Gordy Lee remembers him as a dedicated, intense, undersized University of Utah guard who didn't play a lot.
Lynn Stiles remembers him as a graduate student about to get his master's degree and get started on a career as a zoology professor.Bruce Takeno remembers him as a first-year coach at Westminster College, staying up all night in the back of the bus, "having a good old time with all of the guys."
George Seifert has come a long way in the 25 years since he left Utah.
Today, when the San Francisco 49ers take the field in the Louisiana Superdome against the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV, Seifert's first year as head coach of the 49ers will be complete. As head coaching debut seasons go, Seifert's start is as auspicious as they come; also, in a lot of ways, as inauspicious.
He has not gone through his life stamped as The Genius Who Would Replace Bill Walsh. Every postseason has not been spent dodging schools and franchises begging him to rescue their programs.
Consider this: In the 25 seasons since Seifert and then head coach Ray Nagel were at the University of Utah, the Utes have made seven head-coaching changes. And how many times have they contacted the 49ers' current Super Bowl coach for an interview? As often as they let him start games when he was a player.
But they have kept in touch. Close touch, says Ned Alger, Utah's assistant athletic director who was a coach on Nagel's staff.
"That's one of the things that's always impressed me about George Seifert," says Alger. "He's never forgotten the institution he graduated from. He'll always be a Ute. Whenever he's in Salt Lake he stops in just to visit. He's remained just like he was, humble and sincere. I believe he liked it here."
Seifert had no particular connection with the University of Utah back in 1957, when he was a senior at Poly High in the Mission District of San Francisco. But when John Nikcevich, Nagel's line coach and the Ute coach who was responsible for recruiting Northern California, offered Seifert a scholarship to play football as a Ute, he jumped at it. Utah was the only major college that asked.
"Back in those days," says Alger, "recruiting kept going until the season started. If you hadn't filled up your team, you kept going back on kids. George was a recruit we got onto late."
Those were also the days when players went both ways. Seifert came as a both-ways end. He was soon switched to a both-ways guard, although at 6-foot-1 and around 190 pounds he wasn't exactly a prehistoric refrigerator.
Gordy Lee, a Utah recruit who played at Tooele High and went on to an All-Conference college career as a halfback, played all four years with Seifert.
"I knew George pretty well," remembers Lee, who now lives in Centerville. "We were on different wings of the dorm (Ballif Hall) as freshmen. He was always polite, always a gentleman, always did the things he should have done in school. He didn't play a lot in games, but he practiced hard and contributed in that way. I think he gave everything he had to give and worked hard at being a good football player. He was very dedicated. Very intense."
The three years Seifert was on the varsity, 1959-61, Nagel's Utes went 5-5, 7-3, and 6-4. Besides Lee, another standout player of that era was Stiles, a recruit from Reno who arrived in 1959, a year after Seifert. He played guard-linebacker, the same primary positions as Seifert, and they became friends for life - or at least friends until the present. Stiles is Seifert's special-teams coach on the 49er staff.
Stiles remembers that both he and Seifert had to battle a weight problem in their playing days.
"I remember one summer," he said this week, "I'd been working out every day and I thought I'd really bulked up. I had to weigh-in the next day so I checked my weight. I was 195. I couldn't believe it. I thought I'd be at least 20 pounds heavier than that. So the next day for weigh-ins I tucked this 10-pound weight inside my T-shirt."
Did he get caught?
"Not a chance," said Stiles. "The coaches weighed me, saw that I was 205, and shook their heads. They couldn't believe I was that light.
"Well, George was smaller than I was."
Stiles says there was no problem with Seifert's determination or desire. There just happened to be bigger players in front of him.
"He's a very aggressive person," said Stiles. "There's an element of extreme competition in him. I used to start fights and he used to finish them. If you're going to fight him I have some advice. Bring a gun."
When they were finished with their football eligibility at Utah, both Stiles and Seifert enrolled in graduate school. They got an apartment together, near the campus. Stiles pursued a masters in P.E. (which is still "a dissertation away") and Seifert, an avid outdoorsman, pursued a master's in zoology and wildlife management (which is signed, sealed and delivered and filed behind a game plan somewhere in his office).
They were also both engaged and about to be married, and while they weren't getting too serious about life, they were getting serious enough to this extent: They knew the next step was getting a job.
Stiles fell back on what he knew and loved best. Football. He asked Nagel if he could work on his staff as a graduate assistant in 1963. Nagel said yes. Then, in 1964, there was an opening on the full-time staff. It was offered to Stiles. He did two things. He accepted the offer. And he went back to the apartment and told George he ought to take the G.A. position that was now open.
"George was always helping me out in school," says Seifert. "It came easy to him. It didn't to me. He'd always say `Go to class.' I took his advice. Now I was giving him some advice. I told him about coaching. I told him they give you a car, per diem, credit cards, they send you on the road. I told him it was a great life."
It was at this point that Seifert quite innocently took the career detour that has kept him from teaching zoology to this day.
Nagel hired him on the spot. "He was so bright, and always thinking," says Alger. "He looked like a coach."
Nagel, Stiles, Alger, Seifert and the rest then embarked on the 1964 season that still stands as the greatest in Utah gridiron history.
The Utes went 9-2 and clobbered West Virginia 32-6 in the Liberty Bowl.
Seifert liked this coaching business. He signed up for his second year as a graduate assistant in 1965 and was assigned to aide Pres Summerhays in running the freshman team.
Then came a call from Westminster College in nearby Sugarhouse.
They wanted to know if Seifert would be interested in coaching their football team.
"But you don't have a football team," Seifert told them.
"We will if you'll coach it," they told him.
After several years without a football program, the Parsons wanted to get one going again. They wanted a young man just starting out (who wouldn't ask for too much salary). Seifert was the one. They gave him a football field, some old equipment, a small budget and the keys to a bus. The rest was up to him.
By the time the season started he had rounded up a three-man staff - himself, Mike Hunter and Tony Polychronis - and 30 players. About a dozen were from junior colleges and another three or four were Utah freshmen he talked into transferring.
One of them was Bruce Takeno, a linebacker from Salt Lake's South High School who played at Utah as a freshman in 1964.
"Coach Seifert came to me and said, `Well, Bruce, you can stay here and hold bags and maybe play a little when you're a senior. Or you can come to a place where you can play a lot,' " remembers Takeno. Coming from Seifert, a player who had warmed a lot of Utah benches, the pitch came off as sincere.
"Nobody knew anybody else," remembers Takeno of that '65 Westminster team. "But we went 4-3. We really came around. Some of those JC kids weren't bad, and we had a couple of renegade linemen who'd been around."
In those days, the coach who would take over the 49ers was a little rough around the edges. As Takeno, who coaches high school football, recalls, "You know, he was really inexperienced. Like a lot of young coaches he made up for it with yelling and screaming.
"He was always real intense. I was a little intimidated, to tell you the truth. He was hard-nosed. Before games, he'd be looking at you with fire in his eyes.
"And he wasn't much older than the rest of us. I remember the last bus trip, after we'd played and beaten Eastern Oregon and we were riding home. George was in the back of the bus, partying and having a good old time.
"I'm not surprised now; but back then, yeah, I'd have thought, Naw, he wouldn't be going to any Super Bowl."
After that '65 season Nagel left Utah for Iowa. With the exception of Alger, who chose to stay at Utah, he took his staff with him. Seifert was talked into going along as a graduate assistant. Apparently, the per diem, travel allowance and credit cards weren't what he thought they'd be at Westminster. He and his new wife, Linda, packed their bags for Iowa.
There, the Seiferts ran the Hawkeye Lodge, a motel on the edge of campus, to supplement George's G.A. wages. At the end of the season, when no openings developed on Nagel's full-time staff, they loaded their belongings in a U-Haul and headed to San Francisco to look for full-time work.
While staying in Salt Lake for a few days, Seifert found out about a job under Jerry Frei at the University of Oregon. He and Linda never made it to San Francisco.
He spent eight years as an assistant at Oregon and Stanford, followed by two years as head coach at Cornell - where his teams went a combined 3-17 and where he was fired by Athletic Director Dick Schultz, now the director of the NCAA.
"It was for his own good. There were too many things out of his control there," says Schultz. "Part of the alumni had wanted another guy (former Colts running back Tom Matte) when he was hired. That was before I got there. There was a division because of that. He was having a tough time. He was such a classy young guy. So we had kind of a mutual agreement that he'd leave. He didn't leave disgruntled. He didn't burn any bridges. He went back to Stanford and we got an older coach (Bob Blackman) to soothe the alumni."
Going to Stanford hooked up Seifert for the first time with Bill Walsh, then the Cardinal head coach. Walsh was in command of Stanford's offense. He gave Seifert a green light on defense - and challenged him to try and stop his offenses. A chess-like relationship between the two coaches developed.
They then moved their act to the 49ers. For nine years (and three Super Bowl wins), Seifert's defenses quietly complemented Walsh's offenses. As Steve Young, the 49ers backup quarterback, reminisced this week: "Bill and George are a lot alike. They're very intense. I remember how it used to be on Wednesdays. That's the day they'd give us the game plan for the week. I can see them emerging at noon together with smoke coming out of their ears. They'd hand out the game plans and the paper would still be hot. They were like a couple of mad scientists."
Until this year, when Walsh retired as 49er head coach and Seifert's job description changed.
"The 49ers are probably better off with George Seifert as coach," said Walsh this week. "When I stepped down I felt George could revitalize the team. George is a self-sustained man, the kind who could be successful if he were stranded on an island. He goes to the beat of his own drum. He doesn't need the spotlight. He's never sought any kind of public identity."
Indeed, in the Super Bowl glare in New Orleans this week, Seifert has managed to maintain a measure of separateness. He has drawn little attention to himself, maintaining the kind of style that he demonstrated at his opening press conference last summer in San Francisco.
On that occasion, the media wanted to know how the job would change him.
"Instead of thongs I wear these," he said, holding up a leg to show boat shoes. "At least my feet are covered. And I comb my hair more often and I wear suits sometimes."
Just another Ute hitting the big time. George Seifert is the same person he was as a University of Utah freshman 32 years ago - he's just walking a different sideline.