7. I’M UNABLE TO DESCRIBE CARROLL’S APPEARANCE WITHOUT SOUNDING GAY
Most football coaches are bald, pear-shaped sourpusses. They look like Southern sheriffs, circa 1954. But Carroll is a Hollywood fever dream, a hybrid of Knute Rockne and a rock star. (Folk rock.) He looks like a man who spends his days in the sun. Not the bad sun, the sun of Marlboro Men and aging soap opera actors, but the good sun, the sun of tennis pros and yachtsmen. He’s not leathery, just burnished. His eyes are bright Caribbean blue, and the browner his skin gets, the bluer his eyes turn. His nose is slightly zigzag. It breaks left, then right, a runner in the open field, and his chin is jutting, prominent, always pointing the way forward.
His hair, however, might be his signature feature. A puffy palette of white, silver, and gray, it reminds you sometimes of Bill Clinton, other times of **** Van Dyke. Now you see follicular intimations of Richard Gere, now you see flashes of Phil Donahue, now a fleck or two of Jack Kemp. A journalist friend, when I mention that I’m writing a profile of Carroll— before I realized I couldn’t write a profile of Carroll—says the coach has always seemed to him the paragon of kicked-back cool, the Burt Bacharach of coaches. It’s a fine, and fittingly hair-focused, comparison.
He’s taller in person than on TV. Stalking a sideline, he’s always dwarfed by that phalanx of giants in his private Praetorian Guard, but walking the campus he’s taller than most students he passes. He’s also in better shape. He dresses in concealing layers—a blousy polo shirt over a white body shirt, khaki pants— but when he changes in his office, when he’s standing there shirtless, you notice the definition. A USC strength coach says Carroll is a workout fiend, always looking for new ways to get the heart rate up and the body fat down. He lifts weights, boogie-boards under the pier at Hermosa Beach, and after an exhausting morning of meetings and interviews and speeches, he likes nothing better than to run the floor hard with a pickup basketball team. A doctor told him long ago that his knees are bad, bone-on-bone bad, and he should never play basketball again. He doesn’t go to that doctor anymore.
Every year on Carroll’s birthday he vows to throw a football as far as he is old. When he turned 56 in September, he made a point of going out to the field in the morning and chucking the rock 56 yards. He takes visible pride, disarming pride, in telling me that his ball landed with several yards to spare. There is the trace of a smile on his lips as he tells me. There is always the trace of a smile on Carroll’s lips. His effectiveness as a motivator begins and ends with that smile, which is sincere, unrestrained, and wide, though he mixes in half smiles and smirks when being sarcastic. More than the smile, it’s specifically the prospect of a smile that seems to fuel the many people orbiting Carroll all day. They are prepared to go to great lengths, endure significant pain and inconvenience, to earn one of those Carroll high-beamers, and they brighten visibly upon receipt. They become flustered. They turn the colors of a Pacific sunset. They titter.
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