Cougar Success Provides Lessons On, Off The Field

Maybe football doesn’t matter much, but success does.

From a very young age, most of us have a picture in our minds of success.

We imagine being a success. We wonder whether it will happen.

How success happens, how people deal with it, and what the success of others can teach us all are part of the current frenzy over the Washington State University Cougar football team.

The team is in midst of its greatest success in 67 years.

They beat the Huskies. They are going to the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day for the first time since 1931.

Their quarterback is the player of the year.

Their coach is coach of the year.

Success.

Some obvious lessons about success:

When you have success other people want to be around you and claim some of it. Note how many Cougar sweat shirts appeared the day after the Apple Cup victory.

Success often brings fame. Did you go anywhere in the Inland Northwest this last week and not hear the name Ryan Leaf?

Success raises expectations. Cougars beat the Huskies? Hey, it’s only a matter of days until the team knocks off the Michigan Wolverines, ranked No. 1 in the country.

Dig beneath the easy observations about success, however, and the implications and consequences of success are far less clear.

Long before fans broke out their Cougar sweat shirts after the Apple Cup to declare their undying loyalty to the Cougar football team, someone had to declare that loyalty. Declare it even when success was anything but assured.

The now-famous phone call WSU coach Mike Price made to Ryan Leaf on New Year’s Day 1994 is an example of where success — and failure — find a common ancestor.

As the coach remembers it, he told one thing to the brash 18-year-old star quarterback from C.M. Russell High School in Great Falls, Mont.

Commit to a football career at Washington State University and the two of them would go to the Rose Bowl together.

How could a coach know?

He couldn’t. What he really was saying was that it takes a commitment up front, long before the cheering starts.

That commitment is never a guarantee of success, but it has to be there for any chance of success.

Then there is that fame business.

It comes with success. It doesn’t always lead to a good place.

By all accounts quarterback Ryan Leaf, and perhaps coach Mike Price will be famous after New Year’s Day. Leaf in pro football, Price perhaps at another school.

The road of fame and stardom is strewn with successful people who took a fall because they couldn’t handle the pressure, the temptations, and, eventually, the loss of celebrity.

While listening to the Apple Cup last weekend I finished reading the book “Undaunted Courage,” Stephen E. Ambrose’s stirring, memorable account of the Lewis and Clark expedition across America.

The last chapter offered a lesson about the fleeting nature of success and fame.

Meriwether Lewis, the most prominent, successful and best-known explorer of his day or any day in America, shot himself less than five years after the Lewis and Clark expedition because he could not live on his earlier success. His fame disintegrated into a maze of financial problems and substance abuse.

There is no analogy to football players, except to say that even the most successful people have to recognize that the fame and glory may be as fleeting as a safety running back an interception.

When the fame is gone, the challenge is not to forget the success or what made it happen.

Can success be duplicated? Will the win in the last big contest translate into victory the next time?

Often, yes.

Success isn’t an accident. Luck has a role to play, for example, when Ryan Leaf fumbled at the Husky goal line and recovered the ball for a touchdown. But the roots of success lie in hard work, talent and honesty.

And success builds on itself. Today’s good work lays the foundation for better work tomorrow.

People who want to succeed often will model the successful habits of others.

They see success in the future.

They work toward it.

Yet success isn’t tracked in a straight line from the past. It still takes a commitment early.

It will falter if fame and distractions get in the way.

Success most often requires holding onto a vision even when the work is hard and the future unclear.

Success is a bit like what it take to win at football after all.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on Perspective.