Sonny Lubick: Nevada bred, Ram tough

Steve Guiremand

Thursday, Sept. 24, 1998 | 10:51 a.m.

Long before the WAC and national coach of the year awards began piling up, and long before he helped turn Colorado State into the top football program in the WAC, Sonny Lubick, a native of Butte, Mont., and a graduate of Western Montana University, began his coaching career in the most unlikeliest of places.

Beatty, Nevada.

The year was 1960.

"They called me up and said, 'Hey, the roses bloom all year round,'" Lubick recalled. "And then when they said it was close to Las Vegas ... I was a kid just 20 years old and I'm thinking, 'Hell, I'm going.' You don't think twice."

Then he arrived in Beatty, about a two-hour drive north of Las Vegas.

"I mean this in a nice way," said Lubick, whose Rams host UNLV Saturday. "But when I got there, there were only a few casinos and a few gas stations, really. That's what made it go. And they had this little mine going out of town."

It wasn't exactly a place one would expect one of college football's premier coaches to start a career.

For one thing, there weren't enough kids to field a tackle football team.

"I think we only had 14 boys in the entire school," Lubick said. "So we played flag football. I used to drive the school bus and I coached every sport: girls basketball, boys basketball, baseball, flag football. I remember our girls basketball team was better than our boys basketball team."

Still, Lubick, who went back and spoke at the high school's graduation commencement exercises last spring, has very fond memories of his two years at Beatty.

"It was a real experience for me," he said. "When I went back there to speak at the graduation ceremonies, I couldn't believe they had about 30 students graduate. When we were there, I think there maybe only 30 kids in the whole school."

Lubick chuckles at the thought of having to drive the Beatty team bus.

"Heck, in those days, we'd play games in California, about a four-hour drive one way," he said. "You'd go up, play a baseball game, and then not get home until one or two in the morning.

"We used to pick up hitchhikers on the side of the road," Lubick continued. "The kids loved that. They'd be hitchhiking on the road between Beatty and Las Vegas and we'd pick them up and drop them off in Las Vegas."

Lubick left Beatty in 1961 to return to Butte where he would start a long relationship with Sam Jankovich, who would go on to become athletic director at both Washington State and Miami of Florida, as well as general manager of the New England Patriots. It was there he also would come across a Washington State assistant named Jack Elway, who would recruit the area and one day hire him as an assistant coach at Stanford.

Elway's son, John, also is popular these days in Colorado.

After spending four years (1985-88) as an assistant for Elway at Stanford, Lubick was hired as Dennis Erickson's defensive coordinator at Miami (1988-92). He replaced Earle Bruce as head coach at Colorado State in 1993 and led the Rams to three WAC titles (1994, '95, '97) in five years. He was Sports Illustrated's national coach of the year in 1994.

"No, I didn't envision the program taking off like this," Lubick said. "It's kind of funny you ask that question. We were just sitting here talking about how we're 2-2. Five years ago we would have been happy with that, especially with a huge victory over Michigan State and a couple of real tough losses to Colorado and Air Force."

But after the dramatic come-from-behind 23-16 victory at Michigan State in the Black Coaches Association game, there was speculation the Rams could even go 12-0 and maybe sneak into the national championship hunt. However, Colorado put an end to that talk with a 42-14 victory at Mile High Stadium.

Then last week Colorado State lost a key WAC Mountain Division matchup with in-state rival Air Force, 30-27.

"The fans, you can feel the discontent in there," Lubick said. "As one article said out here, we've kind of created a monster. Five or ten years ago, to go .500 was about the expectation here a lot of times. Now people are saying that 10-2 might not be good enough. I'm thinking, 'Holy cow, what the hell is this?'

"It's probably like the basketball program at Las Vegas. They win a national championship and now the people want to see that all the time."

The Rams bounced back from a 2-2 start last year to win the WAC championship and beat Missouri, 35-24, in the Holiday Bowl.

Because of his success at Colorado State, Lubick's name has popped up for a number of major college openings in recent years, including Miami and USC.

At the age of 61, does he envision Fort Collins being his final head coaching stop?

"Not necessarily," he said.