So Many Memories
Everybody thought he was nuts to take the job, or so Mike Keller claims.
Subsequently, he has devoted 25 years to both proving them wrong and confirming the diagnosis.
If his style - a little frantic, a little furious, but inevitably fun - has tended to mask the substance of what Keller has accomplished in a quarter century of coaching track and field at the University of Idaho, well, it’s just like he says:
“If some guy walks in here and says he high jumped 7-feet for me 20 years ago, hell, I don’t remember if he jumped 7 feet or not - and probably neither does he. But what he will remember are the relationships and wild stories or the crazy things that happened on trips. For whatever reason, those things stick with you.”
For instance, press Keller and he couldn’t tell you how far a big Boise strongman named Charlie Schmoeger threw the discus for Idaho in 1979.
But he remembers the Great Riggins Pinball Pickle.
“Charlie and Steve Saras were pinball addicts,” Keller recalled. “We stop in Riggins on our way to Boise and they’re on the pinball machine. Charlie gets the ball stuck up against a bumper and it just starts racking up games. “Finally I said, `Charlie, we’re leaving,’ and the counter’s going ding, ding, ding 60, 61, 62. He’s got tears in his eyes. He’s pleading, `Coach, all these games,’ and I said, `Leave ‘em for the mayor of Riggins we’re out of here.”’ Now Mike Keller is really out of here. At age 59, he retires next month, ending the longest coaching tenure in UI history.
Amazingly, he lapped the field.
Across the border at Washington State, coaches once stayed until their whistles rusted. The basketball team had five coaches in 74 years, the baseball team just two in 62. Two track coaches stayed more than 20 years apiece.
By comparison, UI is Grand Central Station. John G. Smith did put in 14 years as baseball coach. A 30-year association made Wayne Anderson “Mr. Idaho,” but almost half of it was as an administrator. Louis August coached boxing for 18 years, some as an undergraduate.
No football coach ever lasted more than eight years at a stretch, no hoop coach more than nine.
Some were fired, some were stone-stepping their way to the NFL or NBA.
But Keller stayed - through seven football coaches, 10 in basketball and nine athletic directors, if you count interims.
He did too much right to be fired, and couldn’t find enough wrong to leave.
“The guy at UCLA has the same problems I do and probably a lot more stress,” he said. “If you’re worried about money, you’ve got to keep moving but this has never been a money deal to me. Hell, I’ve never really looked at this as a job.
“If I’d been looking for a job, I’d have stuck with Safeway.”
But it’s doubtful either Safeway or Stanford could have reconciled the many contradictions of Mike Keller.
His caustic trackside manner may occasionally go over the top - he once told a hurdler his form “reminded me of a dog watering a fire hydrant” - but he also used to teach P.E. to first-graders in Beaverton, Ore.
“Most enjoyable year I ever had,” he said. “I taught the kids gymnastics and they thought I was Superman.”
It was his first taste of coaching, and he was pretty well hooked.
“It’s the strangest thing,” he said. “Being a doctor is the only other profession I can think of where you have a living title that follows you. A doctor’s always `Dr. So-and-so’ and a coach is always `Coach.’ It’s never `Butcher Smith’ or `Mechanic’ Smith. But I’ll always be Coach K.”
By importing runners and jumpers from 25 different countries he’s been smack in the middle of the foreign athlete debate that’s polarized college track for 30 years. But he’s also developed the rawest of talents from this region - or doesn’t the name Dan O’Brien ring a bell?
Hear him gush about current UI athletic director Mike Bohn as “the guy I wish we’d had years ago.” Then hear him declare that, “If I find an AD who likes his track coach, that coach isn’t worth a damn.
“A track coach is going to have to fight and scream for everything,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. When the football coach wants the turf replaced, they already have money put away for it. But if you want the track resurfaced, they’re going to drive by and say, `Hey, it’s red, it’s got white lines on it, looks good to me.’ Hell, before Mike, I’d only seen an AD on our track twice - and once was to fire the women’s coach.”
He is as competitive as they come, and yet his won-lost record against his closest rival is 0-44.
Once, he dispatched half miler Justin Havens as the sole entry in a scheduled dual against WSU and sent his better athletes to some far-off invitational. WSU coach John Chaplin inked it into the record book as a 144-1 victory.
“If you want to score it, be my guest,” he said. “I want to take kids to the best competition I can. If I have a 7-3 high jumper and John has a 6-2 kid, that isn’t competition. Nothing bothers me more than when I see two Pac-10 teams in a dual and they bring out some distance runner to triple jump 43 feet to score a point.”
And yet under Keller, the Vandals have scored more points in track than in any time in history - eight conference championships in the Big Sky, Big West and Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. Idaho had never won a conference track championship in the 75 years before he arrived.
This could hardly have been envisioned when Keller decided to jump from a comfortable job at Spokane Falls Community College in 1974.
“I took a $4,000 pay cut,” he said. “The coach had always been a football assistant who started practicing in March. I had four scholarships and an asphalt track that looked like Highway 95.”
Now, of course, 23-year-old Kibbie Dome remains one of the best indoor track facilities in the country. The outdoor track could use a new pouring, but a couple of years ago Keller managed to finagle $20,000 to turn a concrete block storage shed “where we used to hide from the hailstorms” into a trackside office - the only one with air conditioning in the athletic department. He even put his own mailbox up in the parking lot.
“Keller Dome,” it reads.
His program didn’t take off, he acknowledged, until he decided to stop “nickel and diming” - splitting scholarships among a slew of distance runners and throwers. Instead, he invested in sprinters - first from the Caribbean and more recently from Zimbabwe - who could run multiple events.
They come. They stay. They run very fast. And they graduate - all but two, by Keller’s count, out of nearly 50 international recruits over the years.
They also learn to do pretty fair impressions of the coach.
“Well, buddy boy, I hear you were out late last night,” growls 1996 Olympian Tawanda Chiwira in his best Kellerese. “You better have a good workout today. Heh, heh, heh.”
In enduring Keller’s constant practical jokes, his penchant for nicknames - which he tends to remember better than surnames - and his often sarcastic critiques, wunderkinds and walk-ons alike come to develop a surprisingly intense loyalty.
“He’s very direct,” said Chiwira, who owns the school 400 record. “But I’m appreciative of that and so are other guys. Because what you see is what he’s done to build this program and that he’ll always stick up for what he believes, especially when it comes to his athletes. He really does go to unbelievable lengths for some guys.”
Never was that more the case than with O’Brien, who was rescued from seemingly terminal academic ineligibility and set on the road to become Olympic decathlon champion. The stormy shepherding of the world’s greatest athlete has been intensely chronicled - from when Keller recruited him out of Klamath Falls, Ore., in 1984, through his wayward undergraduate days and the trauma of missing the 1992 Olympic team, to the gold medal in 1996 and their decision to part ways after the Games.
It is still Keller’s “greatest ride.”
“There were some incredible highs and some awful lows,” he said. “I’ve always likened the relationship to a candle that you try to blow out only to have it reflame again.
“But we were together a long time and I think it gets to a point where if I’m always on you about one thing or another, pretty soon you’re going to say, `Buzz off.’ He was 30 years old and he didn’t want to hear it anymore. I might have felt the same way. But I wouldn’t have done anything different.”
At Idaho, it will be different.
“Keller is Keller,” said Chiwira. “There is no replacement.”
And if they have nothing to name after him, then at least they’d better not mess with that mailbox.