Dietzel powered

Everyone from fans in the upper west-side deck of Tiger Stadium to ESPN analysts knows the expectations placed on LSU’s football head coach make a pressure cooker feel like a benevolent embrace. Lou Holtz famously declined the position in 1979 for this very reason. But this wasn’t always the case. When a 30-year-old assistant from Army became head coach of the Tigers in 1955, “all they wanted was improvement, not a championship,” says Paul Dietzel.

Three seasons later the former LSU coach had given the fans both, leading the school to its first national title in 1958. The way he laid a strong foundation for the school’s program was not unlike the yeoman’s work Nick Saban did at the beginning of this decade. But when Les Miles feels the heat to repeat this fall, he only has one man to blame. The man who first raised expectations: Coach Paul Dietzel.

Florida State’s Bobby Bowden calls Dietzel a master of organization and an innovator. Dietzel just prefers “coach.” His detailed memoir Call Me Coach: A Life in College Football is available now.

Writing in a breezy, colloquial manner, Dietzel traces his life from humble beginnings in rural Ohio, where his family couldn’t even afford the meager ticket price to attend high school football games, to his own playing days and his storied—yet journeyman—coaching career. If there is an answer to how a poor Midwestern kid with barely average grades becomes a unanimously revered Coach of the Year summoned personally to meetings with legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Dwight Eisenhower, it is in this book. That is the incredible arc of Dietzel’s life. At least it is the story he found looking through seven boxes of memorabilia before writing his autobiography. But Dietzel hopes his book tells another story.

“Looking in those boxes I saw that all these newspaper clippings and photos, all the plaudits and all the barbs, had yellowed and faded and were totally worthless,” he says. “And it reinforced what is really important: my friends and family who know my faults and love me anyway, and my relationship with the Lord. Those are the true rewards.” Call Me Coach: A Life in College Football is published by LSU Press and available in bookstores everywhere.