ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 13, 1996 TAG: 9612130068
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-9 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: JACK BOGACZYK
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK
It was vintage Bill Stewart. It was startling. It also was so unlike him.
If Stewart was a bundle of energy, and he was, he also was a mass of contradictions.
The news release Thursday evening from VMI said Stewart, who had just finished his third season as the Keydets' football coach, resigned for ``personal reasons.'' It's a fill-in-the-blanks story. VMI's athletic administration was as stiff and speechless as the parade-grounds statue of Stonewall Jackson.
It's not likely Stewart just quit. Thanks to player retention in recent years, he had legitimately improved the Keydets, although his three-year record of 8-25 didn't show it. His contract ran through the 2001 season. In a program with a dismal .235 winning percentage in the past 14 seasons, that's security.
He just finished coaching a season in which Thomas Haskins became the most prolific career rusher in Division I-AA college football history, with 5,349 yards. Don't think for a minute, however, that Stewart was a three-yards kind of coach. If he was surrounded by a cloud of dust, it was by his own whirling-dervish creation.
What's most likely is that Stewart did something seriously wrong to get canned. His contract states that if he was fired without cause, Stewart would receive a lump sum payment of the base salary due him through the expiration date. Instead, he got one year's salary - basically a $73,000 settlement - and he's allowed to stay in the house he occupies on the VMI post until March 31, 1997.
He becomes the 32nd Division I coach to lose his job or resign in the past six weeks. Of all of those, the reason for Stewart's demise may be the least clear. And until someone talks, that reason will remain personal.
VMI's announcement that a search committee has been formed to find a replacement makes a statement. Obviously, Stewart's future had been hanging for more than a day.
If someone besides assistant head coach Donnie Ross is named to guide his alma mater, it will be another stunner. Whoever is next, he will become VMI's fifth head coach in 14 seasons. And the job won't be any easier.
When Stewart was hired after Jim Shuck was dumped following the 1993 season, he didn't have the fire you see in most VMI coaches. He was an inferno. In my quarter-century in this business, Stewart is the only coach who wrote regularly thanking me for covering a game or writing about his program.
The last time I saw him was after the Keydets had lost, in mid-October, for the 14th straight time to Marshall. He had spent half an hour talking to the media after the game, then 30 minutes later appeared in the pressbox to make the rounds and personally thank writers for coming to the game.
If that seems odd, and it is, there is no suggestion it wasn't genuine. When you sat down to talk with Stewart, his answers reminded you of Fran Tarkenton. He was all over the field. He always had many points, and often finished those with several of the exclamation variety.
He was optimistically honest. He could be off the wall, but he seldom was off the record. Stewart's remarks often were flecked with hidden parables. So it seems is his demise in a job into which he tried to combine enthusiasm with VMI's rigid tradition, no matter how awkward.
His latest letter to me was written Monday and maybe coincidentally, arrived Thursday. Stewart said thanks for giving Haskins one of my votes for the Dudley Award, which goes to the state's top college football player. The VMI back finished second to Roanoker Tiki Barber of UVa.
Stewart's last paragraph read: ``VMI PRIDE!!! Galatians 6:9!!!''
In the New Testament, that verse says, ``So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.''
I don't think Stewart could grow weary. I don't think he would give up. Obviously, however, it appears he perhaps reaped what he sowed.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB