Leading with the HEART

David Cutcliffe believes in destiny, just as surely as he knew something wrong was looming in his.

That's what he told his wife, Karen, when he flew from South Bend, Ind. back home to Oxford, Miss. in March 2005. So the next day, Monday, Cutcliffe, then 50, went for a treadmill test, and the doctor stopped the rotating belt after a minute and a half and directed him to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford for an arteriogram. That doctor sent him to the North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo for triple-bypass surgery, and that doctor told him what he already knew.

One of Cutcliffe's arteries was 99-percent blocked, but deep in Cutcliffe's crawl-that's the Southern word for guts, he says-he had sensed it, had known it was part of his destiny. He was, after all, a cardiologist's classic study. Chest pain. Sharp aches in his left shoulder. Stiffness in the upper arm. Dr. Phil could have diagnosed him.

But football coaches have no time for such nuisances, not when hours of game reels are waiting to be dissected and the latest five-star recruit is waiting to be wooed-not even when a colossal myocardial infarction is tipping off its blitz like an overanxious high school linebacker trying to impress the prom queen in the front row.

Cutcliffe might have ignored it, too, had he been a head coach, like he was four months earlier at Mississippi. Now that he was Charlie Weis' top assistant at Notre Dame, though, he still shook off the bouts of radiating throbs. Cutcliffe would work out before heading to the office at 5 a.m., but would find himself laying down in the bed of his small condo to wait out the pain. He would brush the snow and ice off his car and drive to work pain-free, until it roared again hours later.

"I kinda knew, but I was pretty stupid," Cutcliffe says contemplatively as he leans back in a rolling chair in his office overlooking Wallace Wade Stadium, its grass drenched with sun on such a gorgeous fall day that Cutcliffe can't help but mention the weather.

It's on days like these when it's good to have a windowed office on the fourth floor of the Yoh Football Center, and it's in Septembers like these when, finally, it's good to have a closet full of Duke Football gear. And for the man in the chair, it's good to be alive, and it's good to be a head coach, and it's good to believe in destiny, and it's good to watch practices on a 52-inch flat screen without swiveling, and it's good to have a photo of a packed student section in eyesight, and it's good to hear from a star freshman that he turned in his paper and-and-more than any other and, it's good to know how to scramble from a blitz.

He must have known, right? This is a coach who takes pages of notes to detail every practice, who can recite his daily schedule by the hour, whose office looks like the inhabitance of an interior decorator rather than a grizzly football coach. Coaches are anticipators. If they could, they would simulate every game scenario. Sometimes the tailback dances left and sometimes he counters right, and it's the coach's fault if the defense guesses wrong. How could he have not seen the linebacker's twitching toes and jiggling fingers?

And then both sides lined up again, and another linebacker leveled Cutcliffe from the blind side.

Quarterbacks get up from the turf. That's what they have been taught to do at every level, and it's what Cutcliffe, one of the foremost quarterback gurus in the country, has undoubtedly instructed his proteges. Peyton reversed his reputation as a big-game failure. Eli won the affection of New Yorkers with a magical postseason. But it's more difficult to plunge from the bottom of a scrum.

The surgeons cleared the artery blockage, but Cutcliffe was then further confined to the hospital with subsequent lung issues. Most open-heart surgeries require five-day stays. Cutcliffe was in Tupelo for more than 20 days.

Finally, he returned to Oxford-where he was supposed to spend time with his family for just a week before flying back to the grind at Notre Dame.

Yet again, the strong-side linebacker rushed the ailing Cutcliffe.

"All of a sudden, my heart gets crazy out of rhythm, and it got really bad," Cutcliffe says. "They put me back in the hospital and couldn't get my heart to get back into rhythm. My blood pressure dropped to 60-over-30, which makes you feel like you're getting ready to die. I was losing consciousness. It's the only time I really ever got scared during all of this. I got scared at that moment when I was in the hospital. And when I got out of all of that, I was miniscule in weight, and I was weak."

And he owed Weis a phone call. He told the first-year head coach, who had graciously visited his lead assistant in the hospital, that he didn't feel up to his responsibilities. Weis told Cutcliffe to think about it over the weekend; he did, and he came to the same conclusion.

"I said, 'Charlie, I don't believe I can do this,'" Cutcliffe recalls, his tender-stricken voice shrinking in stature from his sideline bellows. "'I can't-I'm not gonna half do anything. I'm not gonna be effective. I'm not well.' He told me to think about it. I called him back and said, 'Listen, I can't do it.' So that kinda ended that."

The resignation became official June 1. In just six months-in just a beat of the heart, a pang of shooting pain-Cutcliffe was fired from his first head-coaching gig, then hired by the hottest coach in the game to help guide the most historic program. Then, nothing. Everything had been changed by one congested artery.

But, Cutcliffe learned, change isn't bad. Maybe, after all, it was destiny.

What do you do when you have nothing to do? Cutcliffe, for one, did the things he never could have done and never would have done, all the while knowing he still wanted to do the only thing he's ever done.

Cutcliffe had no coaching job to preoccupy him. For the first time in 29 years, he was staring down another sort of unknown-the kind you can't diagram. It's one thing to speculate the defensive coordinator's next move and try to preempt it. It's another to wonder about fate's next act.

First came the process of cardiac rehabilitation, an obstacle Cutcliffe faced in Oxford. He brought his youngest daughter Emily, who was 5, into Baptist Memorial almost every day. He was joined by five or six others rehabbing themselves after bypass surgeries, including Alan Locke, 78, who was there after his second bypass. Cutcliffe was the youngest in the group, and he not only acted his age but also his occupation when the men were pedaling on stationery bikes, walking on treadmills and pumping light dumbbells.

"I was coachin' 'em up a little bit, trying to energize those guys, and they loved it," says Cutcliffe, who has a not-so-surprising disposition to equate any mass of people to a football team. "I'd say, 'All right boys, where we ridin' today? Y'all wanna ride on up here to Holly Springs, see what's goin' on? And then downtown, we might stop off at the Tasty Freeze, get us a little ice cream on the way back.' That's growth. That's meeting people I would have never met."

And Locke, from Oxford, would never have met Cutcliffe, either. They remain pen pals to this day, e-mailing each other about once a week. Locke doesn't remember any of the rehab after his first bypass-"The second was more outstanding; the first time [in 2001], it's a lost history to me," he says-but he talks about his introduction to Cutcliffe like it was yesterday.

"I was sitting over in a chair doing something, and David comes in and walks in the door, walks straight over to me and stuck out his hand and said, 'I'm David Cutcliffe,'" Locke says. "I had never seen him at all. And that's how we started our acquaintance."

Cutcliffe was supposed to be in cardiac rehab for six weeks, like Locke, but after five, he had sufficiently recovered. He soon found himself, of all places, back in Knoxville, Tenn, passing time and earning money by, all of things, appearing on television and talk radio shows. If his post-surgery stint in Oxford brought out the motivator in Cutcliffe, the downtime in the town where he spent 17 years revitalized the strategic edge of the X's and O's maven.

He talked football for hours every day, on the radio and television, in a studio in his house. In that sense, he was forced to watch football to be knowledgeable-but Cutcliffe is not one to be obliged to anything football-related. He couldn't have done anything else. So he contacted the video coordinator at Tennessee, who passed along any tape Cutcliffe wanted, despite the coach's temporary unemployment. He watched professional schemes and he observed Southern California's prolific offense and, by the time Philip Fulmer hired him to be his top assistant again, Cutcliffe had accomplished the transcendent goal of any sabbatical: he was more learned as a football man.

"I looked at a lot of different alternatives, and it confirmed my belief in what we do," Cutcliffe says. "It just confirmed what I felt like I already knew. We had one of the best systems in all of football."

His heart was functioning normally. His passion was seeping from his mouth, show-by-show, and his enthusiasm had arisen again. Football, his destiny, beckoned. Nine months after triple-bypass surgery, he was back.

"Philip was saying, 'Take it easy, David,'" Cutcliffe says. "I said, 'I ain't taking it easy. If I'm gonna work, I'm gonna work."

And so he did, until December 2007, when he was offered Duke's head coaching position. Destiny was on the line, and Cutcliffe answered the call.

Duke's campus is eerie at 5 a.m. It should be dark, but light poles illuminate the quads' walkways, and the Chapel, smack in the middle of West Campus, is like a lighthouse on choppy seas. Bleakness and desolation are offset by the sheer awesomeness of the campus centerpiece as night turns to morning. Cutcliffe first saw the University in this light, after driving down 40-East in the blackness.

He still prefers to walk campus in the deserted hours of morning, and he does so with a 20-pound weighted vest. He stops to greet custodial workers, to get his hair trimmed by Dave Fowler at the Duke Barbershop and, more often, to admire West Campus buildings-his favorites are the Allen Building and Perkins Library. He sometimes sees students, some that "maybe don't want to see me," he says. And while Cutcliffe enjoys haphazard conversation-"I like talking to people I don't know, just saying, 'Hello, how you doing?'" he says-he walks primarily for exercise.

A foot problem has hindered his strolls, but Cutcliffe still makes it to the office by 5 a.m. and works out in Yoh. He eats a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, and his favorite foods are grilled chicken and turkey spaghetti. Duke Athletics officials quizzed Cutcliffe about his health during the interview process-after all, the search committee was about to recommend a man less than three years removed from triple-bypass surgery to lead a program that needed a resuscitation of its own.

"They asked me, and I had all the doctors' names and numbers," Cutcliffe says, his voice perking up with excitement as the conversation transitions to football. "You couldn't find anyone healthier than I am to work."

Or, for that matter, more excited-and some of it must derive from his time away from football.

Watch the way he interacts with the media. He moseys into his Tuesday press conferences looking dapper in a coat and tie and is lighthearted throughout, chiding media members for the digital recorders and iPods in front of him, telling them that game weeks require more stringent questions, teasing them on conference calls for being inside while he's on the practice field on a gorgeous Sunday. He wasn't like that at Ole Miss; it comes from his time in their ranks. And don't mistake his excitement on the sidelines as an act, either. It's as pure as his interest in Alan Locke.

"It's hard to share in words," Cutcliffe says of what he learned in his nine months off. "I think I just grew a little wise, enjoying every day. And that, in turn, affected how I coach. Man, I make the most of every minute. When I get to talk out onto that practice field, there's nobody on earth-there may be somebody as happy to be out there but I can't imagine anybody on earth happier to be doing what I'm doing than I am. I think it's strengthened that."

We all can die at any time; it's our ultimate destiny. Cutcliffe knows how close he was. The linebacker's hands brushed against his knees, and he almost fell. One beat of the heart, one touch of the knee, and he's fallen on fourth down, never to get up from this sack.

Quarterbacks call it scrambling.

Cutcliffe calls it destiny.

"I'm a believer in that, in the path the Good Lord set," he says. "He put his hands out there and pushed me here and pushed me away, here. The Ole Miss thing-it all kind of happens for a reason."

Just then, mid-sentence, a fly whizzes by Cutcliffe's head. Its buzzing stings the silence of the office, and its flying tantalizes Cutcliffe. In this perfect order, on this perfect sunny day, in this perfect reflection of the flat screen, the bug's destiny is to be snatched by Cutcliffe. One swat. He misses. Then another. Zap.

"Did you see that?" he asks, as he opens his hand on a piece of paper and the insect falls lifelessly, its fate ended when it suddenly intersected with Cutcliffe's. "I caught him."