December 14, 2005

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Stanford losing its biggest sports fan

by Keith Peters

For the past 14 years he has been everywhere. On the sidelines in Stanford Stadium. In the press box at Sunken Diamond. Watching basketball and volleyball in Maples Pavilion. Keeping spirits afloat during swimming and water polo action at the Avery Aquatic Center. Tracking the runners and jumpers at Cobb Track & Angell Field.

Ted Leland is always there, watching over the most successful collegiate athletic program in the nation.

"I've kiddingly told people I've probably seen more athletic contests than any other human being alive, because I go to a lot," Leland said. "I love going to them."

It's also part of his job as Stanford's director of athletics, a position he has wrapped himself in like a kid in his favorite blanket for the past 14 years. Leland is passionate about his teams, athletes, coaches and school.

"When you're in athletics, you're either emotionally part of the team or you're not," he said. "I think to be the athletic director, you have to be emotionally connected to the coaches and to the athletes.

"So life is a roller coaster, especially when you have 36 sports and you care about them all."

That is about to change. On Friday, Leland will walk out of his corner office in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center. He'll turn out the lights and shut the door behind him as he leaves a place that has become an extended family for him -- a place that would be a dream for any sports fanatic, which he is.

"I think that's part of the reason to re-pot myself like this, to see if I can live without that emotional roller coaster," he said. "I may find out that I'm so addicted to the highs and the lows and to the adrenaline and the emotion that I'd miss it. I think I'm going to be happy, though, being a little more mature."

Leland, 57, is leaving behind his 36 intercollegiate teams and more than 850 athletes to return to his alma mater, the University of Pacific, where he will become vice president for advancement. He'll oversee fundraising and alumni relations on all three of the university's campuses, and will hold a non-tenured academic appointment as a professor in the College of the Pacific, the university's school of arts and sciences.

This will be a huge change for Leland, who arguably has become Stanford's biggest sports fan during a storied chapter in the history of Stanford athletics. Since arriving on The Farm in 1991, Leland has overseen teams that have won 50 national championships and 173 conference titles. Stanford has won an unprecedented 11 straight NACDA Director's Cups, emblematic of the nation's top athletic program.

Leland helped raise more than $270 million in private donations while athletic endowments have grown from $52 million to $374.9 million. And he has overseen the construction or renovation of $185 million worth of facilities.

His final project fittingly is his best -- the $90 million renovation of Stanford Stadium that began just moments following the final gun in Stanford's 38-31 loss to Notre Dame on Nov. 26.

Leland was in character that night, standing on the sidelines at the end of the game and taking it all in -- one last time. Not only was it the final football game in the original stadium but it was Leland's last as athletic director. As always, emotions ran high.

"I've been involved in major college athletics for 37 years," Leland said. "That's not the last football game I'll care about.

"Pacific doesn't have football, so I can still be a Stanford football fan and a (Coach) Walt Harris fan. But, to have that deep emotional attachment to the team and to the athletes that I've had all these years, yeah, that's probably the last game I'll have as sort of a do-or-die situation."

To say Leland is closely attached to his athletes and teams is to say the Stanford band marches to a different drummer. Or that Tiger Woods can hit it long.

"They're all emotional," Leland said of the games he attends. "My wife (Stefanie) and I went to the (Stanford) Cal volleyball match, which we won in five. And my wife says, 'Well, wasn't that fun?' For me, no. It ended up with a great outcome, but it was like a root canal. For three hours I was so nervous, the whole time.

"That's the way I am. I think that's the way you have to be to be the athletics director."

Leland invites Stanford teams -- all 36 of them -- to his house on campus once every year or so. On one occasion this year, the women's soccer team visited before the season began.

"And my wife said, as the team was leaving, 'I hope you win a lot of games so my husband won't be so depressed.' One of the athletes said, 'You're husband doesn't get really depressed.' And my wife says, 'Oh yeah, he does.'

"We've had great success here," Leland said. "But we'll have a weekend where we'll have 12 athletic contests. We'll win 10 and lose two and I'll be in a stupor because we lost. The balance between the joy and the pain is out of whack."

Leland had no idea it would be like that when he arrived at Stanford in 1991 after spending two years as Pacific's athletic director. In fact, Leland had no real agenda his first day at Stanford.

"When I came to Stanford, I sort of spent five, six months just talking to people and finding out what was on their agenda, and what should be on our list of priorities," Leland recalled. "Then, I sat down and tried to figure out how to solve them."

Leland's new department faced a huge budget problem, among other things.

"There was a big push to drop sports," he said. "There was a significant concern about whether we could play football in the Pac-10 Conference. Do we belong at this level, because we'd had, what, one winning season in 15 years? (Actually, only one winning year in the previous 10).

"I think there was a concern about the role of athletics on our campus. There was no commitment, at the time, from the athletic department to provide support services to our students. We had like three athletic trainers, no strength coaches, no videotape program. In addition to that, our facilities, of course, had sort of run down.

"So, there was an agenda of things to do.

"But I didn't come with that agenda. I sort of absorbed it from the constituents. I think I came here and then five months later said, 'Here's my plan.'"

Leland had to lay off 17 employees to help solve the budget problem. He developed a long-range facilities plan, revamped fundraising systems and committed to better medical care and scholarship aid to the athletes. And he pushed to build athletic endowments.

"There was a lot of stuff we had on our plate," Leland said.

In addition to the tangible problems, Leland believed there were broader issues to be addressed, as well. As Stanford's athletic success began to match its high academic standards and achievement, the school became the focal point for national concerns.

"The issues and Stanford have sort of been on the cutting edge," Leland said. "Many people, including myself, are worried about the push toward commercialism. The push toward excellence in athletics is making intercollegiate athletics less and less compatible with the academic missions of the institutions. We were sort of a prima facie case because we were so successful across the board.

"Yet, we're one of the best undergraduate institutions in the country. So people watch us, how we walk that line."

Leland offered examples of such growing problems:

* "Twelve football games. I mean, that's stupid doing that," Leland said. "It's because of money.

* "Changing the game times all the time because of television, that's because of money.

* "Now, making our football players spend all summer on campus.

* "Paying a football coach a $2.5 million salary while a professor in Humanities is making $65,000.

"There's just a concern on our part that those commercial pressures are distorting the real mission of the athletic department, which is to foster the growth of the participants and make them better leaders in the community after they leave."

University athletics, Leland emphasized, is "an educational enterprise that has some commercial aspects -- but it can't be seen as a commercial enterprise just unfortunately attached to the university."

Leland said Stanford has done a good job of balancing those opposing forces. Issues such as this go beyond a normal job, and Leland said being an athletic director is not for everyone.

"I suppose you have to love athletics. You have to be a fanatic," he said. "This is not a job for people who have a casual interest. This is not a job for people with a lot of hobbies. I don't have time to enjoy model railroading or stamp collecting. This is a passion that, to me, luckily turned into a job.

"You have to have a passion for athletics. You have to be willing to be disappointed and you have to like to do something different every day. If you're the kind of person who likes to have your life neatly wrapped up and everything in its place, and when you go home at night things are settled, this isn't a good job for you.

"This is a job where you come to work with 10 problems in the morning and you leave with 12, and you had a good day."

Leland counts many good days -- adding up to years. In 1996-97, Stanford won six national titles, an NCAA record. Stanford has won more NCAA crowns than any other school in the nation during his tenure, and has seven teams ranked among the top five nationally.

Many tasks await interim Athletic Director Bill Walsh. One, appropriately, involves football.

"Right now, in this arms race in football, there are 70 teams, maybe, that have the potential to play for a national championship," Leland said. "And we're one of those 70.

"A lot of people argue that, 20 years from now, there won't be 70, there'll be 50. This arms race and this balancing in academics will cause people to drop by the wayside. The Rices, the Northwesterns and Stanford would be part of those schools.

"One of the challenges the new athletic director will have is to make sure we're true to our tradition, which is to play USC in football and play them even up. That's what we want to do. We're not interested in joining the Ivy League."

These concerns won't be weighing on Leland's mind much longer. During a sabbatical in March of 2003, he discovered he could live without the day-to-day involvement in the department and "the total absorption" the job requires.

"I realized I could be happy, and my wife and I could actually talk to each other," he said. "That's part of the reason why I'm thinking to myself this thing at Pacific might be a good deal for me. It gives me a chance to get outside this little world, see if I can enjoy it."

He definitely won't miss getting away from how he feels after losing a game.

"I hate losing," he said. "It's not an ego issue with me. I don't think I'm a bad person if one of our teams loses. But, I'm fanatical about wanting to be as good as we can be. ... To put losing in perspective requires a level of maturity I haven't achieved yet."

"People say to me, 'Well, you know, you've left a great legacy.' I don't have a legacy. Jonas Salk has a legacy. He conquered polio. This is the toy department down here. We're just sort of having fun and trying to work with young people, and create an atmosphere for them, where they can reach for their dreams.

"That's what we're sort of about. In the end, I think we did OK."

Most would agree he did better than OK. It has been quite a run. The new athletic facilities have transformed the campus. The athletes being recruited rank among the best nationwide. Everything is place, allowing Leland to walk away satisfied.

Almost.

"I was hoping to go to a bowl game, until the last eight seconds of (UC) Davis, the last 34 seconds of UCLA and the 1:39 against Notre Dame, I thought we were going," Leland joked.

So, no bowl. Just preparing for his final day Friday, and what it brings.

"I don't know," he said when asked what it might be like. "I'm sure I'll probably cause more problems than I'm worth that day. I'm sure I'll go out trying to solve the day-to-day, like I always have. My last day will sort of be like the others -- answering memos, looking at e-mails, trying to re-seat Stanford Stadium, and trying to make sure all the pledges are paid, and balance the budget for next year. That kind of stuff.

"I did the best I could. I probably caused more damage than one guy should be allowed to cause, but when I walk out it'll be over. I look at it like an athlete graduating from a team -- you leave, but somebody else will come in."

But who has replaced Tiger Woods at Stanford? And who has replaced Tony Azevedo? Or Jenny Thompson? Or even Jim Plunkett?

And Ted Leland? Like the other great ones who have passed through Stanford, he's another tough act to follow.

Keith Peters is sports editor at the Weekly and can be e-mailed at kpeters@paweekly.com.

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