Huskies’ Past Shares the Present

The bigger the victory total, the bigger the ego.

While that’s not always the case with coaches, it is the rule rather than the exception.

Then, there’s Washington Husky Coach Rick Neuheisel, definitely the exception.

Take Monday, for example. It was his stage, his spotlight, his chance to show the nation the miracles he had wrought in two seasons, taking a .500 team still recovering from two years of morale-crushing NCAA sanctions and elevating it to a Rose Bowl victory and a place among the top teams in the country.

So what did Neuheisel do with that spotlight?

He shared it.

On the sideline as the final seconds ticked away and the fireworks punctuated a 34-24 victory over the Purdue Boilermakers were former Washington coaches Don James and Jim Lambright.

They were there, living testaments to a quarter-century of Husky football, because Neuheisel arranged for them to be there.

“The University of Washington is a very proud institution,” Neuheisel said. “They’ve had great moments like this long before I arrived. This shows it’s possible again.

“I just want to be part of it. I’ve just got the keys right now. But they [James and Lambright] are part of it too. The Huskies are one, one deal. They’re just letting me steer the wheel a little bit now.”

It was James, the coach from 1975 to 1992, who steered Washington to its only national football title, the 1991 team going 12-0. James took the Huskies to six Rose Bowls and won four of them.

But under his watch, the program also plunged to its lowest depth, NCAA recruiting violations resulting in a bowl ban and other sanctions in 1993-94.

James quit the day the sanctions were announced.

He left Monday’s game before reporters could talk to him, but his mere presence on the sideline showed his roots remain firmly planted after all these years.

While James provided the foundation, it was Lambright who provided some of the key building blocks for this year’s Rose Bowl champions. It was Lambright who looked at Marques Tuiasosopo and saw a quarterback while others, including Neuheisel at the University of Colorado, saw only a defensive back, or perhaps a safety.

Lambright had just as much right to be bitter about his parting with the Washington program as did James, although in a different way. Lambright was fired after going 6-6 in 1998, ending a sometimes stormy relationship with the school’s director of athletics, Barbara Hedges.

“I felt disappointment, anger, all of that,” Lambright said. “But eventually it comes down to moving on with life and realizing it’s time to take a different path.”

Lambright, who still lives in the Seattle area and works for a company teaching motivation, was only too happy to take the path that led to the Rose Bowl sideline Monday.

“I’m just so proud of these kids,” he said as one Husky after another came up and embraced his former leader, “so happy to have helped with this program. Any old coach loves to see his kids do well. I still feel connected and I will never give up that feeling. To be on the sidelines close to kids I recruited makes me see this is still one big family. It was a warm feeling on that sideline.”

Watching Tuiasosopo lead the Huskies to victory, Lambright recalled the first time he saw the most valuable player of Monday’s game, leading an offense at a football camp when he was fresh out of high school.

“He hadn’t thrown much in high school,” Lambright said, “but you could see his great throwing potential. You knew he could run, You knew he could make mistakes and not get down. There was no doubt he could play quarterback.”

Lambright was not only looking at the past Monday, but the future as well.

“John Anderson, the kicker on this team, grew up,” Lambright said, “knowing that purple [Washington’s primary team color] meant playing in the Rose Bowl, playing in bowl games. Now this win will affect 8- and 9-year-olds out there who will also know that purple wins.”

In the postgame glow, no one was beaming more than Hedges, who gambled in 1998 by taking a chance on a coach who had been ridiculed at Colorado for being too much of a buddy to his players and not enough of a disciplinarian.

“This realizes every expectation we had when we hired Rick,” Hedges said. “We knew we would get here, get back to where we were in the early 1990s, but it has happened really fast.

“We just hung in there, stuck together and got through it. Nobody said it was not worth the effort, and here we are.”

Said Neuheisel, doing his best Tom Lasorda impersonation, “We all bleed purple and golden. This has been a real golden opportunity.”

It was an opportunity that Neuheisel was willing to share with those who came before him. In a profession where battling insecurity is as common as battling the clock, that may have been the most impressive thing about Neuheisel’s afternoon of glory.