado situation, no one had much bad to say about Rick, not nationally. Sure, he had received the normal criticism for losing football games but this was different. This was an attack on Rick’s credibility. It hurt Rick. But it never caused Rick to doubt himself.”

Even now, almost three years after his leave taking, Neuheisel wants you to understand that he did nothing wrong. He wants very much for everyone to believe that.

“I called my kids to say goodbye and nothing else,” he says. “I didn’t get a chance to say it in person to all of them. I didn’t realize it was a violation to call those kids.”

“I think,” Barton says, “that a lot of people liked Coach so much at Colorado that they really felt betrayed. Once they sat back and realized why he did what he did, then they understood.”

Barton says Neuheisel has changed since leaving Colorado.

“He’s more careful,” Barton says. “He’ll still do stuff with us like he used to at Colorado, the stuff he’d get criticized for. He just doesn’t talk about it now. He does it just in front of us.”

Neuheisel, the son of a Phoenix lawyer and the holder of a USC law degree, is self-effacing.

“If I saw film of myself as a high school quarterback,” he says, “I would not recruit me, either.”

He came to UCLA as a walk-on and says it was luck and the baseball aspirations of Jay Schroeder and Steve Bono that enabled him to get a starting job. He says it was only the belief that Terry Donahue had in him that made Neuheisel become a coach, a UCLA assistant.

His dream, he says, was to become UCLA head coach. But dream or not, when Bob Toledo was named offensive coordinator over him in 1993, Neuheisel left to take a coordinator job at Colorado. A year later, he was a 33-year-old head coach.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” he says. “No one expected Bill McCartney to quit.”

Timing is always right for a golden boy.

“Have things worked out for Rick sometimes? Absolutely,” Nevin says. “Is it always an accident or luck or whatever people say? Of course not. It’s not an accident Rick is at the right place all the time.”

So the place Saturday is the Rose Bowl again. Two undefeated Pac-10 teams will play for the conference lead. The sun will be shining. The sky will be blue. The day will be golden. Rick Neuheisel is back.

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