Man in black is back

PORTLAND — The man behind the desk is more cartoon character than coach. He wears a straw cowboy hat. Everything else black. Black pants. Black shirt. Thick black watchband.

He spins stories, dozens of them, one after another. The game tickets left for Elvis and D.B. Cooper. The trip to Iraq that resurrected his coaching career. The time he crashed his race car into a wall and spent five minutes engulfed in flames.

"That's why I don't like french fries!" Jerry Glanville shouts.

Strange that we should find him here, Room 423 in the athletic department of a commuter school in the Pacific Northwest, the new head coach for a Division I-AA football program.

The man made famous during decades spent coaching in college and the NFL, for careers in broadcasting and car racing, for, above all, the character known as Jerry Glanville, is now the coach at Portland State.

And he wants you to be a Viking.

He wants to play you the music that will announce his team's entrance during home games, all war horns and tribal drums beating into crescendo — Star Trek meets Scandinavia. He wants you to see the Viking hull and Viking statues in his office. He wants to tell you the first city the Vikings conquered: Portland, England, in 789.

He's rolling now, ever the salesman, trying to bring Vikings into vogue. He grabs a vintage Viking helmet, made of steel, bought on eBay, from behind his desk.

"You're going to love this," he says, invoking his favorite phrase. "Everybody has worn that thing. The president. The players. Me. Put that bad boy on."

Further proof that Glanville can sell blind men glasses rests awkwardly atop your head. You wear the helmet. You met Glanville 45 minutes earlier.

You want to be a Viking.

The cover letter arrived a few months back. It read, roughly: "Please accept this résumé as a show of interest that I have in becoming Portland State's next football coach. I look forward to your call. Sincerely, Jerry Glanville."

Teri Mariani, the interim athletic director, nearly fell out of her chair. Sure, she had spoken to Darrel "Mouse" Davis, a longtime Glanville friend and former Portland State head football coach (1975-80). Sure, he mentioned he had a candidate in mind.

But knowing Davis' propensity for pranks, Mariani had only one question for Glanville: "Is Mouse playing a joke on me?"

He wasn't, which is how Glanville found himself sitting in the office of PSU president Dan Bernstein. The president asked Glanville if he liked to hunt or fish. Glanville said he would rather watch paint dry. Bernstein asked Glanville if he liked to golf. Glanville said he'd rather walk with three friends and not look for the ball. So, Bernstein asked, what did Glanville like? The answer: football and the blues. And suddenly, Glanville burst from his chair, and they belted a job-interview duet.

Glanville: "Everybody wants to go to heaven"

Bernstein: "But nobody wants to die"

Glanville: "All I want to do is hear the truth"

Bernstein: "And everybody tells us a lie"

Says Glanville: "I'll be your football coach if you can do that."

All that remained was hammering out the details. That fell to Mariani, who took Glanville and his wife to Jake's Grill for a dine-and-sign. They scribbled back and forth on the tablecloth until they came to an agreement, then ripped the, um, contract in half and shook hands. Glanville just might frame his. Mariani took hers home as a souvenir.

The contract includes Glanville's salary of $165,000, plus three upgrades phased in over the four-year deal — a $30,000 to $35,000 increase in the recruiting budget, the equivalent of three more scholarships and $25,000 for assistant coaches.

Asked if a contract on a tablecloth is binding, Glanville momentarily turns serious: "If you're going to worry about that, don't sign it. Welcome to 1950, a time when a handshake meant something."

And with that courtship, at once unorthodox and strangely typical given the man involved, Jerry Glanville became the captain of this Viking ship.

The first question is always: Why Portland State? The easy answer: Why not? Anyone can coach at Texas or Ohio State or Florida, Glanville says, but try recruiting and fundraising and winning here.

So why coach? After Glanville retired from coaching in 1993, he made more money broadcasting than he ever had carrying a clipboard. "What a great country!" Glanville shouts.

He stayed competitive driving race cars — a picture of his car next to Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s hangs on his office wall — at more than 100 tracks, including one in Monroe. Coming out of Turn 4 in fourth gear, waiting for the green flag, well, that felt just like kickoff.

But this is a story about Jerry Glanville, and so it's bound to wind through some place you least expect.

So there was Glanville in March 2004, 11 years into a prosperous retirement, on a morale-building mission in Iraq. He wore body armor and signed autographs and met one soldier who confessed to throwing snowballs at him during an NFL game in Cleveland.

Riding across the desert, on a stretch called The Highway of Death, Glanville's party stopped at a latrine. The words written on the wall inside are burned into his memory: "I'd rather spend an hour with the lions than a thousand years with the lambs."

"There's a song in there somewhere," Glanville says. "Here's a kid [who] wrote that on the wall. And that's how they live every day. And I thought, 'What if I got to coach these lions?' "

Then Glanville ran into an old friend from Western Kentucky. They set up a dinner in Baghdad's Red Zone, riding out of the heavily patrolled Green Zone in beat-up Toyotas with busted taillights, traveling the wrong way on one-way streets and never stopping for red lights.

They pulled up to the dinner and sprinted inside the door of the Palestine Hotel, covered by 14 gunners perched atop the roof. Kurdish guards backed the car into the entrance to prevent suicide bombers.

They ate cheeseburgers and french fries surrounded by guards with machine guns hanging around their necks. They asked the locals questions. Glanville wondered about weapons of mass destruction.

"You Americans, you are all alike," one man said. "You want to see weapons. Come with me, and I will show you the bodies. I will show you where my wife and children lie."

En route back to Camp Victory, the convoy lost a car and circled in attempts to find it, aware of danger lurking in the darkness. Glanville dived to the floor of the car, next to Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, and as they lowered themselves, a B.B. King song pierced the silence.

The thrill is gone, it's gone away from me

The thrill is gone away from me

Although, I'll still live on, but so lonely I'll be ...

Glanville turned to Jones. "If we get out of here," he said, "I'm going to go back and coach those 19-year-old kids."

His life changed in that instant. Not because of politics or right or wrong. Because of soldiers, kids, teamwork and all that.

"Everybody changed who went," Glanville says. "The promise I made was to come back and coach the kids. And I found those same kids in Hawaii [his last coaching stop] and those same kids here, and those same kids are in every school."

Someone pulled up an Internet poll on his computer screen the other day. The question: Is Jerry Glanville alive or dead? "It's running pretty close!" Glanville shouts. "I asked our secretary, and she voted I was dead."

The coach remains a cartoon character. Davis, hired by Glanville to be PSU's offensive coordinator and the inventor of the run-and-shoot offense, remains his sidekick.

Davis knows Glanville will only drive cars with horsepower, no wimpy V6 or standard V8, something closer the 1949 Ford funny car with 980 horses he owns that once blazed a quarter-mile in seven seconds.

Davis has heard all the sayings a million times. "Hardest-hitting team in the country" and "I'd rather take a stick in the eye" and "you're the best" and "you're going to love this." Always, "you're going to love this ... "

Davis knows the punch lines before the jokes start. Like how, in his offense, the tight end isn't so much a position as a physical condition. Or how, because of the skin grafts from the car crash, Glanville can scratch his posterior and his face at the same time.

Davis has known Glanville for decades, and they are like an old married couple. His first and lasting impression: Glanville is "a little crazy. He's got a little nut in him."

Take Glanville's man-in-black thing.

"He said, 'Black's not a color, it's an attitude,' " Davis recalls. "I said, 'Do you know who you're talking to here? Don't give me that. Don't use that line on me. Black is a color, [colorful word deleted].'

"But that's Jerry. You gotta love him."

It's all part of the character — Elvis and the wardrobe of darkness and the race cars.

And here's the thing: Because it's Jerry Glanville, this little experiment just might work.

Let's not forget that the program has a history, turning out pros such as quarterbacks June Jones and Neil Lomax. But when this job opened, and it came time to make a hire, booster Norm Daniels, head of the Joe's Sporting Goods stores (formerly G.I. Joe's), wasn't alone in thinking it was "time to step up or step out." The hire, he says, is "a chance of a lifetime for this program."

The city is already buzzing. A homeless man asked senior linebacker Jordan Senn about his coach the other day. The introductory news conference spilled out into the hallway, bigger, Glanville says, than any news conference during his time in the NFL. People walk in off the street and ask to talk to Coach. They roll down their windows and shout, "Thanks for giving us a chance!" and "Stay here, you're going to love it!"

The challenges — raising money and raising profile — play to Glanville's strengths. He feeds off both. He visited the Oregon Legislature and talked hiking with the governor. He makes appearances, anywhere, anytime, for $3,000 worth of ticket sales. For the first time anyone can remember, the spring game was played at PGE Park.

He helped draw Nike into the mix to capitalize on the excitement, and the shoe giant is designing new uniforms and helmets with spears running down the middle, so that when linemen get down, it looks like a dagger aimed at their opponents.

"He's really what we needed," Mariani says. "Sometimes, it just takes change. Sometimes, you need a character."

Glanville moves like a man on a permanent coffee drip. Sometimes he just pops into the office of Scott Herrin, the assistant athletic director in charge of marketing and corporate sales. Written on the board is Glanville's latest invention (in black pen, of course).

Fan Fannie Night. 3 hrs. to pick up your seat and pay the bill before kickoff of spring games.

Coach.

Herrin wears the smile of a man who won the lottery. Already, PSU has sold $55,000 worth of season tickets — the amount it sold all of last season. If the Vikings can draw 10,000 per game — Glanville wants 20,000 — they will rank in the top 20 in the country for Division I-AA programs.

"The other day I was talking to my wife," Herrin says, "And he jumped right in and started trying to sell her season tickets. I said, 'Jerry, that's my wife.' He goes, 'OK, sorry, I was just trying to sell some tickets.' "

Both the cartoon character and his sidekick are getting up there — Glanville is 65, Davis is 74 — but they aren't running out of energy. When asked how they do it, Davis smiles wide and shouts, jokingly, "Ooooohhhh, lotta sex! Whole lotta sex!"

Whatever works. Hail pounds the practice field. Thunder rumbles in the distance. A man sits on a bench under some cover, unruffled and unmoved. He wears black warmups, black sneakers, black shades and a straw cowboy hat.

Jerry Glanville looks up at his new football team, and starts, to no one in particular, "You're going to love this ... "

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com