Jerry Kill: Pride of the prairie

CHENEY, KAN. -- His career as Gophers football coach has barely begun, but already Jerry Kill is planning for the end. He has asked his brother, Frank, to keep an eye out for some real estate, to watch for a parcel of 20 acres or so of Kansas wheat field that he might buy, perhaps something near the Ninnescah River. And when it's time to move on from Minneapolis, whether it's after two seasons or two decades, he'll come home.

Heck, he's already bought some land: A burial plot for him and his wife, next to his father's grave in a small cemetery on a hilltop surrounded by wheat farms.

"I'll always come back to Cheney," Kill says of the peaceful little clutch of modest homes and family farms in a sloping valley in south-central Kansas, the sort of place where the cell-phone reception is lousy but the sense of community is terrific. There are no traffic lights, no supermarkets, just 2,100 Kansans used to relying on each other. "No matter where I go, I think someday I'd like to come back. Just like Minnesota, there are good people, simple people there."

There he goes again. Making the old man proud.

Family first

Jerry Kill has come home once before, and it's the perfect illustration of the values that have made him so successful. Five years into his college head-coaching career, he had turned little Saginaw Valley State into something of a small-college phenomenon, posting 9-2 records in both 1997 and '98. He seemed to be settling in for a long career at a school that fit him well.

But those plans changed on short notice, when the family received some devastating news: His father's cancer, in a bile duct between his liver and pancreas, was in its last stages. Doctors told Jim Kill that he was living his final six months.

The coach invited his father to Michigan for the football season that was about to start, but his health deteriorated quickly. The night before the season's second game, Jim Kill collapsed in his son's home and was admitted to a nearby hospital in grave condition. Jerry coached the next day while his father underwent emergency surgery, under his old man's explicit orders: Do the job that's expected of you.

"That was so hard, but it's what he wanted," Kill says. As his condition worsened over the next few weeks, his father wanted to return to Cheney for his final days, but it seemed impossible in his condition. Frank Kill called Cessna Aircraft, where his father had worn a tool belt for 38 years, and asked for help.

"The president of the company sent a private plane to Michigan to get him back home. How many laborers do you know who they'd do that for?" Jerry Kill says. "He was too weak to walk. He hadn't been out of bed for two weeks, but when they took him to the plane, wearing his Saginaw football cap, that sumbitch got up and walked to the plane."

His son was just as determined. Though he loved his job at Saginaw, he couldn't live a time zone away from his dying father, and couldn't leave his mother to cope with her grief without him. When the coach at Emporia State, less then an hour away from Cheney, took an assistant's job at a bigger school, Kill applied for the position, though it represented a step back in his career.

"I was making $75,000 at Saginaw -- that was a lot of money for me -- and I took about a $20,000 cut because I wanted to be with my mother through all this," Kill says. "I did what I felt I had to do, and I'd do it again. That's my mother -- I've only got one of them."

Still, says his mother, Sonja, "I hated that he did that for me. I was worried he was wrecking" his career by walking away from the program he had built at Saginaw. "But he cared more about family" than career.

And she needed him after all. On the night Kill's hiring at Emporia was announced in January 1999, his father, by now unable to speak, watched the evening news and shed a tear when he saw the coach on TV. Within a couple of hours, he lapsed into a coma that he never came out of. "He knew Jerry was coming home, at least," says Frank Kill. "I think Jerry had made him happy."

A father's legacy

Jerry Kill is a child of Cheney, and a child of Jim Kill, and, yes, that sentence is redundant. "If you lived in Cheney," says Frank Kill, "you were part of his family."

And family remembers. Walk down Main Street or into the China Bar, the city's lone tavern and Chinese restaurant, where residents gather on fall Saturdays to watch Kill's teams play on TV, and you will hear how excited Cheney residents are that someone from this speck on the open prairie is taking charge of a Big Ten football program. But just as frequently, they will mention, unsolicited, the coach's father, the very model of the man the Gophers have hired.

"Jim wouldn't accept any nonsense, so I never had any trouble with Jerry," said Ken Diskin, Kill's football coach at Cheney High. "He was all about hard work and living up to your responsibilities, and he taught Jerry to live the same way. You could tell him, 'I need this and this and this done,' and you wouldn't have to worry about it getting done. His dad taught him that."

"The boys knew they were loved," says Sonja Kill, who spends every football season with her older son and never misses one of his games, "but Jim thought it wasn't bad if they had a little fear in them, too."

Twelve years gone now, and Jim Kill remains a palpable presence in his sons' lives, his lifestyle adapted as their own, his generosity the model. When Jim Kill died, the church wasn't big enough for all the mourners, most of whom came bearing stories of how he had helped them, some of them unknown even to his own family.

"People told us, 'He gave me some money when I was going through a divorce,' or 'He helped me get my crops in but wouldn't let me pay him,' all these stories he'd never talked about," says Jerry Kill. "We had a big garden, and he'd take half of it and give it away. Dad didn't have a lot -- when he died, I got some cowboy boots and a belt buckle -- but he would do anything for you. He came across as gruff, but he was about as caring a man as you could ever meet."

No coincidence, then, that the Coach Kill Cancer Fund was created to help families of cancer victims cope with some of their financial hardships. Or that five years ago, Frank Kill organized a now-annual golf tournament in Cheney to raise money to see that the children of a family friend who died young could go to college. "Help others less fortunate, that's what we were taught," Jerry Kill says.

It's difficult to say which of the Kill brothers idolized his father more, because each honors him in his own way. Frank, the younger son by four years, remained in Cheney and followed his father's path. He quit college, preferring to work with his hands, and now owns his own appliance-repair business. He bought a piece of land a half-mile from home and built his own house on it with his father's help, a place so friendly that two welcome mats greet visitors.

Jerry, though, left Cheney for college, and has stayed away while chasing his football-coaching dreams. But he's the image of his father, his family and friends say, in how he lives his life and treats his players. He preaches honesty, integrity, the golden rule. And, especially, hard work.

"My dad would take his vacation from the [aircraft] plant every year and spend it helping farmers in their fields. He never took a break from work," says Frank Kill. "When we were old enough, we had to have two or three jobs during the summer, and if it rained and you couldn't work the fields, he would find us work. He'd say, 'Idle hands are the devil's workshop, and you two ain't sprouted wings yet.'"

Jerry worked an assembly line. He helped frame houses. He made donuts, bagged groceries, pulled rye, sheared sheep.

The only way to get out of work was by playing sports, since Jim loved watching his kids compete, believing it was good for them. So the brothers took part in every sport they had time for, forever chasing a ball somewhere. Frank estimates he and his brother played 1-on-1 basketball "a few hundred times, easy. And I don't think I ever won a single time, because Jerry couldn't stand the thought of losing." Despite hardly being tall, Jerry made the varsity basketball team, helping it become the first Cheney team to qualify for the state tournament.

His coaching instincts were coming forward even then; when farm kids gathered for a baseball game, Jerry would organize the group into teams. And football? Jerry Kill, the budding Oklahoma Sooners fan, was designing plays before he turned 10. "We'd play in the yard, and he would have us running the option like Oklahoma," Frank says. "He's diagramming plays and writing them down. I'm like 7 years old, and I'm the tailback against junior-high kids."

The best moments were when their father would take time between jobs to watch them. "He just had that way about him -- you wanted to work hard to earn his respect," Frank Kill says. "He had a way of making you want to make him proud."

Dogged determination

As he got older, sports, and especially football, became more important to Jerry Kill. He was only 140 pounds when he got to Cheney High, but he made the football team as a linebacker on sheer determination. He would hang upside down in the garage, hoping to stretch himself. He would run to school from the family's modest three-bedroom rambler a half-mile outside town, and lift weights by himself in a tin building in 100-degree heat, trying to add muscle.

"If he ran a 5.4 40, I'd be surprised. But he wanted to play so bad," said Jack Thomas, Kill's freshman-team coach. "I watched him run past my house every night. He ran, he'd lift, he worked his tail off."

Thomas convinced an assistant coach at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan., to take a chance on a slow, undersized linebacker whose primary asset was his heart, and from there a coaching career was launched. Through it all, as Kill worked his way up to a head-coaching job of his own, he returned to Cheney to be with his father, who battled diabetes, then cancer. "His chest and back would be burned from the cobalt treatments," Jerry Kill says, "but he didn't complain."

Instead, he took the boys hunting rabbits in his beat-up red pickup -- always buy used, he told his kids, because new cars are a waste -- and tried to give them the same appreciation for his small-town home as he had. "It's the best memory I have of my dad," Jerry Kill says, "except one."

But that one is bittersweet. Home for Christmas in 1998 as he tried to finagle a new job at Emporia State, Kill knew he was saying goodbye for good. As he and defensive coordinator Tracy Claeys, who had tagged along for the holidays, prepared to leave for Saginaw, his terminally ill father met the pair at the door.

"He said, 'Coach Claeys, the keys are in the coat,' which was his way of saying you're his friend, and if you ever need anything, the keys to the house are in a coat in the garage," Kill says. "And he said, 'Jerry, take care of your mother.'"

And one more thing. Kill mists up as he recalls it. "He said, 'Jerry, I love you and I'm proud of you,'" Kill says. "And that was it. Football, coaching, whatever -- it's the best memory I'll ever have."