Indiana University Athletics
GRAHAM: Mallory was the Best Sort of Winner
5/26/2018 5:26:00 PM | Football
By: Andy Graham
IUHoosiers.com
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Perched in a rickety Purdue press box at Ross-Ade Stadium and peering down to the Indiana sideline, I started to see some familiar faces from years past.
It was Nov. 23, 1996. Indiana and the host Boilermakers were embroiled in a competitive Old Oaken Bucket battle that everybody knew marked Bill Mallory's final game coaching the Hoosiers.
And IU's sideline was filling up with folks from previous Mallory teams. The great Anthony Thompson was there. Enough big men to fill out an entire offensive line arrived. Before long every Indiana bowl team Mallory had coached was represented.
I told my colleague sitting beside me, Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Gary McCann, that I was heading for the field at halftime to start collecting quotes from those former players.
I found Thompson, the Hall of Fame running back who by my reckoning should have won the 1989 Heisman Trophy, and he was fired up.
"Coach Mallory – he's still The Man,'' Thompson began. "When I saw him in the locker room, before the game, I saw he hasn't lost a thing. He still has the fire. It left me speechless. There is still plenty of fuel left in that tank.
"Everybody on this sideline, players old and new, would just so dearly love to see Coach Mallory and this team leave here today with that Bucket. He's going out with a lot of pride. He still hasn't said much about himself during this whole situation, because his whole focus is on these players and this program.''
The Boilermakers held a 16-10 halftime lead when Thompson said that.
They wouldn't keep it.
That Indiana team wasn't about to let the man responsible for more IU football wins than anybody, before or since, leave that field with anything other than a resounding victory.
The second half was all Indiana. The final was 33-16.
As the Hoosiers filtered down toward the south end zone where Indiana fans were congregated to share in the post-game glow, I followed along, still garnering quotes.
The area became crowded with celebrants. Everybody was packed like sardines as the throng finally began shifting toward the IU locker room.
As we inched slowly along, I brushed up against a player's shoulder pad. I looked up and saw it belonged to senior defensive end Nate Davis. And atop Davis' opposite shoulder pad was Bill Mallory.
Mallory was being carried above the crowd. Sitting snugly in his lap was the Old Oaken Bucket, cradled in his arms. Tears were streaming down his face. He looked down, saw me, and smiled at me through the tears.
And as memory conjures up that vivid image, it is again time for tears.
Mallory, always so brimming with life, had a fall Tuesday that left his brain bleeding. By Friday he was gone, just five days shy of his 83rd birthday.
"You somehow never think, never consider, that a person like that, so strong and vibrant, will no longer be with us," Mark Hagen, current IU assistant coach and co-captain of Mallory's 1991 Copper Bowl champions, said Friday night. "Obviously, we're all human and all mortal, but it's tough. Because you want him to be there with us forever.
"You love the time you spend with him. You love the lessons he teaches you throughout your time with him. You love his family, because they're all cut out of the same mold. And you're thankful to the family for allowing him to be with us, to share him with so many thousands of young men. Sharing just an awesome, awesome person."
For Mallory, it was always about sharing and about people. Very much including the young people entrusted to his care.
"People ask me what I miss about it, and it's the players," Mallory said last fall during an interview to discuss coaching. "That's what it comes down to. "It's a people business, and the hub is the players. All of us coaches, that was first and foremost, because you're raising them up. And you want them to be good, quality, productive people – not only when you've got them, but after they leave."
Mallory got a clear notion about that when his father, Guy, took him on a recruiting visit to Miami (Ohio) in 1952 to meet coach Ara Parseghian.
"Just as when Ara said to my dad, 'Give your son to me for four years, and I'll return him a man,'" Mallory recalled. "And that's just exactly the thing you're doing.
"That's what our program's focus was, to mold the total person, to help produce good people. That meant they were going to succeed on and off the field, and succeed after they left. And the first goal was always to get an education and to graduate. I was adamant about that."
Mallory did pretty well regarding secondary goals, too.
His first IU team battled but finished 0-11. His second team went 4-7. But take away those two building years plus his final two years coaching in Bloomington and here is what Indiana football did in the intervening nine years under Mallory:
"The football part was awesome," Hagen said. "And he was as tough and intense as anybody you'd come across. The old cliché that we'd all have run through a brick wall for him is true in his case. When your path would cross with Coach Mallory, it was like going to the gas station and filling up your tank. He had that presence about him. You'd get fired up.
"Everything he epitomized in football – all the success and the be-15-minutes-early and lock-your-jaw stuff -- was great. But take all that away, you've still got all those people he shaped, and the type of human beings that they became."
Mallory coached many great players. But he was egalitarian. The walk-on reserve mattered as much as the scholarship All-American.
"From 1 to 125, however many players there were on the roster, walk-ons included, it didn't matter if you were a starter or on the scout team," Hagen said. "He loved you. He was going to push you. He was going to drive you to be the very best you could be. And nobody was above anybody else.
"When you hear about 'Mallory Men' from all the places he's been, all the guys at Miami, Colorado, Northern Illinois and IU, there are so many success stories, young men whose lives were shaped by him. He was a father figure away from home for so many, myself included."
The paternal Mallory showed his young acolytes what it was to be a man off the field, too. And did so without overt ego.
"You look nowadays and some people put themselves up on pedestals in our profession," Hagen said. "That was never him. I just think the life that he led – us players just watching how he interacted, how he treated people, and I mean everybody. Not just players and staff, but the academic people, the trainers, the custodians. Just how he carried himself.
"It's so easy to get wrapped up in the everyday job of coaching. He never, ever got just so locked into one thing that he forgot the people."
Including the people in his family, despite the often daunting time demands and professional pressures inherent to coaching. Mallory had a lot of help in that regard from his wonderful wife, Ellie, who didn't let losses linger in the household and was a founding member of The American Football Coaches Wives Association, an eminently successful support group.
And so even when IU fired its winningest football coach in the middle of the 1996 season, the Mallorys handled it with grace, class and composure. And other topics dominated their dinner-table discussions.
"You don't carry it over to your family," Mallory said last fall. "I'm not trying to say I'm perfect about it, but you can't roll over with it and let it affect your family and those around you.
"Sure, there was disappointment there, but I really worked on flushing it. And I told Ellie, 'We're going to stay right here in Bloomington. We love this place. We're going to make a life right here.' And that's exactly what we did."
How many prominent head coaches and their spouses would choose that approach, regarding the place and the university where, many would attest, a coaching career was prematurely truncated?
Mallory not only stayed in Bloomington from 1996 on. Among a great many other things, he also:
• Organized football camps under the auspices of IU Health/Bloomington Hospital for youth coaches, emphasizing safety and fundamentals.
• Was a fund-raiser and speaker for the Boys and Girls Club, the Children's Organ Transplant Association, The Salvation Army, First United Methodist Church, Phi Kappa Tau and Jill's House.
• Served as an advisor to Bloomington's Parks and Recreation Department and was a member of the IU Health Bloomington Hospital Health and Wellness Committee.
• Worked in several unofficial capacities to help promote IU football and IU athletics.
• Kissed a pig – not a pigskin, a pig – at the Monroe County Fair as part of a fund-raiser.
"You're really talking about a guy who was — in the phrase I've used over the years — 'unceremoniously dumped' after having done so much for football here and for the university," Kit Klingelhoffer, former IU sports information director, told the Herald-Times before Mallory was inducted into the Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame in 2016. "I don't want to pile on people who made that decision who are now deceased, but if anybody had a right to be upset or bitter, in my opinion, it was Bill Mallory.
"Instead, to remain in the community and retain ties to the university and to contribute as he has, is another sign of what a remarkable man he is. He and Ellie made no bones about it. They chose to make this their home and they have contributed so much. All the organizations Bill has raised money for – frankly, I don't know anybody he's said 'no' to – can attest to that. Most people know him as a football coach, but he's much more than that."
People took note. Thompson, a reverend along with his duties as an IU associate athletic director, used the word "revered" about how Bloomingtonians and IU people felt about Mallory. Not just for the football. But for the life beyond football.
Hagen feels current IU coach Tom Allen is "cut out of the same cloth in a lot of respects," and Allen paid tribute to Mallory this way Friday:
"Coach Mallory is not the greatest coach in the history of IU Football because of all the games that he won. It is because of the kind of man that he was and the kind of person that he was in the hearts of his players. He did a tremendous job molding them into men. In my mind, he is and will always be what Indiana University Football is all about."
Maryland offensive coordinator Matt Canada, a grad assistant for Mallory at IU when Hagen was concluding his Hoosier playing career, said this about Mallory via Twitter:
"When it is all said and done, the goal is to have impacted someone's life. Coach Mallory impacted so many in more ways than anyone could imagine. He was the standard for how to live."
Yes, Mallory won a lot of football games, going 168-129-4 (.565) overall in 27 seasons as a head coach. And he was always grateful to win that last one up at Purdue. He kept a photograph of that post-game scene, the coach in possession of the Bucket, in his office.
But his ultimate earthly victory is in the exemplary way players such as Thompson and Hagen and other "Mallory Men" have led their lives.
So much of that carries over, through succeeding generations, increasing exponentially.
Wisdom, work-ethic, integrity, kindness, resilience, love of neighbors and love of life. Dealing with both ups and downs with class. All of that lives on, passed along within Mallory's extended football family from one to the next, through children and grandchildren – and, in Mallory's case, already one great-grandchild.
A great man has left us better for having known him, those of us lucky enough to have interacted with him.
He left what parts of the world he touched better.
He helped fashion and foster great people.
That sort of legacy lasts.
It doesn't always come with a Bucket.
But it is the best sort of W there is.
IUHoosiers.com
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Perched in a rickety Purdue press box at Ross-Ade Stadium and peering down to the Indiana sideline, I started to see some familiar faces from years past.
It was Nov. 23, 1996. Indiana and the host Boilermakers were embroiled in a competitive Old Oaken Bucket battle that everybody knew marked Bill Mallory's final game coaching the Hoosiers.
And IU's sideline was filling up with folks from previous Mallory teams. The great Anthony Thompson was there. Enough big men to fill out an entire offensive line arrived. Before long every Indiana bowl team Mallory had coached was represented.
I told my colleague sitting beside me, Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Gary McCann, that I was heading for the field at halftime to start collecting quotes from those former players.
I found Thompson, the Hall of Fame running back who by my reckoning should have won the 1989 Heisman Trophy, and he was fired up.
"Coach Mallory – he's still The Man,'' Thompson began. "When I saw him in the locker room, before the game, I saw he hasn't lost a thing. He still has the fire. It left me speechless. There is still plenty of fuel left in that tank.
"Everybody on this sideline, players old and new, would just so dearly love to see Coach Mallory and this team leave here today with that Bucket. He's going out with a lot of pride. He still hasn't said much about himself during this whole situation, because his whole focus is on these players and this program.''
The Boilermakers held a 16-10 halftime lead when Thompson said that.
They wouldn't keep it.
That Indiana team wasn't about to let the man responsible for more IU football wins than anybody, before or since, leave that field with anything other than a resounding victory.
The second half was all Indiana. The final was 33-16.
As the Hoosiers filtered down toward the south end zone where Indiana fans were congregated to share in the post-game glow, I followed along, still garnering quotes.
The area became crowded with celebrants. Everybody was packed like sardines as the throng finally began shifting toward the IU locker room.
As we inched slowly along, I brushed up against a player's shoulder pad. I looked up and saw it belonged to senior defensive end Nate Davis. And atop Davis' opposite shoulder pad was Bill Mallory.
Mallory was being carried above the crowd. Sitting snugly in his lap was the Old Oaken Bucket, cradled in his arms. Tears were streaming down his face. He looked down, saw me, and smiled at me through the tears.
And as memory conjures up that vivid image, it is again time for tears.
Mallory, always so brimming with life, had a fall Tuesday that left his brain bleeding. By Friday he was gone, just five days shy of his 83rd birthday.
"You somehow never think, never consider, that a person like that, so strong and vibrant, will no longer be with us," Mark Hagen, current IU assistant coach and co-captain of Mallory's 1991 Copper Bowl champions, said Friday night. "Obviously, we're all human and all mortal, but it's tough. Because you want him to be there with us forever.
"You love the time you spend with him. You love the lessons he teaches you throughout your time with him. You love his family, because they're all cut out of the same mold. And you're thankful to the family for allowing him to be with us, to share him with so many thousands of young men. Sharing just an awesome, awesome person."
For Mallory, it was always about sharing and about people. Very much including the young people entrusted to his care.
"People ask me what I miss about it, and it's the players," Mallory said last fall during an interview to discuss coaching. "That's what it comes down to. "It's a people business, and the hub is the players. All of us coaches, that was first and foremost, because you're raising them up. And you want them to be good, quality, productive people – not only when you've got them, but after they leave."
Mallory got a clear notion about that when his father, Guy, took him on a recruiting visit to Miami (Ohio) in 1952 to meet coach Ara Parseghian.
"Just as when Ara said to my dad, 'Give your son to me for four years, and I'll return him a man,'" Mallory recalled. "And that's just exactly the thing you're doing.
"That's what our program's focus was, to mold the total person, to help produce good people. That meant they were going to succeed on and off the field, and succeed after they left. And the first goal was always to get an education and to graduate. I was adamant about that."
Mallory did pretty well regarding secondary goals, too.
His first IU team battled but finished 0-11. His second team went 4-7. But take away those two building years plus his final two years coaching in Bloomington and here is what Indiana football did in the intervening nine years under Mallory:
- Six bowl appearances (which were much harder to come by then, and representing more than half of Indiana's all-time bowl bids).
- A 60-42-1 overall record.
- A 36-35-1 Big Ten mark.
- The only IU football campaign ever featuring wins over both Michigan and Ohio State in 1987.
- Consecutive wins over Ohio State.
- A second-place Big Ten finish and pair of Top 20 finishes in the national rankings.
"The football part was awesome," Hagen said. "And he was as tough and intense as anybody you'd come across. The old cliché that we'd all have run through a brick wall for him is true in his case. When your path would cross with Coach Mallory, it was like going to the gas station and filling up your tank. He had that presence about him. You'd get fired up.
"Everything he epitomized in football – all the success and the be-15-minutes-early and lock-your-jaw stuff -- was great. But take all that away, you've still got all those people he shaped, and the type of human beings that they became."
Mallory coached many great players. But he was egalitarian. The walk-on reserve mattered as much as the scholarship All-American.
"From 1 to 125, however many players there were on the roster, walk-ons included, it didn't matter if you were a starter or on the scout team," Hagen said. "He loved you. He was going to push you. He was going to drive you to be the very best you could be. And nobody was above anybody else.
"When you hear about 'Mallory Men' from all the places he's been, all the guys at Miami, Colorado, Northern Illinois and IU, there are so many success stories, young men whose lives were shaped by him. He was a father figure away from home for so many, myself included."
The paternal Mallory showed his young acolytes what it was to be a man off the field, too. And did so without overt ego.
"You look nowadays and some people put themselves up on pedestals in our profession," Hagen said. "That was never him. I just think the life that he led – us players just watching how he interacted, how he treated people, and I mean everybody. Not just players and staff, but the academic people, the trainers, the custodians. Just how he carried himself.
"It's so easy to get wrapped up in the everyday job of coaching. He never, ever got just so locked into one thing that he forgot the people."
Including the people in his family, despite the often daunting time demands and professional pressures inherent to coaching. Mallory had a lot of help in that regard from his wonderful wife, Ellie, who didn't let losses linger in the household and was a founding member of The American Football Coaches Wives Association, an eminently successful support group.
And so even when IU fired its winningest football coach in the middle of the 1996 season, the Mallorys handled it with grace, class and composure. And other topics dominated their dinner-table discussions.
"You don't carry it over to your family," Mallory said last fall. "I'm not trying to say I'm perfect about it, but you can't roll over with it and let it affect your family and those around you.
"Sure, there was disappointment there, but I really worked on flushing it. And I told Ellie, 'We're going to stay right here in Bloomington. We love this place. We're going to make a life right here.' And that's exactly what we did."
How many prominent head coaches and their spouses would choose that approach, regarding the place and the university where, many would attest, a coaching career was prematurely truncated?
Mallory not only stayed in Bloomington from 1996 on. Among a great many other things, he also:
• Organized football camps under the auspices of IU Health/Bloomington Hospital for youth coaches, emphasizing safety and fundamentals.
• Was a fund-raiser and speaker for the Boys and Girls Club, the Children's Organ Transplant Association, The Salvation Army, First United Methodist Church, Phi Kappa Tau and Jill's House.
• Served as an advisor to Bloomington's Parks and Recreation Department and was a member of the IU Health Bloomington Hospital Health and Wellness Committee.
• Worked in several unofficial capacities to help promote IU football and IU athletics.
• Kissed a pig – not a pigskin, a pig – at the Monroe County Fair as part of a fund-raiser.
"You're really talking about a guy who was — in the phrase I've used over the years — 'unceremoniously dumped' after having done so much for football here and for the university," Kit Klingelhoffer, former IU sports information director, told the Herald-Times before Mallory was inducted into the Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame in 2016. "I don't want to pile on people who made that decision who are now deceased, but if anybody had a right to be upset or bitter, in my opinion, it was Bill Mallory.
"Instead, to remain in the community and retain ties to the university and to contribute as he has, is another sign of what a remarkable man he is. He and Ellie made no bones about it. They chose to make this their home and they have contributed so much. All the organizations Bill has raised money for – frankly, I don't know anybody he's said 'no' to – can attest to that. Most people know him as a football coach, but he's much more than that."
People took note. Thompson, a reverend along with his duties as an IU associate athletic director, used the word "revered" about how Bloomingtonians and IU people felt about Mallory. Not just for the football. But for the life beyond football.
Hagen feels current IU coach Tom Allen is "cut out of the same cloth in a lot of respects," and Allen paid tribute to Mallory this way Friday:
"Coach Mallory is not the greatest coach in the history of IU Football because of all the games that he won. It is because of the kind of man that he was and the kind of person that he was in the hearts of his players. He did a tremendous job molding them into men. In my mind, he is and will always be what Indiana University Football is all about."
Maryland offensive coordinator Matt Canada, a grad assistant for Mallory at IU when Hagen was concluding his Hoosier playing career, said this about Mallory via Twitter:
"When it is all said and done, the goal is to have impacted someone's life. Coach Mallory impacted so many in more ways than anyone could imagine. He was the standard for how to live."
Yes, Mallory won a lot of football games, going 168-129-4 (.565) overall in 27 seasons as a head coach. And he was always grateful to win that last one up at Purdue. He kept a photograph of that post-game scene, the coach in possession of the Bucket, in his office.
But his ultimate earthly victory is in the exemplary way players such as Thompson and Hagen and other "Mallory Men" have led their lives.
So much of that carries over, through succeeding generations, increasing exponentially.
Wisdom, work-ethic, integrity, kindness, resilience, love of neighbors and love of life. Dealing with both ups and downs with class. All of that lives on, passed along within Mallory's extended football family from one to the next, through children and grandchildren – and, in Mallory's case, already one great-grandchild.
A great man has left us better for having known him, those of us lucky enough to have interacted with him.
He left what parts of the world he touched better.
He helped fashion and foster great people.
That sort of legacy lasts.
It doesn't always come with a Bucket.
But it is the best sort of W there is.
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