Hall of Fame coach Bob Pollock 'did it my way'

Bob Pollock might have been the new kid on the Clemson block, but that didn't stop him from putting Wayne Coffman to the test.

“Bob was constantly trying to gain an advantage,” said Coffman, now an academic advisor at Vickery Hall and then the Tigers' head women's track coach. “Just after he got here, we were preparing the track for a meet and Bob was scheduling the jumps and assigning the jump pits. He just casually tells me that 'the men will jump over here, and the women can jump over there.'

“I guess he's thinking that I hadn't been around the block a time or two. But I tell him, 'No Bob, the men can't have the good pit and the wind at their backs for both the long jump and the triple, while the women jump with a crosswind – you only get one.'

“You had to be watching him all the time on stuff like that.”

Working all the angles to gain an advantage, making the most out of whatever resources were available, and planning and preparing down to the most minute detail were characteristics that helped make Pollock one of the most successful and decorated coaches in Clemson and Atlantic Coast Conference history.

He will be honored this weekend by induction into the Clemson Athletic Hall of Fame, just six months after he passed away from lung cancer.

When Pollock's condition worsened last winter, some of his closest friends and members of the Hall of Fame Committee tried to persuade to him to be inducted early in a special ceremony, perhaps at halftime of a basketball game.

Pollock declined, saying 'I want to go in with the rest of my class in the fall,' even knowing that he might not make it to football season.

“That was an opportunity right there to have said 'yeah, it's all about me,'” said Coffman. “But that wasn't Bob. With Bob, it was never about him – not even after all the championships and all the coach of the year awards. It was always about his athletes and his program and competing, and about being part of something...At his funeral, John Seketa put together a slide show with the music 'I Did It My Way.' And he always did.”

As to what it was that gave Pollock the winning edge that allowed Clemson to dominate ACC men's track and field for more than a decade, Coffman said that attention to detail and a relentless drive to identify and develop talent were at heart of his success.

“Bob was just so meticulous – to the point that some people would say 'this guy is driving me crazy,'” said Coffman. “He was incredibly thorough in everything he did, and that's one of the things I learned from him. I came to the point where I understood that it was that meticulousness that gave him an advantage.

“When we laid out our home cross country course, he was driving the golf cart and I had the wheel outside, measuring the distance. We measured it once, and he said 'okay, we're going to measure it again.' So we measured it again, and we came up with about a 20-yard difference. I said 'Bob, it's 3.1 miles – 20 yards don't matter. It's close enough.' But no, he wouldn't hear of it, so we'd have do it again. So we kept measuring, and kept getting slightly different distances, and so we ride and we ride and we ride, doing laps around that course. At some point, Bob says 'we'll get some lunch, but only when we get this thing right.' And I say, 'no, let's go eat lunch now, and then we'll come back out here.'

“That was just Bob. Everything had to be just right...I don't think it's an accident that he won all those championships. He knew how to turn things upside down, shake 'em up, and all of a sudden he's got you over a barrel.”

Pollock's eye for talent included the signing of a raw young sprinter in Shawn Crawford, who came from a school so small that it didn't have a proper track to practice on, and Michael Green, an under-the-radar Jamaican. Both went on to become NCAA champions and Olympians.

Crawford, who claimed the Olympic gold medal in the 200 meters in 2004, is a member of this year's Hall of Fame induction class, while Green was previously inducted.

Coffman said Pollock was just as effective in recruiting at the other end of the talent spectrum.

“When we went to the South Carolina state meet to recruit, we always got back in the wee hours of the morning,” Coffman recalled. “It never failed that once the meet was over, Bob would be talking to somebody. He would find a diamond in the rough down there that nobody else saw. He'd talk to the kid and he'd talk to his coach, and all of a sudden he's got this kid signed for book money or something. Then he'd get up here and he'd be a guy who could score two or three points at the ACC meet.

“He had so many of those guys that it was always a dilemma for him to figure out who he was going to take to the ACC meet, because you could only have 34. He had guys at 35, 36 and 37 who he knew could score points at the conference. He'd just beat you with depth.”

And, Coffman noted, Pollock would talk your ear off – any time or place, on any subject.

“Had he been alive to accept his award this weekend, we'd have probably had to schedule the Hall of Fame Banquet for both Saturday and Sunday,” he said. “It would've taken today and tomorrow and they'd have had to put him last, so that when everybody got tired of listening to him talk they could have just wandered out.

“You know, I think all his accomplishments speak for themselves,” Coffman added. “But to me what made Bob special was what happened outside the lines – his relationship with people, and how many people considered him a friend as well as colleague. I think the way he touched so many people was what made his death so much harder to deal with.

“That's why it hurt, and still hurts, so bad.”