Willingham grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father owned residential properties that he rented and maintained. When asked which football coaches he admired most, Willingham said, "My best two coaches have been my two parents."
Willingham did not have a college football scholarship, but he made the Michigan State team as a volunteer and played briefly as a quarterback in the 1970s before beginning his coaching career. What would he be if he were not a football coach?
"A football coach," he said with a chuckle. "No, but that's a very serious answer to your question. Because, sometimes in life, you feel like, `This is exactly what you were meant to do.'"
He uses humor in a deadpan way, sometimes to disarm those around him. Bob Morton, an offensive lineman, said that at the beginning of a team meeting Willingham might "just say a little joke and nobody will quite understand it's a joke and he'll be like: `It's OK, guys. You can laugh.' And that really kind of sends everybody off the deep end."
Kevin White, the athletic director who hired Willingham, said: "I see a guy who is careful and thoughtful. He prides himself on being unflappable."
Willingham, 49, grew up in the South during the height of the civil rights movement. When schools were desegregated, Willingham said the one at which his mother taught burned down. "The actual cause of it, no one is really sure, OK?" Willingham said. "But those in the community believe that it was potentially bombed. It was in segregated times."
His musical tastes also reflect his age and times, but Willingham spoke in particular of one artist who inspired him. "It was James Brown and the times that you grew up," Willingham said. "James Brown spoke to some of the issues that were critical to young people growing up at that time and he also did it with rhythm, so that you were able to enjoy the rhythm of it and also understand there was a message there."
When asked about his growing star status, Willingham said, "No, that's not an issue." But what about the automatic attention that comes to those who inherit the role of Knute Rockne? "Rockne was a star," Willingham said. "Rockne not only carved out a place for Notre Dame, but he carved out a place for college football, OK? And that's not my mission."
At the moment, his mission is to beat Michigan and to dissuade those who try to discover more about him than what he presents. "I honestly don't think I'm very hard to read at all," Willingham said. "I'm very straightforward. What is a problem is that most people want to see more than what is there."
RSS