The Hard Knock on Rick Neuheisel

On a winter night in Houston six years ago, college football coach Rick Neuheisel steered his rental car to the curb and placed a cell phone call to a house across the street. When a young man answered, he asked the kid to open the front door and look outside. This was the cutthroat business of recruiting, an annual rite by which coaches scramble to restock their teams with talent from high schools nationwide. The kid in the doorway was good enough to have received offers from other universities. Neuheisel wanted to impress, to set himself apart from the other suitors.

To that point, Neuheisel’s life had seemed charmed. An unheralded quarterback at UCLA, he had come off the bench in his senior year to guide the Bruins to victory in the 1984 Rose Bowl. His rise through the coaching ranks had been equally improbable, blurry-fast, landing him as head coach at the University of Colorado by age 33. Blond and baby-faced, a guy who liked to play guitar, he had basked in the spotlight. From the start, his teams had been winners.

That night in Houston, in January 1997, Neuheisel knew that one of the myriad rules set down by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to govern recruiting forbade him from visiting the athlete personally. To violate such a rule would be no small matter, not when the game had become big business and millions of dollars could ride on each victory.

So Neuheisel sat 15 yards away and chatted by phone.

“It’s difficult to say we were within eyeshot,” he told NCAA investigators reviewing his conduct a few years later. “It was after daylight savings time. So it was dark. I looked at the rule and I thought it would be permissible because it was a telephone call.” Investigators suggested otherwise, counting the incident among others in which Neuheisel had crossed the line. The NCAA placed Colorado on two years’ probation.

But by that time, Neuheisel was long gone. He had left Colorado in 1999 for a million-dollar contract at the University of Washington, where the golden boy kept winning games and--despite warnings from people around him--kept testing and stretching the rules.

Until it all caught up with him this summer. In a move as swift as it was stunning, University of Washington administrators fired Neuheisel “for just cause,” citing a series of transgressions that occurred during his four years on the Seattle campus. The university also moved quickly to replace him as the Huskies prepared for this Saturday’s opening game against the defending national champions, Ohio State University.

With the star coach banished, a question lingered: how could someone as smart and talented as Rick Neuheisel let his remarkable career slip away?

Perhaps the first point to make is that most--some would say all--of Neuheisel’s offenses seemed tame in this season of disgrace for college coaches. The University of Alabama recently fired football coach Mike Price after he spent hundreds of dollars at a strip club and allowed a young woman to order $1,000 in food and drinks from his hotel room the next morning. Iowa State University basketball coach Larry Eustachy was dismissed when snapshots of him partying with students appeared in a newspaper.

Neuheisel’s June 12 dismissal followed smaller and decidedly less salacious controversies:

Shortly after arriving in Seattle in 1999, the coach was accused of trying to improperly lure Colorado players to his new team. He also acknowledged that his Washington assistants had contacted high school recruits in violation of NCAA rules.

After the 2001 season, Neuheisel openly criticized the recruiting practices of rival coaches, including then-UCLA Coach Bob Toledo, and was reprimanded by the Pacific 10 Conference.

In October 2002, as part of the penalty for the Colorado violations, the NCAA limited Neuheisel’s off-campus recruiting at Washington. Called before the ethics committee of the American Football Coaches Assn. the following January, Neuheisel reportedly showed little remorse. Committee members took the unusual step of censuring him.

Several months ago, the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League were searching for a new coach and interviewed Neuheisel. It remains unclear if he adequately notified his athletic director. He told the media there had been no contact but was caught in that lie when a sports columnist overheard him talking--on his cell phone, no less--about the interview.

Finally, in June, NCAA investigators received a tip that Neuheisel had participated in a college basketball gambling pool, the sort of thing people toss a few dollars into during the “March Madness” tournament. An athletic department e-mail had previously, and erroneously, cleared employees to participate in such pools outside the office. But Neuheisel had entered an expensive one and walked away with thousands of dollars, risky business for a high-profile coach in a sport where even a hint of gambling is tantamount to original sin. Asked about it by NCAA investigators, he lied before coming clean.

It is doubtful any of the recruiting violations at Colorado and Washington resulted in glaring advantages. Certainly no one will point at Neuheisel on the street and say: “There’s the guy who got into that basketball pool.”

So how are we supposed to view this man? Supporters say if he is guilty of anything, it is innovation, a hunger to reinvent the way coaches operate. Detractors argue that “Slick Rick” considers himself smarter than everyone else, that he uses his law school education to bend the rules. And he lies.

On one point both sides agree: His confidence is such that, if trouble comes along, he figures he can make it right. In the words of one friend, Neuheisel’s approach was: “Bust through brick walls and fix it later.”

With no remedy this time, Neuheisel took his wife and three sons far from Seattle to be among friends in Southern California. He declined through his attorney to be interviewed for this story. Those close to him said a bleak realization had sunk in: For the first time in a lifetime, he would not be spending autumn on the football field.

“It’s a terrible, terrible scar,” Dick Neuheisel, his father, says from his Tempe, Ariz., law office. “They’ve tainted him.”

He was too small, and probably too slow, for major college football. After lettering in three sports at McClintock High School in Tempe, Neuheisel was largely ignored by recruiters, missing out on the attention he would one day lavish upon young prospects. He was headed for Princeton or Dartmouth--top-flight schools but second-tier teams--until then-UCLA Coach Terry Donahue persuaded him to come west. No scholarship, no promises, only a chance to compete.

The process was arduous, day by day, season by season. As quarterback of the scout team, Neuheisel went against the first-string defense in practice and got hammered. Given a chance on the kick-off squad, he threw himself at bigger, stronger opponents. The source of his grit was not hard to pinpoint. It goes back to boyhood games and contests against his father, who would say: “If you can beat me, Ricky, maybe you can get a new bicycle.”

“I’d let him get close,” Dick Neuheisel recalls. “But I’d never let him win.”

At UCLA, when the quarterbacks loosened their arms by arching long throws into the end zone, Neuheisel often challenged the others to see who could bounce a pass off the field-goal crossbar. “Even just playing basketball around the fraternity, it always became very competitive,” says Bob Smith, a former teammate who remains close.

This trait assumed folkloric proportions on that New Year’s Day in 1984. UCLA quarterback Steve Bono had injured his shoulder earlier in the season and Neuheisel had led the Bruins to the Rose Bowl. On the eve of the game, the team ate its customary dinner at a local steakhouse and a slew of players fell ill with food poisoning. David Norrie, another quarterback on the roster, recalled waking at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of Neuheisel vomiting. By game time, Neuheisel was pale and shaken, complaining to his father outside the stadium. “Dad, I’m sick,” he said. “I don’t know if I can play.”

“This is the most important game of your life,” Dick Neuheisel shot back. “You’ve got to pinch yourself” in the rear.

His son responded by throwing for nearly 300 yards and four touchdowns, earning the most valuable player trophy in a 45-9 victory over the University of Illinois. “Once I ran onto the field, it was magical,” he told The Times. “I was floating.”

Says Norrie: “That’s how competitive Rick can be.”

It makes sense that this type of player would exhibit similar qualities as a coach. Always looking for an edge. Always persevering. “I wouldn’t call Rick a glass-half-full guy,” Norrie says. “I call him a glass-full guy.”

Returning to UCLA as an assistant in 1988, Neuheisel worked his way up the staff with an eye on becoming offensive coordinator. But when that job opened up in 1993, he was passed over for an outsider, Toledo, who had come from Texas A&M.; Family members said Neuheisel felt slighted--”kicked in the stomach” was how his sister, Nancy, put it.

Soon after, he took an assistant job at Colorado and, in the course of a single afternoon, burst onto the national scene. The Buffaloes were facing Michigan at the raucous Ann Arbor stadium known as “The Big House.” They found themselves playing from behind for much of the game and, just before halftime, attempted a long pass. But quarterback Kordell Stewart threw too quickly, not giving his receivers enough time to run downfield. Neuheisel told him afterward that, if the situation arose again, he would need to scramble around a little longer before releasing the ball.

All during the second half, the young assistant could be seen rushing up and down the sideline, assuring his players that this would be the greatest comeback ever. Sure enough, Colorado got one last shot at winning and Stewart, mindful of his coach’s advice, bought those extra seconds, heaving a 64-yard Hail Mary touchdown pass for a 27-26 victory as time ran out.

“People always looked to Rick in dismal situations,” says Smith, his friend and former teammate. “Rick had a pretty good way of explaining the alternative. The alternative is to quit. When you really break it down and look at it that way, it gives people the additional energy to fight past the point of what might seem realistic. It becomes contagious. It breeds enthusiasm.”

Unknown to Neuheisel, his performance had set the stage for another miracle finish. Near the end of that season, Coach Bill McCartney unexpectedly resigned and several veteran coaches vied to replace him. By various accounts, Neuheisel leapfrogged into the job with a stunning interview and last-second pressure from influential boosters. The boy genius was in charge.

Most coaches are ultra-competitive. They don’t get the top jobs without possessing this quality in spades. Neuheisel separated himself from the pack with boyish charisma, a charm he could focus to a burning point through that prism of a smile. No surprise, then, that he charmed high school prospects. “The kids could really relate to him,” says Allen Wallace, publisher of SuperPrep magazine, which chronicles recruiting. “He had a kid-like quality.” There was something extra--a law degree earned at USC while he was a UCLA assistant. Wallace, who practiced law before writing about the college scene, appreciated the significance of this background.

“You are trained to look at rules like they don’t apply to you,” he says. “You argue away the spirit of the law. Or you reinterpret the spirit of the law.” Having interviewed scores of kids recruited by Neuheisel, he adds: “I think Rick enjoyed the mental challenge of stretching the rules because he felt he could justify it.”

So while other coaches shuddered in the presence of the NCAA’s labyrinthine manual, leaving interpretation to specialists within their athletic departments, Neuheisel zeroed in. “I read the rules,” he once said. “I’m not going to curtail creativity. That’s our country, people trying to get better.”

Newly promoted at Colorado, he made clear to his staff what was expected. The NCAA later described the tone he set as “a calculated attempt to gain a recruiting advantage, pushed beyond the permissible bounds of legislation, resulting in a pattern of recruiting violations.” It wasn’t just parking across the street and calling on the phone, which he did more than once. Neuheisel visited players’ high schools and hung around long enough to “bump into” the young men. Recruits who visited the Boulder campus received hats and coats in team colors, another violation.

From Neuheisel, there was always justification. He said he went to those high schools to speak with the coaches, which was permissible. The coats were merely loaned to kids who visited chilly Colorado. Sometimes the kids forgot to give them back. But Neuheisel also told investigators: “Was I trying to be aggressive as a young 33-year-old head coach trying to make it in a world that is extremely competitive? Was I out there trying to win favor, and so forth? There is no question.”

No one saw this at first. They saw the blond hair. They saw a new breed of coach who took his players on inner-tube rides and ski trips, who was personable with fans and relaxed in the limelight, playing guitar on his weekly radio show. “When he’s at parties, he likes to get up and sing,” Norrie says. “He likes to sing karaoke and get people involved.” Most of all, fans saw the results. Colorado went 10-2 in each of Neuheisel’s first two seasons, advancing to bowl games and cracking the Top 10 in the national polls.

No sign of trouble arose until the fall of 1997, his third season, when the team finished 5-6. In the fickle relationship between coaches and alumni--not to mention the media--skeptics noted a history of sloppy play and too many penalties beneath the surface of prior victories. The golden boy got a new nickname, “Coach Kumbaya,” and a Denver newspaper cartoonist depicted him wearing a propeller beanie. “As soon as we fumbled, it was because of the inner-tubing, not because we made a mistake,” Neuheisel complained.

No matter, the Buffaloes rebounded to 8-4 in 1998 and their coach set off for Washington in the winter, making a triumphant return to the West Coast where he would regularly face, among other rivals, his alma mater. He moved into a house on Lake Washington and sometimes took his boat to work. (That boat, by the way, caught the eye of NCAA investigators, who wanted to know if he used it to entertain recruits.)

The Pac-10 was quickly introduced to his modus operandi when coaches gathered for their annual rules meeting. This was normally a sleepy affair, with a conference executive standing at the front of the room explaining various nuances in the regulations.

Neuheisel, however, was “the kind of guy who always had extra questions,” Tom Hansen, the Pac-10 commissioner, recalls. “[He was] very keenly tuned to using the rules to his advantage.” Then, mindful of Neuheisel’s dismissal and a potential lawsuit, Hansen cuts himself short. “I’m not going to say much more because we’re probably going to be in court.”

Neuheisel’s firing was made official days before the Pac-10’s annual media day, at which coaches and a few players hold forth at a Los Angeles hotel about the coming season. A funereal tone colored the usual talk about retooled offenses and two-deep rosters. “These are great jobs and you have to protect them as best you can,” Oregon State University Coach Mike Riley says. “They don’t come along that often.”

There has always been admiration for Neuheisel’s talents, especially his offensive prowess and ability to transmit uncanny optimism to players. In 2000, his second season at Washington, the Huskies came from behind to win eight times, amassing 11 victories and defeating Purdue in the Rose Bowl. Only an early season loss to the University of Oregon denied them a shot at playing for the national championship.

“I always judge a coach by how his team plays, and Rick’s teams have won football games,” Oregon Coach Mike Bellotti says.

But Neuheisel also ruffled a few feathers. The coaching fraternity is claustrophobic, its members doing their best to get along; the guy you irritate today could be standing on the opposite sideline tomorrow. Or the way coaches are hired and fired, he could wind up serving with you on the same staff. A “play nice” mentality is especially prevalent in the Pac-10.

While supporting Neuheisel’s efforts to keep his job, Bellotti says “he had a brashness about him that rubbed some people the wrong way.” Other coaches wondered if, in his rapid ascent, he missed a few lessons on how to handle himself.

Consider the winter of 2002, when he publicly accused UCLA and Oregon of negative recruiting, college football’s version of mudslinging. His statements violated conference rules that bar coaches from airing this kind of grievance through the media.

At a meeting of Pac-10 coaches that spring, Neuheisel tried to make amends with his colleagues but, according to some people in the room, only succeeded in making things worse. Even while apologizing, they said, he left room for the possibility that he might have been right.

The AFCA ethics committee had a similar reaction in January 2003 in censuring him after his appearance to discuss the Colorado violations. “The NCAA report tells just one side,” Neuheisel later said. “I was trying to explain my side to my peers so maybe we could all benefit from my experience.”

Air Force Coach Fisher DeBerry, chairman of the committee, explained to CBS Sportsline: “He showed the committee very little remorse for his actions and decisions. The committee felt there was very little respect for the NCAA by the coach, and the committee had real concern for his attitude and potential negative impact on other coaches.”

Former NFL player Michael Young has watched Neuheisel since they were teammates at UCLA. “I don’t think Rick looks at himself and says, ‘I’m so damn smart, I’m above everybody else,’ ” Young says. “Maybe looking at it from the outside, that seems true. But I don’t think he feels that way. He thinks, ‘I’m pretty smart so maybe there’s a different way I can do this.’ ”

This attitude might have come back to haunt him, Young believes. “Humility would have served him very well with his peers. That might have taken a lot of the heat off . . . I would not be shocked if a lot of Rick’s problems came from other coaches calling the NCAA about things they heard Rick had done.”

Still, investigators never hit him with serious penalties and no one imagined a scenario in which he might be fired. With the Huskies finishing at or near the top of the conference every season, athletic director Barbara Hedges signed him to a six-year contract extension last September, including a $1.5-million loan that would be excused if he stayed for the life of the deal. “It is very important to the University of Washington for Rick to remain coach as long as we can keep him here,” she said.

Their relationship did not begin to fray, at least not publicly, until the 49er incident last winter. And even that might have been avoided. The columnist who overheard him talking about the interview while waiting for a flight at San Francisco International Airport initially hesitated to write about it. His reluctance disappeared after Neuheisel flatly denied any contact with the team. When the dust settled, Hedges delivered a fateful warning: No more lying.

A few days before the University of Washington faced Purdue in the 2001 Rose Bowl, Neuheisel was asked to attend a morning news conference at the Tournament House in Pasadena. It was a substantial drive from where he was staying at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Neuheisel was told to give himself an hour to get there.

He would have none of it, telling Jim Daves, a spokesman for the Washington athletic department, to meet him in the lobby a half-hour before. As they drove away, Daves noticed a light shining on the car’s dashboard: The gas gauge read empty. “Don’t worry,” Neuheisel said. “We’ll make it.” Not bothering to fill up, they sped along back streets and made it on time.

His colleagues tell similar tales, all of which portray a man accustomed to taking risks no matter how large or small.

Bust through brick walls and fix it later.

Family and friends insist there is something else behind Neuheisel’s troubles, an issue of style. They say critics misinterpret his natural-born showmanship for slickness. They say traditionalists in the college game attack him because he does not fit the mold of the grumbling disciplinarian. They say rivals envy his success.

“Sometimes his charisma and charm get mistaken,” Smith says. “They think everything came easy for him.”

No sooner had the 49er commotion quieted than NCAA investigators summoned Neuheisel and Hedges to a meeting at a Seattle hotel. The coach and his boss expected questions about recruiting and, according to university documents obtained by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that was how the discussion began. But then investigators asked about an NCAA basketball pool organized by Neuheisel’s neighbors.

Neuheisel said he had only watched the participants draw for teams.

Investigators said they had information that he had put in $7,000 over two years, winning $25,000.

Again Neuheisel denied involvement. But when the questioning resumed that afternoon, his story changed.

Yes, he had participated. Yes, he had won about $5,000 each year. Asked about this reversal, the coach said he had been confused during the morning session and “didn’t consider it gambling because it was just friends, no organized gambling involved . . . . It was just a social event.”

NCAA executives, usually tight-lipped, spoke out. While declining to address Neuheisel’s case specifically, NCAA president Myles Brand commented to the Associated Press on “issues of gambling by a coach that involve young people. I feel that it’s totally unacceptable behavior. It’s wrong and should be dealt with severely.” Bill Saum, the NCAA executive who oversees such cases, added that “the gambling rule is not vague.” The rule states that no staff member shall knowingly solicit a bet on any intercollegiate team.

Neuheisel vowed to fight the charges. Did anyone expect him to just give up? His legal defense was predicated on an e-mail circulated in the Washington athletic department by compliance officer Dana Richardson advising, in part: “The bottom line of these rules is that if you have friends outside of [intercollegiate athletics] that have pools on any of the basketball tournaments, you can participate.” Though the NCAA insists ignorance is no excuse for the law, Neuheisel tried to rally Hedges. “The NCAA is wrong,” he told her, according to his father. “We’ll show them they’re wrong. All you have to do is support me.”

Instead she fired him. As this story went to press, Neuheisel was considering a lawsuit over an estimated $4 million in severance, including repayment of the $1.5-million loan.

It is not farfetched to suggest the qualities that fueled Neuheisel’s rise also led to his crash: The competitiveness. The supreme confidence. The eagerness to do things differently. “People who achieve at high levels often take risks along the way,” says Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University. “If they had stuck to the secure route, chances are they would not have gotten where they are.”

Neuheisel’s saga has been described as Clintonian, with various parallels drawn to the ex-president. Living on the edge. Explanations in parsed legalese. Clinton, when pressed to clarify an apparent contradiction, famously said: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And Neuheisel pleaded darkness in the Houston affair.

His downfall also raises questions about what we expect from our sports celebrities. Marquess of Queensberry rules were tossed out long ago, so where do we draw the line on modern sportsmanship? What is reasonable in the quest for victory?

Husky players had a front-row seat for this morality play as they hung around all summer for informal workouts. The man who had recruited them, who had led them through good times and bad, was under siege. “Man, it was tough,” offensive tackle Khalif Barnes says. “I had to stop looking at all that stuff on the news.”

Neuheisel’s future is unknown. The NCAA has declined comment but, according to Dick Neuheisel, investigators have threatened a two- to four-year suspension for gambling if his son resurfaces anywhere in the college game any time soon.

Some people suggest he would be better off in professional football, where coaches are not encumbered by voluminous bylaws and regulations. “What Rick tried to do in college was looked at as being above the rules,” says Young, the former teammate who now works as a Denver Broncos executive. “In the NFL, that is looked at as being creative and is rewarded.”

Certainly no one expected him to be unemployed for long. He is too good, too smart, with too many victories on his record. But that was scant consolation to a man whose characteristic optimism, according to family and friends, has taken a jolt. “You can hear in his voice that the reality of not coaching this football season is hitting hard,” Smith says.

Even though he recently gave his son a familiar pep talk--”You’ve got to pinch yourself”--Dick Neuheisel has struggled to find perspective. One moment he angrily accuses investigators of legal misconduct known as “tortious interference.” The next he sounds bewildered. Why has everyone turned on Rick, he wonders. How did a glorious career go south so quickly? The father, so much like the son, muses: “He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.”