Contra Costa Times: Tedford works out

By Eric Gilmore

Looking back, former Cal athletic director Steve Gladstone calls it the key interview he had with Jeff Tedford four years ago. Gladstone was searching for a new football coach, and he spent nearly five hours talking to Tedford at the Hotel Mac in Point Richmond that December day in 2001. "He's very understated," said Gladstone. "He's not flash. He's not a self-promoter at all. But there was an intensity about Jeff that really was palpable." Gladstone said he sensed in Tedford not just a desire to win, but an "absolute need," a trait he had seen in many great coaches. "This is not an add-on to his life or a piece of his life," Gladstone said. "To Jeff, it appears to me it's a defining piece of his life." Gladstone ultimately hired Tedford, who took over a 1-10 team and quickly transformed Cal's football program into a national power. During Tedford's tenure at Cal, we've learned about his tireless work ethic. We've learned about his 18-hour work days and that he sleeps in his office four nights a week on an inflatable mattress during the season. If you want to know what drives Tedford and why football and, yes, winning, are so important to him, you have to start at the beginning. Long before Tedford became a highly paid, highly successful football coach with a beautiful home in Danville, he was a skinny quarterback from a broken home on the wrong side of the tracks in Downey, a Los Angeles suburb. Tedford's was not a "Leave it to Beaver" childhood. His father was an alcoholic. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he has had little contact with his father the past three-plus decades. "You can't choose your circumstances, but you can choose to overcome them," said former Warren High School football coach Randy Drake, Tedford's coach in 1977 and '78. "It motivated him. He was going to overcome them one way or another. That's a credit to his personality and makeup. Very determined guy." Tedford, 44, downplays his hardscrabble childhood. He said he was "very fortunate to have a great mother and a brother and sisters who were very, very supportive." Tedford, though, said he could have easily taken "the wrong fork in the road" and wound up in serious trouble if not for football and his football coaches. "I was not a saint by any means, and I learned hard lessons," Tedford said. "I was very fortunate to get through some of the stuff. "I think without football and without sports my life would be totally different."

Tedford said the "only fear" he had as a teenager was letting down his team and coaches. "Athletics really saved him," said longtime Cerritos College coach Frank Mazzotta. "As long as he had a basketball or a football in his hands, he was fine."

That fear of letting down players and coaches who rely on him still motivates Tedford today. "I look at the kids and players that we coach. I would be devastated if I didn't work my hardest to give them the right answers on the field," he said.

"You never want to put anybody there on the field unprepared because we didn't spend the time or energy to watch that last tape or do whatever." Mazzotta was Downey's coach when Tedford was a freshman. He later coached Tedford for two seasons at Cerritos. When Tedford speaks to high school coaches at football clinics, he often tells of the huge impact Mazzotta had on his life one day when he was a freshman. That school day had long since ended, but Tedford, in no hurry to go home, was still hanging around campus. "I was a little freshman kid," Tedford said. "Maybe 5-8, 130 pounds or whatever. And I'm walking back and forth in front of the coaches' office." Mazzotta eventually called Tedford into his office and started talking to him, about sports and life in general. "He didn't need to do that," Tedford said. "He didn't know I was going to be a good football player or I could have done something for him. He called me in there just to talk. "So I tell these high school coaches, 'You mean so much more to these kids than just X's and O's. When you see that skinny kid walking back and forth, call him in and talk to him because you may change his life. My coaches did.' " Football defined Tedford's life at an early age. So did his role as an overachieving underdog, making up for his lack of size with toughness, desire and intelligence. "He was always so serious about the game," said Sacramento State coach Steve Mooshagian, Tedford's high school rival and teammate at Cerritos and Fresno State. "It meant so much to him. "Jeff was very intense. He was tough as nails. He was dirt tough. He just played with a passion." Drake, a former Long Beach State quarterback, coached Tedford as a junior and senior at Downey and gave him a solid foundation of football fundamentals. His influence, though, went beyond X's and O's. Drake was a stickler for discipline. Whenever a coach asked a player a question, that player's answer had to include one of the following five responses: yes sir, no sir, thank you, may I or please. "And if you didn't do that, you had to get down and do 50 pushups," Tedford said. "It was one of those schools where everybody would shave their heads for football season. Just a lot of dedication. He was really stringent." Tedford said he thrived in that environment. As a senior who stood 5-10 and weighed all of 150 pounds, he led Downey to an 11-1 record. He was an All-CIF quarterback and played in the Shrine Game, facing John Elway. "He was a click ahead of the game," Drake said. "A hard-working, very insightful, intelligent young man. Studied the game and worked hard. "You could see the moxie and the makeup and the determination. That's been constant throughout his career. Very tough. Injuries wouldn't keep him out of a game. He was different." Still, Tedford was ignored by Division I college football recruiters. He was considered too short and too light.

So he went to Cerritos, reuniting with Mazzotta. As a sophomore, he led Mazzotta's team to an 11-1 record. By then he had grown another inch and a half and gained 30 pounds. That made him big enough for former Fresno State coach Jim Sweeney, who offered him a scholarship. Midway through his first season at Fresno in 1981, Tedford owned the starting job. As a senior, he led Fresno to an 11-1 record, including a come-from-behind 29-28 victory over Bowling Green in the California Bowl. He set school single-season records for passing yards (2,993) and touchdowns (24). Three teams. Three 11-1 seasons. That qualifies as a trend. "He was a leader in high school and a leader in junior college and a great leader here," Sweeney said. "The players loved him." When Tedford left Fresno State, he was the school's leader in career passing yards (4,872) and touchdown passes (35). "Jeff was one of those players you loved to have on your side," said Stephone Paige, former Fresno State and Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver. "He was so intense. Just like you see him coaching, he had that same intensity. He had that fire in him. "He's such a leader. That stuff rubs off on everybody around him. When he has a mission, he's definitely going to get it done." Many of Tedford's touchdown passes at Fresno State went to Henry Ellard, a former NFL great now working as an assistant coach for the St. Louis Rams. "He wasn't a real big guy," Ellard said of Tedford. "But he could throw the ball down the field. We lit up the scoreboard pretty good. "In '82 we were throwing bombs. It was amazing. He was launching the ball." Ellard caught 62 passes for 1,510 yards and 16 scores, averaging 24.4 yards per catch. Paige averaged 19.6 yards per catch. He grabbed 48 passes for 943 yards and eight touchdowns. The NFL ignored Tedford -- too small again -- but he played six seasons in the Canadian Football League before becoming a coach. If Tedford's life had taken a slightly different twist, he might be selling corrugated boxes in the Fresno area instead of coaching football. That's what he was doing in 1989 after spending two seasons as an unpaid coach at Fresno State. Tedford and his wife, Donna, had a young son, Taylor. They had spent the money he had saved from playing in the CFL and the $1,000 he had earned washing windows at a huge building in Fresno. "So I was down to absolutely zero money. Zero," Tedford said. So he took the sales job. That same day, Calgary Stampeders coach Lary Kuharich called Tedford to offer him a position on his coaching staff. Tedford turned him down. He was tired of moving. He wanted "more stability" in his life. So he went to work, learning the ins and outs of his new sales job. Three weeks into the job, Tedford was miserable. He remembers driving home from work one night thinking he had made a huge mistake. "And then I walked through the front door and my wife said, 'Hey, Lary called you back.'" Kuharich offered the job to Tedford again. "I said, 'Oh, thank God,'" Tedford said. "That's when I got started. He gave me a break." Tedford spent three seasons at Calgary, getting a crash-course in coaching offense. In the small-budget CFL, Tedford was responsible for coaching quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers, as well as coordinating the offense. "It really forced me to submerge myself in all the game," Tedford said. In 1992, Tedford returned to Fresno State as quarterbacks coach under Sweeney. The next year he was promoted to offensive coordinator, a job he kept for five years. "He was a super guy for play calling and play insertions, double-passes and all that kind of thing, putting in new plays," Sweeney said. "We used to go in with three or four (trick) plays every week. He designed most of them." Sweeney retired at Fresno State after the 1996 season. Tedford, as Sweeney's former quarterback and longtime offensive coordinator, seemed like the likely successor. "He was kind of stamping me as the next coach there," Tedford said. "I was not ready for that. And so I took my name out."

The job went to Pat Hill, but Tedford remained at Fresno State for the final year of his contract. "So without moving I got a chance to see how the team, who I knew, responded to new people coming in. How coaches respond to kids they don't know. How new systems are taught. How new recruiting ideas and methodologies were brought about. Just a lot of learning." Tedford used all that knowledge when he started his own program at Cal. In 1998, Tedford left Fresno State to become offensive coordinator at the University of Oregon under Mike Bellotti, a job he held for four years. Tedford's offenses at Oregon were spectacular, but Bellotti said he often worried about the way Tedford pushed himself. Bellotti said he told Tedford he "needed to relax" and spend more time with his family. "He would get worn down by the end of the season, physically worn down, more from the stress than the workload," Bellotti said. Tedford acknowledged as much. "By the end of the season, I don't know if it was just total fatigue, borderline breakdown stuff."

Tedford said he'd often wake up at 2 a.m. after only two hours of sleep "in a cold sweat and panicked." He was worried about what he hadn't done or needed to do, about "this play or that play." So Tedford would turn on the light and "scribble notes" to himself about the game plan and specific plays. As he saw it, the problem wasn't that he was spending too much time at the office. He was spending too little time. Bellotti typically had his coaches work from 7:30 a.m. to around 11:30 p.m., when they all left the facility together. Tedford went home and worried about his unfinished work. So when he took over his own program at Cal, he changed his schedule. "I sleep in the office (Sunday-Wednesday)," he said. "That helps me. ... We work until 1 o'clock in the morning. Lay down, get up at 6, 6:30 or whatever and start over. I feel much better. "The extra two hours here gets those final thoughts out of the way. I'm much more rested now."  Tedford said he's not worried about burnout now. The only thing that worries him is not putting in enough hours.  "It's what keeps me motivated," Tedford said of his work. "It's what keeps me going. If I didn't spend the time doing it, I would feel more stress."