Remembering Terry Hoeppner,
A Coach Worth Celebrating
June 20, 2007 12:39 p.m. Wall Street Journal
Indiana University football coach Terry Hoeppner died Tuesday morning of cancer, at age 59. Hours later, his family took part in a groundbreaking ceremony for a major upgrade of IU's athletic facilities.
"There were cheerleaders and balloons on the day Terry Hoeppner passed, and somehow it didn't seem inappropriate," Bob Kravitz writes in the Indianapolis Star. "There were hors d'oeuvres and musical ensembles, ceremonial shovels and glad tidings, hardly the trappings one might expect on this most somber day. But they didn't seem out of place. 'Go ahead with the (groundbreaking) ceremony,' Jane Hoeppner, Terry's wife, told IU athletic director Rick Greenspan Tuesday morning after her husband finally lost an unfair fight with cancer. 'I want this to be a celebration.' And so it was. A tempered celebration, a celebration tinged with unspeakable sorrow. But a celebration nonetheless."
Mr. Kravitz pays tribute to a coach whose life is worth celebrating: "He saw his world through a cream-and-crimson prism. The rest of us saw a shambles of a football program. He saw a sleeping giant. The rest of us saw antiquated facilities where football players stepped over each other to find room to study. He saw the kinds of jaw-dropping artists' renderings we saw during Tuesday's ceremony."
Fittingly, he leaves a strong football legacy at a school where basketball has always been king. "Hoeppner went 9-14 in two seasons at Indiana, and rarely does a record mislead as much as that one," Ivan Maisel writes on ESPN.com. "The Hoosiers defeated No. 15 Iowa last season, Indiana's first victory over a top-15 team in 19 years, and came within a close final-game loss to Purdue of qualifying for a bowl game. One of the many legacies Hoeppner leaves is the pairing of quarterback Kellen Lewis and wide receiver James Hardy. Together, they are one of the most exciting duos in the game."
To take the true measure of the coach, Dayton Daily News columnist Tom Archdeacon goes back to his tenure at Miami of Ohio. "Through Jim Place, then Chaminade-Julienne's coach, he met Dominic Bramante, an Otoe Missouria Indian, who'd taken over the beleaguered football team of poverty-stricken Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla. At one point, the team had lost 50 straight games," Mr. Archdeacon writes. "Hoeppner would bring Bramante and his team to Oxford for his weeklong summer camp. He'd provide room, board, food and clothes. On one visit, Bramante was close to tears as he talked about Hoeppner: 'He's a great supporter of the Native American cause, but it's more than that. You can see it in the way he deals with everybody. He's just a good, good man.' That's who we lost."
