Rosenbach Takes On New Game Plan
There was a time when Timm Rosenbach was the guy barking orders. Paul Wulff was a listener.
That was back in the late 1980s when the two were forging a lifelong friendship as football teammates at Washington State University.
Rosenbach was a brash, fiery quarterback. Wulff was just another little-publicized hulk of a human being on a huge, veteran offensive line that would lead the Cougars to their breakthrough 9-3 season and Aloha Bowl victory in 1988.
Rosenbach was the headliner, even when he was horrible - which he was on many a Saturday afternoon 1987 when, as a sophomore and first-year starter, he threw 24 interceptions. Wulff seldom made even the small type, even though he claims he nearly led the team in tackles that fall, thanks to Rosenbach’s penchant to the pick.
Now, nearly 12 years later, Rosenbach and Wulff have been reunited.
Football remains at the root of their friendship, but it is Wulff, Eastern Washington’s first-year head coach, who barks the orders these day. And Rosenbach, less than two months into his new job as a volunteer assistant for the Eagles, listens.
It’s a decidedly different role Rosenbach, a former prep star at Pullman High School, who has always lived close to the edge and done things his way. But it’s a role he has embraced as the next logical step in a long, trying maturation process.
Since passing on his senior season at WSU in order to make himself eligible for the NFL’s 1989 supplemental draft, the 33-year-old Rosenbach has experienced a remarkable number of dramatic life changes - not all of them to his liking, but all of them on his terms.
Since giving up on his short, injury-plagued pro football career with the NFL’s Phoenix Cardinals and the CFL’s Hamilton Tigercats, he has tried his hand at rodeo, ranching and marriage - and given up on each. He even had a brief fling with operating his own deep-sea fishing charter out of Cabo San Lucas. Yet he has somehow landed back at home in the Pacific Northwest, where he is currently sharing a Cheney apartment with three other Eastern assistant coaches.
“All my stuff is still in boxes stacked over in the corner of a room,” Rosenbach said. “I feel like I’m back in college at good ol’ Wazzu.”
And all this from a guy who was making so much money as the top supplemental draft pick of the Cardinals that he would buy new clothes rather than wash the old ones that got dirty.
“Heck, he didn’t wash his clothes in college, either,” Wulff said, when the two sat down to discuss their reunion earlier this week. “He just kept wearing the same stuff - camouflage. He slept in it.”
Wulff and Rosenbach were part of the same penultimate recruiting class of former WSU coach Jim Walden. They redshirted as freshmen, played sparingly the following year and flourished the next two seasons under Walden’s successor, Dennis Erickson.
Rosenbach, following his disastrous sophomore season, developed into one of the most productive quarterbacks in the Pacific-10 Conference as a junior, when he threw for 3,097 yards and 24 touchdowns.
During their three years together, Wulff and Rosenbach became close friends, mainly because of Rosenbach’s preference to party with his offensive lineman.
“I learned pretty early that those were the guys you want to hang out with,” he said. “We pretty much had the same social calendar.”
During his abridged stay at WSU, Rosenbach earned the reputation of a tough, fearless competitor on the field and a hard-drinking, hard-partying free spirit off. And he did little during his days in the NFL, or during those as a struggling team roper on the desert Southwest rodeo circuit, to alter his image.
Even after he divorced, left the ranch he and his former wife, Carrie, had purchased in the Phoenix area and “retired” to the “Go Deep” charter boat he had purchased in Cabo San Lucas, he remained on the party train.
Rosenbach describes his existence in Cabo as “a cross between Jimmy Buffett and Ernest Hemingway.”
“I was never a skipper or anything like that,” he said of his charter business. “I just liked to catch fish, so I hired a crew and everything like that. We did pretty well. I could get out there and tell football stories for seven hours and guys would have fun, even if they weren’t catching anything. “It was basically a way to make enough money to live on - depending on how much fun you wanted to have and how much you wanted to work.”
Rosenbach wanted a lot of the former and not much of the latter. Yet he still managed to make ends meet for almost nine months.
Then one warm, starry night about two years ago, while sitting at a Cabo San Lucas bar and looking around at the clientele, he decided he didn’t want to look at the rest of his life through the bottom of an empty margarita glass. He decided want to end up like the guys sitting next to him.
“I was looking around and realized it was like sitting there with a bunch of guys from a witness protection program or something,” Rosenbach recalled. “There’s a lot of great guys down there, but you don’t really know anything about them.
“They’ll probably laugh their asses off if they ever read that. Or they might be thinking, `He’s on to us!”’
In any event, Rosenbach decided to leave his boat, his boat drinks and his laid-back lifestyle in an effort to find his way back to the sport he had so forsaken nearly five years earlier.
Jody Sears, a high school and college friend and football teammate, had been trying to get in touch with him a year earlier to see if he might be interested in an assistant coaching job at St. Ambrose College, an NAIA school in Davenport, Iowa.
Sears was the Bees’ defensive coordinator and the school needed a part-timer to coach linebackers. The following year, the two met up at a golf tournament and Sears sold Rosenbach on the idea of following him back to the Midwest.
“I just loaded up a U-Haul, got on (Highway) 40 and headed east,” Rosenbach recalled.
As an assistant at St. Ambrose, Rosenbach was give the responsibility of working with the offense, in general. After less than two weeks on the job, he was promoted to quarterbacks coach and soon after that he took on the added duty of calling plays.
And he showed off his people skills during the off-season by traveling to California and convincing seven junior college recruits to give up the beach for the flatlands of the Midwest.
Wulff is hoping Rosenbach’s people skills can help lure some talent to EWU as well. But it is certain he will help, no matter what he is asked to do.
“He’s always been able to adapt to anything real fast,” Wulff said. “And his football background speaks for itself. He’s going to be an invaluable addition to our staff.”
Rosenbach isn’t sure where this latest change-of-career-path will take him. He only knows that he hoping for a smoother ride than he had as a NFL quarterback, team roper, husband and boat owner. “I went to a bunch of rodeos,” he recalled, “but I won like 117 bucks.”
Fortunately, he invested some of the money he made while quarterbacking the Cardinals, and the dividends off his investments - though modest - have allowed him the luxury of accepting the volunteer coaching position at Eastern, where he hopes to complete his physical education degree.
He is hoping to complete his degree work by next fall. “But I’m not going to freak out if it doesn’t happen,” Rosenbach said. “I’ve allotted myself x-amount of time - about 17 years, now - so what’s another year.”
He been sober for almost two years; he sold the “Go Deep” about two weeks ago - “with the condition that I get a couple of days on it each year,” he added - and he left the ranch with his former wife.
Everything he owns is packed in the boxes in his apartment.
“I’m just a nomad,” said Rosenbach, who was making a million dollars a year in the NFL. “But it feels good not to have any responsibility.”
Except that of listening to the orders of his old friend and new boss.
LOOKING BACK Timm Rosenbach College: WSU, 1986-88. Holds season record for total plays (528 in 1987). Holds season and career records for completion percentage (.645 in 1988; .601 overall). NFL: Phoenix Cardinals, 1989-1992. CFL: Hamilton Tiger Cats, 1993.