In spring 1960, college student Ron McBride was riding his bicycle down Seventh Street in San Jose, Calif., when he saw Vicky King walking on the sidewalk.
"I went over and started rapping with her," says McBride, now in his ninth season as University of Utah football coach and about to return to San Jose for the first time to play his alma mater as a collegiate head coach. Utah is playing San Jose State today.Vicky was hoping McBride would come by to talk. The daughter of a former collegiate football player, Vicky was brought up to enjoy sports and athletes. She knew McBride was a player. She liked that.
And she had been watching him ride around the neighborhood "with a little Hispanic boy, a latch-key kid, on the handlebars." The lonely little boy had knocked on McBride's apartment door one day and asked if Ronnie would come out and play. He did, riding him around the streets daily after that. That told Vicky that McBride was good with children. She liked that.
The next year, Vicky became McBride's second wife before either of them hit age 21.
McBride had one son from his first marriage (Dan Schwam, who eventually coached baseball at Salt Lake City's Highland High and for the Salt Lake Trappers). Before McBride graduated from San Jose State, he and Vicky had two children together, and a third was born soon after his coaching career began there.
The McBrides lived for years in Spartan City, student housing across the street from Spartan Stadium. It was crowded with young families, and the apartments were small, about 300 square feet. "It was $37.50 a month, across the street from the stadium," he says. "It was a great place to live."
"It was a barracks," she says.
But with so many student families so close together, the McBrides made lifelong friends. "I wouldn't trade that for anything," McBride says. "We had no money. Everyone depended upon each other for everything."
Many of those Spartan City chums and McBride's former teammates, both from SJSU and from the San Jose Apaches semi-pro team for which he played, will be there for McBride's Utes today. "Oh, yeah. Everyone I started teaching with, guys I went to school with, are still there. Most are ready to retire. My cousins are up there. There'll be a big contingent," he says. He only had time to see them for a bit Friday night; the team flies back to Utah soon after the game.
The McBrides return to San Jose every May to see the old friends, so this isn't such a nostalgic trip. He wants to win, not so much to beat his alma mater - where his coaching career began in 1965 when he worked with the freshmen - but because he wants to win every game.
"It's been a lot of years in between games," McBride says. "It'll be fun to go back and play in that stadium. I don't know what it's going to look like. It was old when I played there."
He remembers his arrival there as a freshman player. He got off the train and went to the first practice, only to find the team working on half of the field and a couple of football coaches using the other 50 yards to practice their golf shots. McBride was upset that it seemed so lackadaisical.
He also remembers the team's doddering old doctor. "One time he sewed my eye shut," McBride says. The doctor made a template mask to put over the cut eyelid but placed it wrong and sewed the eye shut. "I said, `I can't open my eye,' " McBride says. "He says, `Oh, I stitched it shut.' "
Another time, a player broke a leg so badly the bones were sticking grotesquely through the skin. McBride and teammates finally got the doctor's attention. He looked at the leg and made the diagnosis: "Well, looks like he broke his leg," McBride says, still incredulous.
Vicky McBride says her husband doesn't closely follow Spartan scores, and she says he won't consider the game as anything more than another one the Utes need to win.
"It's where we met, where our children were born. He was freshman coach there. It was a fun time in our lives. But he sure doesn't know anybody there now," she says. He's never coached or recruited against Dave Baldwin. The previous athletic director (former Utah State AD Chuck Bell is now Spartan AD) tried to hire McBride away from Utah. "He told them, `It would take more than you could afford. I love Utah so much,' " Vicky relates. With the exception of Ron, all the McBride family, including Vicky, graduated from Utah, and that's where all of their allegiance lies.
"There was a time when we were at Long Beach State (as an assistant) that he had quite a passion to want to beat them," she says.
McBride wanted to win so badly then, in the mid-1970s as a Wayne Howard assistant, that he did some close-up scouting by playing in SJSU's alumni game against the Spartans. "They had a helluva team," he says. He was in his mid-30s and playing nothing more than Sunday touch-football games. He thought he'd just get in a few plays. "I ended up playing the whole game at noseguard and linebacker," he says. "I got drilled. They double-teamed me so far I thought I was in the next county. It took me three days to recover."