By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — It started on star-lit night in the Arizona desert in a hotel room illuminated by the after-glow of victory.
That was where, that was when Bill Stewart was named West Virginia University’s head football coach, and since that night an entire state has been trying to figure out just what was inside the package they had purchased.
He was, quite obviously, the anti-Rich Rodriguez both in persona and values.
He was the kind of man who would consider a deal closed with a handshake to be a done deal, not the kind of man who would fight a signed contract sitting before him with language so straight-forward and simple that a pre-law student could understand it, even if his own attorney seemed completely perplexed by it.
If there would be rumors about Bill Stewart, who still calls his wife “my bride” and says his 13-year-old son will keep him in line, it will be rumors about how he forgot to take the garbage out before leaving for work.
He is a man of faith, this Bill Stewart, an unassuming man who doesn’t like to lose football games but likes far less to lose the people who play for him, be it to physical or moral injury.
While Bill Stewart, the human being, passed the character test, the question remained about how the coach would endure the football test. After all, he is being paid $800,000 a year to coach football and, as such, that means not just to take over the basket full of talent Rodriguez had left him and win with it, but to create as winning a program as Rodriguez had in a less-polluted environment.
There have been bits and pieces of Stewart’s overall philosophy for the program each day, a nibble here, a tidbit there. But it all needed to be drawn together into one cohesive philosophy, which is just what Stewart did on Tuesday during his pre-Villanova press gathering.
He had already been presented with a commemorative rifle by the WVU rifle team and had gone over his thoughts about the Villanova game and his team’s injury situation when there remained time for only one more question.
That’s normally a throwaway, a coach eager to answer so he can get back to game planning, but this proved to be the right question at the right time.
The question grew out of something Stewart had said earlier in the day when asked to define the difference between this opening game and the Fiesta Bowl he coached. After going over a few of the differences, Stewart said:
“We’ve had time to settle in and build what we want the future of the program to be. I am all about winning every football game. We, as a staff and the players, want to win every football game, but what we’re doing here, starting in camp, is laying a foundation for a football program.”
Now, the questioner wanted to know, just what is the imprint he wants to leave on West Virginia football.
If you recall Rich Rodriguez’s answer to a similar question when he arrived in Morgantown, he boldly asserted that his goal was to win a national championship, something he seemed to have positioned himself to do but didn’t want nearly as badly as he wanted to run the entire show all by himself.
Stewart’s answer was not in any way about winning football games. It was a philosophy lesson.
“If we can be good, solid gentlemen in the community, especially in the classroom; if we can be good, solid citizens in this town, if we can be good gentlemen of faith, and I don’t care if you are Catholic, Muslim, Latter Day Saints, Baptist; if we can just be good role models for the youth of America, then we’re doing something right,” he said.
“At the end of the day, I want them to say Bill Stewart recruited men with character, not a bunch of characters. When they put on the Old Gold and Blue, anytime, anywhere, they play the best football they can play; i.e., we had 125 young men for eight days and seven nights in the desert getting ready for the Fiesta Bowl — gambling casinos over here, glitters and bar rooms over here — and we had just one curfew violation.
“That’s the stamp I’m putting on this program. People should be very happy with what is going on in Morgantown, West Virginia. When you come out on the field with the flying WV, you better put your mouth piece in because you’re going to get hit.”
Stewart wants winning people to play winning football, a radical idea in this day and age of power, greed and immorality in the sporting arena.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
