The red? The red misses Mac already.
“I think one time, we might’ve gone horseback riding,” ex-Nebraska football coach and AD Tom Osborne, 87 years young, said Saturday when I called to ask him about the late, great Bill McCartney. “But I don’t remember much more than that. It was just kind of a vague memory. I think it was in Colorado.”
At a time when the Big Eight had more characters than Henry VI, Part 2, they were the conference’s Odd Couple.
Mac was just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit. McCartney, the legendary football coach who put CU back on the football map, grew up in Riverview, Mich., just outside the Motor City, watching high school football practices from across the street. Osborne, who still doesn’t quite understand why Mac picked a fight with him, was born in Hastings, Neb., country strong, in the place where Kool-Aid had been invented just 10 years earlier.
“We had a good friendship,” the retired Big Red icon told me by phone the morning after McCartney died at the age of 84. “And of course, when he went to CU, he decided Nebraska was his rival. And I always a little bit never understood it.
“When he took over at CU, that football program was not in very good shape. And I think his first four or five years were fairly tough.
“But he hung in there and was a good recruiter. And as time went on, he had some very good, competitive teams, and one year (1990) was a national champion. So he did build that program. It was quite an accomplishment.”
And Osborne liked him. A lot. Charlie McBride, Osborne’s longtime defensive coordinator with the Huskers, the father of “The Blackshirts” and a former Buffs football player, positively adored him.
“The thing about it I remember probably the most about Bill was, that after that game was over,” McBride recalled of the day Nebraska lost at CU in 1986, the Big Red’s first in Boulder since 1960, “that I was actually happy for those guys. It’s kind of funny. If you’re a competitor, maybe your level of dislike goes up. But I don’t know. I never did get that way.”
When Osborne thinks on Mac, he doesn’t immediately go to 1985. Or to 1988. Or 1991, the 19-19 game in BoCo, when someone emptied their beer all over the head of McBride’s poor mother.
He recalls the time they ran a lap for charity together at Folsom Field during one CU-Nebraska pregame. The mind turns to wives, to kids, to Fellowship of Christian Athletes functions.
“It was always a little uncomfortable for me to (feel) like somehow we were to be hated, and we didn’t try to do anything to earn that,” said Osborne, who was 9-3-1 against Mac when the latter coached the Buffs. “I never really thought of CU as a rival. I always took the approach that whomever we played that week was our rival.”
Nebraska players, though? When Buffs Week came around, they started keeping receipts. Especially, McBride said, when they saw CU players get off the plane with T-shirts that read, “WE’LL SHOW YOU WHO THE REAL BLACKSHIRTS ARE.” Or words to that effect.
“Mac can get people fired up, now,” the ex-Nebraska assistant laughed. “I’ll tell you what — I never met a guy who could get his kids to play as hard and play better than (McCartney) did.
“As far as I was concerned, in my heart, it was a rivalry. But it was not a hated rivalry. It was a respected rivalry. It wasn’t something where you’d call them names and a bitter rivalry.
Head coach Bill McCartney of the Colorado Buffaloes yells from the sidelines during a game against Nebraska Cornhuskers in 1990. (Photo by Getty Images)
“If a game was in the fourth quarter, you’d think, ‘Well, we can wear these guys down.’ We used to think we could wear people down with depth and stuff like that. (Boulder) was one place we couldn’t wear them down. I always respected Bill for that.”
Osborne told me he hadn’t spoken to McCartney in roughly a decade. And as time passed, he never did get an explanation as to why the Big Red became CU’s red-letter game.
“We never really had that conversation as to why,” Osborne chuckled. “But because he had come from the Michigan-Ohio State tradition, (he) probably thought it would be helpful.
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“Bill felt that was important to his program. And so I didn’t reciprocate. But I certainly respected what he did at CU. He was a good coach. And a good person.”
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