Digging Deep

With 13 men trapped in a mine back home, West Virginia’s football team took the field against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

It was Jan. 2, 2006, and one of the proudest moments in state history was about to collide with one of its most tragic.

You could curse the timing but not separate the coal from the football, or the emotional weight each event carried.

As families held vigil in Tallmansville at the Sago Baptist Church, a coal-chunk toss from the mine site, some folks sneaked outside to get Sugar Bowl updates.

“There were different radios in areas near the church,” the Rev. Wease Day of Sago Baptist acknowledged. “Everyone was interested with what was going on with the game.”

After West Virginia upset Georgia, 38-35, in Atlanta, Mountaineers Coach Rich Rodriguez received a phone call from Gov. Joe Manchin, who had rushed home from Sugar Bowl week to monitor a life-or-death matter.

Manchin said the miners’ families had erupted with cheers when informed West Virginia had prevailed.

“That was the best call I got that night,” Rodriguez said.

Football as a pain reliever?

“It was a minor distraction to take their minds off it,” Rodriguez recalled. “Because all you’re doing there is sitting around waiting. Just gnawing at yourself. So for five or 10 minutes, it was a little bit of a distraction.”

Several anxious hours later, the thrill was gone. Twelve of the 13 miners had been found dead, unhinging initial news reports that 12 had survived.

“It’s something like what we’ve never confronted,” Day said of the emotional reversal.

Eight months later, West Virginia football embarks on what could be its first national championship since taking up the sport in 1891, and that prospect has a close-knit state looking forward instead of back.

“The perception of the state outside the state is not always in the best light,” Rodriguez said. “And we have been in the bottom of a lot of bad categories ... but it is a proud people and things are changing here.... The state of West Virginia has changed, is changing, as we speak.”

In a state with no major professional sports teams it’s not a stretch to suggest the success of a college football program could help with a recovery.

“I believe it does,” Day said. “There’s something special about being a Mountaineer, being a hillbilly, a coal miner, a preacher, a bus driver.”

Coal has actually made a comeback of late and so has West Virginia football; long wed to its unofficial motto of “eternally optimistic but ultimately let down.”

It’s tough to cut down something that’s cutting edge, though, and that’s what West Virginia has become under sixth-year coach Rodriguez, the son of a West Virginia coal miner who knows what it’s like to crawl out of a hole.

“That’s the kind of mentality he brings, that hard-working coal-mining attitude,” Dan Mozes, the team’s star center, said of his coach.

Rodriguez’s innovative spread-formation offense has become one of the state’s most positive exports, with coaches across the country borrowing from West Virginia’s schemes.

Stereotypes, though, don’t easily wipe away.

“They think hillbillies, trailers and no shoes and no teeth,” Rodriguez said of most common derogatory raps against his home state. “It’s going to take years to overcome many, many years of perception.”

Emotions over the coal-mining accident remain raw. A preliminary report released in July offered no clear-cut conclusions for the disaster but stated that “everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

The Sago Mine still churns in Tallmansville, off Sago Road 22, past Lick Run Road, the 18-wheel transport trucks droning daily past the bleach-white Sago Baptist Church.

A visiting reporter was told the media was not welcome at the Sago Mine. A man in the office said a lot of miners were Mountaineers fans. Ron Grall, due out of the hole at 3 p.m., was one. The man accepted a business card and said he’d call if an interview could be arranged.

Grall never called.

The parking lot at Sago offered glimpses into a miner’s life: two bottles of Ibuprofen on the dash board of one truck, a “Remember the Miners” decal on the back windshield of another, the words forming an umbrella over a graphic of a miner crawling on all fours.

Another decal dedication read, “In memory of Jr. Toler 1954-2006.” Martin Toler Jr. was the miner who, before his death, scribbled a note that read “Tell All. I see them on the other side.”

You can’t separate the coal from the football, which is what makes Rodriguez and West Virginia a match made in, borrowing from the John Denver song, “Almost Heaven.”

Rodriguez gets the coal connection and its cultural significance to a state of less than two million people.

He is a miner’s son, raised in Grant Town, a 45-minute zigzag drive up Route 19 out of Morgantown.

“That dirt road, up that holler, that’s me,” Rodriguez said, nodding his head from his office chair at Milan Puskar Stadium.

Rodriguez’s grandfather moved to West Virginia from Spain and worked the mines until he died of black lung.

Rodriguez’s father Vince and his three brothers followed their dad into the business.

Rodriguez might have ended up a miner, too, if not for a dark trip he took as a kid.

“The most dangerous thing when you get in the mine is when your light goes off,” Rodriguez recalled of the experience. “Then you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You get disoriented in the dark. We went in there and turned the light off and I was, ‘Geez, this is not where I want to be.’ ”

Rodriguez and older brother Steve opted for college; younger brother Kenny started out in the mining business but quit and is now a lawyer.

But a lot of kids from Grant Town ended up wearing hard hats.

“Where else are you going to make 10 or 12 bucks an hour in West Virginia straight out of high school?” Rodriguez said. “It was about as good a job as you could get.... That’s what everybody did. In Grant Town there was the mine and the company store.”

Rodriguez knew the mantra of his dad’s profession: “Every day you come home is a good day.”

He remembers his father walking in the door caked in soot, showering, and then eating dinner in the garden to savor every minute of sunlight.

“After spending seven hours down in the hole, they want to be out in wide open spaces,” he said.

Rodriguez saw his dad lose his job when coal took a downturn in the early 1980s and the state’s unemployment rose to 21%.

After a stellar career as a high school athlete, Rodriguez was driven off the holler by his parents and dropped off at the West Virginia campus with little more than a duffle bag and a financial aid package. He had one year to make the football team as a walk-on before the money ran out. He made it.

Rodriguez knew right away he wanted to coach, and set off after college on an uphill odyssey that took him to Salem (W.Va.) College (now Salem International) and Glenville (W.Va.) State before he caught a major break when Tommy Bowden hired him at Tulane in 1997. Rodriguez followed Bowden to Clemson in 1999 and, after two years there, had positioned himself to become Don Nehlen’s successor when the West Virginia job opened.

Rodriguez had come full circle, back to Morgantown, to the bottom of the holler.

His parents still live in Grant Town, population 657, median household income $24,722 (in 2000), a town offset by railroad tracks, boarded-up buildings, manicured lawns and an eerie quiet. A shiny street sign welcomes visitors to the “Home of WVU Coach Rich Rodriguez.”

Rodriguez’ first Mountaineer team finished 3-8 but he took his second to the Continental Tire Bowl, inviting his parents to the game in Charlotte, N.C. It was the first time his dad had stayed in a hotel.

Vince Rodriguez was also with his son for last season’s Sugar Bowl.

When the Sago miner story broke on the morning of Jan. 2, Vince told his son that it didn’t look good.

“What do you mean?” Rodriguez said he asked his dad.

“He said, ‘If they ain’t got them out by now ...’ They all know what the deal is.”

Now the clock ticks toward Saturday’s game against state rival Marshall, the opener of a season that could bring West Virginia a national championship.

West Virginians have tried to enter the title conversation before. The 1993 Mountaineers touted an 11-0 team that Florida oyster-shucked, 41-7, in the Sugar Bowl.

This team has a different gait. Last year’s victory over Georgia, champion of the mighty Southeastern Conference, earned West Virginia a credibility you can’t mine. The Mountaineers, with returning stars in quarterback Pat White and tailback Steve Slaton, won’t face an arduous climb up the polls to get in the hunt.

West Virginia debuted at No. 7 in the USA Today coaches poll and the schedule, while not defeat-proof, is friendly enough to think 12-0 is doable.

“The biggest thing you’ve got to have to win a national championship is luck,” Rodriguez said.

It’s a 16-ton load to think West Virginia players bear responsibility for themselves and the state’s collective psyche.

Rodriguez isn’t blowing back the football hype: He says, repeating the posted words in the team’s weight room, “The problem with most teams is not that they aim too high and miss; it’s that they aim too low and hit.”

Some locals have suggested to Rodriguez that a national title could help to ease the pain of a mining disaster.

“I’m not going to put that burden on my kids,” Rodriguez said. “ ... I’m not going up to them and saying, ‘You’re carrying the hopes of an entire state.’ ”

But the players might not have any say in the matter.

Center Mozes remembers the faces when West Virginia players returned to the team hotel in Atlanta following the Sugar Bowl win.

“People were cheering, people were crying,” Mozes said. “It was just an amazing thing. I didn’t hear anybody really say anything about the coal-mining thing ... but you could just sense the atmosphere.”

There is one West Virginian the program would like to win over: Randal McCloy Jr., the only surviving Sago miner.

When Charlie Weis learned McCloy was a Notre Dame fan, the Irish coach sent off a care package of memorabilia.

“Yeah,” Rodriguez said with a wry smile. “Let’s fix that. Charlie got to him ... we’re going to convert him over.”