DATE: Monday, November 10, 1997             TAG: 9711090001

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LAURIE GOODSTEIN, NEW YORK TIMES 

                                            LENGTH:  166 lines

PROMISE KEEPERS' LEADER STRUGGLES IN HIS OWN MARRIAGE.

SHUTTING HERSELF inside the master bedroom of her elegant new home in Lancaster, Colo., a suburb of Boulder, Lyndi McCartney spent the spring of 1993 weak from bulimia and considering suicide.

Her husband, Bill McCartney, then the celebrated coach of the University of Colorado football team, was busier than ever organizing Promise Keepers, the Christian men's movement that he had founded and that was gearing up for its largest stadium revival rally yet.

While Bill McCartney was out building a movement whose central tenet is that men should treasure and serve their wives and families, his own wife now says she was suffering through the most precarious days of a marriage that has lasted 35 years.

Lyndi McCartney, usually the gregarious and sharp-witted cheerleader to her husband and four children, says she spent nearly a year cloistered in her room refusing phone calls and visits, reading nearly 100 self-help books and hiding the fact that she could not keep down what little food she ate. She lost 80 pounds.

A private person, Lyndi McCartney until now has never talked publicly about her own feelings of marital despair and isolation that she grappled with even after her husband had begun drawing tens of thousands of men to stadium rallies with the message that they must make a new and passionate commitment to their wives and families.

After seven years as Promise Keepers' lead visionary, McCartney, 57, draws crowds that rival those of the Rev. Billy Graham and dispenses rules for living to millions, a sort of Deepak Chopra for evangelical Christian men. He has built Promise Keepers into one of the fastest-spreading revival movements in recent American history, with more than 2 million participants. In early October, Promise Keepers convened several hundred thousand men on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Bill McCartney has often publicly confessed that he has not been the perfect role model. Now, Lyndi McCartney says it was not until after her husband had produced and spoken at 10 Promise Keepers stadium events that he began to practice his own preaching on marital harmony. Before that, he was ``same as a plumber,'' she said in an interview in her den.

``A plumber never fixes anything at home,'' she said. ``He's always out fixing everybody else's plumbing.''

This is the story of how Bill McCartney came to learn that his own marriage had fallen badly in need of repair. It is a story of alcohol addiction and of betrayal, and of efforts to overcome them through prayer, Scripture and therapy. It is also a chronicle of three decades of change weathered by one ``traditional 1950s marriage,'' as Lyndi McCartney describes it, in which the wife reared the children and sacrificed her self while the husband pursued his career ambitions.

Feminist groups have strongly criticized Promise Keepers, saying the movement is an insidious effort to turn back the state of relations between the sexes to the inegalitarian 1950s. But speaking from her own experience, Lyndi McCartney said: ``None of us want to go back to that. It wasn't an ideal time.''

The McCartneys agree they were an unlikely pair.

She was reared Lyndi Taussig in Santa Monica, Calif., in a Methodist home where celebrities came to dinner and the adults talked of poetry and dance. Her stepfather was a screenwriter of now obscure horror movies. Her mother and her biological father had divorced when she was 3, and Lyndi remembers meeting him only once, when she was 12, after he had started a second family.

McCartney is the son of a Chrysler auto worker and grew up in Riverview, Mich., just south of Detroit. The father sought to imbue his three sons with devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, the Irish, the Marines, the Democratic Party and Notre Dame's football team.

His professed devotion to God and family impressed young Lyndi, who met him when she was attending Stephens College, a women's institution in Columbia, Mo., and he was playing linebacker for the University of Missouri football team.

But as they started to date, she saw another side: He could not drink alcohol without drinking to excess. On a double date one night after a beer-keg party, he crashed a borrowed car into a police cruiser in front of Lyndi's dorm and was arrested for mouthing off to the policeman. He lost his football scholarship, became bitter and drank more frequently, he writes.

But each time he prayed for forgiveness, and they married in 1962. She was 19 and he was 22.

Bill McCartney pursued his ambition with strict discipline. He quickly climbed a ladder of high school coaching jobs and by 1971 was keeping a grueling pace simultaneously coaching football and basketball teams that both won state titles in 1973.

Lyndi McCartney, meanwhile, was racking up her own record of four children in eight years, while moving her household from one coaching job to another. Once, Bill McCartney says, he learned of a new coaching job, packed the car and uprooted his resistant family from Missouri to Michigan in one day. He believed that the move was divinely ordained, because he had just returned from a Catholic renewal conference where he had been told that within 72 hours God would irreversibly change his life.

Lyndi McCartney says she considered leaving him once, in the late 1960s.

``Bill was drinking really bad,'' she said in the interview. ``He was never home. I just thought, `I can't keep living like this.' ''

Things got better, the McCartneys both say, after he attended a Campus Crusade for Christ conference in 1974 while an assistant coach at the University of Michigan and became ``born again.''

The impact was immediate and profound, he says. He began praying over his children, fasting every Wednesday and Friday, and rising at 4 a.m. to read Scripture. He evangelized his friends, neighbors and total strangers.

Faith brought the family together for Sunday morning services, for almost daily Bible study and for Christian camps. But the couple avoided confronting their problems, Lyndi McCartney says.

``We both turned away from our marriage,'' she writes in his new book. ``Bill turned to the Lord, and I turned toward the children.''

In what he calls ``career idolatry,'' McCartney worked 16-hour days, six or seven days a week, 10 months of the year. The children say he made time for them by inviting them to tag along to bowl games and locker rooms. They had tailgate birthday parties.

Tom McCartney, 31, now a high school coach in Boulder, said in a telephone interview that he had never felt neglected, because his father had involved him in the excitement of football. His older brother, Mike, 33, a scout for the Chicago Bears, said that while he had loved being the coach's kid, ``the toughest thing was when he was there physically but his mind was elsewhere.''

McCartney's career zeal paid off when he became head coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes in 1982. Within eight years, he turned a losing team into national champions. His experience recruiting black players from struggling homes raised his awareness of racism, which, he says, is one reason Promise Keepers has made racial reconciliation a priority.

Another reason he is attuned to racism is his grandsons. The McCartneys' only daughter, Kristyn, twice became pregnant out of wedlock, in 1988 and 1993, by two players on McCartney's team, a turn of events that received national news coverage. One grandson is half-Samoan, the other half-black.

Kristyn McCartney's personal crises served as very public signs that Bill McCartney was dangerously out of touch with his family.

``Even though he knew to say God was first, family is second and football is third, the truth is that football came first,'' said the Rev. James Ryle, McCartney's pastor at Boulder Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship.

His founding of Promise Keepers in 1990 sapped even more time from his family, the McCartneys say.

By 1993, Lyndi McCartney had hit bottom. Her children had left home, and she went through an identity crisis.

In an interview at his church, Ryle said the catalyst for Lyndi McCartney's breakdown came in an Arizona hotel room on the morning of Jan. 1, 1993, when Bill McCartney confessed to his wife just before the Fiesta Bowl that 20 years earlier he had committed adultery. Then he left the hotel for his traditional pregame walk with Ryle, and in the car, he told his pastor what he had just done, Ryle recalls.

``That moment was the quintessential definition of their marriage,'' Ryle said. ``Here's a guy who has just unloaded on Lyndi the heaviest burden, and he goes off to coach a team.''

Ryle says he insisted they go back to the hotel to see Lyndi McCartney, and they found her in grief.

The couple say they began seeing a Christian counselor, who helped them listen to each other. And Lyndi McCartney says a herbalist eventually cured her eating disorder.

On Nov. 19, 1994, Bill McCartney called a news conference and, with his wife at his side, announced he was quitting coaching and a 10-year, $350,000-a-year contract to spend more time with his family.

These days, Bill McCartney tries to arrive home by 4 p.m. from the Promise Keepers office in Denver. He works occasionally as a motivational speaker for a furniture company. He and his wife take afternoon naps and go on bike rides. They take Kristyn's sons to the circus. Their marriage is better, they agree, although not yet ideal.

They recently took a vacation to Ixtapa, Mexico, and on the night of her birthday had dinner in a romantic restaurant with indoor streams and bridges. They talked for three hours.

``Even I didn't believe it,'' Lyndi McCartney said. ``Three hours. I thought maybe he'd died. It was a record.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

Bill McCartney...

Lyndi McCartney... KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY PROMISE KEEPERS

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