Half-hidden among the oleanders rimming the outfield of Sunken Diamond, Tyrone Willingham, looking dapper as few football coaches wearing sweats can, watches the Stanford baseball team take on Cal Poly. Spring practice is over for the day, and he is at ease -- sort of. His powerful arms are folded across his chest, but his left wrist keeps flicking his watch toward his face. It's well after 7 p.m., and he wants to get to Kresge Auditorium across campus before an 8 o'clock lecture by a woman whose name he can't recall and whose topic also escapes him. "But I'm sure I'll learn something from it," he says, as he turns to leave.
Passing the DeGuerre pool complex, he stoops to pick up a scrap of paper and deposits it in a trash bin. Everywhere he looks, Willingham sees opportunities to improve -- his environment, his program and, more than anything, himself. "I think the pursuit of perfection is what life is all about," he says. "But also, in balancing it up, you should have the acceptance of not achieving perfection. The chase is the game."
A lifelong underdog, Willingham has always been a chaser. He can't imagine living any other way. "I would hate to wake up and not feel like I'm fighting or accomplishing; it would be a terrible way to live," he says. "To me, to always be proving something, to always be challenging yourself, is a great state to be in."
So the 46-year-old enters his sixth year as head coach at Stanford, where the challenges seem endless. Foremost among them, he must win in a major conference with a squad that includes a bunch of players who are just like he was in college: smart and motivated but not particularly big or fast. "I think being the football coach here is the ultimate challenge," says women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer. "Like the rest of us, Tyrone has to find the student-athletes who can get in and be successful here. But not just one or two or three or four. Thirty of them."
How well has he fared? In the five years since the surprise replacement for Bill Walsh was greeted with questions about his experience and insinuations that Stanford had made a "politically correct" choice by hiring an African-American, Willingham has silenced his doubters. Despite his lack of previous head-coaching experience, he has posted a 30-27-1 overall record -- including winning seasons in '95, '96 and '99 -- and has taken his teams to three bowl games. He has been named Pac-10 Coach of the Year twice, in 1995 and 1999. He has also proved to be one of history's great rebounders. In 1996 he converted an ugly 2-5 start into a sparkling 7-5 finish (including a 38-0 pasting of Michigan State, his alma mater, in the Sun Bowl); and last year he took a team that got trounced by 52 points at Texas in September to the Rose Bowl in January. It was the first such appearance in 28 years for a Stanford coach and the first ever for a black coach. (He is one of just six African-American head football coaches in the NCAA's Division I, excluding historically black colleges).
Of course, there's still room for improvement. Willingham didn't win the Rose Bowl, and perhaps more important, he hasn't won enough in the regular season to instill in Stanford fans the same high expectations they hold for, say, men's basketball, where every home game is a raucous sellout. "I would like our fans, when they walk into that stadium, to not just hope their team wins, but to expect it," says Willingham. "We have to create a level of consistency, and then we gradually change what our fans expect to happen."
So even as his name circulates in the pro coaching ranks and among bigger-time college programs that would love to lure him away, Willingham remains in Palo Alto. Last winter, instead of taking the head coaching job at Michigan State, he negotiated a contract extension through 2004 that puts his pay "among the elite of Pac-10 coaches," according to his agent, Ray Anderson. (Those salaries range from about $500,000 to $1 million a year) "Ty could have taken the easy way out and probably made more money," says college teammate Charlie Baggett, now an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings. "I really believe it's easier to win at Michigan State than it is at Stanford. It shows you he likes a challenge."
Willingham also likes to challenge others. Though one athletic department staffer reports that the coach has "loosened up a lot" in the five years since he arrived on campus with a reputation as a humorless disciplinarian, he still presents a stoic public façade that is difficult to crack. Beat reporters who have sat through his formal and almost comically brief press conferences now recognize and appreciate his dry wit, but he wasn't in a hurry to show it off. Nor has he ever been willing to give up personal details or deep inner thoughts. "People see him as being secretive, and that's not the way he is at all," says his wife, Kim. "He's from the South, and people there tend to be very private about private matters."
His associates confirm that what the public generally sees of Willingham is hardly a true picture of the man. "Ty has a very businesslike persona, but one-on-one or in his office with recruits and families, he is very warm and genuine, if not exactly effervescent," says Dave Tipton, the team's defensive interior line coach. "He is incredibly self-disciplined, but I think of a disciplinarian as a real hard-ass, and he's not that. The players love him because he is very understanding, very warm and very consistent."
Among the Willingham characteristics you can count on: his office will be a bastion of orderliness and he will always be better dressed than you. He'll be happy to talk about his team but will submit to a personal interview only with reluctance. He will choose his words carefully, and he will speak in a voice so quiet it nearly defies tape recording. Even on the field, he rarely raises the volume; in his huddles, you can see players bending toward him as though pulled by a great force. He will be gracious and polite with both friends and strangers. His preparation and attention to detail, especially regarding football, will be painstaking; indeed, he gives his players and coaches a to-the-minute itinerary for every home game and road trip. ("For a whole week, you know what you will be doing at 2:32, at 5:44," marvels former running back Anthony Bookman, '98.) Punctuality will be enforced. (Though Kim Willingham insists that at home she and their three kids are always waiting for him, she once had to run after and pound on the side of the team bus when it took off, right on schedule, without her.) Players who are tardy or guilty of even minor rule infractions get a date with the 6:30 a.m. Breakfast Club -- usually attended by Willingham himself -- for extra conditioning or trash collecting. Players who perform below expectation on the field get The Look.
That glare -- or is it a pout? -- has become one of Willingham's trademarks. It's an expression of acute displeasure that involves a narrowing of the eyes and an extra little crease in the upper lip. As minimalist communication, it's masterful. Former MSU teammate Kirk Gibson, who went on to fame as a slugger for the Detroit Tigers and L.A. Dodgers after a college career as a wide receiver, hasn't seen Willingham in person in 20 years, but he remembers him well. Not only does he recall The Look, but he can summon any number of interpretations thereof. "The Look would mean different things," recalls Gibson, now a Tigers game analyst for the Fox TV network. "Ty would give you that look as opposed to retaliating or doing or saying something stupid. Or if he was in deep thought -- and he is a very deep thinker. So I don't think you could ever say it means he's pissed off. It can mean different things."
Among players, the most common reading of The Look is disappointment. And coming from Willingham, that's more searing than anger. "For me, it's a horrible feeling to think I've let him down," says former standout wide receiver Troy Walters, '99, now a rookie with the Minnesota Vikings. "He has done so much for me personally, taken me so far as a person and a player, that I want to do my best for him. I'd probably credit most of my success and the player I am to him."
Willingham begins molding his players through a preseason conditioning program that is notoriously brutal. (Bookman recalls being hooked up to an on-field IV for fluid replacement the first time he attended two Willingham practices in one day.) But it is a hardship that makes players mentally tough and tends to bond them into a team. "Not to knock previous coaches, but Stanford used to have a reputation for being soft," says offensive coordinator Bill Dietrick, who was an assistant at the University of Washington before he came to Stanford in 1998. "Tyrone's teams are tenacious. He has instilled in them a great fighting spirit and a never-say-die attitude."
Willingham's teams fight hard in part because they fight together, which is no accident. He doesn't choose captains for the next year until the end of the current season. That way, he says, "you get more leadership and participation from other people." He doesn't crow about great recruiting classes like the one coming in this fall -- which has been ranked in the top 25 and is characterized by Tipton as "the kind of class Florida gets" -- because he doesn't want to alienate current players. Besides, new players will have to prove themselves on the field just like everyone else. His policy is simple: the best player plays, even if he's a walk-on, and everyone will get the opportunity to be that player.
Lionel Tyrone Willingham knows well what hard work and opportunity can bring. Growing up in segregated Jacksonville, N.C., he saw a lot of the former and made the most of what he saw of the latter. His father, Nathaniel -- "the hardest-working man I've ever seen," says Willingham's younger brother, Jerome -- was a landlord and self-taught contractor who built the local Masonic lodge, turned the bottom floor of their family home into a rec center for the neighborhood and gave away loads of food from the large garden his four kids helped him cultivate. Though somewhat disabled by arthritis, he worked nearly to the day he died in 1995, at 93.
The civic contributions of Lillian Willingham, for whom a park and parkway in Jacksonville are named, were equally monumental. Besides being an elementary school teacher with a master's degree from Columbia, she volunteered for so many organizations -- school board, Elks auxiliary and Eastern Star, among others -- that the family rarely ate dinner before 9 p.m. "Our mother traveled a lot, so she was worldly," says Jerome, now a lawyer in Jacksonville. "That allowed us to think outside the box of our environment, to dream that anything was possible if you set your mind to it."
Willingham set his mind to becoming an NCAA Division I athlete. While other kids were hanging out on the street or in the rec center, he'd do drills like lying on his back on the front lawn, tossing the football in the air over and over again. "He wasn't subject to peer pressure," says Jerome. Though he topped out in high school at 5-foot-7 and 140 pounds, Willingham became the first black quarterback at Jacksonville High, as well its MVP in football, basketball and baseball. He walked on at Michigan State in 1972, eventually earning a scholarship in football and All Big Ten honors in baseball. In football, he served mostly as a backup quarterback to Baggett, his roommate and an old high school rival. When Baggett got hurt in 1973, Willingham started the last six games of the season and then spent the off-season spurring Baggett to get back in shape. "He's the one who kept me going," says his friend. "When he'd get up in the morning to do his push-ups, he'd grab me and say, 'Come on, let's go!'"
Baggett was not the only Spartan who felt the cattle prod of Willingham's will. "We used to have a pact on the team," says Baggett. "So the coaches wouldn't know we weren't going full speed during windsprints, we'd have everyone run together. But Ty wouldn't do it. He'd be out in front, and the coaches knew he wasn't the fastest guy on the team. We'd tell him to slow down, but he wouldn't. He'd look at us like we were crazy."
His senior year at Michigan State, Willingham was voted the team's most inspirational player and won the school's Big Ten medal of honor as the outstanding scholar-athlete. After graduating with a degree in physical education, Willingham took a graduate coaching position at MSU, beginning a 15-year career as a college assistant that would take him to six stops at five different schools. After a three-year stint coaching running backs under Denny Green at Stanford, Willingham followed Green to the Minnesota Vikings.
His work ethic knocked people out. "I can't even get across just how exceptional Ty was at his job, how precise," says Tampa Bay coach Tony Dungy, who was another Vikings assistant at the time. "You knew he was going to be successful; he had head coach written all over him. You only hoped someone would recognize that and give him a chance; and, fortunately, Stanford did."
Willingham had no qualms about taking a job at a place where it had been difficult to win consistently. "I am a fairly positive individual," he says. "You seek to jump in and not necessarily question what it is you can't do."
There have always been plenty of other people asking the question for him. "It has always been, 'We don't know if Tyrone Willingham can do it,'" says Dungy. "'We don't know if he can play in the Big Ten because he's small; we don't know if he will be an effective head coach at Stanford because he has never been a coordinator before.' I think his mind-set has always been: 'I can't control whether I'm going to get the opportunity, but if I do, I'm going to be fully prepared.' I think that's what motivates him."
Bookman, who is 5-foot-6, has a slightly different take on the Willingham drive: "I think he's like me; he has even said it: 'Maybe I have the little man's syndrome -- I just want to beat everybody.'"
Willingham today carries a trim 155 pounds and is still in superb shape, a fact not lost on his players. "When you see him out there running sprints, you can't help but be motivated to do the same thing," says 1999 backup quarterback Joe Borchard, '01. He still has a good enough arm that when his team was short on quarterbacks a few springs ago, he stepped into the pocket for drills. He carries a 12 handicap in golf and still does "a lot of push-ups and squats and lunges and those kinds of things," says Kim, but he no longer plays racquetball, much to her relief. "We played racquetball when we first got married, and I wouldn't move fast enough for him, so he'd hit me in the butt with the ball to get me going," she says. "I don't play anything with him if I can help it."
Competing with Willingham is not for the half-hearted. Aside from his two varsity sports at MSU, he was a fierce practitioner of intramural basketball -- "We always won the championship, mostly because of his hustle," says Baggett -- and the card game bid-whist. "He hated to lose, so if you weren't a good player, he wouldn't pick you as a partner," says Baggett. "If Ty lost the first time he sat down, he'd be pissed. He'd sit and wait for his next turn to come around, but he was getting another partner."
He has a reputation for attacking his work with the same intensity. "Whatever assignment Denny divvied up and gave his assistant coaches, Tyrone's was always in first," says Dungy. "It was always done the best, without any fanfare. I don't care what the project was -- researching hotels, researching other teams' defenses, researching players, it didn't matter -- Tyrone's was going to set the standard."
With all those exacting characteristics -- the neatness, the organization, the punctuality, the hypercompetitiveness, the tireless line-toeing and standard-setting -- you might expect the guy to be a dour control freak or an irritating goody-two-shoes.
Willingham is neither. "Most people who are that driven and that self-disciplined want to do everything themselves," says Dungy. "Tyrone doesn't have that need, and he doesn't seek the recognition. His thinking is, 'It's not my program; it's Stanford's program. But we're going to do it my way.'"
His way means keeping meetings and practices short but intense, letting his coaches coach and staying involved with the rest of the athletic department. When the men's and women's basketball staffs are preparing for the NCAAs, for example, he orders a catered lunch for them. "I'm a huge Tyrone fan," says VanDerveer. "He doesn't put himself above anybody else, and his hard work and genuineness make you really want to cheer for him. I think everybody here feels that way."
Asked recently how he would remember Willingham years down the road, last year's quarterback Todd Husak, '00, turns to an image of water. "I think he'd like to be remembered as an ocean," Husak says. "He put up a poem once about how water will wear down anything, as long as it keeps working, keeps pushing. That kind of describes him. He's all about persistence. I think that will always stick with me."
It's an example few of his players forget: Don't give up the chase.
Willingham's Highlight Reel
Career
- Walk-on in football and baseball at Michigan State U., 1973-77; starting quarterback in 1976
- Graduate assistant coach, MSU, 1977
- Assistant coaching positions at Central Michigan U., MSU, North Carolina State and Rice, 1978-88
- Running back coach, Stanford, 1989-91
- Running back coach, Minnesota Vikings, 1992-94
- Head coach, Stanford, 1995-present
Stanford
- Number of bowl games: three, including two in his first two seasons
- Five-year record: 30-26-1 overall (22-18 in Pac-10)
- Pac-10 Coach of the Year in 1995 and 1999 (the only Stanford coach to receive this award twice)
Kelli Anderson, ’84, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, lives in Sonoma, Calif.
