Holtz following in father's footsteps

JohnClay / Herald-Leader Sports Columnist

His father tried to talk him out of it. Pleaded with him. Begged. Did everything but offer him a tall stack of cash, anything to persuade his son not to go into the family business.

When finally the father knew the son was determined to be a football coach, he had but one more question.

"Have you told your mother?" asked Lou Holtz.

"Not yet," answered Skip Holtz.

"When you do," Lou said, "make sure she's unarmed."

But how could 44-year-old Skip Holtz, who leads his Conference USA champion East Carolina Pirates into Friday's Liberty Bowl to play Kentucky, be anything but a football coach?

"The experiences that I've had growing up around my dad I couldn't find anywhere else," he said recently on the phone from his office in Greenville, N.C.

Like the time he was 10 years old and his father took North Carolina State to the 1973 Liberty Bowl. Of course, the entire Holtz family tagged along to Memphis. And as part of the bowl package, the team was treated to a trip to Graceland to tour Elvis Presley's home.

Only Mrs. Holtz didn't think Graceland was any place for a 10-year-old boy to be, so she decided to take young Skip to the Memphis zoo.

When mother and son returned, the team was all abuzz after its return from Graceland. Turned out Presley happened to be home that day. And the King gave the Wolfpack a guided tour himself.

"Meanwhile," said Skip Holtz, "I was feeding peanuts to the elephants at the zoo."

A few years later, when Lou Holtz was head coach of the New York Jets — a job he held for just one season — young Skip helped his father out at training camp. One day, Skip was on his way to the cafeteria when up pulled a white Eldorado convertible.

"Have you had lunch?" asked the handsome man in the driver's seat.

"Not yet," said young Skip.

"Hop in," said the man.

Skip did, and off he went with Joe Namath to eat lunch at Jack in the Box.

"I just decided that I could always go into coaching, and if I didn't like it, then I could go into business," said Skip Holtz. "But it would be harder to start out in business, and if I didn't like it, go into coaching."

Even if his coaching baptism started a little earlier than he expected.

Holtz graduated at Christmas from Notre Dame in 1986, and decided it would be a good idea to take the next six months off, maybe go live for a while in California with one of his old college roommates, then look for a graduate assistant's job in the summer.

But then one day his mother informed him that Bobby Bowden had called. Florida State had an opening for a graduate assistant. If Skip wanted it, he had to act now. And you couldn't turn down Bobby Bowden.

"Instead of laying on the beach in California," Holtz said, "I was sitting in a classroom as a grad student at Florida State thinking, 'What in the heck am I doing?'"

Turned out, he knew what he was doing. After two years at FSU, Holtz spent a year on Earle Bruce's staff at Colorado State. He then joined his father at Notre Dame in 1990, where he spent four years before becoming head coach at Connecticut, then a I-AA school. After five years there, Skip joined up with his father again, to be offensive coordinator at South Carolina.

"It's good and bad working for your father," Skip said. "You know he's going to be hard on you, but in the long run it made me a better football coach."

Like father, like son. Holtz became head coach at East Carolina in 2005. The Pirates have improved each season, going from 5-6 to 7-6 to 8-5 to now 9-4 and the conference title.

Not bad for a chip off the old block.

Said Skip Holtz, "I wouldn't have it any other way."

Reach John Clay at (859) 231-3226 or (800) 950-6397, Ext. 3226, or jclay@herald-leader.com. Read his blog at Kentucky.com.