Jul. 4—Please pardon the sentimentality of this column, written, as it was, while my laptop gently weeps.
Jim Walden died on Thursday at age 88. He was head football coach at Washington State University (1978-86). The sense of loss is made keener by the simple truth that they’re not making coaches like Walden anymore.
He was the perfect coach at a time of great need in Pullman. The fourth head football coach in four seasons at WSU, he promised to stay, and he did.
Getting the Cougs in the 1981 Holiday Bowl broke a 51-year postseason drought, and it not only stifled some threadbare jokes about WSU’s competitiveness, it also laid the foundation for greater things for the program’s future.
He did it with a homespun humor that often drew more attention than his toughness, his discipline, and his great affection for his players.
If Pullman had some qualities of the televised rural Mayberry, Walden was certainly Sheriff Andy, respected and admired, a folksy wise-man with a whistle and a cheek bulging with a plug of Red Man tobacco.
Thousands of former players and colleagues will come forward with stories of the many ways Walden affected — and most likely improved — their lives.
I will try to add a few that allowed me to see so many of the ways in which his endearing public persona was only a part of who he was.
Somehow, I got attached to a book project with Walden in 2004, writing up his tales from the WSU sidelines. For several months, I enjoyed the great privilege of hours-long phone chats when he recalled his time in Pullman.
The interviews all started with him answering the phone: “Hey, boyyyyy.” Two words, stretched out by his Mississippi drawl, setting the tone for guaranteed entertainment.
So many of his stories were ones that never made the sports pages, and, in my mind, drew a picture of a man of great dimension, so much deeper than his humble and self-deprecating approach ever allowed to reach the public.
Walden grew up in Aberdeen, Miss. His dad, with an eighth-grade education, ran a gas station, and his mother worked at a garment factory. Both sets of grandparents had key influences on him.
“I learned to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’,” Walden said. “I learned to go to church and be reverent. I was a rambunctious, wild-horse kind of a kid, and did I get spanked? Man, oh man, Did I need it? Yeah. I’ll tell you, those ‘time-out’ deals wouldn’t have worked on me.”
After two years in junior college, he became a two-year quarterback at Wyoming (Skyline Conference MVP), and was drafted by the Denver Broncos in the AFL and Cleveland of the NFL, but got a better offer from the B.C. Lions in the CFL, and played three seasons in Canada.
Back to Mississippi, he started coaching high school football, learning that “driving the bus, doing the team’s laundry after games, and lining the fields gave him important lessons in the value of doing the dirty work. “I can’t prove that going through all those things makes you a better college coach, but I can testify it makes you a more appreciative one.”
He built impressive credentials as an assistant on the National Championship (1971-72) staffs of Bob Devaney’s at Nebraska.
When elevated to head coach at WSU in 1978, Walden was the fourth head coach in four consecutive years as Jackie Sherill (Pittsburgh) and Warren Powers (Missouri) turned one-season stays in Pullman into better jobs.
Walden’s opening press conference in Pullman gave fans and boosters a glimpse of his approach. Straight-forward, funny, honest.
“On a sheet of posterboard, I wrote a message. “First answer: I plan to fulfill my contract,” Walden recalled. “A roomful of media pretty much keeled over laughing. But it was as truthful and honest and convincing as I could be. And, I’ll tell you what, it cut through a lot of the conversation.”
It was a golden age of WSU coaches for the media, Walden joining basketball’s George Raveling, baseball’s Bobo Brayton, and track and field’s John Chaplin as articulate voices for all seasons.
“We didn’t win all the games in the world, but, man, the events were sure fun,” he said.
Walden’s shooting from the lip got him in trouble a number of times with the administration, though.
“Sometimes I wished I wouldn’t have said some of the things that have gotten me in trouble over the years. But it wasn’t my fault, somebody was always calling and asking me for my opinion. Can’t blame me for that … they shouldn’t call me if they didn’t want to hear what I had to say.”
But Walden made it easy for anybody to call him at any hour. “I never had an unlisted phone number,” Walden said, it was always in the phone book, and it never seemed an inconvenience. “Mostly, it was calls from drunks at 1 or 2 in the morning asking me to settle bar bets.”
Although so notably outspoken, much of Walden’s influence went unseen.
A staffer once told me about a time when he was having troubles away from the job — divorce, money issues, housing. One day, Walden asked him why he seemed down, and the staffer sketched in his problems. Walden’s response: “If I loan you the down payment, can you get it back to me in a year?” The staffer agreed. Walden wrote him a check and never said another word about it.
Although coaching for a starting salary of $32,000, Walden was once offered a $5,000 raise by AD Sam Jankovich. Walden took it, but divided the entire $5,000 among his assistant coaches. None for himself.
He was asked if he ever had a player that he really had to coach hard, and who benefitted from his tough-love.
Mike Utley, Walden said. Utley was a hugely talented offensive lineman who loved social life to a degree matched only by aversion to school work. Walden sketched out the dire prospects if he didn’t find the right path. “I really got after him. I confess, I said some terrible things to get his attention. I never wanted to give up on anybody, but he was almost there.”
From that moment, Walden “never had a bit of trouble” with Utley.
Cashing in on his last chance and Walden’s motivation, Utley did reach the NFL, but was paralyzed by an injury in a game with the Detroit Lions.
“It broke my heart,” Walden said. “But I don’t know if I’ve ever been more proud of a man than Mike Utley. That terrible accident has never stopped him. To see how he competes against his circumstances … has been the most courageous thing. To me, that man is a hero.”
Walden talked about the ways coaching needed to encompass more than the game itself.
On Sunday afternoons after home games, he orchestrated self-improvement classes for his teams. He would bring in members of the community or university staffers to give seminars on etiquette in social situations, table manners (“You know, you don’t throw your napkin in the gravy at a nice restaurant”), how to dress for a job interviews, how to manage a check book and open bank accounts.
“Mostly, it was about how to be a gentleman, how to be respectful,” Walden said. “It was shocking how many guys later told me how much that meant to them.”
It took a long time, though, for Walden to wean himself off chewing tobacco — especially during televised games. “I know, that big lump of tobacco in my cheek looked stupid, but I’d been chewin’ since I was a little guy in Mississippi (starting at about 12). One thing, though, it usually caused everybody to give me a little space on the sideline.”
It’s hard to explain the magnitude of Walden’s achievements in Pullman, and how dramatically the expectations of the program were altered over that time.
In eight seasons, Walden won three Apple Cups, including a streak of three in four years. The 24-20 upset of the 2-win Cougars over the undefeated and No. 5-ranked Huskies in 1982 was one of the all-time WSU victories.
Along the way, he was offered jobs at Arizona State, Wisconsin and LSU. Bigger money and better programs. “I (had) told those people at WSU that I wasn’t going to cut and run at the first success we had. I was committed to that place.”
A coach making good on his promise in the face of massive raises? Shouldn’t somebody erect a historical marker?
After the 1986 Apple Cup loss at home, though, Walden had a feeling that “Washington State might need a change. That game convinced me that the team might benefit from playing for somebody else.”
As soon as he accepted the job at Iowa State, he felt he made a mistake. Two weeks after he took the ISU job, going to a team that was going to be sanctioned by the NCAA, he was offered the job at Arizona. He was committed, though.
“I coached there (ISU), I worked there, but that was a job; Washington State was a passion. Being a Cougar was a passion.”
During subsequent years as a radio color commentor on Coug games, he was an unapologetic homer.
“I’m pulling for Washington State all the way,” he said. “Am I a homer? Yep. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Walden promised stability and loyalty in his first press conference, and in his last one, he showed his depth of emotion.
Face awash in tears, he struggled to say goodbye.
“I loved Washington State so much it was pretty hard keeping my emotions together,” he said. “I was never ashamed of crying in front of people. I told the media not to make too much of it, though, because I cry just watching ‘Lassie’ reruns.”
Thousands of people who were touched by this one-of-a-kind coach are fighting through the same feelings as we try to absorb the news of his passing.
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