Switzer talks football at chamber dinner

COLUMBUS - Former Oklahoma Sooners coach Barry Switzer was driving down an Oklahoma City street about three months ago when his cell phone rang. The voice on the phone conjured up a memory of a chilly November day in Lincoln 28 years ago.

It was Jim Pillen of Columbus calling.

“It was a voice out of years past. It was Jim Pillen, who had been in my nightmares for years,” Switzer told about 700 people attending the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce's “Night of Champions” annual meeting Tuesday night at Platte County Agricultural Park.

Pillen, the chamber's chairman for 2006-07, was calling to invite Switzer to the chamber's annual event, but his voice was a bittersweet reminder of that 1978 Nebraska-Oklahoma game in which a defensive back from Columbus made a pivotal play that decided the outcome of the contest.

The No. 1-ranked Sooners were trailing the Huskers by a field goal late in the game when Heisman Trophy-winning running back Billy Sims broke free on a spectacular run for what appeared to be the winning touchdown. A Husker defender caught the Sooners' running back at the NU 3-yard-line and jarred the football loose, with Pillen jumping on the fumble and saving the game.

Final score: Huskers 17, Sooners 14.

“It's not the victories, Big 8 championships and bowl games you remember, it's the ones that got away,'' Switzer said. The game in which a clumsy defensive back from Nebraska, who had tripped over the chain gang on the sidelines before recovering to catch Sims, blindsided Billy and wins the game for the Huskers is the one that sticks in your memory, he said.

“That's the game of football,'' the 68-year-old Switzer said during an after-dinner speech peppered with reminisces of OU-NU games, his sideline rivalry with former Huskers coach Tom Osborne and his years coaching the Dallas Cowboys in the National Football League.

The tables were turned for the 1986 Sooners-Huskers contest in Lincoln. Sooners tight end Keith Jackson made an acrobatic one-handed, behind-the-back catch and run late in that game that sparked an OU rally. The Sooners kicked a field goal and won the game, 20-17.

But Huskers fans still wanted to register their displeasure with the outcome. After shaking hands with Huskers coach Tom Osborne, Switzer was walking across the field toward Memorial Stadium's south end zone when he noticed that 15,000 or 20,000 fans hadn't begun departing when the final gun went off.

“I noticed nobody was moving in the stands. I pointed up to the crowd, and 15,000 people” made an obscene gesture, joked Switzer as the chamber crowd roared with laughter. “NU fans are the greatest in the world.”

Switzer, who won three college football championships at OU and a Super Bowl trophy in 1995 when the Cowboys defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, said he and Osborne had a different mission coaching in the college ranks compared to the win-at-all-costs mantra of pro football.

“We take a 17-year-old kid, go into their home and sell our program and sell our school,” Switzer said. “Mothers trust us to take their sons for the next four or five years and develop them into productive citizens.”

Coaches get to know college players on a much deeper level than pro football coaches, Switzer said. “You know a player's mother, where he comes from, his goals and ambitions. We know all these things that pro football coaches don't give a damn about.”

A college coach's job isn't done when the player leaves the practice field or when the clock runs out in the fourth quarter of Saturday's game. A college coach is molding a young man's talents and abilities away from the field as well, Switzer said.

Tuesday night's program also included recognition of the chamber's 2006 “Night of Champions” award winners.

Jeff Gokie, owner of Big Apple Bagels, was the recipient of the Charles E. Farnam Volunteer of the Year Award sponsored by First Nebraska Bank; Rich Anderson, owner of Shelly Valley Companies, was the recipient of the Archway Award sponsored by Bob and Jane Stachura and Columbus Tire and Service Center; and Rebecca Rayman, executive director of the East-Central District Health Department, was the recipient of the Athena Award sponsored by Ernst Auto Center Inc.