Lou Holtz, who coached six major colleges to bowl games and revived a floundering Notre Dame football program, taking the Irish to an unbeaten national championship season in 1988, has died in Orlando, Florida. He was 89.
His death was announced Wednesday by Notre Dame, which shared a statement from Holtz’s family. It did not say when he died or provide a cause. He was reported to have entered hospice care in January.
When Holtz, slender and bespectacled, arrived at Notre Dame in 1986, taking on college football’s most pressure-packed post, he hardly projected the image of a tough coach who might inspire his players to win one for a latter-day Gipper.
“I’m not very smart and I’m not very impressive,” he remarked. “I’m 5-10, weigh 152 pounds, speak with a lisp, appear afflicted with a combination of scurvy and beriberi, and I ranked 234th in a high school class of 278.”
But Holtz had a keen football mind and a disciplinarian’s resolve, insisting that his players strive for perfection. He was also an astute motivator with a quick wit.
Holtz’s teams compiled a 249-132-7 record in his 33 years as a collegiate head coach. In his 11 seasons at Notre Dame, his teams went 100-30-2, placing him second in career victories at South Bend to Knute Rockne’s 105. He took the Irish to nine consecutive major bowl games, winning five of them.
Known for turning around losing programs, Holtz was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008.
The successor to Gerry Faust, whose Notre Dame teams had an uninspiring 30-26-1 record over five seasons, Holtz put his players through grueling practices and told them that he expected a victory every time they took the field.
“We would smell his pipe coming around the corner, and we would all get quiet and sit still,” Wes Pritchett, an All-American linebacker for Holtz’s 1988 champions, once told The New York Times. “Hey, we were scared of him. He was a 145-pound guy who everybody walked around on eggshells.”
In his memoir, “Wins, Losses, and Lessons” (2006), Holtz recalled laying out his expectations in a prelude to Notre Dame’s championship season.
“There are millions of people who live and die with Notre Dame football,” he told his players. “Perfection at Notre Dame will be demanded and expected. A loss is absolutely disastrous.”
The Irish defeated the University of Southern California in a battle of unbeaten teams at the close of their 1988 regular season, then beat West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl to give Notre Dame its first top ranking since 1977.
Holtz’s lone coaching blip came in pro football.
He was named coach of the New York Jets in February 1976, when they were coming off a 3-11 season. Many fans of a certain age were probably more familiar with another Lou Holtz, a comedian and actor, 82 years old at the time, who was best known for his Jewish-dialect routines.
Taking over the Jets in what became the final season for their gimpy-kneed quarterback, Joe Namath, Holtz promised that his team would “move the ball.”
“I just hope to God it’s forward,” he said.
His team was 3-10 when he resigned with one game left in the season, walking away from a five-year contract to become head coach at the University of Arkansas.
“God did not put Lou Holtz on this earth to coach pro football,” he said.
In his memoir he wrote, “My short-lived tenure in the NFL has been a source of embarrassment for me, not because the Jets didn’t do very well under my leadership (they did not), but as a result of a so-so commitment on my part.”
Louis Leo Holtz was born Jan. 3, 1937, in Follansbee, West Virginia, a city in the northern part of the state on the Ohio border. A son of Andrew and Anne Marie Holtz, he grew up further north, in East Liverpool, Ohio, where his father drove a bus and then owned the bus company, which eventually went bankrupt.
After playing linebacker for Kent State in Ohio, Holtz worked at several major colleges as an assistant, most notably as the defensive backfield coach for Woody Hayes’ unbeaten 1968 national champion Ohio State team. Hayes, a famously demanding coach, became one of his heroes.
Holtz embarked on his head-coaching career after that. He took William & Mary to a bowl game during his three seasons there and coached North Carolina State, which was coming off a string of losing seasons, to bowls in all four of his years in Raleigh.
Following his stint with the Jets, Holtz took his first Arkansas team to a 31-6 upset victory over Oklahoma in the 1978 Orange Bowl, spoiling the Sooners’ hopes for a national championship.
Holtz’s Razorbacks were consistent winners, but he was asked to resign after a 6-5 season in 1983 in which the team failed to reach a bowl game. His departure came soon after he made TV spots in his office endorsing the reelection bid of Sen. Jesse Helms, a conservative North Carolina Republican and an opponent of civil rights legislation. Responding to criticism of the endorsement, Holtz said he had been friendly with Helms since his years coaching at North Carolina State and was not making a political statement.
Holtz coached at Minnesota for the next two years and took the Golden Gophers to the Independence Bowl after the 1985 season, but he did not coach them in their victory over Clemson, having just accepted the head-coaching post at Notre Dame.
He left South Bend after the 1996 season, in which the Irish were 8-3, saying simply, “It’s the right thing to do.”
Holtz spent two years as a college-football commentator with CBS, then coached for six seasons at South Carolina, which had won only one game the year before his arrival. He took the Gamecocks to two bowl games.
The last game of Holtz’s coaching career, a loss to in-state rival Clemson in November 2004, was marred by an on-field brawl. Holtz blamed himself for the melee, saying he had lost control of his players; the next day, he told them he would retire.
His wife, the former Beth Barcus, died in 2020. He is survived by his sons Skip, an assistant at Notre Dame under him and later a head coach at several colleges, and Kevin; his daughters Luanne and Liz; nine grandchildren; and two great‑grandchildren.
After his second retirement from coaching, Holtz was a commentator for ESPN from 2004 to 2014 and gave motivational speeches.
In 2020, President Donald Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. A strong supporter of Trump, Holtz had spoken at the Republican National Convention that year.
When he was 28 years old with three young children, little family savings and his prospects of becoming a collegiate head football coach in doubt, Holtz set down life goals, professional and personal. He came up with 108 items.
While Notre Dame was preparing for its 1989 Fiesta Bowl game with West Virginia, Holtz said he had accomplished 84 of those goals, among them sitting next to Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” meeting the pope and dining at the White House.
Holtz, a practicing Roman Catholic, met Pope John Paul II while touring the Vatican. Even before his award from President Trump, he was invited to the White House, first by President Ronald Reagan (who in the role of Notre Dame’s George Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne All American” implored Rockne from his deathbed to “just win one for the Gipper”). He also accepted invitations from Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas during part of Holtz’s coaching tenure there.
Speaking in 1989, Holtz said he still hoped to achieve his goal of skydiving but, of more immediate concern, he was worried about the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 2, with the top national ranking on the line.
“Who knows?” he told The Chicago Tribune. “I might jump January 3: Without a chute.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
