ROOTS

 

               I always knew I’d go to college because my parents (who hadn’t gone) made it clear I would, but like many in my era (I recall) never gave much thought to where. When looming high school graduation (class of ’55) made a choice necessary I sent out two applications—to Northwestern University and the University of Illinois. Northwestern didn’t accept me and Illinois did, so off to Champaign I went. The rest, as they say, is history.

               I can’t say that NU’s rejection was unexpected-- my high-school record wasn’t sterling. Nor can I claim it bothered me much. But being a normal, petty person it didn’t endear me to the leafy campus on Lake Michigan just north of Chicago, and for many years I got even by rooting against the school’s athletic teams.

That posture became a bit harder to maintain beginning in 1975, when an adult I and my family moved into a big old house on Pioneer Road in Evanston, Illinois, an easy, six-block walk from Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium football home. The Mildcats (er, Wildcats) were not a big draw then so tickets were cheap and on many an autumn Saturday afternoon I’d take my kids to a game. I’d watch the action and they’d frolic in the south-end-zone bleachers, which always were nearly empty. Walking home amid the smell of burning leaves is a fond memory of that time.

Some of wife Susie and my friends during our tenure in Evanston were NU faculty people. They included Bruce Corrie, the school’s athletics director for a time, and his lovely wife Jane. We’re still in touch even though we’ve moved apart geographically. By osmosis, my enmity toward NU athletics changed to benevolent neutrality, and so it remains.

That lengthy intro is meant to explain what is to follow, a “good news” take on a subject I’m rarely not down on. That would be big-time college sports and the swamp that surrounds it. A few weeks ago Northwestern announced that it had signed a 10-year contract extension with football head coach Pat Fitzgerald. Such pacts usually elicit shrugs because successful college coaches rarely let a few pieces of paper keep them from bounding upward, but based on Fitzgerald’s biography I’m betting on this one to stick. 

Fitzgerald got to be NU’s headman in 2006 by accident—the sudden death in July of that year of his predecessor, Randy Walker. The appointment surprised many people, probably including him; he was the team’s linebackers coach at the time and, at age 31, five years younger than any other top-division collegiate head football coach.

 Before he took the job the Wildcats mostly had been joke-level bad, with just five winning seasons in the previous 40. From 1976 through 1981 their win-loss-tie record was 3-62-1. A high-toned private institution with just 8,000 or so undergrads in a conference of state-school behemoths, their Big Ten status often was questioned, the mid-major Mid-American Conference seemingly a more-appropriate roost.

Fitzgerald, though, knew what he was getting into. Chicago born and raised, and an ex-NU linebacker and grad, he’d been a three-year assistant coach at the school and its recruiting chief. After an obligatory first-year losing record he’s been plus-.500 nine times, is 106-81 overall and has taken teams to 10 bowl games. That wouldn’t cut it at Ohio State but it’s dreamy good at NU.

About here sportswriters usually opine that Northwestern’s high academic standards mean it can’t recruit with the big fellas, but I won’t say that. Stanford and Duke have standards at least as high and regularly field first-rate football or basketball teams. The collegiate big-timers all recruit from the same talent pool and it was my observation that the biggest difference between the Stanfords and the Ohio States is that the gap between the jocks and the rest of the student body is wider at the formers than at the latters.  Still, people who grade such things say Fitzgerald’s teams outperform their recruiting rankings, so the guy must be a good judge of talent and know his X’s and O’s.

What is unquestioned is his loyalty to his school and the example it creates.  He’s called his position his “dream job” and one can only believe him. He’s reportedly turned down offers from other colleges and the pros, and while his annual salary of $3.3 million ain’t hay it’s less than he could get elsewhere. His roots to Sweet Home Evanston are thick and deep.

Northwestern’s example well might be followed by the U. of Illinois, my school. It has floundered in football’s slough of despond throughout this still-young century and now is on its sixth head coach in that span. Each of that number had good credentials but none had much connection to the institution going in. No matter what they may have said, for them the UI job was a gig, another step in a typically winding career.

In college football them that has gets, so breaking into the title-contending group of any “Power Five” conference requires extraordinary oomph.  Roots seem to be one engine for that. Wisconsin has escaped the mire via a coaching tree started by Barry Alvarez (1990-05). At Iowa the key has been Kirk Ferentz, a nine-year assistant at the school before he got the top job in 1999. Indiana had one of the Big Ten’s saddest football histories before Tom Allen turned things around in 2019. He’s an Indiana native, former state high-school coach and an ex-assistant at the school.

Tom Lasorda, the longtime L.A. Dodgers’ coach, manager and executive, used to talk about “bleeding Dodger blue.” Blood also comes in collegiate colors. 

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               I turn 83 tomorrow but still have more questions than answers. Here are some of them:

--How did it figure that Cox told me my bill would go up if I dropped one of my two telephone “land lines”?  It was something about “bundling” but I didn’t stick around for the whole explanation.

               --When the traffic light turns green and the guy in front of you doesn’t move, isn’t there about a 90% chance he’s texting?

               --What’s the chance there will be a computer snafu when you try to order something online, and that it won’t be correctable? 20%? 30%? 50%?

               --Shouldn’t the college-basketball cliché “one-and-done” be changed to “none and done”? Most jocks who use it drop out during second semester and don’t complete a year of schooling.

               --Why does unplugging and replugging your computer eliminate bugs?  Other appliances don’t respond to that.

               --Were “smart phones” designed to make users (some, anyway) feel dumb?

               --COVID-19 thought: Parkinson’s Law has it that work expands to fill the time allotted to it, but doesn’t that also apply to idleness?

               -- Why was it that, for the same home-repair job, we got bids of $8,600, $22,400 and $27,000?

               -- Why was I not surprised that the same politicians who rolled back anti­-pollution laws were the quickest to advocate reopening businesses in the face of the virus? Human sacrifice didn’t end with the Aztecs.

               --Is there any modern plague more difficult to shake than identity theft (besides the virus, of course)? Once the scammers have even a little bit of your data they never let go.               

               --Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when a company calls its employees “team members” or “associates”?

               --How do our appliances know to wait until 5 p.m. on a Friday before breaking down?

               --Doesn’t high-definition television highlight how many people have really bad skin?

               --Aren’t all social movements demanding “justice” doomed to failure? Human disputes rarely work out to the complete satisfaction of anyone.

               --Does anything taste better after dinner than a Frango mint?

               --Why are backyard seed receptacles called “bird feeders” instead of “squirrel feeders”?

               --Did you know you can take a comfortably warm shower around Phoenix in the summer without turning on the hot water?

               --Is there a bigger bargain than the $29 I paid for a year’s online subscription to the Washington Post? Or was it $39? Either way.

               --Why do people bother to wear face masks if they walk around with their noses sticking out?

               --Is there anything tastier than Dungeness crab? Besides stone crab, I mean.

               --What have things come to when a husband (me) can tell his wife (Susie) “cute mask”?

               --I know you hate to admit it, but aren’t some of those Progressive Insurance ads clever?

               --Isn’t one of the (few) good things about the covid siege that people usually are at home when you phone them?

               --Won’t a return to “normal” depend as much on finding effective treatments for severe virus-caused illnesses as on the vaccines?  Continuing mutations will make immunity illusory, just like with the “regular” flu.

 --Is there a recorded-phone-message menu that doesn’t announce it recently has changed?

               --When did “reticent” become a synonym for “reluctant”?

               --Doesn’t accenting the first syllable instead of the second in the word “insurance” constitute a setback for the language?

               -- How can anyone believe there was guiding intelligence behind the mob that vandalized the Capitol? Most of those bozos weren’t smart enough to cover their faces.

               --Has there ever been a better made-for-TV miniseries than “Lonesome Dove,” which first was aired 31 years ago?

               --Why is it that I talk to my kids more than ever these days but still miss them more?

               Just askin’.