Victory The Sweeter For Fidelity To Form

It was springtime in the Palouse and a father sat with his little boy in the warm sun, watching a Cougar baseball game. Look, said the father. That man in the white sweatshirt is the Cougars’ new football coach. His name is Mike Price. He wants his players to be good students as well as good athletes.

Being of the age when boys collect baseball cards and autographs, the youngster crept up to the coach and tugged shyly on the great man’s shirt. Price turned around, smiled at the tongue-tied little figure before him and signed the youngster’s mutely proffered hat. Then he bent down low and solemnly shook hands.

The boy is taller now and the autographed hat collects dust among the souvenirs of childhood. And for Mike Price, the same generosity that noticed the hope in a 10-year-old’s eyes has built a champion football club out of unlikely players in an unlikely place.

Price is the Pac-10’s coach of the year. A squad of athletes whom the pollsters underrated and the richer, fancier schools passed by is going to the Rose Bowl. His latest quarterback, plucked from the plains of Montana, is a candidate for the Heisman Trophy. All 26 of the Cougar football team’s seniors are on track, academically, to graduate in the spring.

There was something universal in Saturday’s Apple Cup victory. While many of the nation’s high and mighty, lavishly endowed football programs take it for granted that they will play in a bowl game, for the Washington State University Cougars, Rose Bowl 1998 will be a Cinderella story come to life. For 67 frustrating years the Cougars have scrubbed the cellars of Pac-10 football. Their facilities are plain, their recruiting budgets modest and their coach has the second-lowest base salary out of the top 25 teams in the nation.

But their coach has one more thing. Mike Price’s disciplined optimism - his positive thinking was a butt of jokes in darker years - builds winning teams out of unsung young men who walk onto the field without even a scholarship or a recruiter’s inducements, in some cases.

The character Coach Price brings to his work has earned him the loyalty of his players. Quarterback Ryan Leaf declared Saturday night that Price “could be making a half-million dollars in Minnesota, freezing his butt off, but he’s loyal and sticks by his word and his players. … I love the guy, and that was for him today.”

Now, everyone for miles around is a Cougar. Including this writer and father, who still appreciates the moment when Price took the time to indulge a little kid. Sure, football’s only a game, but every once in a while it gives you enough hope to think that a nice guy can finish first.

Go Cougs. , DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board