THE PURPLE ROSE OF NORTHWESTERN

By Steve Wulf

AT BRUEGGER'S BAGEL BAKERIES in the Chicago area, you can buy purple bagels. Purple flags festoon every other car on the streets of the Windy City. The Chicago Sun-Times recently devoted a column to the question, "Won't head-to-toe purple make me look like Barney?" And at the Roxy Restaurant in Evanston on New Year's Day, patrons will be able to drink purple beer.

Why this fascination with the color purple? Well, it is the dominant color of Chicagoland's favorite, mighty, Rose Bowl--bound football team, Da Wildcats. Da Northwestern Wildcats.

Prior to this season, the words mighty, Rose Bowl and Northwestern last appeared in the same sentence in 1948. "Da" was an inarticulate article reserved for Bulls, Bears and Blackhawks. The ineptitude of Northwestern football was so profound that the "Mildcats" lost 34 straight games during one extended period, and in the 24 years between '71 and '95, they averaged two victories a year. During the waning moments of losing games, the academically prideful students would chant at opposing teams, "That's all right. That's O.K. You're gonna work for us someday."

But then along came a former Colorado assistant coach named Gary Barnett. He arrived on campus four years ago, and at a Northwestern basketball game in January '92, he told Wildcat fans and students that he was "taking the Purple to Pasadena." The 49-year-old Barnett now says he can't believe he made such a claim. "When I first got here," he told Football News, "I was very naive to what our problems were. I assumed that everyone here wanted to change, that everybody was sick and tired of losing. But that wasn't true. Some people became very comfortable with losing and thought maybe that was the right way to do it."

Indeed, Barnett's first three seasons did not exactly foretell Northwestern's current success: 3-8, 2-9, 3-7-1. In the meantime, though, he was recruiting some very good talent and instilling in his players a new sense of confidence. Before the first game of the year, against heavily favored Notre Dame, Barnett told his players not to carry him off the field when they won. Not if they won. When they won.

And win they did, 17-15, for their first victory in South Bend since 1961. When the Wildcats lost to Miami of Ohio 30-28, they looked like a fluke, but then they beat Michigan 19-13 in Ann Arbor (for the first time since '59) and Penn State 21-10. Northwestern finished the regular season at 10-1 but seemed headed for the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Florida, until Michigan upset unbeaten Ohio State, thus making Northwestern the No. 3 team in the country and the representative of the Big Ten's 11 teams in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day against U.S.C. of the Pac 10. Barnett is in fact taking the Purple to Pasadena. What makes Northwestern's comeback story even nicer is that there's a moral to it: colleges can win and maintain high academic standards at the same time.

None of this might have happened had Barnett not convinced a headstrong and homesick theater major that he should give his college one more try. Like Tony Randall, Warren Beatty, Ann-Margret and Charlton Heston before him at Northwestern, Darnell Autry is an actor. Unlike them, he can explode through the line, break tackles and outrace defenders. He rushed for at least 100 yds. in every one of Northwestern's games this year, and had he not been a mere sophomore, he might have got more consideration for the Heisman Trophy.

Last spring, though, Autry returned home to Tempe, Arizona, with every intention of transferring to Arizona State. "Winter hit me right in the mouth," says Autry, who recently projected himself as a Sicilian statue for a theater class. "I couldn't imagine ever coming back for another year." But Barnett and Autry's father pressured him to return, and by the time football started, "things just turned around like that."

Last week Autry and the other Wildcats visited the Dewey Elementary School in Evanston, where they received roses with purple streamers and a giant football sign made by all the kids in the school. A second-grade class serenaded the team by singing, "Everything's coming up roses for you and for me."

Forty-seven years ago, the Wildcats were sent off to Pasadena to play California with signs reading GO WEST, YOUNG MEN AND SMELL THOSE ROSES and MAKE WALDORF SALAD--a reference to Cal coach Pappy Waldorf. Thanks to a 43-yd. run by Ed Tunnicliff with three minutes to go, Northwestern beat Cal 20-14 for coach Bob Voigts.

The 79-year-old Voigts, who attends every game, will be going west with these young men also. Says Voigts of his return to the Rose Bowl: "I didn't think it was possible."

--Reported by Julie Grace/Evanston

With reporting by JULIE GRACE/EVANSTON