By Nicholas J. Cotsonika
Daily Sports Editor
In front and in charge, Lloyd Carr clenched his jaw so tightly as the team buses rolled up to Beaver Stadium three weeks ago, his temples began to throb. His cold eyes stared nowhere but forward in football coach fashion, perhaps looking farther ahead than a critic's eyes ever could.
Two hours from then, Carr's Wolverines, ranked fourth at the time, would give their most inspired performance of his three-year tenure. They would push and shove and dominate a second-ranked Nittany Lions team for a 34-8 victory, one that would rest
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| FILE PHOTO An avid reader, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr learned lessons from Theodore Roosevelt and the novel "Into Thin Air," which helped him restore Michigan's pride. |
The victory would give the Wolverines their first No. 1 ranking since 1990, and afterward, victories over Wisconsin and Ohio State would give them their first victories as the nation's top team since 1977. Beating Ohio State would put them in their first Rose Bowl since the 1992 season - with their first 11-0 record since 1971 - and would erase many memories of Michigan's four straight four-loss seasons.
None of that was known to the masses, though, when Carr took his team into State College. The Wolverines, who most had expected to finish fourth or fifth in the Big Ten, were a hopeful 8-0, but Carr still endured the questions that have cursed him since he took the job in May 1995. So many doubters calling themselves loyalists. So many critics. So many people Carr stared straight through, looking right past them, undaunted, to a goal only he could see.
And perhaps that is why Carr, whose only other head coaching experience came at Westland John Glenn High School in the mid-1970s, is now mentioned in the same sentence with Alabama legend Bear Bryant. Vision has made him a finalist for the Bryant Coach of the Year Award. And with a chance to win Michigan's first national championship since 1948 coming up in the Rose Bowl, the only question that remains is how far Carr's vision can reach.
When Carr isn't coaching, he likes to do two things: play golf and read. He loves to read, devouring almost anything. His favorite subjects, however, may be triumph and motivation, from which he has learned enough lessons to create his own fairy tale.
On Page C22 of the Michigan football playbook, among several other moving quotes by famous achievers, Carr inserted one by Theodore Roosevelt that is titled "The Critic." Roosevelt says "it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled." And Carr couldn't seem to agree more.
He got his job when the critics pointed out where the strong man, his best friend Gary Moeller, stumbled. Moeller had gotten drunk at a restaurant, and after causing a disturbance, he was arrested. Tapes of his comments were plastered all over by all types of media, leading to Moeller's firing soon afterward.
At the press conference that named him interim head coach, Carr fought back emotion and said he was "excited and confident" about the upcoming season. But then came the questions. Carr had never been a head coach before at the college level, everyone knew, and few gave him a chance to win the permanent position.
"Whatever the decision is," Carr said then, "I will back it 100 percent. I want what is best for Michigan."
Carr won his first five games but wasn't named head coach until before his 8-2 Wolverines prepared to take on Penn State, the team against which he would establish his program three years later. But then, he suffered a 27-17 home loss to the Lions on the way to a four-loss season.
The stumble drew fire from the media and fans, who called for his head often. And when his team blew a 16-0 fourth-quarter lead to lose at Northwestern and later lost at lowly Purdue, the fury only intensified. He was left with the comfort of Roosevelt's words, which told him "the credit belongs to the man actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood."
Carr's face was marred by the media as he stumbled to another four-loss season, and he was left to defend himself and his players. When a reporter commented that his anger with a certain question revealed a "sore spot," Carr fired back, "That's your opinion!"
When this season began, Carr was called paranoid for his zest with the press. He read everything, and everyone knew it. He even entered The Michigan Daily's offices on two separate occasions to discuss stories run in the paper.
"He just cares," said quarterback Brian Griese, whose erratic play in 1995 and breaking of a bar window in 1996 earned him media attention and vigorous defense from Carr. "Sometimes people don't understand how much he does care."
In between newspaper articles during last summer's soul-searching, however, Carr read the novel "Into Thin Air." He was so moved by the mountain-climbing story, he even invited one of the book's subjects to speak to his team and gave each player a climber's ice pick - all of which hang from the ceiling in the team meeting room - to help with their own mental climb.
One dangerous step at a time, that's how Carr decided to approach this season of cracks and crevices, which were named Notre Dame and Penn State and Ohio State.
And now the summit is in sight.
"It goes back to the past," Carr said. "One year ago, we learned a terrible lesson (in letdown losses) that may turn out to be not-so-terrible for the guys that learn from it. We are a very mature football team."
With a very mature coach.
Perhaps the firestorm of criticism was a baptism of sorts for Carr, who now is accepted as worthy successor to Fielding H. Yost and Bo Schembechler. "It is the way the profession goes," Carr said after the Penn State victory, which established him and his program the way Schembechler's storied 1969 victory in his first season over Ohio State and his mentor, Woody Hayes, established his. Perhaps it showed he could scale the cliffs with the big boys.
"Success is never final, and this is part of the climb," Carr said afterward. "I try to maintain focus on what I'm
doing and do it to the best of my ability. If you can prevent yourself from being distracted, then you have a much better chance of being successful. Winning is a big part of coaching at any level, not that that is right, but that is how it is."
Perhaps that was what Carr was thinking about as his bus climbed though the Nittany Mountains not long ago, up and up and up, with the critics far behind, on his way to an uncertain fate in what is now a certain place: Pasadena. Then again, it might have been Roosevelt, there on Page C22, and the words that helped Carr when he wasn't on top:
The credit goes to the man "who at best, in the end, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
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