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Ready to rumble

EVERY MORNING, LONG before classes begin, Jerry Glanville walks into his modest PSU office and boots up his computer. He can hardly wait to see the screen image: a wide-angle photo of a Viking football game taken before he came to town. The PGE Park stadium lights glisten; the stands frame the action.

Quickly, like a kid at a candy machine, Glanville clicks a few keys. Out of the computer speakers comes a penetrating howl.

“That’s us,” Glanville says, his eyes now twice as wide. “That’s the Viking horn.”

It’s meant to unnerve or inspire, depending on whose side you’re on.

He cranks up the volume. “Here we come ... I’m talkin’ about the Port ... land ... State ... Vikings,” his voice goes low and slow as he holds the vibration of the final syllables for effect.

Glanville smiles and hits the return key again. And again.

Some people start their day repeating affirmations. Glanville blows his Viking horn.

Glanville—known as football’s Man in Black, remembered for his successas an NFL coach in Atlanta and Houston, regarded as at least a little bit crazy—has PSU fans buzzing. His decision to leave the defensive coordinator job at University of Hawaii in February and become the Vikings’ head coach changed PSU athletics overnight.

More than 500 season tickets were sold in just two days after Glanville’s hiring, and sales are expected to triple or quadruple over last year before the home opener game September 8 against University of California, Davis.

And Glanville is ready for it. He is 65, with the drive, zest, and swagger of a teenager. The man is different.

“Very different,” he says, sitting up straight and immediately slipping from singular to plural. “That’s the way we are. We’re not going to change. This is who we are and what we do.”

TERI MARIANI, WHILE she was interim athletic director, was the first Portland State official to contact Glanville and check him out. When PSU head coach Tim Walsh left to become offensive coordinator at West Point, Mariani called former Viking coach Darrel “Mouse” Davis and half-jokingly asked if he would be interested in the vacancy. Davis, who was an assistant coach at Hawaii, told her no, but said he knew someone who might be. A couple of days later, a résumé arrived by fax from Glanville.

“I thought maybe Mouse was playing a joke on me, so I actually waited a couple of hours until I called Jerry,” Mariani says. “Jerry assured me that he was really interested, that his wife wanted to get off the island, and that he’d heard a lot about Portland and PSU.

“So we arranged for him to come interview. I met him at the airport and stuck out my hand. He gave me a big bear hug like we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. Right away, I knew he was my kind of guy.”

She also quickly discovered that Glanville loves to talk and tell stories from his anything-but-typical life. For instance, he’s driven on NASCAR tracks against the big daddies of stock-car racing. “Got a photo of me and Dale Earnhardt, Sr., coming out of Turn 3 in Atlanta,” he says. “My last race was at Michigan, and we were runnin’ top four, top five all day. On that two-mile oval, you run 191 miles per hour all day. Runnin’ 191 miles per hour is almost as good as bein’ on the kickoff team.”

He suffered severe burns in one race, but so what?

“I was a French fry. They took skin out of my legs and put it in my arms. It’s just part of racin’,” he says, casually. “You get back in the car and go again.”

He has long been on a first-name basis with the kings and queens of country music, from Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson to the late Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. He also loves the blues and Motown and spends a lot of time with John Mellencamp and Jerry Jeff Walker. “Songwriters interest me,” he says. “They can tell a total, complete story in three minutes.”

Glanville’s life story is a bit longer than that.

HE GREW UP in Perrysburg, Ohio, with his mother and older brother, Richard. His parents divorced when he was young.

He starred in both football and baseball as a boy. At Northern Michigan University, he stuck to football while majoring in physical education.

After briefly teaching P.E., history, and driver’s education at a high school in Ohio, he got his first college coaching job in 1967 as an assistant at Western Kentucky.

From 1968 to 1973, he was at Georgia Tech, developing a reputation for coaching defense and stealing recruits from higher-profile schools. Glanville says he turned down job offers from legendary coaches George Allen (Washington Redskins), Paul Brown (Cincinnati Bengals), Paul “Bear” Bryant (Alabama) and Woody Hayes (Ohio State).

“I never thought I’d leave Georgia Tech,” he says. But in 1977, he was recruited by the Atlanta Falcons as defensive back coach.

He lasted in the NFL through 1993, spending four-plus seasons as head coach of the Houston Oilers and four seasons as head coach of the Falcons. Atlanta fired him in ’93 after his second consecutive 6-10 season. He knew nothing about TV, but Fox, which had just gained the rights to NFL games, enticed him and another rookie analyst, John Madden, into the broadcasting booth.

A year later, Kansas City Chiefs coach Marty Schottenheimer wanted to hire Glanville as an assistant, but Glanville told him he couldn’t go back on his word to stay with Fox. He never got another shot at the NFL. “In my heart, if I had to do it over again, I probably should have gone to Kansas City,” he says. “It’s funny how one yes or no changes the whole equation.”

Glanville says he won’t try to use Portland State as a steppingstone to something bigger. And retirement doesn’t even sound like an option with him. “A teacher never quits teaching, a preacher never quits preaching. You are what you are,” he says.

GLANVILLE HAD BOUNDLESS energy then and still has it now.

“I used to ask my mom, ‘What did you do to make me like this, that I’m different, that every day I’m going 100 miles per hour?’ She told me she didn’t do one thing, that from Day One it was wide open. And you know, it’s never been shut down.”

That’s the way he coaches, and that’s how he expects his teams to play: wide open. His teams play hard and hit harder.

“I’ve never had one player in my entire coaching career talk back to me or say they weren’t going to do something I asked them to do. That’s because I’m a teacher, and all our players here at PSU will know that.”

Glanville appeared to have it made in the shade in Honolulu during the past two years. The Rainbow Warriors, coached by former PSU star quarterback June Jones, are one of the nation’s winningest teams. He didn’t have the pressure of the top job. The fans are rabid. The climate is soothing to older muscles and bones.

“Forget Hawaii. It’s hard to walk away from a team that may win every game,” Glanville says. “But this here is a sleeping giant, if we get the whole city of Portland to grab our rope and pull in the same direction.

“We’re gonna have a lot of fun making this program special.”

A brief biography of Glanville’s career.

Steve Brandon is the sports editor at the Portland Tribune newspaper

Mouse Returns

THE CITY, the traffic, the campus, the athletic facilities—just about everything in Portland and at Portland State has changed immensely since Darrel “Mouse” Davis last coached Vikings football in 1980.

“I haven’t really changed, though,” says Davis.

“Neither has the offense.”

Davis and his run-and-shoot style—pass first, ask questions later—worked when he was head coach at the Park Blocks from 1975 to 1980, and he believes it will again now that he is the offensive coordinator under Jerry Glanville.

“It takes a year or two to build it up, to get your players to understand the offense and execute it,” says Davis, 74. “I’d like to get it really rolling before I leave.”

THINGS WERE SNOWBALLING in 1980, when Davis’ Viks, which included quarterback Neil Lomax, went 8-3, beat Montana for the third straight year (20-0) and averaged 49.2 points per game. Davis then took the run-and-shoot on what amounted to a quarter-century tour of North America, coaching at major colleges and in the NFL, USFL, Arena Football, and Canada.

Critics used to say teams couldn’t win in the pros or at top colleges using his offense—that they needed to rely primarily on running the football. But Davis’ success at various stops vindicated his four-wide receiver, aerial approach. At all levels, the game is much more wide open than it was 27 years ago.

“There was no question in my mind from the get-go that football had to evolve this way,” he says. “The way it has would indicate that maybe we weren’t totally screwed up after all.”

DAVIS GREW UP in Independence, Oregon, and graduated from Western Oregon in 1955, lettering in football, basketball, and baseball. He was a 4-foot-10 quarterback/halfback in football and shortstop in baseball when his older brother, Don, gave him the nickname “Mouse.”

Davis returns to Portland State after three years at University of Hawaii as an assistant coach under June Jones, once his star quarterback at PSU. Glanville was the defensive coordinator at Hawaii the last two seasons.

“We got along well at Hawaii,” Davis says, “but neither of us was the head coach. Maybe that will change the overall situation, but I think we’ll be fine here together. Jerry’s definitely high-octane, go-go-go, and he does a great job with the defense. I’ll have control of the offense.”

Davis says without hesitation that if he hadn’t been a football coach, “I probably would have been a nuclear physicist,” waiting for a quizzical look or a laugh. “OK, maybe a basketball coach.”

A succinct biography of Davis’ career.