My Shot: Lou Holtz

Interviewed by Guy Yocom
Photo By Kevin Lynch April 2009

At home I have a copy of the April 21, 1986, issue of Sports Illustrated. I'm on the cover with the blurb, "Can Lou Do It?" I'd just arrived at Notre Dame, and with spring football underway I was the focal point of that week's coverage. It's a special issue to me because it's the only one in existence. When Jack Nicklaus shot 30 on the back nine that Sunday and won his sixth Masters, they tore up the cover with me on it and put Jack on there. The people there sent me the cover -- the entire issue, actually -- that never made it to the newsstands. If there's a reason to be kicked off the cover, I guess Jack winning his sixth Masters is a pretty good one.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn't much, so to get $300 more per year I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn't even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments. After one of the tournaments I see my No. 1 player, Jeff Graham, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. I asked him, "What do you think you're doing?" Jeff shrugs and says, "It was a tough tournament." So I had the team do a bunch of calisthenics. I knew of no other way to punish them. Heck, I was a football coach.

For years I was a member at Isleworth. The club has a big, double-ended practice area, and I liked to show up at 11 a.m. to hit balls before teeing off with the guys at noon. While I warmed up, I'd see Tiger Woods practicing at the opposite end of the range. Tiger had been out there a couple of hours already. The guys and I would play 18 holes and then go inside to have a drink. After that, I liked to go to the range and hit some more balls before going home. By then it was 6 p.m. and getting dark, but Tiger would still be at the opposite end of the range, practicing. It happened more times than I can count. Tiger has all kinds of talent, but the secret to his greatness is what I saw at the end of the range.

See, winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they're making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that's the difference.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they'd be, what position they'd play and so on. If Tiger Woods had played football, he would have been a quarterback. He has the demeanor, poise, confidence, leadership, mental toughness and cerebral quality that would make him perfect at that position. You'd want the ball in his hands on every play.

I gave a pep talk to the U.S. Ryder Cup team last year, and all those guys are great. But they guy I'd really like to talk to is John Daly. He played golf at Arkansas just after I coached football there, and watching his career, it's obvious nobody has more raw talent. But I'd like to look him in the eyes and ask him what kinds of sacrifices he's made to take advantage of his God-given gifts. I'd invite him to confront that question and to answer it honestly, because sacrifice is the one thing that would make him realize his potential. It applies to personal habits, practice, training and studying the game. It's a big word, but it's the key to his being a successful and happier person.

My handicap Index is 12.9, up pretty good from the 8 I was years ago. There are two reasons: I'm losing distance off the tee, and it's football season [Holtz was interviewed in December], so I'm playing only once a week. Lake Nona is configured in a way that really hurts the short hitter. Now, there are five sets of tees, and I refuse to play the ladies' tees or the senior tees. I could play the white tees, the regular ones, but the guys I play with play the blue tees, which are one notch in front of the pro tees. What I do is play the "coach's tees," meaning I play from the front of the blue teeing ground rather than from the markers. Fortunately for me, they're pretty long tee boxes. But I still get my butt beat.