Columnist Dean Juipe: Ault unable to resist coaching temptation

Dean Juipe

Friday, Dec. 5, 2003 | 10:17 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

What happened to Chris Ault could happen to anybody.

It also says something about human nature.

Ault reclaimed the head coach's position for the Nevada-Reno football program this week, taking the job for a third time in spite of stepping aside twice due to family and personal concerns. But he was never far away, serving as UNR's athletic director and overseeing the program from a safe, if short, distance.

When the Wolf Pack failed to produce a winning season for the fifth consecutive year, Ault made it known he wasn't happy with coach Chris Tormey even though he had given the coach a one-year extension just a year ago.

Tormey was let go last weekend after a horrendous loss to Boise State dropped UNR to 6-6 in spite of having the most returning starters (17) in the Western Athletic Conference. Tormey was a less than satisfactory 49-54 overall, losing too often to in-state rival UNLV as well.

Ault had been working the phones for at least a couple of weeks before he fired Tormey, and I know of at least one former head coach he contacted and pitched the idea of coming to Reno.

He said early in the week that he was inundated with applicants.

But he knew none of them had the experience, the zest for the task and the inherent knowledge of its pitfalls better than himself. He knew, after years of seeing his beloved program in decline, that he was the best man for the job.

So Wednesday he appointed himself coach, with the school's smiling president and the state's bemused governor sitting nearby and nodding their approval.

Ault is a still-young 57 despite being a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, and his career record of 163-63-1 was built during a 17-year tenure (1976-92) and a two-year tenure (1994-95) as head coach of the Wolf Pack.

Obviously, his teams won on a regular basis and for those who may recall or have heard of such things, they did it with panache. An Ault-coached Wolf Pack was explosive, daring and determined to throw the ball on almost every down.

They ran up huge offensive numbers and kept the turnstiles humming at Mackay Stadium.

When more recent UNR teams under the direction of Jeff Tisdel and then Tormey failed to do the same, Ault was left in an uncomfortable position. He was still in the building, so to speak, but he had only a token influence and no day-to-day decisions to make pertaining to Reno football.

He may have been AD, but he was an observer, the equivalent of a captain emeritus in the deckhouse of the Titanic. He could see what needed to be done without having the absolute authority to do it.

He was in a position where his opinion carried some weight, yet no one was obliged to listen. He could relate how he handled difficult situations and he could hand out his unsolicited advice, yet anything he may have offered ran the risk of being dry-docked.

He was still committed to UNR but he could see its banner slumping.

Enough, he finally said. I'll do it. Instead of sitting up here in my suite at the stadium and second-guessing what's going on down on the field, I'll go down there myself and straighten this out.

As temptations go, this one is fairly universal. Once you've done the job and been successful at it, you always feel you can step back in and do it again.

And usually, you can.