By Bob Hertzel
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN —
As someone whose career has taken him from Wilmington, Del., to Atlanta, to Dayton, to Cincinnati, to Cleveland, to Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh, to St. Louis, back to Pittsburgh, to New York and then to Morgantown, rest assured I believe I know something about moving.
Truth is, at one time, I had Mayflower Van Lines on my speed dial.
And as someone with that background, when I learned that Oliver Luck was going to pack up his family and move from Houston to Morgantown to replace Ed Pastilong as West Virginia University’s athletic director, I had one thought:
Is he out of his mind?
The man was 50 years old, had a wonderful job as president and general manager of the Houston Dynamo soccer franchise, lived in a lovely house in a lovely neighborhood, his wife’s sister just four or five doors down, a wife who was a lawyer, two kids away in college but two still at home in school.
It’s almost like my friend in Morgantown, Ed Harper, likes to say when people tell him he’s done something wrong:
“What are they going to do, make me pack up my things and move to Morgantown, W.Va., to try and scrape out a living?”
That is how some people view it, but Luck and his family didn’t quite see it that way.
Professionally, Luck saw it as something new and exciting.
“In terms of my professional life, I absolutely love challenges,” the former West Virginia and Houston Oilers quarterback said. “I also have the utmost respect for this institution. I think the next 10 or 15 years is going to be a challenging time for a lot of collegiate institutions. I really do. It can be a very fruitful time, but I also think there will be challenges out there.”
Indeed, Luck finds himself guiding the school through the landmines of conference expansion.
I kind of wondered when he actually began thinking about the job. Pastilong, it will be recalled, agreed to a contract under President Mike Garrison a couple of years ago that ran through July 1 of this year.
“I didn’t pay much attention until I got on the board (of governors). I’m up here every few months for meetings. We would talk about athletics as well as we talk about other things,” Luck explained.
Luck was part of the search for a new president in that role, actually wound up hiring Jim Clements, which leads to the interesting situation where the man whom he helped hire is now his boss.
“When Jim was being hired, I remember sitting with board members and joking with him,” Luck said. “I told him, ‘Keep in mind, when you start this job, 75 percent of your time is going to be on Mountaineer athletics.’ He sort of laughed. He didn’t know. He was provost before and that has absolutely nothing to do with athletics.
“Then someone said, ‘No, Jim, we’re being serious.’ To be forewarned is to be forearmed.”
After Clements was hired, he would be on the board as president of the university and would be sitting there with Luck.
“He would take me aside at a board meeting and say, ‘Oliver, would you mind giving me some advice on the kind of person we need in the athletic department? I realize it’s important at WVU and that there’s a great tradition of success over the years,’” Luck recalled.
He told him he would but it wasn’t until this past spring that he started thinking it might be a job for him.
And as he thought about it more, it seemed more attractive, at least enough to bring it up with his wife, Kathy.
“My wife knows me pretty well. I know her pretty well,” Luck said. “We’ve moved all over the place. She’s a trooper. She grew up as a kid, her father was in the off-shore oil business. She knows about moving. She lived in Trinidad, Brazil, Mexico, Holland, England and Venezuela. Not that she likes moving, but she’s done it so many times.”
About the time the project that had been devouring Luck’s time, a $22 million soccer stadium in Houston, was finalized, he decided it was time to talk to the family about it.
“I said, ‘Hey, this may be something that’s fun. Morgantown is a fun little city. Our kids would enjoy going to school there,’” he recalls.
They spent some time “kicking it around,” as Luck put it.
“Hey, you want to do it. Let’s do it,” Kathy Luck said.
It wasn’t exactly like she was a stranger coming to Morgantown. She’d been to the city many times, had some friends here and was as intrigued as her husband.
“People come up to me now and say, ‘Thanks very much for taking the job. I know you’re making a sacrifice,’” Luck pointed out. “I’m not. This is great. I have a lot of friends here. It’s a marvelous climate. I have family in Cleveland.”
Only someone from Houston, where the mosquitoes are larger than our deer and where 90 degrees is a cool summer’s day, could think the climate here is marvelous, but at least now you know how it came about that Oliver Luck returned to Morgantown.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
