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By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
"I'm as human as the next guy and I didn't like standing out there on the Hawai'i sideline for 4 1/2 hours watching us get beat. That wasn't easy for me. I kicked the ground so many times the toe nail on my big toe came off."
— Brigham Young University football coach Gary Crowton, in 2002, recalling the 72-45 loss to Hawai'i nine months earlier.
Does time, as they say, really heal all wounds?
Even one of nasty proportions caused by a 72-45 bludgeoning on national cable television?
If so — and if three years is enough time — the University of Hawai'i just might find BYU back on its football schedule. Perhaps even before the day deposed UH President Evan Dobelle and the Board of Regents finally bury their hatchets. Somewhere other than in each other, that is.
We're told that UH has approached BYU about resuming the one football series that anybody here used to care about: UH-BYU. Val Hale, the BYU athletic director, told The Advertiser's Stanley Lee he is fine with it as long as his head coach is willing.
And that could be the rub here: Crowton. It isn't hard to see that the enthusiasm for continuing this series took a decided nose dive after the Cougars' bid for an unbeaten, top-10 finish in that 2001 game did the same thing.
Right up until then the schools were talking positively about extending the series due to end in 2002. But you could make a case that BYU hasn't recovered from that 2001 game and, so far, neither has the talks.
The Cougars, who won their first 12 games in 2001, have won just 9 of 25 since the humbling in Halawa.
BYU won the series finale in 2002, 35-32, in Provo, a game UH very nearly pulled out despite one of the worst games of quarterback Tim Chang's career.
But even two days before that game, visions of his lumbering linebackers struggling to cover fleet UH receivers no doubt still throbbing in his noggin from 2001, Crowton made it clear he was in no hurry to sustain the series.
"It is a good rivalry. I like the rivalry but they're not in our conference and they're not a (Bowl Championship Series) school, so I don't know about some of those things," Crowton said in 2002. He also lamented the travel — "that's something we have to think about" — the weather differences, you name it.
You didn't have to be able to understand hangul (the Korean writing system) to read between the lines of the only Korean-speaking football coach on the Division I-A level and understand this series was going nowhere in a hurry.
The fact that Crowton has suffered through back-to-back losing seasons and is under the gun to bring back a winner probably hasn't helped.
We now know that it wasn't an upset when UH stunned No. 9 BYU in 2001. But, without a change of heart, it might be one if Crowton gives his blessing to resume the series with the Warriors any time soon.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
