Rick Neuheisel's redemption, his road back to UCLA and respectability, began with a phone call and a plea.
It was the summer of 2003 and Neuheisel had recently been fired as football coach at the University of Washington for lying about his involvement in a high-stakes basketball betting pool. He'd gone from hero, a Rose Bowl winning coach, to villain. There was no firm ground to stand on, this was purgatory.
Angry, unsure, and feeling lost with no team to coach, he needed to steer his emotions in the right direction. Some suggested he put coaching in the rearview mirror. Some said that with his charm, he'd have a fine career in television. But that afternoon, all Neuheisel wanted was to coach again.
So he picked up a phone and called Mark Haley, the venerable coach at Rainier Beach High, a tough campus in the hardest corner of Seattle.
At first, Haley thought it was a prank. He'd hardly talked to Neuheisel before.
This was no prank. This was a petition from a man looking to find his way again. "Coach Haley, can I come down there and be a volunteer assistant?"
Neuheisel would end up getting the job and holding it for two seasons. From there he'd move to the NFL, becoming the offensive coordinator in Baltimore, and he'd achieve a measure of vindication for his firing, receiving a $4.7-million settlement of a wrongful termination suit against the NCAA and Washington.
Last month, finally, he returned at 46 to the campus where he became famous as a player. Despite all of those who said it would never happen, despite those who said that with his past it never should, Neuheisel landed his dream job: head coach at UCLA.
Funny, isn't it, how fate works? Neuheisel's story might well have turned out differently had he not made that call and had Mark Haley not responded as he did.
"If the principal and the teachers agree," Haley recalls saying over the phone, "we would love to have you."
Back then, word spread quickly that a new quarterback coach would soon be plying the sidelines at Rainier Beach, a campus of roughly 600 kids, almost all of them minorities, most of them poor.
The betting pool and his firing had tarnished Huskies football. In Seattle, that's like taking a hammer to the Taj Mahal. So, parents wrung their hands. The Rainier Beach athletic director was threatened. Commentators heaped their scorn.
