The year was 1973, and the plan was as simple as a down-and-out pass route:

Norm Chow would take leave from his teaching and coaching positions at Waialua High and use a graduate assistant football position at Brigham Young University to help further his plans for a Ph.D. before returning home.

But unlike the football X’s and O’s that Chow has masterfully drawn up over the intervening four decades of a much-decorated coaching career, this "plan" didn’t go as envisioned.

While Chow did earn a doctorate in educational psychology, his return home comes nearly 39 years later, and it will be as head coach of the University of Hawaii football team, not the Bulldogs.

The 65-year-old Honolulu native was introduced at a Thursday afternoon campus press conference and feted by the governor at a Washington Place reception, part of a whirlwind beginning to a contracted five-year assignment to turn around the fortunes and popularity of Warriors football.

Chow, who is of Chinese, Hawaiian and Portuguese heritage, is the first major college football head coach of Asian-American ancestry, and his return, with a glossy resume that includes having tutored three Heisman Trophy winners and been part of three national championship teams, and winning three national assistant coach-of-the-year awards, has prompted a booming business in "Chow Time" T-shirts. UH officials hope the first Hawaii-bred head coach of the team since Larry Price (1974-76) will help boost tickets sales, and announced a deposit program for new buyers.

Before an introductory press conference televised statewide, Chow had a six-hour flight from Los Angeles Thursday morning to ponder a homecoming the likes of which, he said, "I never imagined. How could I?"

Indeed, once upon a distant time, "I had no idea of becoming a (full-time) college coach, none, anywhere," Chow said.

PUNAHOU STANDOUT

Chow brought a no-nonsense attitude and solid work ethic to sports in high school, lessons he took from his father that were reinforced on the fields and playgrounds of Palolo Valley, where he grew up.

They helped him gain entrance to Punahou School, where he excelled at football, basketball and baseball and was chosen the most outstanding athlete in his 1964 graduating class.

"He was all business in everything he played — starting pitcher and first baseman in baseball, center in basketball and (two-way) lineman in football," said Pal Eldredge, a Buffanblu classmate. "No showboating around him."

Playing for Interscholastic League of Honolulu rival Kamehameha Schools, Rockne Freitas opposed Chow in football and basketball and "came to respect him a lot. He was a tough, tough competitor," Freitas recalled. "Whatever the sport, you were wary of where he was."

A UTAH STAR

At the time Chow graduated from high school, UH football held a back seat to the high schools at Honolulu Stadium, where Hawaii played a mix of local club and military teams before often meager crowds.

So he accepted a scholarship to the University of Utah, where he was a two-year starter at offensive guard and earned all-Western Athletic Conference honors (1967) as a senior.

He played a professional season in the Canadian Football League, earned a master’s degree in special education at Utah and returned home to Hawaii to teach and coach at Waialua High.

But after three years with the Bulldogs, family circumstances helped prompt a return to school.

"I had actually taken a leave of absence — I had not worked long enough in the DOE to take a sabbatical — to finish my degree so that my wife (Diane) and I could go back (to Utah) and visit her dad, who was ill at the time," Chow said.

But what was supposed to be a one-year stay turned into a remarkable career as he earned a reputation for grooming quarterbacks and producing high-powered offenses at BYU.

"He had been a lineman in high school and college — not the kind of background you associate with jumping right in and becoming a guru in passing," said BYU head coach LaVell Edwards, who hired Chow. "At the time he shared an office with (offensive coordinator) Doug Scovil and developed a real rapport with him. He picked Doug’s brain and learned a lot about the passing game. We were one of the few that was doing a lot of passing back then, and Norm really dug into it."

Chow’s son Carter said, "He still has some of those notes."

Scovil parlayed his stay into a head coaching job at San Diego State, and his successor, Ted Tollner, similarly went on to become a head coach. But before Tollner left, he told Edwards not to bother going outside for the next hire. Chow, Edwards was told, was ready to run things.

Chow spent 27 seasons at BYU, "and when you played for him you always felt like you were on top of things," Ty Detmer, the 1990 Heisman Trophy winner, recalls. "He made sure you were well-prepared."

A GRIDIRON CAREER

With BYU’s success, Chow did not lack for job offers, turning down feelers from UH to become an assistant and from elsewhere in the early 1980s. The life of a gypsy football coach didn’t appeal to Chow. Family and stability were important.

"When the four of us were growing up, he was home almost every night," Carter said.

Sports writers would ask why he didn’t pursue a head coaching job, and Chow usually replied, "Because I spend all my time trying to do the one I have."

Only when it became apparent that BYU’s new administration wasn’t going to give Chow an opportunity to succeed Edwards as head coach for the 2000 season did he begin to look around.

North Carolina State won the sweepstakes, and Chow developed a young freshman, Philip Rivers, now a star quarterback with the San Diego Chargers.

But distance from family prompted him to take an offer from USC that brought him back to the West Coast, where he groomed Carson Palmer and then Matt Leinart, helping the Trojans win two national titles.

The Chow secret? "There wasn’t one, really," Detmer said. "He knew how to work with different people with different skills and help you be successful. If he had good quarterbacks and receivers, he was successful with that. If you had good running backs, he made that work."

Chow turned down the head coaching job at the University of Kentucky in 2003, deciding the fit "just wasn’t right."

The job he thought he should have gotten — and the one he seems to have wanted more than any other until now — was Stanford University, where he was a finalist in 2004. Friends say Stanford was so close to hiring him that it told him to start talking to prospective staff members.

SHARP AND SPRY

When the name of Chow surfaced as a candidate for the UH vacancy soon after the departure of 66-year-old Greg McMackin, some fans expressed concern the Warriors might be exchanging one old coach for another.

But former classmates at Punahou, friends in the coaching profession and ex-players say Chow’s active lifestyle and mental acuity are such that he seems a much younger man. "Norm has always taken very good care of himself," Edwards said. "I think he still runs every day."

Carter said, "I don’t know if he wants me saying this, but he still weighs 220, the same weight he had when he was a senior in high school."

HOMESICK NO MORE

At BYU it was common for the coaches in adjoining offices to be asked by passers-by, "What’s that Norm is listening to?" and be told, "Music from home."

Players from Hawaii would stop by his office not just to talk, but also to listen to the latest Hawaiian music tapes or CDs that friends from Hawaii or visitors from home would drop off.

Near his desk — and always within view — was displayed a bodysurfing photo from Sandy Beach, a poignant reminder of home. "You couldn’t tell for sure, but a guy in the picture looked like my dad, so I think he told people it was him," Carter said.

"It wasn’t me but that’s what I said," Norm confessed, undoubtedly wishing he was back home.

After a nearly 39-year separation, no longer will it be a wish — for him or UH.