By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — The phone in the Dave McMichael residence rang at 5:30 on a cold October morning.
The assistant coach for the Connecticut Huskies wiped the sleep from his eyes and picked it up. He knew a call at that hour was never good news but he could never have expected what he heard.
“Jasper Howard is dead,” a graduate assistant told him.
McMichael remembers that moment.
“I was numb, sick,” he said. “That’s one of your kids, part of your family.”
McMichael was a coach on the offensive side of the ball, Howard a defensive player, so he didn’t know him as well as if he was his position coach, but he knew how the team felt about this spirited little guy, knew that he was among the most popular players on the team.
You can’t quantify a loss like that, nor can you really rein in your emotions.
“It was quite a week,” McMichael said.
At the time he was a former West Virginia coach, a situation that would be remedied after Doc Holliday left Bill Stewart’s staff to take the head coaching job at Marshall, leaving an opening for McMichael to take as he came home.
But then he only knew that he was heading back to West Virginia for the day, to play the strangest of football games under the saddest of circumstances.
There were so many distractions in Connecticut, so much for head coach Randy Edsall to see to.
Would they play the game? How would the team react? How could he, as head coach, offer any solace to the family?
In West Virginia, wheels were turning to. The Mountaineer nation, headed by Bill Stewart, showed the kind of compassion you would hope they would show. They were touched by the tragic shooting outside the Connecticut student union, knowing it well could have been one of their own.
Normally, they are among the nation’s most zealous fans, tough on visitors, but on this 24th of October they would be as one with the grieving Connecticut team.
McMichael, of course, knew not what to expect upon the return to Morgantown. He’d been here when Miami was in town and Randy Shannon was hit in the head with a garbage can thrown by a fan. He’d been here when teams were booed and players ridiculed, when curse words were thrown around like so much confetti.
“When the buses turned down Don Nehlen Drive the fans were lined up giving us the No. 6 sign,” McMichael said, noting that No. 6 was the uniform number Howard had wore. “I thought, ‘Wow! I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
It was the same in the stadium. They cheered the Huskies as they came out on the field, carrying Howard’s helmet and uniform shirt, and they cheered them after the game following Noel Devine’s spectacular run that brought the Mountaineers from behind.
McMichael was proud of his team, of the way it played and almost won in the most difficult of circumstances, but he was proud, too, of the city and state that he used to call home.
A native of Kettering, Ohio, just outside Dayton, had played for Nehlen at Bowling Green and had spent 18 years on Nehlen’s Mountaineer staff, leaving only after Rich Rodriguez showed him the door. He’d been a fine coach, the man who coached such players as Anthony Becht, Rob Bennett, Rich Braham, Brian Jozwiak, Jack Linn, Adrian Moss, Page, Rick Phillips, Lovett Purnell, John Ray, Brian Smider and Keith Winn.
His wife, Karen, was a West Virginian and they considered these hills their home.
That’s why the phone call he received from Bill Stewart was so much better than the call he received that October morning, a calling asking him if he would be interested in returning to West Virginia.
He’d been at Connecticut for nine years, helped the program make the move into Division I and into the Big East. He’d put a lot of himself into earning the respectability Connecticut now enjoys, but this was home.
He never thought he’d be asked back, but wasn’t going to say no when the opportunity presented itself.
“This,” he said, “is a crazy business.”
Now his business cards list the Puskar Center as his address and that just has this right feeling about it.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
