As Eric Bieniemy posed for a photograph Friday at Spaulding
Field, fullback Michael Pitre walked by, helmet in hand, the last
player to leave the field after the scrimmage.
“Good work, Pitre,” Bieniemy, the first-year UCLA
running backs coach, called out. “Don’t tell anyone
I’m out here taking pictures or I’m going to fight
you.”
Bieniemy and Pitre shared a laugh over the coach’s mock
threat, but the joke was worth noting, considering Bieniemy’s
past indiscretions. The controversy that has followed Bieniemy
throughout his three-year collegiate coaching career has boiled
over. Past transgressions at the University of Colorado have
recently come to light in court depositions from the Colorado rape
proceedings. That, coupled with the transfer of two UCLA running
backs due to personal issues with the coaching staff, has made
Bieniemy subject to public scrutiny.
Bieniemy has rubbed some the wrong way because of his passion
and hard-nosed style. Simply put, some players get along with
Bieniemy and some do not, despite the coach’s efforts to
befriend all of his players.
“You’ve got to have a relationship where you can
develop a friendship with players,” Bieniemy said.
“You’ve got to know when you can push kids’
buttons and when to back off. When it’s all said and done,
you want to make an impression on their lives so you can be friends
outside of football.”
Trouble in Westwood
In January 2003 first-year UCLA coach Karl Dorrell hired
Bieniemy, stealing him away from Colorado, where Bieniemy coached
running backs and the kickoff coverage unit for two years.
Bieniemy left a lot of memories behind at Colorado ““ as a
senior running back, he led Colorado to a national championship in
1990. He went back there a few years ago to get his degree in
sociology and to coach the Buffaloes after an undistinguished
nine-year career in the NFL.
Since arriving at UCLA, Bieniemy has proved to be a personable
coach who tries to cultivate close relationships with his players,
while demanding nothing short of excellence on the field.
That style has appealed to many of the current Bruins, most
notably sophomore-to-be running back Maurice Drew, one of
Bieniemy’s prized recruits who has excelled under the
coach’s tutelage.
“On the field, he is tough on you, but off the field, he
is your friend,” Drew said. “You can talk to him about
whatever you want. A lot of other coaches don’t do that. He
wants to have a long-lasting friendship past this football, past
school, past everything else.”
But, several of the players recruited under the Bob Toledo
regime have not taken to Bieniemy’s in-your-face style. Tyler
Ebell, one of the two running backs to transfer along with
ex-teammate Wendell Mathis, was one of them.
Part of the issue for Ebell was a lack of playing time,
something the junior-to-be has acknowledged since transferring to
Texas-El Paso in January.
Bieniemy favored a platoon system at running back which meant
Ebell, who netted 994 rushing yards in a breakout redshirt freshman
season, saw his carries cut in half. He split time with Drew and
Manuel White last season, rushing for just 501 yards.
As Bieniemy hastened Drew’s development, Ebell’s
relationship with the coaching staff appeared to worsen. Ebell, who
declined to comment for this story, had a mid-season meeting with
his father Dennis and Dorrell to discuss his diminishing role on
the team.
Prior to the team’s last game of the season, when it was
clear there was already friction, Bieniemy said he was confident
Ebell would stay at UCLA. He has since reiterated he and Ebell
coexisted, but he gave the running back his blessing to
transfer.
“My only thing was I just wanted to make sure that he made
the best decision for himself,” Bieniemy said.
Bieniemy and Ebell have each been tight-lipped about their
relationship, but Ebell has indicated that he and unspecified
members of the coaching staff did not have a good relationship.
“I loved UCLA. But I couldn’t play for those coaches
again,” Ebell told The Associated Press in January.
“I’m not saying all of them, just a handful.”
Bieniemy has also dealt with allegations of favoritism from
Mathis, a Toledo recruit who transferred to Fresno State last
August.
“From the time I got (to UCLA), I wasn’t
happy,” Mathis told the Fresno Bee last December. “I
really did not get along with my position coach. As a coach and in
terms of things that (Bieniemy) taught, they were great. But his
mentality that went along with being a coach, I hated. I absolutely
despised it. I didn’t want to play for a guy like
that.”
Multiple attempts to reach Mathis were unsuccessful.
Support for Bieniemy
Other players recruited during the Bob Toledo era have refuted
Mathis’ claim of favoritism.
“People leave for certain reasons,” redshirt
senior-to-be Pat Norton said. “The biggest thing for me is:
Does coach Bieniemy drive people off? No. He’s going to coach
everybody to beat everybody else out. That’s just how he
coaches. There is no in-between. Everyone gets a fair shot. We all
understand that the fact is, it pushes us to play
better.”
Bieniemy has said he believes Ebell and Mathis would have been
an asset to UCLA had they decided to remain with the program.
“You are never satisfied when kids leave,” Bieniemy
said. “But I can’t force a kid against his
will.”
One player who left the football team but decided to stay at
UCLA to get his degree is former fullback J.D. Groves, who quit the
team in January because he said he was no longer having fun playing
football.
Groves said when he told Bieniemy he was quitting, the coach
wanted to make sure that he would still get a degree.
“I will say this, I liked Bieniemy as a coach,”
Groves said. “I didn’t have problems with the coaches
at all. Coach Bieniemy is an excitable person; he’ll get on
you if you screw up. I noticed that when you did well, he was quick
to praise you as well. A lot of people had problems seeing the
praise.”
Groves, a sophomore, said some of his former teammates had
trouble dealing with Bieniemy’s straightforward coaching
style. When Bieniemy arrived at UCLA he told his players that there
were no stars.
That, according to Groves, was difficult for some of his former
teammates to stomach.
“Guys were having problems with him making everybody work
just as hard as everybody else,” Groves said. “That
wasn’t the style that they were used to. Guys had problems
with him treating everybody the same.”
Colorado controversy
UCLA took quite a gamble when Dorrell hired Bieniemy. Dorrell
and Athletic Director Dan Guerrero hired an assistant coach with a
troubled legal background.
Information on Bieniemy’s time as a player and as a coach
at Colorado has resurfaced via several depositions given in 2003
for the lawsuit brought against Colorado by a former Colorado
student who alleged she was raped during a football recruiting
party. Bieniemy’s history at Colorado was brought up in the
depositions in an attempt to display a pattern of behavior that
lawyers said the university should not have accepted.
Court documents include testimony that Bieniemy was cited for a
DUI in April 2001, three months after he came back to Colorado to
coach. Depositions also indicate that in 1994, Bieniemy allegedly
choked a female parking attendant at a Colorado football game and
was subsequently banned from the university for a disputed length
of time. Bieniemy was also involved in other barroom altercations
as a student-athlete at Colorado, according to depositions. He
declined to comment about any of his legal trouble while at
Colorado.
Because of the lawsuit, the University of Colorado Board of
Regents has set up the the Independent Investigative Commission,
which is currently investigating whether the university used sex
and alcohol to entice recruits. According to the Boulder Daily
Camera, the commission listed Bieniemy as a person it would like to
question. The commission is not a legal entity; therefore, Bieniemy
is not required by law to submit to it for questioning.
Both Guerrero and Dorrell knew of Bieniemy’s history at
Colorado, and Dorrell said in February of 2003 that
“(Bieniemy) had more positives than negatives.”
There are indications that some Colorado players also had
difficulties with Bieniemy similar to those Ebell and Mathis
experienced. Although former Colorado running back Marcus Houston
asked to be released from his scholarship in January of 2003 after
Bieniemy had already left Boulder, it is clear Bieniemy and Houston
did not get along.
According to a Denver Post article published Jan. 12, 2003,
Houston said Bieniemy called him “˜Markeesha’ after the
running back was slow to recover from an injury.
Houston, who is now at Colorado State, was not available to
comment after repeated attempts to reach him.
Bieniemy’s rock
Through all of Bieniemy’s personal and legal issues, his
8-year-old son Eric III keeps him grounded. Bieniemy said Eric III,
who suffers from cerebral palsy, is his rock.
“He’s the rock of the family,” Bieniemy said.
“He wants to be just like everybody else. Unfortunately, he
was dealt a certain hand, and he can’t be like everybody
else. But you know, he doesn’t complain, he just gets up and
goes on with his days like every day is normal. It’s blessed
me and my wife. It’s given us a greater appreciation for who
we are and why we are together.”
Part of the reason Bieniemy came to UCLA was the chance to be
closer to his family, much of whom reside in Southern California.
While he is originally from New Orleans, Bieniemy grew up in Los
Angeles and has a strong support network here, which is very
important to him and his wife, Mia. Bieniemy and Mia have two
children ““ Eric III and 4-year-old Elijah.
Bieniemy’s former boss, suspended Colorado coach Gary
Barnett, spoke about the influence Eric III has had on his
father.
“When I hired Eric Bieniemy, I hired him after talking to
a number of people who worked with him in the profession,”
Barnett said in a deposition for the aforementioned case. “I
watched (Bieniemy) grow, change, be the father of a son who has
cerebral palsy. I saw him mature as a person, I saw him mature as a
father and as a husband. I saw him grow up tremendously.”
Some find Bieniemy’s status as a role model to current
UCLA players unsettling. Many of the current Bruins look up to
Bieniemy ““ they respect his athletic pedigree and his NFL
experience. They know that Bieniemy won the NFL Player
Association’s Unsung Heroes Award ““ given to a player
on each team, in recognition of the outstanding things he does in
the community, and on the field ““ four times in his
career.
“Bieniemy has done what we all want to do,” Norton
said. “He’s played on a national championship team,
been to the NFL, he’s played with the best of the best across
the board.”
For every Tyler Ebell or Marcus Houston, there is an athlete
like Chris Brown, a running back for the NFL’s Tennessee
Titans, who has nothing but praise for his former coach at
Colorado.
“We were always friends off the field,” Brown said.
“He made sure you were doing things in the classroom and
studying. If he has any advice, he’ll let me know. He watches
all my games.”
Brown’s comments reflect the type of relationship Bieniemy
has tried to foster with players, to varying degrees of
success.
There are the friction-filled relationships, and there are the
life-long friendships. Some of Bieniemy’s peers feel he has
learned from his mistakes, and some of his players have left school
in search of better experiences.
“I really believe that he is one of those coaches that
will become a special coach because of his passion to coach,”
Dorrell said.
That’s the biggest difference with him; he wants to be the
best running backs coach out there. He works hard at it, and he
works his kids hard at it.”