In the 1970s and ’80s, when Brigham Young University’s football team was regularly tormenting Hawaii, their head coaches managed to be the best of friends.
“As an assistant coach it used to really upset me when Coach (Dick) Tomey would talk about what a great guy LaVell (Edwards) was,” recalled then-defensive coordinator Bob Wagner.
“I hadn’t met (Edwards); all I knew was that I didn’t like losing to him,” Wagner said. “And I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him because I knew I wasn’t going to like him.”
Then, Wagner said, “I was really disappointed when I did meet him because he really was such a great guy.”
In time and up through this year, they exchanged Christmas cards.
Edwards, who died Thursday at age 86, was remarkable in that way, a coach who was hard to beat and even harder to dislike.
“I have great respect for the job he did professionally and even more for him as a person,” Tomey said Thursday. “His death is a big loss to the profession, but I just smile when I think of him because he brings back so many fond personal memories.”
Overall, Edwards was 17-4 against UH in a 29-year Hall of Fame career in which he was 257-101-3 in the course of winning 20 conference titles and one national championship.
Between 1978 and 1988 Edwards’ BYU teams beat the Rainbows 10 consecutive times, earning him and the Cougars the role of UH’s biggest rival.
Several of the games — including 24-23 in 1988, 16-14 in 1987, 10-3 in ’86 and 18-13 in ’84 — were squeakers, with left-footed punts, soaring tackles, field goals clanging off the crossbar and dropped passes in the end zone adding to the lore. That BYU’s victories came amid a lineup usually dotted with former Hawaii high school stars further stoked the rivalry.
Through it all — and sellout crowds at Aloha Stadium would unleash storms of invective — Edwards stood, arms folded, impassive on the sidelines. The joke was that Edwards was so stoic in even the most heated contests that pigeons could land on him.
As much as Edwards, a former BYU lineman, helped revolutionize the passing game with the wide-open approach, his larger contribution would be showcasing the breakthrough of Polynesian athletes.
As BYU racked up conference crowns and bowl game victories, coaches, first in the West and later nationwide, increasingly took note of their role in the triumphs and expanded their own recruiting.
Edwards had UH’s number for so long and it became such a sore point locally that when Wagner succeeded Tomey in 1987 an elderly fan implored him to beat BYU before the fan died.
Wagner presciently imported the spread option offense to UH in part so the ‘Bows could compete with BYU. UH finally succeeded in 1989 with a 56-14 victory and then followed it up with a 59-28 triumph.
The victories were so similar that on the night of the 1990 win some fans called KGU, the radio station carrying the game, to question whether they were replaying the previous year’s conquest.
Edwards took so much heat when he got back to Provo, Utah, that he vowed to jump off Mount Timpanogos if UH managed to win again in Provo.
Asked if he would really do it, Edwards deadpanned, “Well, it is only (11,752) feet and, besides, they (Cougar fans) would probably throw me off first anyway.”
Edwards and Tomey regularly played golf on Fridays before their teams met, but in a nod to the competition between their schools, agreed to keep it quiet.
“And, then he (eventually) wrote about it in his book,” Tomey laughed.
Tomey said he once asked Edwards, “ ‘Would we still be friends if you hadn’t won so much of the time?’ He said, ‘No,’ and we both laughed because I’m sure we would still have been.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
