BY GREG SELBER
PSJA North High School
Get him started talkin’ about the Slot-T Offense, and Bruce Bush can ski downhill with the best of them, his rich, deep voice quickening as he gets more involved. One has to pick up the pace brain-wise to stay with the coaching legend, because he has been down this slope so many times before, the terminology, meaning and intricacies of it all about second nature by now.
With over 250 wins in a peripatetic career that began in 1976, out at Dimmit in West Texas, Bush has made a name for himself as an innovator, a motivator, and a winner; he’s in the top 20 for career grid success in the state of Texas, and mere mention of his name around here will elicit bona fide respect and instant admiration. And if his knowledge of the misdirection magic that is the Slot-T seems like a physiological appendage now, if he seems to be an organic one with the essence of the game of football, well, that makes sense, too.
Bush came to the world from Center, a tiny burg sitting 40 miles from Nacogdoches and 30 miles from Longview. He still sounds East Texas. His dad was a football coach and the younger Bush “grew up on the sidelines.” The family eventually moved to Nederland where Bush played three years of ball for the program that might still be familiar to Valley fans. It was the group that ousted the Jim Helms- and Robert Cortez-led Greyhounds from the state semifinals in 1961 on the infamous fumble return for a late TD by current Dallas Cowboys coach Wade Phillips, then known as “Jerry.”
While Bush was too young for that thriller, he was good enough later on to play at Blinn Junior College and then for the Lamar University Cardinals as a defensive back.
In college he got a glimpse at some of the best talent ever to grace the small-college ranks in Texas and surrounding area, including Mercury Morris and Duane Thomas of West Texas State and Terry Bradshaw of Louisiana Tech.
But coaching was a birthright, it seems, and Bush quickly joined the ranks his father had long been a member of, gaining his first head post at Dimmitt. Prior to that, he’d been a defensive assistant on the 1975 Port Neches Groves unit that won the state title that campaign over Odessa Permian.
“I got the job at Dimmit and stayed one year,” he said. “It was 722 miles away and then I came 722 miles back to take the job at Livingston.”
The fact that he can still note the distance between the two towns is emblematic of the attention to detail that has always been one of the signatures of his coaching style. Another is the 61-year-old’s continued emphasis on fitness; Tuesday morning he had initially been too busy to chat because he was in the middle of a daily workout regimen. In short, this is a football lifer whose dedication to the game is illustrated in myriad ways.
Bush’s coaching journey would take him from Livingston to Alice and then Gregory-Portland and San Marcos, and locals know that he’s also been the leader at P-SJ-A and Donna. Now in his second season at Pharr North (8-4 last year), he has the Raiders in the third round of the state playoffs for the second time in school history (2003 marked the other trip). A lifetime of experience tells the steady boss that though New Braunfels will pose a steep hill to climb Friday afternoon at the AlamoDome in San Antonio, it is a mountain that the Raiders are ready to assault.
HOW IT’S DONE
“Now there are the people up there who will say that this is Valley Week, and that a team from down here will never beat a team from north of 1604,” he said. “’Never have, never will,’ they say. But I tell our kids that the pressure is actually on them because of that, not on us. Our saying this week is, ‘An Underdog is Always Dangerous.’”
If the 11-1 Raiders are going to keep the season alive up in San Antonio, they will have to confront the facts and work with them.
“We have the short end of the stick, size-wise,” said the long-time mentor who has 253 wins since 1976. “And the other thing is, we will see quickness up there that we haven’t necessarily seen yet. The Valley always has some stars, like Mishak, with great quickness, but the teams we will see up there have real speed at a lot of different positions, not just running back. I keep telling them to imagine a game played on fast-forward, and that’s what it’s going to be like.”
However, he’s been around long enough to know that talent doesn’t always win out, and that teams with less ability can end up winning. This year’s North squad is a good example of that axiom.
“Some teams you think might be your best don’t wind up being that, bad things happen or they don’t play to their potential,” he explained. “A lot of it boils down to the mental aspect. When a team wins early in the season it tends to develop that as a habit. For example, we got down three touchdowns to Eagle Pass last week, but the kids are a steady bunch and they just played through it. We’d been down 14 to San Benito earlier and came back on them, so like I say, the habit was there, the expectation that we could overcome that obstacle.”
Bush noted that this year’s Raiders stand as one of the most pleasing squads he’s ever coached.
“The kids have played hard, they’ve worked hard and we have gelled as a team all year,” he commented. “Coming in, we had some real question marks in the summer, on both lines, offense and defense, but we have plugged in some new people and they’ve come through for us. And it has been a fun group to coach.”
In his travels, Bush has found that teams come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties, each with their own tribulations and successes.
“This is not a real rah-rah group, they just come to play every night and they never quit,” he explained. “We have been pleasantly surprised as a staff at how they have competed, they know when to turn it up and they’ve played with real intensity this season.
“Honestly, I had some concerns about overall talent level coming in, but it’s like a cake, I guess. You put all the ingredients together and pop it in the oven. It either does well or it falls apart. We’ve done well this season and these kids have the right stuff. They’ve shown that every week.”
THE CURRENT CROP AND THE FOE
The Raiders of 2009 have carved out a niche as one of the most consistent offensive teams in recent memory; they’ve scored 35.6 points a night in winning 11 of 12 games, placing them as one of five area teams this season to put 400 points on the board, part of a record team showing for a single season in the Valley. They scored 48 against Brownsville Pace in bi-district and 56 in the comeback win over Eagle Pass.
With two-year starter Noe Garcia running the fake-happy offense to perfection, and a trio of fast backs toting the mail – sophomore Alex Gutierrez slammed for 175 and three scores last week as North had a trio of 100-yarders – the team is ready for the challenge of New Braunfels. Senior J.J Rodriguez has scored over 150 points in 2009 and the defense, though not overly big, has made the plays when it’s needed them.
The Unicorns are a perennial Central Texas power who’ve won 60 percent of their contests lifetime, with nine trips to the semi-finals total, five to the state finals. From 1981-86 they were 67-10-3 and have defeated Valley teams four straight times in the playoffs, in 1982 (Donna), 1983 (Pace), 1997 (Harlingen) and 2002 (Mission).
Though they missed the postseason last year with a 6-4 mark and were picked fifth in their district by Texas Football magazine in 2009, the Unicorns (9-3) are back on the scene again. They pounded Bastrop 41-21 in bi-district and then steamrolled Corpus Christi Carroll 42-14 in the area round to set up a battle with the Raiders. Against Carroll, the Unicorns limited the Tigers to 67 yards in the first half and pitched a shutout into the fourth. Previously they’d scored on seven straight possessions against Bastrop, and it is this first-round performance that worries Bush the most.
“That was something else, because Bastrop was one of the two teams to beat Austin Westlake in the regular season,” said the coach. Harlingen faces off against Westlake for the third time in seven years directly after the North-NB game, which starts at noon Friday. Edinburg North-Brandeis comes the next afternoon as the remaining locals seek to break through with a third-round win, something that has happened only 12 times in 70 lifetime tries at this stage of the game.
“We have been watching films of New Braunfels, looking for some weaknesses,” Bush noted. “And we haven’t found any. This is a solid team, very strong on defense with great technique. They don’t have the great running back, like Brandeis, but their offensive line blocks well.”
Bush thinks that his kids have a shot, even though he scoffs at the notion that with three losses this season (to San Antonio schools Madison, Churchill, and Reagan), the Unicorns are not as good as they have been in the past, when the program slogan was, playing on the team nickname, “Not a Myth, but a Legend.”
He also believes the Cardinals have a solid chance to upset Westlake, for the opposite reason.
“They have a good opportunity, because I don’t think that Westlake is as awesome as people associate the name with being,” he noted. “Harlingen has a special group of kids, they’ve got it all, speed, size, you name it. The main thing they have to do is what we have to do, which is get past that Valley Week stuff. We have to think that we can win, against anyone.”
To that end, the veteran coach has been more than gratified at the show of support the Raiders have received this year from their loyal Raider Nation rooters.
“It has been phenomenal all year,” he stressed. “We went on up there to Eagle Pass with something like seven chartered buses! It was just a great atmosphere and it reminded me of football in the old days…everyone in town was there and it made a real difference in what we were trying to get accomplished.”
ON THE HORIZON
With yet another trip deep into the state playoffs, and the latest vindication of the supposedly “old-fashioned” Slot-T, an offensive set he learned decades ago from a group of college coaches at Washington State, the question is, what else does Bruce Bush have to accomplish?
He retired from coaching after the San Marcos season of 2004, but quickly found that it wasn’t as easy as hanging up his whistle, filing away the note cards under historical ephemera, and taking off.
“I saw that retirement is something that comes in phases,” he recalled. “If you’re not careful, you begin to lose your identity, because you’ve quit doing something that has defined you for so long. You can find yourself feeling worthless if you’re not careful.”
So he came on back, to a place he always valued highly, a Valley football world he has intermittently helped to achieve success, by coaching at several stops and by aiding in the growth process of a handful of protégés, i.e., Coach Tony Villarreal.
It has all led to now, with a third-round fight ahead against a tough opponent. Bush spent quite a bit of time Tuesday pouring forth on the nuances and virtues of the Slot-T, but in the interest of preserving the reader’s sanity, details and particulars about motion, strong/weak side, and over-pursuit will have to be parsed another time.
But suffice to say that right now, the braintrust for New Braunfels cannot be said to be enjoying that same luxury. Not even close.
Tags: coach bush, psja north, raiders
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