Brooks did it his way

By John Clay / Herald-Leader Sports Columnist

Herald-Leader file photo

Above: An irate Rich Brooks yelled at an official after UK was flagged for a penalty on a punt against Vanderbilt in 2003. Right: Rich Brooks gave a thumbs-up to the student section after UK beat Clemson 28-20 in the 2006 Music City Bowl. It was the first of four consecutive bowl appearances for Brooks and the Wildcats.

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The man was the genuine article.

They used to say that a lot. They don't say it as much anymore, mainly because they don't make them much like Rich Brooks anymore.

The 68-year-old retired Monday morning after seven years as head football coach at the University of Kentucky, and in those seven years there was nothing much insincere about the man, nothing false, nor pretentious, nor over-the-top.

Rich Brooks didn't give you that self-serving talk about his program always doing the right thing, like so many other coaches do. He didn't go on and on about how this was the greatest place, or his were the greatest kids, or bore you with how hard he and his staff worked, or how important his family was to him.

He didn't say any of that because he didn't have to.

Pros don't do that kind of stuff, and Rich Brooks was/is a pro. And pros put their head down, place one foot in front the other, make one improvement after another, and leave a collegiate football program in much better shape than the one they found.

That's what Rich Brooks did at Kentucky.

Oh, it hasn't beaten Florida or Tennessee, and it didn't win as many games as the head coach would have liked. That, Brooks said Monday, was his one regret. But on any given Saturday, it could go to Athens and beat a Georgia, go to Auburn and beat an Auburn, it could even upset the No. 1 ranked team in the nation (LSU, 2007).

When you think of Rich Brooks and his time here, remember this: Once the coach shed the handcuffs of probation and the scholarship-reductions he inherited, there were very few Saturdays that you went to Commonwealth Stadium and thought "Kentucky has no shot today."

This is Kentucky football we're talking about, and that's saying something.

But what I'll remember most, and respect most, is the way Brooks did it.

First off, he's the best pure football coach I've been around. His successor, Joker Phillips, told me once that Brooks was one of the few coaches he knew that could coach every position. I believe it.

He brought a much-needed consistency, a solid foundation. He didn't run one scheme one year and something else the next. He stayed true to his beliefs.

He didn't get bogged down by the little things, either. He never curried favor with the media, but he never backhanded it either. And I was hard on the man when he got here. Too hard, probably. Yet he never said a cross word, and only once did he personally object, and he was right to do so. We had our job to do. He had his job.

He was a fighter. Oh, boy. He might have been in his 60s, but Brooks' drive was somewhere in the 20s. You only had to watch him on the sidelines to know that. He could chew at (and up) a line judge, admonish an assistant, even criticize a player in the post-game press conference. And get away with it.

I wondered if Brooks could relate to today's players, only to find that what he was selling — a honesty, sincerity and professionalism — always relates.

"He wanted you to do well as a person," said Keenan Burton, "not just as a football player."

I got the former UK receiver, now St. Louis Ram, on his cell phone Monday afternoon, and even though the signal kept breaking up, the admiration in Burton's voice rang through.

When I asked him what he remembered most about his time with Brooks, the Louisville native didn't mention wins or yards or bowl games.

He said it was after his junior season, when Burton was considering leaving school early and entering the NFL draft.

"He helped me fill out the papers, and I remember him telling me, 'I'll help you the best way I can.'" said Burton. "And right then and there I knew I was in the right spot, that every thing that I had done for him, he was willing to do back for me."

That was Rich Brooks.

Rich Brooks

Biography

Born: Aug. 20, 1941, in Forest, Calif.

High school: Graduated from Nevada Union in Grass Valley, Calif., in 1959.

College: Bachelor's degree in physical education from Oregon State in 1963 and master's degree in education in 1964.