Endurance test: UW's Hedges is vague about her future

When things get bad, she walks. She walks through the morning mist, through the pre-dawn showers and the sunrises that burst like stadium lights over the Cascade Mountains. While the rest of Windermere sleeps, Washington athletic director Barbara Hedges roams the neighborhood, arms flapping, legs chugging, skittering over darkened curbsides.

Here is where she goes to forget the demons of the past year. To a place where the visages of the awful summer appear from the fog: Rick Neuheisel in his purple sweater vest and William Scheyer clutching his doctor's bag. It is the place she visits to summon the strength to knock them both back.

It is where Barbara Hedges pastes on the smile that will be her armor for the rest of the day.

"Everything you read about exercise is right," she says. "It makes you reduce stress, it helps you to cope with issues. It's a good routine I have. You go out and you walk as fast as you can. It's just soothing."

Now it's the end of the day at the end of a year Hedges would rather stuff in a box and heave into Lake Washington. She is relaxing in her office in a building near Edmundson Pavilion. Or at least relaxing as much as Hedges seems to relax, which means she is rigidly perched on the edge of a chair, face locked, eyes probing for the first sign of trouble.

She would rather not be here, of course. She would rather not be sitting ever so patiently with her hands crossed over a blue folder answering questions about the men who have deceived her in the last nine months. A 13-year legacy of new arenas, stadiums and practice facilities paved with FieldTurf has been tarnished at the end. The palace has a layer of graffiti like a freeway underpass.

Neuheisel's betting brought the NCAA investigators and left a football team in disarray. Scheyer's alleged prescription spree brought the state health department and the ousting of softball coach Teresa Wilson.

"Gambling and drugs, the two worst things as far as the NCAA is concerned," her detractors like to say.

"Twelve years have been terrific," she says. "The 13th has been... "

She sighs as she searches for the right word.

"What would it be?" she continues, "less rewarding?"

The thought hangs in the air because the last nine months have been something far worse than "less rewarding." It's as if a tornado has torn through her stewardship. In just a handful of months, she has gone from the athletic director fans liked to complain about but grudgingly respected to the scourge of the department. Now an angry mob has jumped her and is pounding away on talk radio, in the papers, at lunch counters and in bars. Six-and-six football seasons have a way of bringing out the worst in people, especially with the specter of probation looming.

The mob gets louder. But the more it bites, the faster she walks and the faster she walks, the harder that shell grows, the deeper the smile gets until it has dug into her skin like a trench. It does not disappear.

"I've been very even," she says with measured words. "I don't have any real highs and lows. I don't allow myself to be negative. I just do not allow negative to creep in at all. I think it's my personality. I think I've always been that way. I try to find the positive. I know that when you are dealing with major issues that's tough, but I really try to find the positive."

On Fridays, she entertains, and this soothes her, too. There's a weekly party at the house in Windermere, just like there were parties with Mexican hors d'oeuvres in happier days at the old place she and her husband, John, had in Madison Park, up above the tennis club. Everything can still be happy. Everything can still be Huskies purple and gold, even as a toxic cloud has moved over the program.

The other night, at one of those gatherings, Ron Crockett, one of the school's most visible boosters and the president of Emerald Downs, found himself standing on Hedges' porch with another guest. The other man looked back toward the house, saw Hedges fluttering happily around the room, and he shook his head.

"That is one resilient human being," he said.

As Crockett remembers this, he gives a small, dry laugh.

"I've never seen her break," he says. "Never."

A polarizing figure

There are so many who would love just that, to see Barbara Hedges crack into dozens of tiny pieces. Nobody in Seattle sports divides loyalties like she does. Those who support her argue that the athletic department has thrived financially under her watch and, unlike almost all others, it does not siphon a dollar from state funds. They point to the cluster of new buildings, a handful of successful Olympic sports teams and several student support groups and ask what else could she have possibly done.

Others revile her as an interloper who destroyed a football dynasty with a careless disregard for its power. They blame her for two years of probation in 1993, for Don James' subsequent resignation, for Neuheisel, and now for a 6-6 record. They blame her, too, for Bob Bender's basketball failures and current assistant Cameron Dollar's improper recruiting blitz two springs ago. And while they're at it, they blame her as well for Scheyer's softball pharmacy.

"It's not personal, it's her utter, horrendous mismanagement of the major revenue sport," says Doug Glant, a longtime booster who has become one of Hedges' most vocal critics in recent years. "From the moment she got here until she leaves we will be under the NCAA's looking glass. Under her watch, not much watching has gone on."

Even those who are far less critical, who are much friendlier with Hedges, find a layer of culpability. She likes to delegate authority, they say, and it is that very trait has kept her from having too clear a view of what's going on.

"I feel for her in that situation because Barbara is very trusting," says Chris Gobrecht, former UW women's basketball coach now at USC. "She is inclined to trust and see the good in there. She's gotten stung by people who she probably trusted. She was willing to put some faith in people."

Mostly, there is a sense that she should have known about Neuheisel, Scheyer, Dollar and all the others who were breaking the rules.

"How would I know all of that?" she says, flinging her hands in the air. "It's absurd! That expectation is too high that you are going to know every single thing that every single person is doing at every time. It's impossible!"

Hedges drops her hands, and for a moment she looks flustered.

"Responsible people should act responsibly," she says.

UW takes notice

Few athletic department executives in the country had a run quite like Hedges did at USC in the late 1970s and 1980s. She was always an achiever right from the start as the youngest of nine children from Glendale, Ariz. When she was 1, her mother died, and she was raised by her father, her siblings and by the various housekeepers who came along.

Perhaps spurred by her upbringing, she threw herself headlong into tasks, like attending clinics to learn how to coach high-school gymnastics in Denver and Cheyenne, Wyo. She went back to college at Arizona to get a master's, then hit the USC campus.

At the time, there was no such thing as big women's sports programs. Immediately she set out to create one at USC.

"You could always tell Barbara was coming down the hall by the click, click, click of her heels," remembers Gobrecht, who was a student at USC at the time.

Hedges took risks. Like the time she bought a new Mercedes, "a 450 SL, it was a beautiful car," she says, and raffled it off as a fundraiser by selling $2 tickets. She took the Mercedes everywhere, to football games, basketball games, pep rallies, wherever she could until ultimately she pulled in close to $300,000.

By the late 1980s, she had turned USC into a haven for women's sports. Which is where William Gerberding, then the president at Washington, found her when he was looking for an athletic director in 1991. Gerberding already knew Hedges from Pac-10 Conference meetings where he used to joke that she was "one of the good-old boys" because she seemed to be friends with everybody.

Glant, who says he was part of a group that made a recommendation to Gerberding, says he and others on the panel felt the president was determined to hire a woman. Gerberding does not deny this.

In fact, Gerberding admits there was more support for a male candidate (Ball State athletic director Don Purvis), but he felt strongly about Hedges.

"I was open, very much open to this new world of bringing a woman into a position of authority," Gerberding says. "I'm willing to live with the statement that, all things being equal, it intrigued me. I thought it was good for the university and the society to bring women into a position of authority."

It was under these circumstances that Hedges arrived on Montlake. The previous athletic director, Mike Lude, was a Marine who talked only of football, and suddenly taking his place was a 5-foot-4 female whose previous experience had been auctioning a Mercedes for softball and volleyball teams.

"There were rumors that she bled cardinal and gold because she was from 'SC," Myles Corrigan, a former football assistant coach, says with a laugh. "You were moving from a strong male leadership in Mike Lude to Barbara. To some degree she got bum-rapped a little bit. She tried to create a sense of the Husky family but the 'SC ties hurt her, to be honest. Anytime you have a gender change like that, some of the old salts might not go along with it."

Sitting in her office last week, Hedges is asked if she thinks it was difficult to be a female from USC suddenly thrown into such a masculine world.

"Nooo question," she says definitively. "No question."

She'll go no further, then talks about Don James, the longtime football coach whom she says welcomed her gracefully. When James and the Huskies shared the national championship in just her first year on the job, it seemed everything was perfect. Gerberding pulled her aside after the Rose Bowl and said, "It's not always going to be this easy or this fun."

The next fall brought Billy Joe Hobert and his improper loan and ultimately the investigators. Hedges hired a law firm that specialized in college-athletics cases to examine everything in the program, infuriating the coaches and players who thought the attorneys who were supposed to defend them were instead tearing them to pieces.

After that came the Pac-10's decree of a two-year probation after indications that it would only be one season. James resigned in protest. To many of the football people, Hedges had become the woman from USC again.

Clearly this is where a rift began between Hedges and many of the football players, coaches and fans. Most, however, will not speak about her on the record, citing a James mantra that they always remain loyal to the school and program.

But privately, they, too, attack Hedges, saying she did not defend James enough to the Pac-10 the way they insist that Lude would have done. They say she didn't attend football practices, didn't understand the game and did things to damage the program rather than help it. Many are still furious she hired Neuheisel, who constantly had problems with the NCAA. Yet the committee of football people who interviewed Neuheisel were just as enthralled as she was back when he was hired in 1999.

Mostly, they say, she is just not one of them.

"You know if I hear that one more time... " she says, her eyes rolling. "No. 1, I love football. No. 2, if you look at everything that has been done from a facilities standpoint, there isn't one facility that we built, renovated or created that in some way hasn't had a positive impact on football. From my standpoint, there is no question about my commitment to football, no question. And I can just show you chapter and verse."

Currently, Washington spends $12.5 million annually on its football program, or 31 percent of its budget. James refuses to place blame for his resignation on Hedges, saying, "I don't think she would have endorsed two years of sanctions against the football program."

Asked about the sanctions, Hedges closes her eyes.

"It took me a long time to get over it, because I didn't think it was fair," she says. "But you know what? It's over, and we have to move on, that's what we need to do. That's past history. You've got to move on, and I think we have moved on as an institution — amazingly well."

She is asked if she thinks the perception of her would be different if she were a male, if people would then consider her a football person.

"I'm sure it's part of it," she says. "Yeah, if I were a guy, it would have been kind of an automatic. But I never want to use that as an excuse."

Building a legacy

A sunny afternoon has filled with the chill of dusk, but Hedges wants to walk again, away from the storm, because this time there is a legacy she wants to show off. Whenever people talk about Hedges' 13 years at Washington, they ultimately talk about the buildings — the indoor football facility, the softball stadium, the renovation of Edmundson Pavilion. Even the people who despise her the most admit she has done a wonderful job of delivering new homes for her teams.

She stands now inside the Dempsey Indoor practice facility, a hangar of a structure big enough to hold a fleet of 747s. She talks about the need to build something for her teams because the old buildings were either falling apart, or in the case of this indoor football field, there wasn't anything at all. The football teams simply practiced outside.

Just an hour before, she helped break ground on an $18 million crewhouse and athletic dining hall that will sprawl along the banks of Lake Washington. At the ceremony, university president Lee Huntsman said "There is no question that Barbara has been the spiritual leader of the facilities renewal."

And all of it came from private funds.

"In the athletic department, we hadn't done fund raising of this scale," says Chip Lydum, the facilities director. "We were under-prepared for the cost of the projects, and once we found out how much they were going to cost, we had to regroup and begin again."

In all, more than $100 million was raised for six buildings.

There are many successes. Many of the school's non-revenue sports teams — namely softball and crew — have competed for national titles. Two years ago, nine of Washington's 23 sports teams finished in the top 15 in national rankings. She formed a student support group aimed to give athletes better leadership training and tutoring as well as a stronger voice in department affairs. When she began the search that ultimately led to Neuheisel's hiring, she insisted that a football player sit on the committee.

All of these are new at Washington.

But athletic directors are rarely judged on the success of the softball team. Or even for the fact that the department made $2 million last year. Ultimately, their legacy is driven by football and basketball. And a 6-6 football team and a men's basketball team that doesn't make the NCAA tournament is not going to motivate alumni.

"She did a good job at fund-raising, but she did it in an insane stock market," Glant complains. "She raised a lot of money, but so could you and I."

Now, Hedges' legacy is tied up with trouble, Neuheisel's lawsuit and Scheyer's situation, none of which she is at liberty to talk about. She is 66, and with so much trouble, only a nine-month contract extension that ends in June and a new president presumably on the way in the next year, there is endless speculation that she will soon retire.

A rumor flew around last week that she would do it at the crewhouse dedication, drawing so many curious news reporters that it might have been the best-covered crewhouse dedication in history. But those close to her shook their heads. It wouldn't be her style to quit that way, they said.

Hedges is, however, tantalizingly vague about her future plans.

"I didn't say I don't have any plans, I just said I'm not ready to announce them," she says.

When told that by saying such a thing she only opens the door for more speculation, she laughs.

"We always have plans. Everybody has plans. I just haven't revealed my plans yet. You know I'm not going to do this thing forever."

For now she is. And that means there are the walks. The walks around her neighborhood, the walks around campus, the walks to the athletic department's coffee stand where she orders her daily double-tall, non-fat decaf latte.

Many who know her say they don't really know her, that they never see beyond the basic biographical information — her longtime marriage to John and the fact she has two grown sons. They watch her walk, they see her smile, and yet they don't know what is truly going on.

"She's a lot like the duck swimming on top of the water looking serene but with the legs churning madly underneath," Gobrecht says. "Her temperament never changes. It's both a blessing and a curse."

The day is dying now, the sky outside of Hedges' office is almost black. And, yes, the last few months have been hard, some of the worst she has ever had in her life.

"Everybody has an ego," she says. "And when you read things about yourself, it's difficult, particularly when you don't think it's right."

She is asked in this stillness if she is mad, perhaps at Neuheisel who lied or maybe Scheyer for running amok. She shakes her head.

"I'm not angry," she says. "No, I'm not angry at all. Anger is not a particularly good emotion for a long period of time."

Instead, she'd rather go for a walk.

Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com.