Picture of triumph
Anyone charged with painting a portrait of Paul Wulff’s life better be versed in a variety of styles.
After all, the picture will be filled with a thousand faces and dozens of places, each needing a varying degree of focus.
Some must be sharp, featuring a Rockwell-like realism. Others are not as clear, mere impressions, blurry forms like a Renoir crowd.
But all come together to form the backdrop on the canvas portraying Wulff’s passage through life, a journey that has led him from the depths of despair to the heights of success – over and over again.
Paint the picture now. He’s on top again. Head football coach at Washington State University. The main subject. The face in focus.
All thanks to those people in the background. The ones whose features form the tableau of his life.
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When WSU athletic director Jim Sterk introduced Wulff as the Cougars’ 31st football coach last Tuesday, he described him with words not usually used at such events.
“I think Paul’s been refined by fire, both personally and then as a coach,” Sterk said.
Talk about understatement.
Wulff’s original burns were inflicted at age 12, when his mother, Delores, disappeared, never to be seen again. The details of the death are fuzzy, but the police in Woodland, Calif., determined she was murdered. His father, Carl, was a suspect. Finally charged years later, he never faced trial (see Bill Morlin’s accompanying story).
The death disrupted a childhood just beginning to fade into adulthood.
“At that stage of my life, I became a much deeper thinker,” Wulff said, “and formed into one of those people who analyze, who think a lot by myself. Not that I necessarily went into a shell, but I felt alone a lot.
“It changed me. When kids have a normal, balanced family life, they take things for granted. At that age, I didn’t have that option.”
It wasn’t the only wound he would have to endure. Football at Washington State came with typical bumps and bruises, plus a knee injury his junior year and an appendectomy 18 days before the Apple Cup his senior season. The latter became part of his legend.
“I immortalized him in Cougar football lore with the story that I told about him having his appendix operated on,” then WSU coach Mike Price said recently, “on Monday and then playing the game against the Huskies on Saturday and the blood coming down off his jersey.”
Price was embellishing, “just a little bit,” but no one needs to embellish the pain that engulfed Wulff after that.
WSU left him with a wife, Tammy, and a chance at a pro career. The latter was cut short by injuries. The former stayed and helped Wulff through the wilderness of college coaching. They shared a series of trailers on the West Plains, while Paul struggled as a volunteer assistant on Dick Zornes’ Eastern staff.
“It taught a tremendous amount of humility,” Wulff said of the time. “Living dollar to dollar. Living in two 8-by-40 trailers. Having mice run in and out of the cupboards. When we started living in a 14-by-70, we thought we were in the Taj Mahal.
“But we realized life was OK, you could live. Still, I knew I had to fight to get out of that.”
“He worked an entire year for no pay,” said former Eastern coach Mike Kramer, who was an Eagles assistant at the time. “A lot of other guys maybe paid prices to get where they are by being graduate assistants, but Paul wasn’t afforded that luxury. He wasn’t a graduate of the school and assistants at least get paid.”
Still, Wulff was learning. And moving up. He earned a paycheck his second year, when he became offensive line and strength coach. When Kramer succeeded Zornes, Wulff became his offensive coordinator. And when Kramer moved on to Montana State, Wulff became head coach. It was 2000. He had been at Eastern for seven years.
But as pretty as the picture looked on the outside, the reality was different. Tammy was diagnosed with brain cancer in 1997.
Though Wulff has talked about the battle many times, he’s reluctant to revisit it again. Still, the long illness and Tammy’s subsequent death in his arms in 2002 engulfed him in sorrow.
“It was like being shot in the gut,” he said. “We were totally blindsided. That was where my life dramatically changed. Basically my faith had grown, and, being a born-again Christian, it woke me up. From that point forward, it changed me forever.”
A different man, Wulff began leading a different life. Football, once important enough to endure living hand-to-mouth, became something else. It was a refuge, but not a place to hide.
He met Sherry, a nurse and mother, fell in love again and married. They have three children, Katie, 12, Max, 4, and Sam, 1.
“Sherry has just settled my life down for the last four years,” Wulff said. “It’s really turned a corner for me personally. It’s the first time, I think, in my life that it has some sense of normalcy to it.”
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The coaches who helped Wulff along the way are easier to define. The roles they’ve played clearer, the lessons they taught less subtle.
The line stretches back to Davis High in Northern California and Dave Whitmire. It was Whitmire who formed Wulff into a lineman recruited by most Pac-10 teams. It was Whitmire who sat with Wulff after his recruiting trips. It was Whitmire who helped him decide on WSU.
The next coach to ride – almost literally – into the picture was Jim Walden, the homespun, folksy Cougar coach who, two decades later, still brings a chuckle to Wulff.
“I had Tom Osborne, Rich Brooks, (ASU’s) Darryl Rogers, Joe Kapp from Cal, in my house,” Wulff remembers. “All those coaches were in my house, along with Coach Walden. The difference was, he came in with cowboy boots on and he pulled the rocking chair in the middle of the living room and started talking to everybody. It was a lot more of a personable approach.”
And a winning approach. But Walden called it quits at WSU after the 1986 season, Wulff’s second in Pullman (he redshirted as a freshman). Still, the lessons Walden taught are burned into Wulff’s memory.
“We had half-hour team meetings with Jim,” Wulff said, “and he’d tell stories. When Dennis came in we were done in five minutes.”
That wasn’t the only transformation when Erickson became coach. Not only did Wulff move from guard to center, the whole tenor of practice, games, academics, everything, changed.
“(Walden) was very passionate about where he was at Washington State, he had a feel for the big picture and to have a lighter side to it, have fun with it,” Wulff said. “(Erickson) brought a competitive nature, to make sure we were focused. We wanted to succeed at all costs. Make sure we are doing everything we can to win.”
Two successful years with Erickson morphed into one year with Mike Price, a storyteller of the first order and another sea of change to endure.
“The skits he did, all the subliminal messages we had in the music in our dressing rooms, there was a dramatic change there,” Wulff said.
Ask the trio what they remember about Wulff and the most prominent adjective used is smart.
“He was a center,” Erickson said as way of explanation. “To be a center, you’ve got to know what’s going on. He was extremely smart, understanding everything that was going on. Obviously, that’s carried over into coaching; he’s just that kind of guy.
“Football was important to him and he kind of ran the show (on the line) and he had some great guys to tell where to go too.”
Wulff was smart enough to understand quickly the pro experience (he was signed, but never played for the New York Jets) was not what he wanted.
“It really changes post college,” Wulff said. “The X’s and O’s are similar, obviously, but every other aspect is different. It turns into such a business, much more cutthroat. It’s so hard to form a team bond, because everyone is out for themselves.”
Discarding the business and egos, his path took him to I-AA Eastern Washington and the life of poverty on the West Plains. It was football-coaching 101 and the instructor was Zornes.
“He was extremely organized and technical,” Wulff said. “The most fundamental coach I’ve ever been around.”
When Kramer was tabbed to replace a retiring Zornes, Wulff took on the role of running the offense. But the coaching classes continued.
“Mike was great because he always liked to see the big broad picture on the outside looking in,” Wulff said. “He could see things and wanted the whole world to see it too. There’s a lot of value in that.”
In two years Wulff became the teacher. And all the lessons he drew from the coaches turned into a philosophy of his own.
“Hopefully, someone who gives everyone ownership of their responsibilities,” is how Wulff the man described Wulff the coach. “A communicator. It’s very important everybody is on the same page, that we are saying the same message. We all know where we are at and what we have to accomplish and the goals are very consistent.
“We’re going to work hard, we’re going to do it the right way and we’re not going to deviate very often from our philosophy.”
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Eight seasons as a head coach at the I-AA level taught Wulff other lessons. He learned how to deal with few resources and plentiful expectations, big hopes yet small margins, being an underdog and outworking a favorite. Lessons that will serve him well in Pullman.
“Do what you’ve been doing,” is the advice Erickson would give. “I mean, he’s been successful because he believes in what he’s been doing and in his coaches. To me that’s what it’s all about.
“He has a philosophy that he believes in, and don’t let anybody talk you into changing it, whether it’s I-AA or in the Pac-10 or it’s the National Football League it’s all the same, as far as coaching is concerned. It’s about developing relationships with players. He’s done a great job of that.”
The enormity of what he’s facing hit Wulff like a paint ball when he walked through the locker room at WSU, so much bigger than he remembered, so much larger than Eastern’s and yet still well down the ladder in the Pac-10.
“It was cleaner, it was a lot nicer than when I was there,” he said. “The facilities have changed so much, which I hope would be expected after 17 years… yeah, it’s different.
“But I’ll tell you what, the neatest feeling of all is when I walked … into the coaches’ office and Marie (Taylor), who was the secretary when I was a player there, stood up and said, ‘Welcome home.’ ”
Taylor’s smiling face completed the picture for Wulff. It’s done. The paint is dry. The frame attached. It’s time to hang it on the wall of his office. The head football coach’s office at Washington State University.
“A rush went through my body,” he answered when asked about being introduced as WSU’s head coach. “It was the full circle of my life, a very surreal feeling to stand there and realize I was this 18-year-old, clueless kid at Washington State in 1985. All of a sudden, it seemed like yesterday.”