Post by Kampy on Dec 9, 2005 13:05:06 GMT -5
www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=38&u_sid=2079361&u_rnd=4062892
Husker coach offers a view from the top
BY DIRK CHATELAIN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
A beautiful day.
"I used to think I could control everything," says Nebraska volleyball coach John Cook, who is now nearing 50 and took over the NU program in 2000. "The longer I coach I realize I have less control."
Patches of white snow cover granite peaks, daring, defying the summer sun. A motionless blanket of water glistens in the distance, matching, mirroring the blue sky above. The future national championship coach stops to soak it in. To enjoy the moment.
Ansel Adams, eat your heart out.
The hiker is 24. He is a professional athlete. He will soon be a husband. He will soon be a history teacher, coaching volleyball only so he can move to the gridiron, his true love, after a few years. The NU Coliseum is nowhere on his horizon this 1980 afternoon.
He is climbing up and through the Sierra Nevadas outside South Lake Tahoe, Calif., more than 7,000 feet above the beach back home. Past roaring white waterfalls and splendid green softwoods. Past sharp, brown boulders that will bask in the sunshine long after his red blood stains them.
A beautiful day, John Cook says.
"An awesome day."
* * *
A wretched day.
A snuggly dressed Southern Californian lumbers up the stairs, that scarred left leg planting and bending and lifting, past the championship photos and the Pearl Jam poster on his door, into his cramped office on a December 2005 morning. He plops down in his chair.
John Cook, Nebraska's sixth-year volleyball coach, is a quirky teacher. An obsessive motivator. A stickler for all things detailed. On this morning, he's just cold.
"It's so cold it hurts."
Hurts worse than stuff blocking Bill Walton on the beach courts back home? Maybe. Worse than the 2001 collapse, the one that changed him as a coach? Probably not. Worse than the accident that nearly killed him 25 years ago? No way.
He looks much younger than his 49 years, a speckle of gray as hard to find as losses on his resume, his eyes still steely like they were when he scared young girls to tears. Three days from learning whether his Huskers are destined for a final four, Cook says he's calm.
"Let the big dogs run; that's what it's about."
Cook was never planning to be here, just as he didn't plan that nine-week hospital stay. He wanted to be Tom Osborne, not Terry Pettit. Volleyball? Nebraska? He knew nothing about either. But sometimes the trail parts from its original course. Sometimes the fall preludes the greatest of ascents.
It's an idea Cook, a control freak even by coaching standards, has warmed to. He's tasted pain, defeat, sorrow. He's rallied with a work ethic those close to him say can't be taught, lifting storied Nebraska volleyball to unprecedented levels.
"All the great ones are a little tweaked," said Diane Mendenhall, NU's former director of volleyball operations for four years under Cook. "They have something special. It's true of him, too."
Maybe his mom was right then. Maybe when she walked into the hospital that summer day and saw her broken son, maybe she knew.
* * *
They had hiked all afternoon. No food. Little water. Twenty-somethings with bronze tans still convinced vulnerability was a stranger to them. John Cook was with his girlfriend, Wendy, the one whom he'd one day marry. Brother David Cook and his girlfriend were there, too.
They marched up from Cascade Lake. Up to Cascade Falls. Up further. John's legs were weary. His head, too.
"I wasn't thinking clearly."
The brothers were pulling rocks, trying to uproot them from the cliff top. Trying to start them down the mountain so they'd explode at the bottom like a bomb and all would laugh.
It was about 6 p.m.
After a half dozen explosions, John planted his feet and pulled on a big one, his back toward the cliff. The rock didn't move. He stood. His mind lost control. His vision blurred. His body fell backward, plunging down the cliff like a spiked volleyball.
Faster and faster, still faster. More than 45 miles per hour. A rocky ledge deflected him and snagged his baseball cap. He landed in a manzanita bush some 75 feet below his girlfriend, his brother.
"I thought for sure he was dead," David said.
* * *
John Cook grew up on a dying lemon ranch nine miles from the Mexican border. He was the high-school quarterback who sat in classes and sketched formations and plays. He wanted to coach football - still does someday. During college, he got a job helping at Coronado High. He was promoted to defensive coordinator his second year.
"I was loving it."
But he didn't have a teaching job and coaching didn't pay the bills. Cook applied for a job at a small, private college prep school. They offered him the gig on one condition: coach girls volleyball.
"I said, 'Well, wait a second, I want to coach football.' I know nothing about indoor volleyball. Nothing. I don't know how to rotate, the rules; nothing."
Cook knew well the two-on-two beach game. He had moved to an apartment a stone's throw from Mission Beach after two years on the University of San Diego basketball team. He started playing every afternoon. Every weekend: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
He and David worked their way up the ranks, battling Karch Kiraly and Sinjin Smith as beach volleyball, still in its grass roots, blossomed. They traveled up and down the Pacific coast playing in summer tournaments. A few times, NBA center Bill Walton, who had a house in San Diego, came down to the beach to play.
"He was terrible," Cook says.
Nothing on the beach helped Cook grasp indoor volleyball, though. He went to a library and checked out a volleyball book. He started driving to Orange County once a week to study a coach. That first year, his team went to state playoffs, where they'd never been.
"I was coaching them just like football basically. This is back in the '80s when girls were just starting to play competitive sports. There was somebody crying every day. I'm just doing this until I can coach football."
But coaching is coaching, he says. And Cook became the first coach to ever lead a San Diego team to a state title. Volleyball hooked him.
* * *
Just let me die.
His face was cut up. His jaw split open. His body battered. Bone from his left leg was breaking through the skin. Blood trailed down the mountain. Wendy ran and found a fisherman on Cascade Lake. The man happened to be a sheriff. He had a two-way radio.
Volunteer rescue workers had to hike an hour after parking at the base of the mountain. They tried to bring a helicopter in. The terrain was too rocky.
"It's called Desolation Wilderness for a reason," Cook says.
As the sun finished its descent, as blood continued to spill, 30 workers secured him in a basket and started slowly transporting him a few hundred yards down the mountain.
They yelled at him continuously to keep him awake as he repeated himself.
Just let me die.
They placed him in a 14-foot aluminum boat, which carried him through the blackness of night across the lake to an ambulance. He finally arrived at the hospital. The time: 3 a.m.
* * *
"His new favorite thing to do," said Nebraska setter Maggie Griffin, "is raise his fist in the air and say 'I love my people.'"
Griffin shakes her head like an embarrassed daughter. Cook leaves notes in players' lockers. He makes them fill out surveys and read inspirational handouts. He's got a trust rock in the locker room. He calls players his "homies." He tries to be cool.
"Sometimes he fails," Griffin says.
Cook requires that his players always have a bottle of water with them on the road. Staying hydrated prevents cramping and jet lag, he says - never mind that bathroom availability can threaten team chemistry. He constantly reminds players about nutrition. Only buy yogurt with live cultures.
"He just doesn't rest until every stone's unturned," Mendenhall said.
* * *
God spared you.
The phone call woke Bobby Jo Cook. The phone call no parent wants, she recalls. Dad and Mom stormed into the hospital after hours of travel. She looked at her eldest child. She repeated herself.
God has spared you. You're going to do something really great.
Cook lay in that South Lake Tahoe hospital for nine weeks. He couldn't leave the bed. He didn't know if he'd ever walk again. His broken jaw was wired shut. Mom made dinners - beef stew and split pea soup - then ground it, serving it to John through a straw.
Richard Steadman, Cook's doctor and orthopedic surgeon for the U.S. ski team, could've inserted pins and rods to help reattach the femur bones. Instead he applied traction, elevating and immobilizing Cook's leg. The bones grew together naturally, allowing Cook to compete athletically again. But it took time.
His body lay still, but his mind ran laps during those weeks. Insanity tapped him on the shoulder too many times. Better not to think. Better to get wheeled outside to the hospital deck where one can read books under the sun. Still, the patient told the doctor he'd make it all the way back.
"That was my motivation."
Eventually he moved back home to Mom and Dad's living room. Eventually he was running five miles. Eventually he was back on the courts where the old guys taught him. Eventually he regained his status at the professional level.
"Pretty much everyone just stopped and watched him," David says of that first day back.
The details Cook keeps from his players.
"They don't want to hear that stuff."
* * *
John Cook sat in a beachside San Diego hotel lobby sifting through explanations for the fall. Water wasn't the problem this time. He had the most talent that 2001 season. The most experience, too. Find another lineup with five returning All-Americans and you'll be the first. Still they failed. A glorious homecoming it was not.
Cook met Terry Pettit in 1988 at a San Diego tournament and struck a friendship that led to a job offer. After three seasons under Pettit in Lincoln, Cook left to lead Wisconsin for seven seasons. He came back and replaced Pettit in 2000.
The Huskers didn't lose a match his first year. Cook remembers a squad whose chemistry, whose unity, whose poise betters any squad he's ever coached. The next year was supposed to be better, a step toward a dynasty.
"We have a chance to have one of the greatest teams ever," Cook said in August 2001.
NU was the favorite going to the final four in San Diego. Nebraska led Stanford 29-25 in game one and gave up six straight. Cook's bunch led 25-19 in game two and lost that one, too. Game three wasn't close.
"It was great to be there (in San Diego), but I wanted to win so bad," he says. "When we got to the defining moments, they didn't have that special intangible, whatever it was. They just couldn't get over that hump. . .The most talent doesn't always win."
"Things like that haunt him," Mendenhall said. "They cause him to be up at 4 in the morning."
Cook has pushed his players harder to build relationships since 2001. He mixes their roommates on the road. Seniors mentor freshmen. He forces players with opposite personalities to hang out.
"It's his quest at controlling the intangibles," Mendenhall said.
But as Cook nears 50, he realizes those defining moments he can't coach.
"It really comes down to players stepping up, making plays," he says. "I used to think I could control everything. The longer I coach I realize I have less control.
Meanwhile, insiders have seen a change this fall in the coach.
"He's kind of letting his team do its thing," David Cook said. "He's given up control more than I've ever seen before in him. I think it's because he believes in this team. He truly believes in them."
A week ago, when Nebraska finished Duke in the NCAA tournament second round, Cook suggested his players take a victory lap around the Coliseum court. As the crowd funneled to the floor to high-five the nation's No. 1 team, Cook walked toward the locker room before turning under the balcony. He stopped to soak it in. To enjoy the moment.
* * *
"They can conquer who believe they can."- Virgil
John Cook's vault of quotations reaches far beyond first-century Roman poets. If it's catchy, if it's inspiring, it's material for a Cook e-mail; players receive two or three a day. Preaching and acting in the defining moments, though, differ like Tahoe and Mission Beach.
The cliff top never left his mind. Not while in the hospital. Not after he went back to the beach. So he returned maybe a year after the fall. To Tahoe. To Desolation Wilderness. Up to Cascade Lake. Up to Cascade Falls. Up further. Past the green softwoods and roaring water. To the boulder that wouldn't budge.
A beautiful day. An awesome day.
"I had to go back. Just had to look at it one more time."
