Columbia, S.C. – Steve Spurrier still looks like he could hurl a visor as far as he once threw a football. His full head of finely parted brown hair has only a touch of gray around the ears. His face has nary a wrinkle; his stomach is without paunch.
The only sign the ol’ ball coach is really old, that he’s (gasp!) 60, is when he runs. After Saturday’s practice, the South Carolina skies opened up and chased Spurrier under a tarp with a rainstorm that blacked out the sky. Spurrier scurried along in a rickety, side-to-side giddyup that made him look like Hopalong Cassidy chasing a cab.
It isn’t clear if his gait is due to two back surgeries or if his experience with the Washington Redskins left him half crippled – or whether he’s weighed down by the sudden realization that his new team’s offense goes forward about as smoothly as he does.
But it’s not only his face that belies his 60 years. It’s his spirit. He has the exuberance of a prisoner paroled, which, considering his two-year stint in the NFL, he sort of is. Greeted by a visitor from Denver, he winked and said: “I played in Denver. I got in one exhibition game in ’77. Red Miller cut me. I was what you’d call expendable. That’s OK. I don’t blame ’em. They went to the Super Bowl that year.”
South Carolina isn’t going to the Rose Bowl to play for the national championship this year. It will be lucky to go to any bowl. However, a fan base that might lead the nation in blind loyalty believes his vow to, yes, bring a national championship to South Carolina.
Not that he had to say much. He has the best conference winning percentage (.861) in Southeastern Conference history and won seven SEC titles and the 1996 national crown.
He has come to lift a mediocre program that never has been to a major bowl yet averaged 80,000 fans a game from 1998-99 when it went 1-21. If Spurrier goes fishin’ in the middle of nearby Lake Murray, the locals don’t figure he’ll need a boat.
“You have to absolutely not be able to see it to not notice what’s been going on here,” said new athletic director Eric Hyman, hired from Texas Christian shortly after Spurrier was hired. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
It goes well beyond the sign outside the Columbia airport reading “WE’VE GOT SPURRIER!”
Last week a South Carolina real estate professor told her class Columbia real estate prices have increased since Spurrier’s hire, which was announced shortly before construction began on condos next to Williams-Brice Stadium. So many signed up for the annual women’s football clinic, they ran out of artificial smoke when they sprinted onto the field. Season tickets jumped to a record 62,618 as of late in July, and every seat will be filled for tonight’s season opener against Central Florida.
His news conference Sunday attracted 11 cameras and more than 40 reporters. On Aug. 24, on trivia night at Jillian’s, a local hot spot, a trivia team called itself Eight Days Til Spurrier.
“The best thing about playing for Spurrier is the attitude of winning,” senior defensive end Orus Lambert said. “He’s a winner. His record shows it. He’s got a lot to prove, and the team feeds into that.”
It’s a safe bet the Redskins didn’t react that way. His NFL career ended with a 12-20 record and a quick resignation to the nearest golf course after the 2003 season. It is the reason he can smile while giving instructions to a jumpy 20-year-old quarterback.
“They listen and they try,” Spurrier said. “Most of these guys try to do it the way we ask them to do it. Sometimes in the big leagues, you go, ‘Here’s how …’ ‘Uh, Coach, that don’t work in the NFL.’ And I couldn’t convince them it could work.”
He also couldn’t convince Redskins owner Daniel Snyder which players to acquire. At South Carolina, Hyman doesn’t approve Spurrier’s recruiting list. That’s why he walked away from a five-year, $25 million contract and can coach in college for $1.25 million a year.
“I thought I’d coach five or six years in the NFL and hang it up and go to the beach and play golf,” he said. “I had one offseason where I was playing golf and going a little bit to the beach, and it’s not for me. It was boring, plus I don’t play golf well enough.”
The problem is, his rebuilding job here is much more difficult than what he inherited at Florida in 1990.
Sophomore quarterback Blake Mitchell, an erratic backup last year, has been shaky in practice and hit only 18-of-51 passes in his last scrimmage. The top three tailbacks are freshmen, one guard is a converted defensive lineman and the center has fought a neck injury for three years. The defense is solid. It’ll have to be until Mitchell matures.
Of course, Spurrier already has made waves. He booted top returning rusher Demetris Summers for off-field issues and alienated the state’s high school coaches by pulling scholarships from six players he didn’t deem good enough – although three were later retained and two had their scholarships returned.
Plus, predecessor Lou Holtz left South Carolina on three years’ probation for academic fraud, which will cost Spurrier four scholarships the next two years. But he has a good line on Jimmy Clausen, considered the nation’s top prep quarterback out of Westlake Village, Calif.
And forget what Spurrier did at Florida. Spurrier led Duke to the 1989 Atlantic Coast Conference title.
Duke? No wonder South Carolina’s first three games will be nationally televised.
“You people want to see South Carolina play, don’t you?” he said. His accompanying smile was anything but trivial.
Staff writer John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
