When Bill Campbell was the head football coach at Columbia University, he wound up hospitalized for exhaustion a time or two.He eventually found himself a more healthy occupation — Silicon Valley mogul. The same vigorous approach he had used in Ivy League football worked with executives and engineers.
“You know, when they hear you’ve been a football coach, they think you’re going to swing through the room on a vine,” Campbell said the other day. “I wanted to be a businessman like everybody else. I wanted to put the stereotype behind me.”
He has never left football. William V. Campbell, chairman of Intuit, guru to other corporations, has become a shining beacon for the possibilities of life after shoulder pads.
His name is now being attached to one of the highest honors in his sport. The National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame announced Wednesday that the annual award to the top scholar-athlete would be renamed for Campbell.
“They should have given it to Roger Staubach,” Campbell said in a telephone interview, in his Monongahela River Valley rasp, but he sounded a bit pleased all the same.
The award is regarded as the academic Heisman, a reference to the Heisman Trophy, given to the best college player every December. The foundation, trying to ramp up its presence, is changing the name from the Draddy Trophy to honor Campbell, a fiery 165-pound linebacker at Columbia from 1959 through 1961.
“He would never give in and would will his way to victory,” said Jonathan R. Cole, a star baseball player at Columbia in the early ’60s, later the provost there and now a professor. “He was like a Pied Piper with his teammates and friends — people who would follow him anywhere.”
Campbell helped Columbia share the 1961 Ivy League championship, something it has not done since. In a subsequent nonleague finale, Columbia lost at Rutgers, 32-19, which allowed Rutgers to finish undefeated.
“People were sitting in the ivy,” Campbell said, recalling the overflow crowd on a bleak November day. “It was the most exciting game I’ve ever seen. We were up, 19-7. Ochhhh.”
Among the players on the field that day, a Columbia receiver, Russell Warren, has become a pre-eminent orthopedic surgeon, and the center for Rutgers was Alex Kroll, who played one year for the New York Titans (now the Jets) and later became chairman of Young & Rubicam.
Campbell knew what he wanted to be. “My dad was a coach,” he said, referring to the man who worked the night shift at the steel mill in Homestead, Pa., and worked all day at school, ultimately becoming superintendent. At Columbia, Campbell played for another son of Pennsylvania, Buff Donelli. He wanted to be like them, so he became an assistant, first at Columbia, then at Boston College, before coming home as head coach in 1974, only to encounter the rigid academic and acceptance standards of the Ivy League.
“Back then nobody knew whether a kid was coming until April 15,” he said the other day. “When I was at Boston College, you were done in January. You could worry about football. At Columbia you spent all your time freaking recruiting. Drives you crazy.” He had to visit 100 prospects all through the Northeast winter to secure 25.
“I’d leave after workout programs, at 4:30, and I’d drive to Albany and back in a night. Scranton and back,” he said. “Just so I could be back in the office the next day.”
A friend shamed Columbia into buying Campbell a fresh set of tires lest he slide off the road in the Poconos or the Berkshires.
None of it helped. Campbell resigned after a six-year record of 12-41-1 and, at 39, went job-hunting. A football friend pointed him to J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, and he has since been involved at Kodak, Claris, Apple, Go, Google and now Intuit, the maker of financial software.
Campbell admits he had some failures, but the skills that did not win games on the Upper West Side of Manhattan were spectacular in the emerging Internet world. A business major, he found an affinity for engineers, bringing groups of them together to talk shop, sometimes with a football game blaring in the background.
“I appreciate what engineers do in the world,” he said. “You surround yourself with good people and see how it works.”
He remains a regular in earthy pubs in New York, Homestead and the Bay Area. Without bragging, Campbell casually said, “Once I got a few bucks in my pocket,” he was able to do some good things, including donating computers at Homestead and naming a field and a gym after his late father and brother.
Now the chairman of the Columbia trustees, Campbell also donated the weight room in Donelli’s name. He was sighted there last weekend, while dropping his daughter, Maggie, for her first year at Columbia. His son, Jim, played football there earlier in the decade and Campbell’s wife, Roberta Spagnola, was a dean at Columbia when they began dating.
He is sanguine enough about the abuses of big-time sports but says that at the majority of colleges “the rules are not broken, kids are provided with the right place to study, they get their degrees and their job opportunities.”
His pub voice coming through loud and clear on the phone, the chairman of Intuit sounded like the intense young coach with the bald tires. Hard to imagine him on the verge of exhaustion, ever.
nytimes.com
