Commentary: Carlen infuriating, engaging, winning

Jim Carlen was not an easy man to get along with. I know because over 33 years, unlike many sports writers, I generally did get along with him. And it was rarely easy.

It was also never dull.

In seven years as head football coach and athletics director at South Carolina, Carlen – who died Sunday at age 79 – made countless friends and almost as many enemies. As athletics director, he hired highly successful USC soccer coach Mark Berson – and disgraced women’s basketball coach Pam Parsons. As football coach, he beat Clemson 56-20 in 1975 – and lost five of six games to the Tigers after that.

He also recruited George Rogers, the school’s lone Heisman Trophy winner; twice won eight games and went to three bowls; won the third-most games (45) in school history; and coached a 31-13 upset of No. 3 North Carolina in 1981 – USC’s biggest victory until Steve Spurrier’s 2010 team knocked off No. 1 Alabama.

But in 1981, his team lost its final three games, two of them to Pacific and Hawaii. Three weeks later he was fired by a board of trustees that had grown tired of his caustic style and found, in that year’s 6-6 record, the excuse to send him packing.

Carlen was as engaging, as infuriating and as confounding a coach as I ever met. He could charm you one day and eviscerate you the next, depending on oh, say, the latest article written about him or his most recent feud with the media, USC president James Holderman or boosters.

It was only after he left USC that I really got to know him. And I learned that if you were one of “his guys,” you had a mentor and a protector forever.

In 1990, when Rogers was arrested for cocaine possession and booted out of his job at USC in disgrace, it was Carlen who rescued him, sending him to drug rehab and helping him rebuild his reputation. Today, Rogers – older now than Carlen was when fired – is the smiling face of USC football, posing for photos with fans every home game, running a foundation to help needy students go to college.

When Johnnie Wright, the player Rogers had supplanted at tailback in 1979, was waylaid by bipolar disorder, Carlen tried – unsuccessfully – to reel him back in. When NFL steroid user Steve Courson, who had turned his life around, was killed in an accident, Carlen was devastated. “Oh no,” he said, sad but unsurprised. “I was always afraid of something like that.”

And when USC hired Spurrier in 2005, Carlen said this: “He’s the best they’ve ever had, if they’ll just be patient with him.” And this: “He’s opinionated and obnoxious, so we’re two of a kind.”

Jim Carlen, to the end, believed in himself. That worked against him when his blend of bluntness and perceived arrogance with reporters, fans and USC higher-ups made him an easy target. But he always figured he knew what was best, and by his own admission stubbornly plowed ahead, regardless of consequences.

I liked the guy, often in spite of himself. That began in August 1979, when as a new hire at The Columbia Record, I found myself in Carlen’s tower overlooking practice one day. Over a couple of hours, I got his opinions on local media, as well as advice on my career path and even my love life. I left in a daze.

In 1981, after the upset win at Chapel Hill, an excited fan tried to leap into his arms; Carlen grabbed the guy and threw him to the Kenan Stadium turf. Later, during his post-game interviews, he saw me shaking my head in dismay – and winked.

When Holderman went to prison for misappropriating funds while at USC, Carlen felt vindicated: “(the firing, orchestrated by Holderman, he said) flat destroyed my career, my reputation. I stood up for what I thought was right and it cost me dearly. People back then said I was the one who was wrong; I wonder what some of them think now.”

But Carlen later reached out to Holderman when the ex-president was released from prison. In 1992, he was cheered by fans at a home game, and later made a run at returning as USC’s athletics director (Mike McGee got the job). Twice in his 60s, he scratched his coaching itch by “assisting” at Lowcountry SCISA schools. Again: never dull.

In 2008, when he was inducted into the Texas Tech Hall of Fame (adding to his South Carolina Athletic and National Football Foundation hall of fame memberships), we did a question-and-answer session. At 75, he was still capable of surprise.

Who knew, for instance, that Carlen played golf with music superstar Willie Nelson? Or that he was friends with Elvis Presley? “(Elvis) was hung up on football a redneck from Mississippi,” Carlen said then. “He was such a good fellow.”

That, to me, was Jim Carlen: a good fellow. Not the easiest – never the easiest – but life was more interesting knowing him.

This story was originally published July 22, 2012 at 12:00 AM.