The Simple Life

The city looks like a ghost town, stretches of empty storefronts, windows boarded over. Not even Christmas lights and a frosting of snow can cheer things up.

Driving along gray streets at dusk, streets where he grew up, Ron Stoops Jr. says Youngstown has been down on its luck since the steel mills closed. He gives a wisp of a smile to the next question, the one people always ask.

Why does he stay? It makes no sense in a culture that prizes bigger and better, richer and glitzier.

People compare him to his younger brothers. They see Bob Stoops coaching Oklahoma, earning millions of dollars, guiding his team into the BCS national championship game against Louisiana State at the Sugar Bowl tonight. They see Mike taking over at Arizona and hiring Mark, the youngest, as his defensive coordinator.

That makes Ron Jr. the forgotten man in college football’s best-known brother act.

Not that he doesn’t love the game. Any male born into the Stoops family seems genetically coded to live and breathe football. They look like coaches, with close-cropped hair and a certain intensity around the eyes.

“When you think about it,” Ron Jr. says, “that’s what we were destined to do.”

But instead of trying for the big time, he has chosen to remain in their hometown and coach high school -- as an assistant, no less -- going on 25 years.

“Obviously, being our brother, Ron would have every opportunity to coach at this level,” Mike says.

They have never offered him a job because they know something so many others do not. They know why Ron Jr. stays in Youngstown.

Not long ago, more families could afford the tuition at Cardinal Mooney High. With a burgeoning student body, the Catholic school’s football team collected state championships by the fistful.

Now, enrollment has waned and the team is rebounding from a string of lackluster seasons.

Though Stoops teaches at a larger public school in the suburbs, he makes the drive to the Southside, to the old campus, every afternoon in fall. He coaches at Cardinal Mooney, where his father coached.

Walk along the hallways and peek into offices. There are photographs of Ron Stoops Sr., of compact build with wavy hair and those pinpoint eyes, sprinkled around campus. A bronze likeness adorns the lobby.

“He was the epitome of what every male would like to be,” says Jim Cooney, an assistant principal at the school for 40 years. “Just your all-around good guy. Good father. Good husband. Good friend.”

A teacher’s salary was all Ron Sr. and his wife, Dee Dee, needed to raise four boys and two girls. Not the sort to joke loudly or be the life of the party, he attended Mass before school each day and made a point of talking to every kid he came upon.

“The greasers, hippies, jocks,” Ron Jr. recalls. “The guys out smoking in the parking lot, the hoods, he didn’t approve but he never made them feel less than.”

As a defensive coordinator on the football field, his style was strictly old-school. When he bit his lower lip, well, that wasn’t a good sign. A burst of screaming might follow, directed at some young man who misbehaved or forgot an assignment.

Over three decades, his postgame routine never varied. While everyone else celebrated a victory, took showers, cleared out, he quietly loaded uniforms into the washing machine and swept the floors.

It wasn’t his job. No one ever asked him.

“If he saw something that needed to be done, he just did it,” Cooney says. “The janitors loved him.”

His boys sensed an extraordinary quality in their father. “You felt it as you were around him ... people looked up to him,” Mike says.

Ron Jr., people say, was the one most like him.

“Always responsible,” Bob says from New Orleans, where his team is preparing for LSU. “Always the leader of the game.”

It was not Ron Jr.’s intention to follow in his dad’s footsteps. “I would never dream of making that kind of impact,” he says.

His life proceeded as most lives do, tending toward the familiar, like water flowing downhill.

As the oldest, he was the first to play for Cardinal Mooney and maybe his father was tougher on him as a result, keeping him on the bench until the third game of his senior season.

It was a humbling experience for Ron Jr. but not an embittering one. “I learned you’ve got to hang in there and persevere,” he says. Given a chance to play, albeit a shortened one, he broke most of Cardinal Mooney’s single-season receiving records.

His playing career ended there. No big schools came calling and he felt no urge to leave home for a lower-division team. Enrolling at Youngstown State in 1975, he majored in education -- “teaching was what my father did, what I knew in life” -- and soon married his high school sweetheart, Bonnie Petrony.

Some nights he played basketball with guys from the neighborhood. His uncle, who coached football at nearby Youngstown South High, asked him to help.

“I thought it might be fun,” he said. “That was how I started coaching.”

It was different for his brothers. Though Mike insists they weren’t much better at football, they all got noticed and, one after another, earned scholarships to play for Iowa.

“We spent critical years away from Youngstown,” Mike says. “The big-time football -- we played it and we liked it.”

Two or three times each fall, after Ron Jr. and his dad finished coaching at their respective schools on Friday, they drove all night to attend Iowa’s home games the next day.

As he and Bonnie started a family, Ron Jr. says there was never a thought of envy or an itch to be somewhere else.

If anything, it was the other way around. Rising through the coaching ranks, moving from school to school, town to town, Bob says he always kept Youngstown in mind. He still thinks of his older brother playing hoops with their buddies.

“I think back about how nice it is,” he says. “It gives me peace that I don’t need all this. If I wasn’t happy, if it wasn’t right for me, I know I could go back.”

Ron Jr. wants to show a visitor the old neighborhood, which requires leaving the pleasant suburbs and driving into the city, past the vacant stores and taverns and empty lots.

His boyhood home is there, a small Cape Cod where his father set up a projector to study game film in the dining room and the four boys shared an upstairs bedroom. Down the block is a park where all manner of sports were played.

The people who lived on these streets were not rich, but they had steady work. All of that changed in the late 1970s and early ‘80s when the mills shut down.

Tens of thousand of jobs evaporated and families that had been in Youngstown for generations were forced to go elsewhere. “It was a scary time,” Ron Jr. says.

Economics were only part of the problem. Sherry Linkon, co-director of the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State, says: “There was a loss of community identity. Youngstown was so strongly identified as a steel town.... Nothing became the new business by which we name ourselves.”

Families that remained -- people who worked in restaurants and hospitals and car dealerships, anywhere but the mills -- suffered increased rates of spousal abuse and divorce, depression and suicide, Linkon says.

But something happened over time.

“For many people who fought through it, I think there probably is a greater sense of commitment to this place,” she says. “You see strong ties to family. Underneath all this struggle and difficulty, there is a sense of pride.”

Ron Jr. talks about the toughness of his city. A steel worker’s ethic. An immigrant sensibility among the Italians and Greeks, the Irish and Slovaks.

“Lots of good food,” he says. “People playing bocce in the summer.”

Something of his boyhood remains on these streets where families still gather for Sunday dinners. His sisters live here, Kathy a teacher, Reenie a nurse. His oldest son, also named Ron, played defensive back for Cardinal Mooney this season.

“People have their priorities straight,” he says. “The work ethic, faith in God, family and community. You learn those things here.”

If the Stoops brothers ever forget where they came from, what they are made of, the reminder is as close as their father’s memory.

“Some people would say he was simple, but he lived his life where he wanted and how he wanted,” Bob says. “We never had a lot of money but I feel my father was the wealthiest and happiest and strongest man I’ve ever come across.”

Mike says: “I don’t know if you truly appreciate that until it’s too late.”

It was the fall of 1988 and Ron was the only brother left in Youngstown. By that time, he was teaching government and coaching at Boardman High, across town from Cardinal Mooney.

When the teams met on a Friday evening in early October, he sat in the coach’s box overlooking the field while his father paced the opposite sideline. Family was in the stands.

The teams played close that night, the lead changing hands several times before the game went into overtime. Ron Jr. got a call over his headset.

“Come down to the sideline,” he was told. “Your dad’s not feeling good.”

It had to be serious -- no flu or bout of indigestion could distract that man during a game. By the time Ron Jr. reached the opposite sideline, his father was stretched across the bench, conscious but pale.

They held hands and Ron Jr. informed him that Cardinal Mooney had just scored to take the lead.

“You can relax now,” he said. “You’re going to beat us.”

Ron Sr. forced a small grin.

An ambulance hurried him to the hospital, his loved ones following close behind. By the time they reached the emergency room, he was dead of a heart attack. He was 54.

“I’ll never forget his funeral Mass at Saint Dominic on the Southside,” Ron Jr. says. “It’s a huge place, almost like a cathedral, and it was packed. In the aisles and the balcony. It was mind-boggling.”

Cooney, the assistant principal, recalls an especially tough kid on the team -- the kind who always gave teachers a bad time -- breaking down in tears.

To this day, Ron Jr. wonders: “How did he make such an impact? He never did anything to seek recognition. He was an ordinary person. How did he touch so many lives?”

There are several reasons Ron Jr. might give when asked about staying in Youngstown. He could talk about his father’s legacy, love of family, community pride, and all of that would sound right.

But those are only pieces of a puzzle whose full image comes into focus in a cramped office beside the locker room at Cardinal Mooney.

Old photographs clutter the walls. Team pictures and newspaper clippings. Ron Jr. sits with Don Bucci, who coached here for more than 30 years, and the new coach, an alumnus named P.J. Fecko.

Talk turns to old times, rivalries with Boardman and Warren Harding up toward Cleveland, big games won and lost. There is much laughter and shaking of heads.

Away from the group, Ron Jr. tells a story.

In the fall of 2000, with Oklahoma emerging as a national power under Bob’s hand, he traveled west to watch the Sooners play Nebraska. This is something he often does, the proud brother on the sideline, and he will be there tonight for the Sugar Bowl.

Of that game three years ago, he says: “I’ll never forget, I was in the locker room at halftime. The coaches were coming in and finding their little area where they can write on the chalkboard and discuss strategy. We’ve got to do more of this and less of that.”

Something about this scene struck him.

“I was thinking to myself how similar it was to high school,” he says. “For me, I get the same excitement on a Friday night at a high school game. It’s what you put your heart and soul into. You work all week to go out and play the game.”

As simple as that. Like three guys sitting around an office, talking football, shooting the breeze. No need for complex theories or psychology.

As Mike puts it: “Where you coach and how much money you make, none of that has anything to do with true happiness.”

So when people ask Ron Jr. about staying in Youngstown, in the shadow of his little brothers, he always gives the same answer.

“I’m very content,” he says. “This is my life.”