Endorsements and Foreward

So many people have celebrated, and continue to celebrate, the story of Coach Fry and the Iowa Hawkeyes. Fewer people know the story of Tom Berthel and how he built a multimillion-dollar company from the ground up. And even fewer know the great story of the friendship that these two men share. The following chapters provide a snapshot of their relationship and challenge all of us to really think about what it takes to achieve and maintain success.

Even though Tom is a business executive and I am a football coach, we both owe a great deal of our success to the mentoring of Coach Fry. In fact, most of what I have learned about college coaching started with his direction and guidance. Whether it was how a program should be run, how to mentor others, how to hire people, or how to recruit, the foundation of my own story was built upon what I learned during my early coaching years at Iowa.

By the time Coach Fry hired me, he and his staff had been in the building process for two years, and a lot of the heavy lifting had already been done. They had experienced several close games and tough losses, and the team was very, very tired of losing. What impressed me was that everybody had their minds solidly set on achieving a winning season, even though it hadn’t happened yet. Coach Fry and his staff had certainly been successful at instilling an attitude of winning. During the year prior to my arrival at Iowa, I was a graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, where we finished second in the nation and were blessed with a team of very talented players. In fact, eleven of our seniors were drafted that year, and three of them were first-round picks.

We didn’t have that sort of talent at Iowa in the early eighties. Ron Hallstrom went in the first round and Andre Tippett in the second of the 1982 draft, but the majority of our players were free-agent, good college types rather than NFL prospects. Still, what Coach Fry lacked in team talent, he made up for in a demanding work schedule, and by instilling a true sense of team in everybody. It was steep and fast-paced, but it was all good because we were unified for a single purpose. Coach Fry set the bar high and it paid off. Not only did we achieve a winning season, but we also earned a Big Ten Championship and an invitation to the Rose Bowl. It was an amazing story.

Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what happened at Iowa in the 1980s, reflecting on methods and strategies. First, there was the staff. I don’t think there was a guy on staff that was not an underdog in terms of having an opportunity to coach at the University of Iowa. Nobody but Coach Fry would have even given me an interview, let alone hired me. I was young and had limited experience, but for whatever reason, he invited me out and then asked me to join the staff. I learned a very valuable lesson from that. Even though everybody had a public opinion about what he should do and who he needed to hire, he did what he felt was right and stood behind it. That took an unbelievable amount of courage.

In addition to hiring me, Coach Fry brought in Barry Alvarez, a successful high school coach in Mason City, and Bill Brashier, who was on the staff that had been fired at North Texas prior to Coach Fry going there. Bill Snyder and Carl Jackson joined Hayden at North Texas and then moved with him to Iowa. Both coached high school football for many years, and Bill also worked as an offensive coordinator at Austin College, a Division III school, prior to joining Hayden’s staff at North Texas. The point is that there were certainly guys with more impressive résumés, but Coach Fry saw something in each of us that he believed in; he was not always about hiring or recruiting the most acclaimed or highly decorated people. He obviously wanted people with some level of expertise, but most important, he wanted good people who were team players. In football, that’s everything. We were all on the same page, and that is one of the things I enjoyed so much about being on that staff. We just had a great camaraderie, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was not by accident. Coach Fry selected people who were going to mesh well together, coaches and players alike.

Once he had the “right people,” he was deliberate in building a culture that allowed us to get out of our own way and succeed. Typically, coaches and competitors want to keep one foot on the gas, continually pushing harder, but Coach Fry has an amazing way of knowing when less is more. I can remember being in the locker room prior to the 1984 Freedom Bowl, preparing to play Texas. I think he sensed that all of us were pretty tight, and we all knew how much a win would mean to him, since he was from Texas. After giving the team a little talk before the game, Coach finished off with a god-awful joke about Texas belt buckles and the room busted up laughing. It was totally out of left field and completely relaxed everybody in the room. The rest is history. We went out and played a tremendous football game, winning 55–17.

Another memory of Coach Fry’s ability to get the team refocused for crucial games came prior to a midseason game in 1987. We were 4–3 and struggling to gain momentum. It seemed to be one step forward, one step back, and he obviously knew that a good belly laugh could be the fuel we all needed to get in sync. Before Coach Fry came into the locker room, one of our players got up in front of the team with a card board cutout of Coach’s face. He got really animated, gesturing and talking like Coach Fry. . . . Of course, the whole team was laughing. In the midst of it all, Coach came into the room, behind the player, and started miming that he was strangling the guy. Well, the laughter got louder and the player kept going because he thought it was all about him. He had no idea that he’d just been busted. We ended up winning six straight games after that, and I’ve often wondered if the whole thing was orchestrated. It was just too coincidental. Coach Fry was a master at knowing when to do things like that. It is a gift.

I don’t think any of us knew at the time how demanding it was to be the head coach of a college program. Coach Fry made it look so easy and seemed to take everything in stride. I will never forget calling him a couple weeks after accepting my first head coaching job at the University of Maine. As soon as he answered I said, “Coach, how in the world did you ever do it, and how did you make it look so effortless?” He just chuckled, like a dad would do. I guess I always thought he was drinking coffee and reading the paper behind those closed office doors; I found out in a hurry that there’s a lot more to it than that.

All of us who worked for Coach Fry picked up many of his values, ideas, and even his traits. As Tom explains in the following pages, Coach is one of a kind, and I would certainly never attempt to duplicate him or pretend to have his charisma or charm. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you cannot be somebody you’re not. That’s why they call it mentoring, and not cloning. I’m fortunate to have had more than one mentor in my lifetime: my father, Coach Fry, and Joe Moore, my high school coach and former boss at Pittsburgh. The personalities of all three men are very different than mine, and I’ve had to figure out how to learn from them while being true to myself and doing things that fit my own personality. Obviously, that is what Tom has been doing for years—listening and observing Coach Fry, and then making it his own.

Most of us are successful in life because somewhere along the way somebody took a special interest in us. Needless to say, I am so appreciative and have always felt indebted to Coach Fry for taking a risk on me. He gave me a solid start, personally and professionally, and I feel very fortunate that our current coaching staff at Iowa is much like that of Coach Fry’s staff in the 1980s.

My deepest thanks to Tom Berthel, for sharing his own story in Beyond Xs and Os; in doing so, he is helping the rest of us to celebrate the life and contributions of Coach Fry. As you read, I invite you to enjoy some great football memories; to set a new goal or follow through on an old one; and, most important, to consider the people in your own life who may need someone to believe in them.

Enjoy . . . and Go Hawks!

—Coach Kirk Ferentz

University of Iowa