The silent plainsman

Sporting News, The, Dec 19, 1994 by Steve Marantz

Becoming a winners, not winning, is the point, Tom Osborne says: in his quiet way, he has accomplished both at Nebraska - with one nagging exception

Tom Osborne is a man hard to know, as near and as far as a prairie horizon.

A few years ago, after Nebraska's spring intrasquad game, Osborne and his top defensive coach, Charlie McBride, went fishing. Jumped in Osborn's car and made a beeline from Lincoln toward Valentine, hard by the Snake River. Problem was, Osborne's foot got a little heavy and an officer flagged him just past Long Pine. Another speeding ticket wasn't the end of the world - there have been a few - but it so happened a gust of wind blew Osborne's license out of the officer's hand. Osborne muttered a "dadgummit" under his breath while he polite assisted the officer and McBride in a search for the license. Problem was, it was dark and cold, and in Osborne's imagination, plump, high-colored trout were calling to him.

By the time they found the license, and the horrified officer apologized profusely as he wrote the citation - of all the lousy luck, to stop the head coach - Osborne's mind was miles up the highway, on the river. A while later, at 2:30 a.m., Osborne braked near to the river and said it was time to sleep, and three hours later, at dawn, he shook the slumbering McBride. Holding his gear, Osborne pointed up the river. "I'm going this way," he said. Then Osborne pointed down the river. "You go that way."

Perhaps you have to be a Nebraskan to fully appreciate Osborne. Same as you have to be a rural Nebraskan to love the wide empty spaces, the endless wind and sky. Same as you have to be an Omahan to know that from the long spine of Dodge Street radiates a graceful and garrulous urbanity.

Nebraska is not too far past its frontier beginnings, a time when the Union Pacific chose the banks of the Missouri River as the place to commence connecting America by track. Somehow, miraculously, the railroad never brought with it the cynical warp of life on the coasts. Nebraskans believe they inhabit Canaan on the prairie, a place where hard work and honesty are rewarded with milk, honey and victories over Colorado and Oklahoma.

Osborne embodies the best of Nebraska's self-image. He is upright, modest and courteous. Behind his outward gentleness is a backbone of iron; inside his reticence is a personality shrewd and droll.

Osborne fits a heroic Western archetype: the silent plainsman. Tall, lean and laconic. If you've seen "The Virginian" and "High Noon," you've seen Osborne. Gary Cooper plays him.

"I've often thought that Tom belongs to a generation gone by from a time when the West was won," says Nancy Osborne, his wife of 32 years and mother of their three grown children. "There was a time when a handshake meant a deal was done, when a man was, measured by his actions, not by what he said. Tom doesn't say much, but when he does, he really has something to say.

"His type is so out of the ordinary for this day and age that people misunderstand it, especially the press."

"Are you saying that your husband is out of time?" I ask.

"No, because that sounds like something is wrong with him," Nancy Osborne says. "I just mean there aren't a whole lot of people anymore who let their actions speak for them."

Osborne published his autobiography, "More Than Winning," in 1985, an astonishing act of self-revelation roughly equivalent to a cloistered monk singing "Stairway to Heaven, on primetime Husker Vision.

In it Osborne lays out his philosophy of coaching, a high-minded approach emphasizing "process" over results. Osborne's model casts himself as a teacher-mechanic who nurtures young minds and bodies as he assembles them piece by piece into a purring engine.

The way Osborne tells it, he experienced an epiphany as an assistant coach under Bob Devaney, after Nebraska clinched the 1971 national title by routing Alabama in the Orange Bowl.

He writes: "The important thing about athletics really is the process. It's the path you follow in attempting to win the championship that's important. The relationships that are formed. The effort given. The experiences you have. And when it's over, it's all over! Everything else, at least for me, was kind of anticlimax."

Osborne also writes of the unsettling effect of World War II on his childhood. Osborne was 4 when his father, Charles, went off to fight, and 9 when he returned. During those years, Osborne, his younger brother, Jack, and his mother lived with his mother's parents in St. Paul, Neb. His grandparents had lost two farms during the Great Depression.

There was a feeling, Osborne writes, "of being from the wrong side of the tracks, which resulted from the absence of my father and the uncertainty of wartime. Much of my life has been directed toward proving something - what it is I don't really know - but the roots of that striving, I am sure, lie in the events surrounding my childhood experiences during World War II."

Introverted, Osborne channeled his emotions into sports. He was a standout in football, basketball and track, at Hastings (Neb). High School and at tiny Hastings College. After college, Osborne made the San Francisco 49rs' taxi squad as an 18-round draft choice. He was traded to the Washington Redskins, for whom he made 31 receptions in two seasons.