The considered opinion of his contemporaries in the coaching ranks was that it would be a mistake for Bob Wagner to take a coaching job at the University of Hawaii.
“People in the profession brought that up a lot,” Wagner recalls. “They didn’t think going to Hawaii would be a good career move.”
That was 35 years ago and, as he prepares to retire as the athletic director at Kamehameha-Hawaii, Wagner can laugh about the advice and the instinct that told him to ignore it.
“You know,” Wagner said, “the short of it is that it worked out great.”
For both Wagner and the two schools he has served in 30 years here.
Wagner, 65, announced he will retire this summer after 10 years at Kamehameha-Hawaii, where he got the Warriors’ athletic program going from scratch as the school’s first athletic director. But he made his name in the state with a nearly 20-year investment in UH football.
In Manoa, where he has been enshrined in the Circle of Honor, he is remembered as the coach who ended Brigham Young’s decade-long string of dominance and guided the then-Rainbows to their first WAC championship, a breakthrough Top 25 year-end finish in the polls and its only mainland bowl victory. He was a co-founder of Na Koa, the football booster club.
None of which seemed likely in the first months after he left a graduate assistant’s position at Washington in 1977 for a job in the most tumultuous period in UH athletic history.
The UH men’s basketball program was going on NCAA probation and the entire athletic administration was in turmoil. But Wagner said he took the “leap of faith” because, “I wanted to be a (full-time) coach on the Division I level and, well, it was Hawaii. I figured the worst that could happen would be that I would have to go back to Ohio and coach at a small college.”
Less than two months later, Wagner was in California on a recruiting trip when a junior college coach told him, “Hey, I heard your head coach (Larry Price) just resigned.”
Wagner was kept on by Price’s successor, Dick Tomey, and spent 10 years as an assistant, rising to defensive coordinator, before becoming head coach in 1987.
Parlaying a tenacious defense and the spread-option offense, Wagner’s teams went 58-49-3, won the 1992 WAC title and punctuated the school’s first all-collegiate double-digit win season (11-2) with a victory over Illinois in the Holiday Bowl.
When expectations soared and the results didn’t, Wagner was fired after the 1995 season and eventually moved on to coach at Arizona and Texas-El Paso. But even the spectacle of a public firing that the administration came to publicly regret did not sour him on Hawaii.
“It wasn’t real pretty,” Wagner said of the execution-like press conference. “But we came back for a lot of reasons: I fell in love with the islands, the people. The climate and the beauty are pretty good, too. The people were always super. This is where I met my wife and our daughter was born. Both my wife and my daughter are Manoa graduates.”
After taking some time off to travel, Wagner said they will move near Waimea.
“This is home. And, (looking back), I think it worked out great.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
