PROVO — It sounds like the far-fetched plot of some romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.
A young man and a young woman attending colleges separated by 450 miles are lined up by a mutual friend. The pair begin a long-distance relationship. After about a year, they decide to break up. For an entire decade, they have no contact with each other, until fate brings them together at an airport terminal. Sparks fly, kismet takes over and they end up — naturally — getting married.
This is no Hollywood script, however. It's the true story about the courtship of BYU football coach Bronco Mendenhall and his wife, Holly (more about that later).
What may be even more far-fetched than that, though, is Holly landing the role as First Lady of Cougar Football — not exactly something she had aspired to be. "It was the furthest thing from my mind," she says.
Holly Mendenhall never had much interest in football and, in some respects, she still doesn't. "I'm the least knowledgeable of any wife on the coaching staff," she admits. "After eight years (of marriage), maybe I won't get it. People try to hit me up for information (about BYU football), and I have no idea. I care, but I don't care."
The public may view her only as Bronco Mendenhall's wife, but Holly is an accomplished woman in her own right.
She is the mother of three young, energetic boys and a graduate from the University of Montana with a degree in French. For a time, before her marriage, she owned and ran her own travel agency. For 10 years she worked at a dude ranch in Montana, coordinating conferences. While in college, she kayaked a river in Mexico and spent a semester picking grapes at a winery in France. "There I was, a Mormon girl who had never touched alcohol," she recalls with a laugh. After graduation, she worked at Euro Disney in Paris for six months in its inaugural year. A couple of years ago, she authored, and self-published, a book about budgeting. She is also an avid outdoor enthusiast who enjoys camping, hiking and bike-riding.
Holly Mendenhall loves adventure and thrives on challenges. No, you won't see her at LaVell Edwards Stadium on Saturdays this fall shouting at the referees, and, no, you won't see her breaking down X's and O's. She's not that kind of coach's wife.
And that's one of the things Bronco loves about her.
"She likes to go to the games but really doesn't know what's going on," he says. "She knows who's on offense and who's on defense. She just goes to support me and whatever team I'm coaching. Holly's interest is one of support rather than a student of the game. Nor does she have a desire to learn the intricacies of the game. She wants to know the coaches' wives, the players' wives, and what's going on in their lives. She's very concerned about that part and trying to fulfill whatever role she needs to in that regard. But the actual game itself is just something fun to go to."
Bronco knows that Holly's support is crucial to the success of the program, and he says she is the ideal complement to his high-intensity approach. With three sons (Cutter, 5; Breaker, 3; and Raeder, 2) to raise, she has her own focus.
"My boys come first. They're little, they need me," she says. "I'm so lucky I can stay home with them. They're sweet children. I'm having a ball with them."
Holly fills her boys' lives with plenty of outdoor activities. Recently, the family hiked to the top of Y. Mountain. "They all seem to be athletic," she says of her sons, "though they haven't sat through a whole (BYU) game yet."
A few months ago, she eliminated television-watching on weekdays.
Simply put, Holly doesn't have the time to fret over the magnitude of her husband's professional responsibilities. "She's so busy with the three boys, she's probably oblivious to this job most of the time," says Bronco, who, when he can, takes his sons to his office, where they draw on greaseboards and hang out with the players. "Holly is so well-grounded and is such a person of her own will, of her own thoughts, of her own mindset, and, really has been a tremendous balance for me because football isn't all she cares about. That's just what I do. Even though now I'm the head coach at BYU and she understands that role is different, when I go home, there's balance. Unless I bring it up, we don't talk about football. We talk about my boys. We talk about their schoolwork, their swimming lessons, little things they do during the day. That's her world. Her life revolves around raising our family. And it has to, with the time demands that I have. She's absolutely the perfect one to be a partner with through this adventure. The best thing Holly provides me is balance."
That balance was publicly evident last Dec. 13 when Bronco was introduced as BYU's 14th head football coach. She showed up at the Cougar Room of Edwards Stadium wearing, um, a red sweater — oblivious to the fact that donning the arch-rival's colors on such a momentous day would be considered a faux pas.
"It didn't occur to me, and that's the dead truth," Holly says. "As I was leaving to go to the press conference, my neighbor saw me and told me I was wearing Utah's colors. I was just wearing red because it was close to Christmas. When Bronco saw me, he had this funny look on his face. He said, 'You look beautiful, but I'm going to have to comment on your outfit.' "
He did. "I want to clear up a little bit of controversy that might be written about tomorrow. My wife is dressed for Christmas, not in any kind of alliance issues," he joked in his opening remarks at the news conference. "Let me make that clear right from the beginning. That's why we're such a good team. I'm very focused. And she's not."
Six months later, she still gets comments on her red sweater. "I'm known as 'the lady who wore red,' " Holly says. "It's become quite the family joke."
Bronco owns several red articles of clothing from his days at the University of New Mexico, but he refuses to wear them anymore. "I think that's ridiculous. I love red," she says. "I understand the rivalry and everything, but in my mind, it doesn't mean that."
While Bronco is constantly in the limelight, Holly says he is an "extremely private" person. She, on the other hand, is very outgoing. "I am gregarious. I can't stop talking. When we go somewhere on an airplane, if I'm sitting next to a stranger, by the time we land, I'll not only know his name, but I'll also know all the names of his grandchildren, too," she says.
Holly goes to great lengths to remove Bronco from football mode when he's not working. "My job is to keep him grounded and broaden his horizons as a human being," she says. Holly has scheduled a couple of family vacations in July, including a wilderness trip to Montana, where the family will ride pack mules to a remote destination to camp, fish, float down a river and pick wild berries.
"It's good for the soul," Holly says of spending time in the backcountry. Later on in the month, they will travel to Mexico for some beach time.
"Holly's very perceptive that way, because unless I'm out of the state or away from here, I'm not out of the state or away from here," Bronco says. "So she knows for us to have true privacy and for my thoughts to be drawn back here to the same level, we have to be someplace else."
Since Bronco became BYU's head coach six months ago, he's relied on his wife more than ever. "It's really nice to come home and hear about other things besides football," he says. "I've purposely, oftentimes, kind of excluded her from what happens here because I talk about it all the time. Now what I've found in the role of head coach is, there's not very many people I talk to. I've found it being necessary to talk to her more about these things, which is both a positive and a negative. It's nice to be able to have a companion and a confidant to be able to do that with. Yet our home has been a sanctuary where, usually, football doesn't exist. I've included her more in what's going on out of, there's really no one else to talk to."
Holly's father was a physician who hailed from Detroit and her mother is a Midway native. She, like Bronco, enjoyed a rural upbringing. While Bronco grew up in Alpine, keeping busy with cutting horses, she grew up in Missoula, working with show horses.
In the mid-1980s, a friend who knew both Bronco's family and Holly's family suggested that Bronco, who was playing football at Oregon State, and Holly, who was enrolled at the University of Montana, meet each other.
The friend encouraged Holly to write Bronco a letter. "I wrote, 'Dear Bronco, my name is Holly,' " she recalls. "How dorky is that?"
Dorky or not, it was effective because the two began dating after that. It was a long-distance relationship that the two tried to manage with trips and phone calls between Corvallis and Missoula. After a year, the relationship waned. "He says I broke up with him," Holly says, "but I think he broke up with me."
Over the next 10 years, they say they didn't have any communication with each other. "I completely wrote him off," Holly recalls, though she adds that she kept up with Bronco's career through mutual friends, and she knew that he was an assistant coach at Oregon State. After graduation, she was living in Montana, running her travel agency and dating a lot. "I was 30," Holly says. "By LDS standards, I was an old maid, but I was not feeling a rush to get married. I was perfectly content."
Then, one day at the Salt Lake International Airport, Holly got off a flight from California where she had been visiting her then-boyfriend, a bull rider on the pro rodeo circuit. Suddenly, she saw a man wearing an Oregon State football jacket. "Do you know Bronco Mendenhall?" she asked him.
"Yeah," the man replied, pointing to the same gate that she had just walked out of, "he's sitting by me."
Holly glanced over and saw Bronco, who was catching a connecting flight to New Orleans for a coaching convention. The two became reacquainted during an hourlong conversation at the airport.
"It was the same gate that I had arrived in and he was leaving from, and I knew right then. It was a done deal. He was the one," Holly recalls of her chance encounter with Bronco. "Our conversation was deep, intelligent. It was weird. It felt like it was meant to be. We had clicked before, but the timing wasn't right. When we were dating, I wasn't sure I wanted to marry a football coach. I thought I needed more. We had both matured."
Bronco and Holly were married 18 months later, in 1997. When he proposed, he had just been fired at Oregon State. "Our honeymoon was going from Montana to Louisiana (after he was hired at Louisiana Tech)," she says.
While Bronco's career thrived after that, there were plenty of off-the-field trials. Holly was pregnant with their second son, Breaker, when her father died. Bronco and Holly attended the funeral in Montana, but Bronco, who was the defensive coordinator at New Mexico, had to return to Albuquerque because the Lobos were in the middle of their 2001 football season. She remained in Montana with her mom.
During her stay there, terrorists struck on Sept. 11, causing the closure of airports throughout the country, including the one in Missoula. Days later, Bronco was returning to Albuquerque at 3 a.m. after a game against Baylor when he received a phone call from his mother-in-law, who provided a play-by-play of Breaker's birth. Bronco didn't meet his new son until a couple of weeks later. "It was very difficult," he recalls.
Later that year, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Holly received a phone call from Bronco, who asked her to bring something to his office. Holly did and when she returned home, about an hour later, she found the door hinges were smashed. Upon entering, she saw that they had been robbed of almost everything they owned.
"It was a strange deal, and we ended up moving," Holly says. "Anything compared to that is easy. You go through experiences like that together, and it either pulls you together or it pulls you apart."
Now, the Mendenhall family is pulling together, again, as usual. Holly may not be a walking encyclopedia of BYU football, but she understands that her husband has been charged to restore greatness to the Cougars. She's willing to do whatever she can to help Bronco succeed.
"It is an adventure," Holly says. "We'll see where it takes us."
E-mail: jeffc@desnews.com