"And now, I watch him on the sidelines and he's the same guy. Writers seem to be looking for some cosmetic fluke. They won't find a thing. It's him. Intense, genuine, inspiring."

Next stop was Napa JC, a small school nestled in wine country, with a vinegar football history. Vermeil recruited his kid brother Al, and Al told him about a quarterback who had left Cal.

"I was working nights, sulphuring the vineyards," Walt Raymond says. "And trying to sleep days. I'd just gotten married.

"Here came Dick Vermeil to recruit me. And I'm in bed with my wife. When you see him, tell him I hope his timing has improved."

That is known as your basic quarterback sack. Vermeil got Raymond, and handed him a playbook thicker and more sophisticated than the one he had at Cal.

"I was a local boy, fourth generation in St. Helena," Raymond says. "We had a good team. Started a win streak that lasted 56 games. For a while, it was the longest in the nation.

"I went to Cal got my thumb banged up, hurt a knee. Gave up football and decided to be a student. I was in the process of transferring to Cal Poly when Dick came around.

"Napa had had mediocre teams for years. But Dick managed to round up some players. He was strict, demanding, but fair. The thing that sticks in my mind is how organized practice was. None of that running around in circles.

"He already had a quarterback, a guy 6-3, an excellent player. It took a while to ease me into the job. He was trying to protect the other guy's feelings.

"We went 8-2, reversed the record in one year. And if we had won our last game we were going to a bowl game. But Santa Rosa beat us, 14-7.

"I think the turning point was the second game of the season. Against Appleton. We thought we were in over our heads, but we played well and we got confidence out of that one.

"Dick did a lot of things to psyche you up. He played speeches on tape in the locker room. Bob Richards, the pole vaulter. He had everybody wanting to play, working as a team. We won some games we were out-personneled."

The first thing he did was change the school colors from blue and gold to Green Bay's green and gold. "Yeah," Louie Vermeil remembers, "and then he found out the school didn't have the money for new uniforms, so he had to go out and raise it."

Raymond's mother was a Beringer. The Beringer winery is an historic landmark. A few years ago, Nestle bought the winery and Raymond set out to build a winery of his own. It is tough, painstaking work, but Raymond has been that route before.

"He gets the most out of everybody," Raymond says. "Emotional. We'd come out of the locker room and guys would be crying before the game started. Me, I used to throw up all the time."

Vermeil moved on to Stanford in 1965. In 1969, he coached the Rams special teams under George Allen. He spent a year at UCLA, as one of Tom Prothro's assistants. Then it was back to the Rams for two years under Prothro and a year under Chuck Knox. Then those two meteoric years as head man at UCLA.

Bill Woods has followed Vermeil's career proudly and sees him as a thoroughbred, galloping ahead of a pack of donkeys.

"I think those other coaches better get off their asses," Woods says. "One thing I've noticed in all the coaching I've been around, and that's that very few are workers.

"Most of 'em are full of bull. They don't really put out. And it's hard to put together a staff that's hard-working. Those other guys will have to wake up.

"But it's difficult to maintain winning. I was always a Yankee fan. The Yankees always won. It's easy the first time around, you catch 'em by surprise. They don't understand what happened.