Shortly after his son Will, a sports publicist for Oklahoma State University, was killed in the Jan. 27, 2001, plane crash in Adams County, Bill Hancock decided to bicycle from California to Georgia. The experiences and people he encountered along the way, and his family’s attempt to deal with the tragedy, became the basis for a moving book, “Riding With The Blue Moth.” The former administrator for the NCAA Tournament is now doing the same job for college football’s BCS. But for the next couple of weeks, Hancock is working with the USOC at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy. Recently he took some time for a chat.
Anthony Cotton: What is your relationship with life these days?
Bill Hancock: Mostly it’s very good. There are moments when it’s not so good.
AC: We should do an explanation of the blue moth.
BH: It’s the personification of grief. It comes from the derivation of a weather phenomenon called a blue norther, a cold front that comes in with dark, gray-blue clouds. When I was little, my grandmother, who was from North Carolina, would say “blue naw-ther,” and I thought she was saying “blue moth.” I couldn’t figure out what she meant, why we’d be having a blue moth tomorrow. But the grief after Will’s death came in waves, like the cold fronts would, and when I was trying to find a way to personify it, the blue moth jumped back into my head after all those years.
AC: It was interesting that by the end of the ride, you had come to regard it as something of an ally.
BH: Yeah, because it’s such a metaphor for life. There’s always some thing or some person that you despise somehow becomes someone you respect. An ally. A companion. The blue moth reminds me of how precious the good moments are, how precious life is. So in that way, it’s an ally. It still comes almost every day; I get sad – “The blue moth is here again” – but you become wiser. Your experience tells you the blue moth will go away.
AC: You’re in Italy now. You were in Athens for the Summer Games two years ago. I would imagine that, well, anything in life brings about a connection with Will. Like how you reflected on your flight together to Sydney for the 2000 Games and how great it was for the two of you.
BH: I thought about that flight on the way over here, I thought about him being here in the USOC office, I thought about him working next to me in Sydney. Every day there are hundreds of reminders. Mostly that’s a sad thing for me; it ushers in the blue moth. But then I’ll see a friend or something to remind me that I’m so lucky to have had Will and those times with him that I really can’t complain. Another reason why is that so many people have to experience the blue moth, either from losing a child or sister or brother or job. That darned blue moth is everywhere.
AC: On Jan. 18, 2001, you had a nightmare about Will being in a plane crash, and you write about trying to figure out the hows and whys of that dream. Did you ever pursue that?
BH: No. I decided the ultimate specialist is in heaven waiting for us, so I’ll get the answer then. I’m not a preachy guy, but that’s what I believe.
AC: Something else that was remarkable – all along the way you’d come upon people who didn’t know what you were dealing with, and they would say something prophetic. You came to determine they were angels seeing you along the way.
BH: It was unbelievable, completely unbelievable. I decided that perhaps I was looking for that, so that when the Peach Angel started me down, perhaps I was ready for that, and perhaps someone who hadn’t experienced what I had experienced wouldn’t have been ready for those messages.
AC: People – after looking at you like you were crazy for what you were doing – would also ask what your “cause” was.
BH: So many people read about people doing those things, trying to raise money for X, Y or Z. It was so ironic, those questions. I didn’t know what my cause was, but by the end I realized that it was to solidify the beauty of life – what a simple message. I thought I got it before we lost Will. I thought I knew how to live, I thought I was some sort of poet/philosopher. Afterward, I realized how shallow I was before.
AC: You had run marathons before, but it’s not like you were in optimum shape for the bike ride. Was there almost a kind of naivete when you started?
BH: No question. I was probably in better shape than 95 percent of people, but I was so naive about health, about dealing with the heat and the hills and the dogs.
AC: And the daily count of Cheez-Its and Fritos, what was that about?
BH: I’ve always been a counter, a nerd who counts things. I count letters in words. I taught Will how to keep score for baseball when he was 4. That’s just something inside of me. I don’t know where I got it from, but I just thought it would be fun to count what I ate. And I also thought I didn’t want to eat all of those Fritos, so if I kept count, surely I would stop at 20 instead of 90.
AC: You changed jobs last fall, leaving the NCAA for the BCS. You used to be the administrator of the ultimate playoff series. In your new job, why wouldn’t you just do the world a favor and put that together for everybody?
BH: There are so many people who want a playoff, but for every one who does, there are those in our business who don’t, and the consensus in our business is not to do it. All of our constituents – presidents, faculty, athletic directors, coaches – they don’t want a playoff.
AC: The coaches?
BH: Yup, the coaches. You’ll read comments from some of them asking why don’t we have a playoff, but for every one of those, there are a dozen who say they like the system. They like the bowls – 28 coaches end their seasons with victories. And the bowls just don’t believe they could survive with an eight- or 16-team playoff. Watch the team that wins its last game of the season to go 6-5 and become bowl-eligible, and watch how they celebrate on the field. That’s when you come to know the value of bowl games. And people forget how it was before the BCS, when there was no chance that Texas and USC could meet.
Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
For more information on Bill Hancock’s ride, go to .
