They haven’t quite got around to erecting a statue, renaming the stadium or even making up T-shirts with catchy slogans bearing his name, though that’s surely coming soon. What the University of Illinois football faithful are doing, however, is as telling as it is intangible.
They are buying what Ron Zook has been selling.
First came the team and then the town. Somewhere in between came the recruits. And now, solid evidence in a New Year’s Day date with USC in the Rose Bowl that it wasn’t some hackneyed sales pitch three years ago by the coach Florida threw away.
Contrary to then-popular belief, Ron Zook can coach a little. The Illini can play football. But it is Zook’s skills as a salesman, the object of both awe and suspicion, that’s at the root of it all — the growth, the success and the hope for the Illini’s future.
Zook says it’s the atmosphere surrounding his program that has drawn some of the top recruits in the nation, and with them a suspicion among some, illuminated in a New York Times article early this year, that Illinois must be guilty of something fishy.
“Look, we’re all selling the same thing. We’re all selling something you can’t see,” Zook said. “And when all that came up — ‘What are they doing there?’ — I wish I could tell you, but it’s a feeling, a feeling of excitement. When kids say they want to come here, it’s from their heart. We’re not high-pressure. The guys who are here are the ones who sold it.”
The guys who are there, guys like senior linebacker J Leman, clearly have been listening and are just as capable of speaking the word themselves. Zook, Leman said, “has always told us, ‘Guys, perception is reality. People perceive you as a losing program. Let’s go break that perception.’
“I think we did that. As a team and as individuals.”
Smoke clears
It is actually quite easy to measure how strongly Illini fans have bought into Zook’s optimism. Season-ticket sales improved by a whopping 13,000 over last season, the second biggest increase in the country.
But it is the perception of outsiders that threatened last winter, on national signing day no less, to stain the program when a New York Times article quoted rivals questioning Zook’s tactics in landing top-tier recruits like wide receiver Arrelious Benn from Washington, D.C., and defensive end Martez Wilson from Chicago.
Most inflammatory were comments by John L. Smith, recently fired from Michigan State.
“If they had a winning program and all that, it would be a different deal,” Smith said. “If they had the greatest facilities in the world, then maybe they could sell them. But what are they selling? Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire.”
Zook was beside himself, even more so perhaps when another newspaper followed soon after with a headline blaring: “Zook: I’m not a crook.”
“Who I really felt sorry for were the [recruits] because this was supposed to be their big day and people are questioning their character,” Zook said.
Zook turned down a radio show this fall when he heard Smith was hosting it. He said he refused to return a phone call from Smith when he heard Smith had not placed the call himself.
Smith, now doing radio-TV work as well as scouting for the St. Louis Rams, clarified what he said by phone from Louisville last week.
“The article only played up half of what I said and that wasn’t fair to Coach Zook and it really wasn’t fair to me because it wasn’t the intent by any means,” Smith said. “What I said was, what you have to ask yourself is ‘What is he selling? He isn’t selling wins and losses because he can’t sell that (Zook was 4-19 his first two seasons at Illinois). He can’t sell facilities. But the thing he is selling is the future. Future facilities and friendships, because your biggest sellers are your kids.’
“They asked me about airplane flights and about a bar and giving kids money and I said we never ran into him, we never recruited against him except for one or two kids. If you have all this smoke you say is out there, where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire. But I haven’t seen it.
“I think he has done a tremendous job. He has done what you have to do on the bottom rung: get pipelines established and look under rocks. All these recruiting gurus who want to know how that happened, well, maybe it’s because he outworked everyone’s tail.”
Illinois athletic director Ron Guenther did what he had to do after the article appeared. He consoled his coach, and then he mounted an investigation.
“Ron and I talked and he said, ‘Somebody has to go to our defense,’ and the only way to go is to investigate all the allegations,” Guenther said. “I take all that stuff very seriously. We investigated every piece of that, and there was absolutely nothing of truth in any of it.”
Honesty is best policy
What is clear is that Zook is obsessive about recruiting, about the thrill of the chase, so much so, one rival contends, that on signing day he has been known to announce and publicize signings of kids Illinois might not admit to school “just so he can create that aura.”
Illegal? No. Crafty? Perhaps. Competitive?
“People say, ‘Well, you love to recruit,'” Zook said. “I don’t love to recruit, I just hate to lose, and the best chance you have of being successful is to have the best players that you possibly can, and good people, good students.”
Parents of athletes Zook has recruited seemed impressed by the simplest things.
“He may have been the only head coach to visit my house,” said Denise Benn, mother of Arrelious “Regis” Benn. “The other ones I spoke with or even visited at schools, you just didn’t get that gut feeling of honesty and sincerity.”
Benn said she knew her son made the right decision when she received an anonymous call at work telling her, “He’s making the wrong decision. [Illinois] offered him money.”
Benn said the call came from a Notre Dame booster.
“Once Regis made the announcement, I was getting stuff Notre Dame threw out there,” she said. “Everyone else was a class act. I cried, I was hurting, and that’s when Ron Zook picked up the phone and said, ‘See, Denise, aren’t you glad he didn’t go there?'”
Linda Bussey’s son Nathan was a Dunbar High teammate of Benn and Vontae Davis, who signed with Illinois the year before. Zook, Bussey said, was “different” from the other coaches.
“I read in the paper where the Maryland coach was saying that [Illinois] was coming down and ‘sweeping up all the D.C. talent,'” Bussey said. “They didn’t sweep up nothing. If I felt the school wasn’t right for my son, he wouldn’t have gone there. Coach Zook said all the right things. He came to the phone when I called. He still does.”
Zook said he has selected his players as much as they have selected him, by talking to guidance counselors, janitors, “anybody I can talk to because I want to know everything I can know. I want to know the truth.”
Can he simply look a kid in the eye and know the truth?
“How about when I have 25 seconds to make a decision and Juice [Williams] grabs me by the arm and says ‘Coach, I’ll get you an inch,’ knowing that the whole nation is looking at you?” Zook responds. “Yeah, I look them in the eyes. And I do have a good feeling for them.”
Misfortune at Florida
Zook took over at Florida when Steve Spurrier left for the NFL and was fired after 2 1/2 stormy seasons. If he was looking for validation, surely he received it last January when Florida won the national championship with 22 of 24 starters who joined the Gators while Zook was the coach.
He said he receives countless e-mails from Florida fans and reporters saying they misjudged him — his teams were 8-5, 8-5 and 4-3 when he was fired after an upset loss to Mississippi State. But he still bristles a bit when talking about how it all ended, after Zook came to some players’ defense at a campus fraternity and traded words with frat members.
“They had to have an excuse for why they fired me, so they said it was discipline,” Zook said. “Well, if they would have thought about it, look at what we did those last four games.”
Florida won three of its last four games under Zook, including a victory at Florida State the day the Seminoles named their field for coach Bobby Bowden.
“If we weren’t a disciplined team, you couldn’t have done it,” Zook said. “That team stuck together, they rallied around it; we won the last three games. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
“But I got to thinking: I told all those kids and all those parents that I was going to take care of them. And in life, there are tough times. … When it was announced that they were in the championship game, I had been gone for two years and Chris Leak’s dad called me and said, ‘Ron, if there’s ever a parent you want me to call, you give them my number and I’ll tell them why they should play for you.'”
It’s all about selling, though beating Penn State, Wisconsin and Ohio State in Columbus always helps.
“He has often said our theme is ‘Believe,’ believe that what the coaches are telling us is true,” Leman said. “Now we’re starting to see that. We believed and now we’re starting to see what Coach Zook saw.”
“I told them for two years about believing — ‘Fellas, if we were winning, it wouldn’t be believing, it would be seeing,'” Zook said. “We’re still not at the point where we have enough who believe we can win the whole thing. But I don’t want to walk down the street and have people thinking with all we’ve accomplished that this is a fluke.
“You have to keep doing it, and pretty soon people are going to see that dadgum, they really are a good team.”
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9 days
It’s been 24 years since the Illini last played in the Rose Bowl. We count down until their Jan. 1 date with USC.
FAST FACT
Illinois’ bowl record for total offense is 611 yards, set in the 63-21 victory over Virginia in the 1999 Micronpc.com Bowl in Miami.
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misaacson@tribune.com
