Feeling the Rush

Pete Carroll jumps into the scrum at USC football practice, sometimes diving over a goal-line pile as if he were a 22-year-old tailback leaping for the end zone.

Carroll, age 5, jumped over a tower of pillows in a living room, diving for the imaginary end zone if only he could evade the hulking form of his 10-year-old brother.

It is September, his USC football team is playing at Cal, and Carroll has left 25 tickets for the guys -- for Skip Corsini and Jim Peters, for Henry Diaz and Ken Roby -- for his football pals, his basketball buddies, his baseball compatriots, for the gang from Redwood High in Larkspur, Calif., for the kids who thought the Carroll backyard was, Corsini said, “Mecca.�

It was Thanksgiving 37 years ago and Pete and his big brother Jim were calling Corsini and Peters, Diaz and Roby and others, yelling into the phone: “Let’s play football!�

In an instant, a tradition was born: Neighborhood kids, young guys home from college, newlywed dads, middle-aged men and their sons and daughters playing football together on Thanksgiving, still playing, even this year. Except for Pete.

Pete couldn’t make it. Again.

On Thursday, Carroll, 52, will lead No. 1-ranked USC against Michigan in the Rose Bowl. In three years, Carroll has rebuilt the Trojan program from mediocre to excellent, from stagnating to electric, from boring to intriguing, from No. 2 in its own city to maybe the best in the country. He has been honored as 2003 Coach of the Year. He sits with his team as part of the studio audience at the “Tonight Show With Jay Leno� and the crowd hoots and hollers. Despite the demands of this season, he still checked in to make sure, Corsini said, “that everybody showed up for the Turkey Bowl.�

Carroll walks in a hurry, always on his toes, moving ahead as if there is the coolest car waiting for him or the prettiest girl or the best party. It turns out Carroll is just going to practice, where he can throw passes and teach coverage to his cornerbacks, leap in joy when his quarterback gets it.

He can afford the coolest car now. He’s got the girl, Glena, a volleyball player who received the first athletic scholarship awarded to a woman at Pacific. (“My kids got their athletic genes from their mother, believe me,� Carroll said.) Parties don’t matter, unless it’s with the boys from the neighborhood.

But practice, “I love practice,� he said. “I really do. You watch the kids get things, you see it in their eyes, and it’s the best.�

That is the thing about Carroll. He enjoys. Everything.

“You’d have to say we had a dream childhood,� Jim Carroll said. “We played sports all the time, everywhere. We had great parents. We lived in Marin County before there was traffic.�

The Carrolls -- Jim, who was a liquor salesman, and Rita, who seemed always to be at home so her two sons could always have a dozen friends over -- lived in Greenbrae, a middle-class place of tidy homes and big yards. “We didn’t have all that other stuff,� said Jim, Pete’s brother. “We didn’t go to movies or watch TV or have video games. We played sports.�

What Jim did, Pete did. Jim played football, baseball and basketball. So did Pete.

“We’d play knee football on the lawn,� Jim said, recalling that he would walk on his knees to offset his size advantage. “We’d play football in the street, we’d play pickup basketball games. Then, when I was a junior in high school, we won the league championship. I guess I was about 15, Pete was 10. All the guys his age looked up to all the guys my age. We were the big high school football guys. That was our life. I was the offensive lineman, Pete was the running back. That’s how it was.�

Carroll collected friends by the season. He had his football friends, his basketball friends, his baseball friends.

“Even when we were kids, 9, 10 years old, you couldn’t help but notice a couple of things about Pete,� Corsini said. “Pete always wanted to get everybody fired up. And Pete had a genius about the games.�

The fired-up thing?

“Pete was so deeply enthused about whatever it was he was doing that he couldn’t believe the rest of us wouldn’t be,� Corsini said. “So we would always be playing our hardest. I mean, I’ve never seen the guy have a down day. Never.�

And the genius?

“Basketball wasn’t even his good sport,� Corsini said. “I was playing, Pete would be on the bench and we’d have a timeout and Pete would come running out, all excited, to tell me something he’d noticed about the other team or about some play we should run because he knew it would work. And he was usually right.�

The genius.

Monte Kiffin noticed it. Right away.

Kiffin is now the defensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Then he was an assistant coach at Arkansas when Lou Holtz was the coach. Carroll was a 25-year-old grad assistant.

“Pete was sitting in the back of the room at our first meeting as a staff,� Kiffin said. “After about 40 minutes, Pete raises his hand and asks a question. One question, but it was so smart and insightful I walked out of that meeting and told Coach Holtz, ‘That guy is special. That guy is a football genius. We’re going to lose him after a year.’ And we did.�

Even now, Kiffin said, when he talks to Carroll about a game 10 years ago, “Pete will remember a specific play, remember the play was run from the right hash mark on the 32-yard line. He’ll remember which way the wind was blowing. He’ll get all excited. It’s amazing. It’s a special kind of genius.�

Kiffin’s son, Lane, works on Carroll’s staff. It is the ultimate compliment, the father eager to place his son with Carroll. “I’m happy my son is working with such a good man, smart man, with a man who is so enthusiastic about his sport.�

The enthusiasm.

Bob Troppmann was Redwood High’s coach when Carroll arrived as a 110-pound freshman. “Pete wanted to play so badly,� said Troppmann, 80. “But back then there was a rule that no one could play until they weighed 115 pounds. Pete worked like crazy to gain those five pounds.�

Troppmann can’t stop talking about Carroll the skinny kid, Carroll the quarterback, halfback, defensive back, whatever back Troppmann needed, or about Carroll the coach. As an assistant at Pacific and Arkansas, at Iowa State, Ohio State, North Carolina State; as an assistant with the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings; as a defensive coordinator with the New York Jets and San Francisco 49ers; as head coach of the Jets and New England Patriots.

Mostly, though, Troppmann wants to talk about Carroll at home.

“His house was an open house every day,� Troppmann said. “All the kids were there all the time. There was always something going on, and Pete was the leader. Just a leader. I’d find myself thinking, ‘This kid is a leader before his time.’ And he’s still the leader. He gets his buddies tickets. He makes sure the group stays together.�

Troppmann chokes up when he talks about Carroll the man: “He makes me cry all the time.�

This fall Carroll invited him on a road trip. Troppmann flew with USC to the Notre Dame game, rode on the team bus, sat in all the meetings.

“I don’t have anything to do with his knowledge of the game, but as I sat in the meeting, a lot of the philosophy we used to preach, I heard that coming back,� Troppmann recalled. “The power of positive thinking, that was the main thing. When I talked about positive thinking, even way back when, I could always tell. Pete listened.�

Dave Perron, another close friend of Carroll’s from the old days, describes him as “happy. Just that one word. Happy. I’ve never known Pete to have a bad day, a bad moment. Nothing has ever discouraged Pete. Does that sound hokey? I know it does. But it’s the truth.�

Added Corsini: “Pete has never once been down about anything, at least not that anyone can tell.�

Said Kiffin: “Pete enjoys whatever it is he’s doing, and he wants to have everybody else enjoy it too.�

Of course there were bad times, “but those are relative,� Carroll said. “I mean, how bad can it be, a head coach in the NFL? That’s not bad.�

He’s a twice-fired NFL head coach. Until he got the USC job, that was all the resume that mattered. Fired by the Jets after one 6-10 season and replaced by Rich Kotite, who won four games in two seasons. Fired by the Patriots after three years and two playoff appearances after replacing Bill Parcells, who had taken the Patriots to a Super Bowl, and replaced by Bill Belichick, who would do the same.

Carroll would ride his bike to NFL practices, organize bowling trips, play basketball in the parking lot with the guys. He was described by writers as “goofy� and “West Coast loopy� and his sideline enthusiasm was described as “bordering on ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch territory.�

“I think some of that was very unfair,� Jim Carroll said, “but Pete didn’t complain. In the pros, back East, I think it was just harder for people to get behind all the enthusiasm. But for Pete, he couldn’t be any other way. He’s enthusiastic.�

Said Perron: “I guess we’re foolish not to think there was disappointment then, but that’s the character of the guy. I think, for a period, there was, because of his nature and enthusiasm, the sense that he didn’t have the intellect or sense of self and toughness to be a head coach. The biggest testament to Pete is that he never lost the faith in himself or his sense of self. He will not change his personality to suit some perception of what a football coach should be. But he will also not allow himself to be anything but a success.�

The bad times didn’t come when he was fired, Carroll said.

“The bad time was when I didn’t make it to the NFL. To this day I believe I could have played in the NFL,� said Carroll, a two-time all-conference free safety at Pacific. “I will never tell a kid he shouldn’t dream about playing in the NFL because I would never have wanted anyone to tell me I couldn’t play. I wouldn’t want anybody to tell me that today.�

Carroll sits outside Heritage Hall and begins a list of what is right in his world. His wife and her willingness to move from small house to small house in all the strange places. That his oldest son, Brennan, is now on the USC football staff. That his daughter, Jaime, goes to USC. That youngest son Nathan loves living in Southern California.

That he is proud to be a Trojan, loves the Tommy Trojan statue, the band and Coliseum. That he loves recruiting, finds it invigorating to meet kids and their families, to step out at a high school field and smell the popcorn and see the hope in the eyes of teenagers who dream of the NFL.

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Adding It Up

A look at the career of USC football Coach Pete Carroll, who has led the Trojans to their first No. 1 ranking since the middle of the 1981 season:

* Pro head coaching record: 34-33 (1994 New York Jets; 1997 to ’99 New England Patriots).

* College head coaching record: 28-9 (three seasons at USC).

* 2003 honors: National Coach of the Year; Pac-10 co-Coach of the Year.

* Rival beatings: For the second time in history, USC swept rivals UCLA and Notre Dame in consecutive years.

* Slow start: After starting his Trojan career 2-5, he has gone 26-4 (86.7%).