Finding Their Way Back
The sun was still easing into the eastern sky, the haze of early morning glimmering Wednesday off wet grass and waving cornstalks, as the first figures in pads and cleats ambled down a gravel path and onto the football field, suddenly a place of solace and sweat-soaked relief.
Practice wasn’t supposed to start until 8. But offense in white jerseys, defense in black, purple helmets aloft, Northwestern’s football team assembled early. After a summer of grief and heartache, they stood poised, just as coach Randy Walker would have wanted, to take the first measures of a thoroughly unscripted response to adversity.
That was Walker’s mantra -- responding to adversity. But Walker, the coach who loved to bark across this field at the University of Wisconsin Parkside, Northwestern’s summer training camp, is gone. He died June 29 at age 52, of an apparent heart attack, making this Northwestern season, which got underway Wednesday with the first of two-a-day practices, among the most riveting dramas in college football.
In Walker’s place, whistle at the ready: 31-year-old Pat Fitzgerald, now the youngest Division I-A football coach. A standout on the 1995 Northwestern team that went to the Rose Bowl, then a linebackers coach on Walker’s staff, Fitzgerald made it clear he is both humbled by the opportunity but hardly a meek or retiring soul.
Asked his goal for the season, Fitzgerald didn’t hesitate: “Go to the Rose Bowl.”
Asked if he felt pressure, Fitzgerald said, “It’s football. It’s the greatest game. It teaches young men how to be men and how to deal with adversity. I get the opportunity and the great honor to be a head football coach in Division I football. Let me know when that gets bad. You let me know when that gets stressful.”
The idea of Northwestern’s making the Rose Bowl would, at first glance, seem preposterous. The team’s star quarterback, Brett Basanez, graduated, and none of the contenders to replace him has yet to take charge. Moreover, the defensive line is a question mark.
Adversity brings a response. What will it be?
“When you have a tragedy, you can go one of two ways. You can fall apart. Or you can respond,” said defensive back Bryan Heinz of Lone Tree, Colo., a fifth-year senior. “I think we’re going the right way as a team.”
For his part, Fitzgerald remains undaunted. If the 1995 team could do it, any Northwestern team has to be considered dangerous, he made plain, adding, “We coach like our hair is on fire,” a tribute to Walker, who gave the Northwestern program the one thing it perhaps never had -- the expectation of consistent wins.
For nearly a generation, from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, Northwestern was awful, underscored by a 34-game losing streak.
Then came the 1995 team, led by coach Gary Barnett and, on defense, Fitzgerald, which ran the table in the Big Ten, going 8-0, then losing a wild 1996 Rose Bowl to USC, 41-32.
A couple of years later, after his 1998 team slid to 0-8 in the Big Ten, Barnett moved on to Colorado. Northwestern lured Walker from Miami of Ohio, where he also had been a star running back. The 1995 Miami team, coached by Walker, had dealt Northwestern its only regular-season loss.
Under Walker, the 2000 Wildcats tied for the Big Ten championship and appeared in the Alamo Bowl; the 2003 team played in the Motor City Bowl; and the 2005 team lost to UCLA in the Sun Bowl last December, 50-38.
Walker himself was tested by the 2001 death of Rashidi Wheeler, a defensive back who collapsed and died after a summer workout. Fitzgerald had just come back to Northwestern that year.
Fitzgerald, who started his coaching career in 1998 as a graduate assistant at Maryland, had in recent seasons emerged as Walker’s likely successor -- some day in the far-off future, Fitzgerald used to say.
In July, a day after a memorial service for Walker, Fitzgerald was introduced as the new coach, Athletic Director Mark Murphy making it clear that at Northwestern, the head coaching spot has to be seen -- as Walker did, as Fitzgerald does -- as a destination, not a way station.
Referring to the school’s demanding academic reputation, Murphy said, “The standards are what they are. The school is what it is. You can look at all these things as a negative. Pat looks at it and says, ‘This is what really makes us unique.’ ”
Murphy says he has been “encouraged” by the way Fitzgerald has stepped into the role, adding, “There’s not a script you follow.” He said, “It’s one of the things Randy coached and taught: How do you respond to adversity?”
The Wildcats open the season Aug. 31 at Miami of Ohio. The game was scheduled years ago.
Both teams will wear helmet decals that say, “41 WALK.” The 41, Walker’s number as a player, will appear in red. “WALK,” his nickname, will appear in Northwestern’s purple.
The Wildcats also will wear a black-and-white rectangular patch reading “WALK” for the 2006 season on the front of their jerseys -- “over the heart,” Northwestern spokesman Mike Wolf said.
Among those who will be on hand that evening, up in the ESPN booth: Chris Martin, a defensive back on the 1995 Northwestern team, now an announcer, who said of Fitzgerald, “The reality is, we live in a world in which young coaches are thriving. I think everyone’s looking for the next Jon Gruden. Fitzy’s going to give you a lot of that -- a lot of the energy, excitement and vigor.”
Fitzgerald said, looking ahead not only to that first game but the other 11 on Northwestern’s schedule, “We’re going to have very emotional pregames everywhere we go, very emotional times every time -- to honor Coach Walker and his family.
“We’ve just got to make sure we can focus when we go out, that when we pay our respects, we do it with the positive nature that Coach Walker demanded from us, and to have a great attitude about it and be excited -- get focused, get ready to kick it off.”
He also said, “You know, I just really think that coaching is a passion. And it’s a very special gift that we’ve been given. You have to coach attitude every day. You have to get those guys playing at the tempo and at the pace you want them to be, and you need to be the example.”
Because, he said, “If you’re the example, they’ll follow you.”