Shutting herself inside the master bedroom of her elegant new home in this Boulder suburb, Lyndi McCartney spent the spring of 1993 weak from bulimia and considering suicide.
Her husband, Bill McCartney, then the celebrated coach of the University of Colorado football team, was busier than ever organizing Promise Keepers, the Christian men’s movement he had founded, which was gearing up for its largest stadium revival rally yet.
While McCartney was out building a movement whose central tenet is that men should treasure and serve their wives and families, his own wife now says she was suffering through the most precarious days of a marriage that has now lasted 35 years. Lyndi McCartney, usually the gregarious and sharp-witted cheerleader to her husband and four children, says she spent nearly a year cloistered in her room refusing phone calls and visits, reading nearly 100 self-help books and hiding the fact that she could not keep down what little food she ate. She lost 80 pounds.
“I thought she was just exercising discipline,” McCartney said in an interview. “I saw her losing weight, but I didn’t see it as a bad thing. You know how ladies are, concerned about the pounds. I saw that she was losing weight, and I was proud of her.”
A private person, Lyndi McCartney until now has never talked publicly about her own feelings of marital despair and isolation that she grappled with even after her husband had begun drawing tens of thousands of men to stadium rallies with the message that they must make a new and passionate commitment to their wives and families.
After seven years as Promise Keepers’ lead visionary, Bill McCartney, 57, draws crowds that rival those of Rev. Billy Graham. He has built Promise Keepers into one of the fastest-spreading revival movements in recent American history, with more than 2 million participants and a budget of $96 million.
McCartney has often publicly confessed that he has not been the perfect role model. Lyndi McCartney says it was not until after her husband had produced and spoken at 10 stadium events that he began to practice his own preaching on marital harmony. Before that, he was the “same as a plumber,” she said in a lengthy interview. “A plumber never fixes anything at home. He’s always out fixing everybody else’s plumbing.”
This is the story of how Bill McCartney came to learn that his own marriage had fallen badly in need of repair. It is a story of alcohol addiction and of betrayal, and of efforts to overcome them through prayer, Scripture and therapy. It is also a chronicle of three decades of change weathered by one “traditional 1950s marriage,” as Lyndi McCartney describes it, in which the wife reared the children and sacrificed her self while the husband pursued his career.
Bill McCartney’s professed devotion to God and family impressed young Lyndi Taussig, who met him when she was attending Stephens College, a women’s institution in Columbia, Mo., and he was playing linebacker for the University of Missouri.
But as they started to date, she saw another side: he could not drink alcohol without drinking to excess. On a double date one night after a beer-keg party, he crashed a borrowed car into a police cruiser in front of Lyndi’s dorm and was arrested for mouthing off to the policeman. He lost his football scholarship, became bitter and drank more frequently, he wrote in his newly released second autobiography, “Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference” (Word Publishing).
But each time he prayed for forgiveness, and they married in 1962. She was 19, and he was 22.
“It was a nightmare,” she said of his drinking, “but I just didn’t have a very strong sense of myself. I was too afraid to confront him and say, `We can’t get married if it’s going to be like this.’ “
Yet McCartney pursued his ambition with strict discipline. He quickly climbed a ladder of high-school coaching jobs and by 1971 was keeping a grueling pace simultaneously coaching football and basketball teams that both won state titles in 1973.
Lyndi McCartney, meanwhile, was racking up her own record of four children in eight years, while moving her household from one coaching job to another. Once, Bill McCartney says, he learned of a new coaching job, packed the car and uprooted his resistant family from Missouri to Michigan in one day. He believed that the move was divinely ordained because he had just returned from a Catholic renewal conference, where he had been told that within 72 hours God would irreversibly change his life.
Lyndi McCartney said she considered leaving him once, in the late 1960s.
“Bill was drinking really bad,” she said in the interview. “He was never home. I just thought, `I can’t keep living like this.’ “
She packed her two small children in the car and was walking back into the house to pick up the baby when a messenger arrived with flowers. There was a note on them from her husband saying he would be home late.
“So I just got the kids out of the car,” she said, “and I just cried.”
Things got better, the McCartneys said, after he attended a Campus Crusade for Christ conference in 1974 while an assistant coach at the University of Michigan and became “born again,” convinced that he could have a direct, personal relationship with God, without the mediation of priests.
The impact was immediate and profound, he said. He began praying over his children, fasting every Wednesday and Friday, and rising at 4 a.m. to read Scripture. He evangelized his friends, neighbors and total strangers. It was a “compulsion,” he said, and one that eventually resulted in what he described as his “total abstinence” from alcohol.
Faith brought the family together for Sunday morning services, for almost daily Bible study and for Christian camps. But the couple avoided confronting their problems, Lyndi McCartney said.
“We both turned away from our marriage,” she wrote in his new book. “Bill turned to the Lord, and I turned toward the children.”
She went through “blue times,” she said in the interview, but always rallied.
In what he called “career idolatry,” McCartney worked 16-hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, 10 months of the year. The children said he made time for them by inviting them to tag along to bowl games and locker rooms. They had tailgate birthday parties.
Tom McCartney, 31, a high-school coach in Boulder, said in a telephone interview that he had never felt neglected because his father had involved him in the excitement of football. His older brother, Mike, 33, a scout for the Chicago Bears, said that while he had loved being the coach’s kid, “the toughest thing was when he was there physically, but his mind was elsewhere.”
“You knew he wasn’t listening,” Mike McCartney recalled. “He was a great father, and we knew we were loved, but day to day he wasn’t present.”
McCartney’s career zeal paid off when he became head coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes in 1982. Within eight years, he turned a losing team into national champions. His experience recruiting black players from struggling homes raised his awareness of racism, which, he said, is one reason Promise Keepers has made racial reconciliation a priority.
By 1993, Lyndi McCartney had hit bottom. Her children had left home, and she went through an identity crisis. “I really didn’t like who I was,” she said. “I failed as a wife. I failed as a mother.”
In an interview, Rev. James Ryle, McCartney’s pastor at Boulder Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship and chaplain for the Buffaloes, said the catalyst for Lyndi McCartney’s breakdown came in an Arizona hotel room on the morning of Jan. 1, 1993, when McCartney confessed to his wife just before the Fiesta Bowl that 20 years earlier he had committed adultery. Then McCartney left the hotel for his traditional pregame walk with Ryle, and in the car told his pastor what he had just done, Ryle recalled.
“That moment was the quintessential definition of their marriage,” Ryle said. “Here’s a guy who has just unloaded on Lyndi the heaviest burden, and he goes off to coach a team.”
Ryle said he insisted they go back to the hotel to see Lyndi McCartney and found her in grief.
“To her,” he said, “it was like it happened last night. It ain’t no 20 years ago.”
Lyndi McCartney, asked in an interview whether her husband had ever committed adultery, only repeated, “He’s been a faithful Christian husband.”
The couple said they began seeing a Christian counselor, who helped them listen to each other. And Lyndi McCartney says a herbalist eventually cured her eating disorder.
On Nov. 19, 1994, McCartney called a press conference and, with his wife at his side, announced he was quitting coaching and a 10-year, $350,000-a-year contract to spend more time with his family.
