Is Holtz Starting New College Tradition by Hiring his Son

Modesty forbids the proprietors from hanging out a shingle at their new offices. They won’t be advertising their wares in the local Yellow Pages. Just the same, the firm of Holtz&Son; is setting up shop in Columbia, S.C.

Football coaches traditionally describe their programs as families, loving groups banded together against the cruel, heartless outside world. Lou Holtz Sr. took the notion a step farther Tuesday when he announced the appointment of Lou Holtz Jr., nicknamed Skip, as his offensive coordinator and intended successor at the University of South Carolina. It represents the beginning of a potential dynasty to which the sport is unaccustomed.

Such arrangements are becoming common in broadcasting, where Harry Caray begat Skip who begat Chip, who now sits behind the Wrigley Field microphone that occupied his grandfather’s attention. Similarly, Joe Buck is going about the business of his father, Jack, in St. Louis. Neither is this sort of thing unheard of in college basketball, where Joey Meyer had a decent run at DePaul after inheriting the job from his revered dad, Ray, and where John Thompson and Mike Jarvis may have such designs for their offspring/assistants at Georgetown and St. John’s, respectively.

But it marks a bold approach in college football, where, until now, the First Family consisted of Bobby Bowden, the head coach at Florida State, and sons Terry and Tommy. The former abruptly resigned as head coach of Auburn during the 1998 season and the latter recently left an undefeated team at Tulane to become head coach at Clemson. It doesn’t require much imagination to consider either one a logical heir to his father’s exalted position in Tallahassee. Still, the most direct line of succession now rests in Columbia, provided the Holtzes revitalize a program that lost 10 of 11 games this fall and never has appeared in a major bowl game.

The younger Holtz resigned as head coach at Connecticut after guiding the Huskies to a school-record 10 victories and into the second round of the Division I-AA playoffs. “Some people think I have not made a very intelligent decision,” he said at a news conference in Storrs, Conn., on Tuesday, “and I’m the first one to note I’m not a very intelligent man. But the decision I made had pros and cons to it. The bottom line was the opportunity for me to be with my family and have my wife closer to her family.”

Father and son had been separated for five years, since Skip left Lou’s staff at Notre Dame to tackle his first head coaching assignment at UConn. According to the elder Holtz, he just about keeled over when his namesake, a walk-on special-teams player in South Bend, informed him a decade earlier that he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“I said,” he recalled from his new office Tuesday, “ ‘We didn’t send you to Notre Dame to be a coach. You could have gone anywhere to do that. Did you tell your mom?’

“He said, ‘No.’

“I said, ‘Well, make sure she’s unarmed.’ ”

It was typical Holtz, making a joke to stretch a point, or a truth. This, after all, is a man who traded quips with Johnny Carson on national television and earned no worse than a tie. Only last week, in his first appearance before the South Carolina media, he claimed that when he served as an assistant coach at the school in the late 1960s, Paul Dietzel told him he should seek another line of work. That wasn’t the way Dietzel remembered it when he was contacted but it made for a good story and Holtz enjoys a good story.

His glib manner, his slight build and his glasses (picture Woody Allen demonstrating a bull rush to Reggie White or Bruce Smith) mask one of the most restless and driven personalities in a profession that lives by a 24-hour clock. In 11 seasons at Notre Dame, Holtz amassed more victories than any previous coach since Knute Rockne, earned one national championship and contended for several others before stepping down two years ago. After a career in which he has been associated with 10 colleges and, for most of one forgettable season, a pro team called the Jets, he couldn’t wait to start over in Columbia at 61.

Consider that Joe Paterno, 71, continues to pad a victory total that places him fourth on the all-time list for Division I-A coaches. And remember that the man at the top, Paul (Bear) Bryant died within months of his retirement from the University of Alabama at the age of 69. Coaching football is an addiction to which there is no apparent cure.

The prime example of that remains Amos Alonzo Stagg, a standout on Walter Camp’s first all-America team in 1889 while a divinity student at Yale and the man who virtually invented the coaching profession during a 40-year tenure at the University of Chicago. After reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70 at that institution, he spent the next 14 seasons at College of the Pacific, leading the Tigers to stunning upsets of UCLA and Cal-Berkeley in 1943 when he was 81.

Nor did he stop there. At the request of his son, Amos Alonzo Jr., the football coach at Susquehanna, the Grand Old Man executed a neat twist on family values by coming east in the late ‘40s to run the offense at the Pennsylvania institution. He remained until 1952, the year he turned 90 and one year after Susquehanna enjoyed its first undefeated season. He would have continued in that role if not for the fact that his wife, Stella, who scouted future opponents, became too ill to travel. Stagg Sr. returned to California and coached at Stockton Junior College until he was 98.

Holtz is not expected to challenge that record but he’s already being thrust into unprecedented territory. The first question from a newsman during a teleconference call this week related to Clemson, South Carolina’s fierce in-state rival and the final opponent on the 1999 schedule. “I’m not even sure I’ll be alive by then,” the man replied, lapsing into his poor-soul shtick.

But there’s no doubt it should be a most interesting matchup now that Tommy Bowden has become the head coach at Death Valley. Holtz and Tommy’s dad are old friends and it was Bobby Bowden who gave Skip Holtz his first coaching opportunity, as a graduate assistant at Florida State.

Small world. And how much longer will it be before a third generation of the two clans get into the college football act? There are several Bowden grandchildren and Lou Holtz III, known as Trey, will be 5 in February. No one should be too shocked if he also heeds the call.