Tough Luck
June 10, 2010 11:42 PM | General
June 11, 2010
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Darryl Talley remembered hearing the name Oliver Luck when he first came to West Virginia University. Both were football recruits from the same area (Cleveland) although they had never met.
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| Oliver Luck had the universal respect of his teammates and coaches during his four-year varsity career at WVU from 1978-81.
WVU Sports Communications photo |
"Everybody kept telling me about Oliver Luck, Oliver Luck, Oliver Luck," the former all-pro linebacker said from his home in Orlando, Fla., Thursday. "I'm like, 'Wait a minute, Oliver Luck? That sounds like a black guy.' That was my first thought, but then I saw him play and I said, 'That white guy can really run!' He can flat run!'"
Talley was also surprised to find out that Luck was just a regular guy like the rest of his teammates despite coming from stuffy St. Ignatius High. Like the other Cleveland guys, Talley had heard over and over again the famous St. Ignatius chant …
Oh my goodness, oh my gracious,
Who are those guys from St. Ignatius?
They don't smoke and they don't drink,
All they do is think, think, think!
"He was on everybody's level," said Talley. "Oliver was one of the few quarterbacks that could get along with anybody. It didn't matter who you were, where you came from or what you did, Oliver could get along with you and could communicate with you."
"The kids that come out of (St. Ignatius) are our future presidents and stuff like that," added Luck's Mountaineer teammate Dave Oblak. "But he was always just one of us."
Luck's ability to carry on a conversation with anyone from the board room down to the boiler room is what makes West Virginia University's newest athletic director so special, his teammates say.
Luck just has a genuine and sincere interest in people.
"Whether you were at a party with him or on the practice field or in the locker room he was well-versed in just about anything," noted Dave Johnson, Luck's teammate and West Virginia's offensive line coach. "He could talk about the events of the day; he could talk about sports or whatever. He was friends with everybody."
"Oliver could move seamlessly from group to group and was accepted and welcomed by all of the different groups and cliques," recalled teammate Pat Conachan. "He was very comfortable in a lot of different situations."
Talley says Luck could talk about the United States' monetary policy with an economics professor as easily as he could talk about cartoons with some of his teammates.
"Hell, he would talk about cartoons just like the rest of us," Talley laughed.
Luck had extremely intellegent parents - both were biochemists, according to Talley - and they held out hope that their son would accept an offer to attend one of the Ivy League schools. But a guy named Gary Stevens kept telling him that he could become a big-time college quarterback if he went to WVU. Luck was sold and picked West Virginia University over Wall Street.
Luck was so brilliant, his teammates say, that he was known to sometimes pick up the syllabus on the first day of class and then return a few weeks later for the first test and promptly ace it.
"He was the only person I knew who didn't have to go to class and could still get an A," said Talley.
"Trust me, Ollie was not the kind of guy when every time you looked into his dorm room he was sitting in there with a book in his hands," said Oblak. "He just did what he did."
"He's so smart," added teammate Dave Sarkus. "I've seen him speak a couple of times recently and that guy can put together an impromptu speech in 15 minutes and still deliver it very well."
Luck's second WVU coach, Don Nehlen, said he never had to go over a game plan twice with his quarterback.
"Game planning and studying film and all of that stuff, Ollie grasped that very easily," Nehlen said. "Oliver was just a dream kid to coach, naturally."
What most Mountaineer fans remember about Luck's successful four-year career were his pin-point passes and those acrobatic moves in the pocket to elude Pitt and Penn State defenders. What many people don't recall is Luck's toughness - a toughness that was (and still is) the secret to his great success, says Nehlen.
"There is the key," Nehlen said. "Oliver Luck was tough."
Everybody you talk to associated with the football program during his playing career has (pardon the pun) a tough Luck story to tell.
"I can recall two instances from his freshman year," said Conachan. "We started off the year with Dutch Hoffman at quarterback and Oliver came in and he got a concussion against Syracuse, but he still just exuded this confidence and it was really surprising because at that point, he had to only be about 180 pounds and he appeared to be kind of fragile.
"Then later his season was cut short when he broke his collarbone against Penn State. He had that toughness and we recognized that right away, plus, he always maintained a calm demeanor on the field no matter what was going on."
Talley remembers once grimacing from the sidelines watching Penn State's Bruce Clark body slam Luck to the turf.
"I'm thinking to myself, 'God, I wouldn't want to be him,'" Talley laughed. "Then I saw him get up, adjust his facemask, and look over at Pat Conachan (the guy who was supposed to be blocking Clark) and give him a look like, 'Hey, you all going to do something to help me out here a little bit?'"
Sarkus saw Luck tear up his ankle badly during a game and never heard him say a word about it. "It just never came up in conversations," Sarkus explained.
Nehlen remembers well that same ankle injury and for the next 19 years of his coaching career he used to tell his players how quickly Luck overcame it as an illustration of how mentally tough they had to be to play the game.
"We played Pitt, I think, and he threw an interception and their kid is going down the sideline. Ollie takes off after him and smacks him and hurts his ankle," said Nehlen. "I mean his ankle was as big as my head. And we had no other quarterback.
"We're trying to figure out for the next week, are we going to be a single wing? What are we going to do this week?" Nehlen said. "Ollie was on crutches until Wednesday. On Thursday he walked out onto the practice field and Friday he came to practice and hobbled around. Then on Saturday he goes out and plays a helluva a football game. I just couldn't believe how well he played. He said to me afterward, 'Coach, I wanted to play worse than my ankle hurt.'"
That was Nehlen's lasting memory of his first West Virginia quarterback. The thing Dave Johnson remembers most was observing him and the rest of the seniors in the locker room after the Mountaineers' big upset victory over Florida in the Peach Bowl. It was the school's first bowl win in six years.
"I just remember him in the locker room - not only him, but that whole senior class - with the joy and the satisfaction of all of the preparation and the work that they had put into that game," Johnson said. "If you look at one particular game that may have catapulted our program to a different stage and a different level that might have been the game."
Sarkus knew right away that Luck was on the fast track to success. From a professional football playing career to becoming a successful sports executive, Luck has made the different transitions in his life very easily.
"He has a lot of staying power," Sarkus said. "NFL Europe wasn't easy and I think he won a championship or two over there and he won two championships in soccer (with the Houston Dynamos)."
Yogi Jones, a former Pitt Panther linebacker who used to spend his Saturday afternoons chasing down Luck, later got to know him well when the two were in Europe. Their conversations usually ended up being about the Backyard Brawl.
"He was such a tough guy and a good athlete - and a competitor, without a doubt," said Jones. "To me, if he would have stuck around in the league he could be the (NFL) commissioner right now … and there would still be an NFL Europe."
Talley is happy and proud that his teammate is returning WVU to run the athletic department.
"Oliver doesn't come in here with an empty bookshelf, now. He's got a bookshelf of credentials," Talley said. "The thing about him is he will put his heart and soul into it just like he does with everything he does. He's the type of guy who will roll up his sleeves and be like, 'OK, here's what we've got to do guys' - be it baseball, soccer or anything, he will make sure we have the best people in there to do it. That's just Oliver. That's the way he is."
"From a moral and a character standpoint, he's just an outstanding individual," said Conachan. "Knowing our experiences at West Virginia, the way the state embraces the school and the athletic programs, you would be hard pressed to beat that anywhere else. Knowing how much Oliver meant to the program down there, and then having him come back, it's going to be a tremendous boost."
"He knows how to rally people and bring people together and get them excited," Sarkus added. "I think what he's going to bring to the table here is a lot of passion and a lot of excitement, instant credibility, and respect in his arena - plus being able to raise the bar another level from the great job that Eddie (Pastilong) has done."
Oblak remembered seven or eight years ago Luck arranging a reunion for the Cleveland area players in Morgantown before a Mountaineer football game. The Friday night before the game some of them were supposed to take part in the homecoming parade. Luck and Oblak were running late and they couldn't find a place close enough to High Street to park so they wound up parking down below the Business and Economics building where the old stadium used to sit.
The two got out of the car and took off through campus, cutting through all of the familiar buildings as they hustled to make the beginning of the parade. While running through the hallways Luck pointed out what classes he had in each building as they went by.
"I'm like, 'Ollie come on we've got a parade to get to!'" Oblak chuckled.
They eventually got there just in the nick of time. Later while riding down the street and observing the throng of Mountaineer fans decked out in their gold and blue, eight-to-10 deep on each side of the street, a wonderful feeling of nostalgia overcame both of them.
"He said to me, 'You know Dave, I had a chance to go to Harvard and you know what, I picked West Virginia. My parents were trying to talk me out of it.' "I said, 'Oliver I know exactly why - look around you, the people, the state, it's just phenomenal,'" said Oblak.
"I still get chills just thinking about it."
