Landscape in Pullman has changed

The recent and proximate deaths of Al Kircher and Bert Clark were relegated to mostly newspaper footnotes – not so surprising in a Washington State football culture that can speak firsthand of Rose Bowl buzz and in which a relative pup like Jim Walden serves as the resident sage.

It is the happy eras that are feted and eulogized. Neither Kircher nor Clark presided over such, and of course they did their business a very long time ago. And since they weren’t innovators or outsized personalities like some of the coaches they bridged, they aren’t prominent in the Big Book of Cougar Lore.

But it is a fact that even with all the recent bowling, 60 years of post-war Wazzu football have produced but 21 winning seasons. What transpired in their respective tenures, then, carries its own significance and is representative of the program’s struggle to get from there to here.

And a long, strange trip it’s been.

Think of it this way: Clark was fired shortly after Thanksgiving 1967 – and that’s the last time WSU fired a football coach. Given the Everest-to-abyss sways of Cougar football and the increasingly quick-trigger nature of college athletics – hello, Notre Dame – that’s simply mind-boggling. Of course, a few of the latter-day coaches were guys who kept the getaway car running just in case; the others were downright beloved.

But, yes, there used to be some bad old days around here – and not just because four of the five coaches who followed Babe Hollingbery were pink-slipped.

The challenges of coaching at and recruiting to WSU remain, but it has come to be taken for granted how the playing field has been smoothed, if not leveled, by scholarship limitations and other NCAA legislation. Competitive equity is not a cruel joke, at least, even if USC seems as big a bully now as it was 30 years ago.

That Wazzu remains in the hunt for a premier high school running back like Jonathan Stewart, for example, is by no means unthinkable. But it used to be.

And for better or worse, the defining moment of Clark’s tenure at WSU – 1964-67 – was the October afternoon he admitted it out loud.

“Our biggest problem is not having one outstanding offensive ballplayer,” he said after the ‘67 Cougs lost to a pretty ordinary Stanford team – and then went further with the flame-throwing. “As it looks now, we shouldn’t even be playing in this conference, but I must say there may come a tomorrow. Washington State has the hardest recruiting problems in the conference because of our location and … our program has not progressed to the extent the others have.”

In today’s climate, they’ll push you out the door on the flight home for that kind of candor – possibly without a parachute.

Clark lasted long enough to beat Washington 9-7 in the season finale and get carried off the field, but not long enough to work out the final year on his contract.

Jerry Henderson had been Clark’s quarterback most of that season, and recalled his coach’s exasperation.

“Bert played at Oklahoma and coached under Jim Owens at UW where they had things pretty good,” he noted. “He’d lived in the penthouse of programs and I think he got frustrated by what he was up against.”

There were better times, too – notably his 7-3 “Cardiac Kids” team of 1965, which had to be one of the most entertaining seasons in Cougar history. Too bad so much of the excitement – narrow wins over Iowa, Minnesota and Indiana – took place in some other time zone – but, again, those were among the limitations of the day; the Cougs played just two games in Pullman that year, and two more in Spokane.

Kircher didn’t have one of those seasons. When Forest Evashevski vamoosed to Iowa in 1952, he left behind some remarkable talent – Ed Barker, Harland Svare, Don Steinbrunner, Bob Burkhart – but the Cougs lost to USC, Stanford, Baylor and Ohio State to open the season, a tone that would never be reversed. One highlight of the four Kircher years: He split four games with Washington, the best batting average of any Cougar coach who’s played the Dawgs more than twice.

Otherwise, he was better known as the owner of Pullman’s famed Hilltop Motel and Steakhouse for 20 years – and, indeed, one of his players, Bill Steiger knew Kircher “better afterwards than I did when he was the coach.”

But if nothing else, the Kircher and Clark eras helped point to the kind of coach and approach needed to survive and succeed in Pullman – which is to say, a certain level of imagination and innovation, and a certain degree of frisky charisma, both useful in overcoming the natural limitations of the job.

Kircher was succeeded by the redoubtable Jim Sutherland, whose field-stretching pass attack was a precursor to what Dennis Erickson and Mike Price later employed – and who was no wallflower.

“Thinking back, I don’t even remember the assistants,” admitted Steiger. “He was so dominant a personality. Kircher was the opposite – I remember the assistants better than him. Plus, it was a totally different game of football. Kircher and Evashevski had brought in all these big guys – Tom Gunnari and Arnie Pelluer and Russ Quackenbush. Sutherland came in and recruited speed. The size of his linemen was pitiful. Bill Berry – what was he, a 160-pound guard who was all-coast?”

Clark, of course, was replaced by Jim Sweeney, and Henderson was almost dumbstruck by the contrast.

“Bert was the old way, the Bear Bryant stuff,” he said. “No water, you’re going to hit people and be tough guys, three yards and a cloud of blood. I remember Larry Griffith getting knocked out in practice and Bert putting the ball down next to him and having us run a couple of plays over Larry. And those had been the times. But Jim was more of a kindred spirit, emotional. You were part of the family.”

Because the times had changed.

It is interesting that Sutherland’s tenure produced the most post-war success at Wazzu until Walden got it going a bit in the 1980s, but when his welcome frayed the administration opted to go back to an old schooler. Price, who played for him, noted that Clark “taught me the toughness I needed at that time in my life” – and maybe the program needed it, too. But you wonder how Wazzu’s football course might have been different if those steps hadn’t had to be retraced.

Of course, if it hadn’t been a long, strange trip, it wouldn’t have been the Cougs.