If you're in midtown Manhattan during business hours and you walk into a building between 65th and 66th streets on Columbus Avenue, chances are you'll find him there on the second floor, behind a glass door that says "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Public Affairs."
LaVell Edwards, the old coach, has gone to New York City.
He finally sent himself on his own "whiteshirt" season.
Introducing the only LDS missionary with 257 Division I-A wins.
LaVell and his wife Patti arrived in New York this past June for an 18-month LDS mission. These days, they spend their days at the Lincoln Center building the church owns on the west side of Central Park about a mile north of Times Square. They spend their nights in the high-rise apartment building next door.
"I told Pat," says LaVell in his familiar deadpan, "It took us 51 years but we're finally back to living in a one bedroom apartment again."
The Edwards' mission is diplomatic in nature; their assignment is to foster friendships, bridge gaps and mend fences. And how's that for typecasting? Why not send the BYU guy who couldn't even get hard-core Ute fans to resent and despise him?
Already, LaVell and Patti have met with leaders of a variety of races, religions and walks of life, including Muslims and Jews and Notre Dame fans. To date, there have been no international incidents, only an exchange of mutual respect, which is the whole point, because churches in general deal in goodwill, and in New York right now the LDS Church, in particular, can use all the goodwill it can get. Within the next couple of years, an LDS temple — a first for the city — is scheduled to be built in the Lincoln Center building four floors above where the public affairs offices sit. The temple will be on the sixth floor.
In Manhattan, you don't build out, you build up.
Which is exactly what LaVell and Patti are about, building up as much good feeling as they can while warding off any would-be opposition or adverse feelings toward the temple.
It's the old "the best defense is a good offense" philosophy that once delivered BYU out of football purgatory.
LaVell coached football in one form or another for nearly 40 years at BYU and several years before that as a high school coach, so this is his first autumn not strolling a white chalk sideline in more than half a century.
Not only hasn't he coached a football game, he hasn't even seen one in person (he has watched BYU on television, so far without sedation).
On a recent Saturday, when virtually every college in America was teeing it up, LaVell was accompanying Patti to a matinee of the hit Broadway show "Mamma Mia!"
But using the same that was then and this is now attitude that carried him through half a century of coaching without an ulcer, LaVell says he doesn't really think much about being away from the game.
He's taking his mission one month at a time.
He and Patti don't have a car. They travel by taxi or they take the subway. In their brand of mission, where the idea is to blend in, they don't even wear name tags. And they have evenings and weekends off.
"Not bad," says LaVell, "We like it."
And the old coach is running in a brand new crowd.
"I shook Rudy Giuliani's hand the other day," LaVell says. "He didn't know who I was."
At least not in that white shirt.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.