BLACKSBURG Last year, a businessman named Robert Hodges got an opportunity to open a restaurant in a vacant building space near Virginia Tech's campus. Hodges decided he would do it only if he could name the establishment after Bud Foster, Tech's defensive coordinator, whom Hodges had known for 16 years.
Hodges invited Foster and his wife to the prospective location, and as they stood inside, Foster expressed reservations. "Are you sure you want to put my name on it?" he asked. "People might not recognize my name. My name's not that strong."
Hodges refused to quit. He told Foster that, during games, his face appears on the television screen more than head coach Frank Beamer's. Hodges knew, as he said later, that Foster's name "carried an impact with it."
Foster finally agreed to launch the restaurant. Though he does not share in the profits of Bud Foster's, as it is called, the place is another example of his prominent presence in southwest Virginia.
You can see it on the T-shirts bearing the image of a lunch pail, the emblem he adopted for his defense's workmanlike ethos. You can hear it in his radio commercials for a local car dealership, during which the only identification he offers is his familiar closing line, spoken as though he were recommending his favorite diner: "And tell'em Bud sent ya."
Foster, 50, came to Tech with Beamer in 1987 and tomorrow begins his 15th season as defensive co ordinator. He is regarded as one of college football's best assistant coaches because of his knack for tweaking his scheme during the offseason and making quick adjustments during games -- by noticing things like how many fingers an offensive tackle places on the ground before the snap.
But little has changed about Foster since the days when no one knew his name. He grew up in Nokomis, Ill., a 2,500-person town of coal miners, corn and beans. His late father ran a Western Auto hardware and appliance store, and Foster helped deliver refrigerators on weekends. Foster last season made more than $400,000, but he still enjoys everyman activities. A picture in his office shows him shirtless and holding a 23-inch smallmouth bass that he calls "beautiful." He attends a NASCAR race each spring with his high school friends. He prefers Bud Light beer.
"The last thing I ever want to do is come across bigger than I am," he said. "That's one thing I've always guarded against."
Yet he always aspired for the football success he eventually found. After Foster's family moved from Missouri to Nokomis, when he was beginning middle school, he wrote a letter to God, telling him he wanted to be a football player and coach.
Nokomis lacked youth football, but when Foster reached high school, he demonstrated an aptitude for the sport. Sometimes during games, Nokomis coach Bill Vangel got preoccupied on the sideline and couldn't signal the defensive assignment to his players. Foster, the middle linebacker, noticed and made the call on his own. "He always got it right," Vangel said.
Foster also played tailback, so on Saturday mornings after games, he ached so badly he could hardly move. But his father -- who, like him, was named Robert -- needed Foster and his friend Greg O'Malley to help deliver appliances in the company box truck. So off they went, house to house, unscrewing doors at the smaller places so they could squeeze fridges inside. "You gained a lot of respect for what people do to make a living," Foster said.
Football steered him to Murray State, a Division I-AA school in rural Kentucky where he played his final two seasons with Beamer as his defensive coordinator. When Beamer became head coach in 1981, the season after Foster graduated, he hooked on as a graduate assistant. "You could see that he had a good understanding of the game in how he played it," Beamer said. Foster also worked at a pizza joint to make money.
One night at a party, he met a 23-year-old woman named Jacquie, who grew up in Murray. "I was what they called a townie," she said. Jacquie was raising a 2½-year-old daughter, Amy, on her own. As they talked, Jacquie told Foster, "I'm not like girls you're gonna go out with in college."
He didn't care. They married in 1985 in her mother's backyard and borrowed her mom's car to drive away. (Foster's buddies had slathered his Oldsmobile with sardines and Vaseline.)
By this time, Foster was coaching Murray's linebackers, a job he continued in 1987 when Beamer got hired at Tech and brought Foster -- 27 years old and so green that his first media-guide biography, next to a clean-shaven mug shot, included his high school rushing statistics.
Beamer promoted Foster to co-coordinator in 1995. He shared the job with Phil Elmassian, who departed after that season for the University of Washington, leaving the position to Foster. Changes came immediately. Foster rarely called for the 46 defense, a package in Tech's eight-man-front scheme that he believed was ineffective and overused in 1995.
Within three seasons, Foster's defenses consistently ranked among the nation's top 10 in fewest points and yards allowed per game. His unit ranked first in scoring in 1999, when the Hokies played for the national championship. But he knew he needed to tinker again after 2003, which ended with a 52-49 loss to California in the Insight Bowl. "I was embarrassed," Foster said.
He transformed the eight-man front into a more traditional 4-3, with four linemen and three linebackers, by moving the whip linebacker closer to the line and sliding the rover into the defensive backfield, essentially making him a second safety. Using a two-safety alignment prevents the offense from easily determining what coverage the Hokies are using, Foster said. In the five seasons since the change, the Hokies finished in the top 10 in fewest points and yards allowed every year.
In-game adjustments, though, are where Foster said "you earn your check." His sharp eye for offensive tendencies allow him to alter coverages between series. "We can adjust our package very quickly to what an offense is doing," said defensive backs coach Torrian Gray, a former Tech safety whose final two seasons were Foster's first two as coordinator. "We don't have to wait until halftime like a lot of people do."
Two years ago, Foster made a keen observation in a game. He noticed that whenever one opposing offensive tackle dug all his fingers into the turf during his stance, the team ran the ball. But when he just put some fingers down, the play was a pass. Foster ordered his linemen to watch for this. Alert the secondary of a pass play by raising your hand, he told them. "How did he even see that?" rover Dorian Porch, then a backup, wondered as he watched Foster relay the information to his starters.
Foster's success and intensity -- you notice his familiar goatee and furious glare every time the TV cameras focus on him -- have drawn the attention of peers, other administrations and head coaches.
In 2006, he won the Broyles Award, given to college football's top assistant. He was a three-time finalist before that. Murray State has offered him its head-coaching job "several times," he said. He turned down two defensive-coordinator offers from Steve Spurrier -- at Florida in 1998 and South Carolina in 2007. The second time, Spurrier told Foster he'd be the country's highest-paid assistant, an offer Foster said he strongly considered. "Have we accomplished everything we can accomplish here?" he asked himself.
Though the only goal left is a national championship, Foster believes his achievements to date make him a worthy candidate for the position he really wants: head coach in one of the six major conferences. "I don't feel that I have to take a step back to go to Bowling Green to show that I can be a head football coach," he said. "I'm doing that now."
He came close to his dream last season, when he interviewed for Clemson's job, which eventually went to interim coach Dabo Swinney. Foster told his friend Scott Pasley that he ended the interview by saying, "I think I'm your man. But if you don't choose me for the job, the next time we play, we're gonna whoop your [butt] up and down the field."
More people around Blacksburg know Foster simply as that -- Bud -- because car dealer George Harvey admired Foster's ferocity on the sideline. He liked what he saw enough that 10 years ago, without having met Foster, he hired him to appear in his dealership's TV and radio spots. Foster started with four commercials a year and now does six.
"We've had people call up and ask when he's gonna be here because they want to come buy a car from him," Harvey said. "I guess they think he works here."
. . .
Public speaking used to make Foster "a nervous wreck," said Jacquie. Before he addressed boosters during his early years at Tech, he read his speeches to her so she could correct his bad habits, like saying "um" too often. "He didn't want to sound dumb," she said.
Now, Foster is more of a public figure than most local politicians. He stops by his restaurant at least once a week to eat. After he finishes his meal, and sometimes before he does, he walks around the place, chatting with everyone from patrons to cooks. One day, he stood outside the restaurant and posed for 18 individual pictures with women from the Red Hat Society, a social organization. He once walked through the garage at a NASCAR race in Atlanta, only to have pit-crew members ask him for autographs. "We started teasing him, calling him Hollywood," said Mark Wiseman, Foster's friend since seventh grade.
When Foster wants to escape the attention, he returns to his house on Claytor Lake, 30 miles south of Blacksburg. "It's just like Eden," Jacquie said. Foster relishes summers there, a respite from a job he refers to as "7-11" -- seven days a week, 11 hours a day.
He sits outside with neighbors, listening to music, and when the song "Chicken Train" by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils comes on, he hops out of his seat, flapping his arms and squawking like a chicken. Or he takes the local kids for a spin down the road on an all-terrain vehicle. Or he just fishes off his dock, shouting up to Jacquie for a camera when he hooks a catfish. "Like a 10-year-old little boy," she said.
Before returning to work, he caps every summer with an adventure at the lake -- like plunging off a 20-foot rock ledge into the water, or learning how to wake surf, which is similar to wakeboarding, except without a rope. (He speaks proudly about the YouTube video of him surfing behind his boat.) One year, he sat outside with Pasley and friends, eating shrimp, when a june bug landed in the cocktail sauce. "I'll eat that," Foster said, crunching the beetle in his mouth before pronouncing, "I think I'm ready for the season."
No matter Foster's next coaching step -- "The perfect job to him would be head coach at Virginia Tech someday," said Sean Whittemore, a neighbor and friend -- Foster will retire at Claytor Lake. "This is where we will sit on the porch and rock and watch fish jump," Jacquie said.
Southwest Virginia is home now, the place where they raised their son Grant, 23, and daughter Hillary, 21. Where Foster became a grandfather; Amy's daughter, Jaiden Olivia, is 16 months old. Where he got a tattoo on his right shoulder of a four-inch-wide lunch pail, complete with the trademark WIN (What's Important Now) on its lid. Where he now finds himself gathering pieces of his life -- helmets from Murray State, game balls from Tech -- to display at a restaurant that bears his name.
He brought past and present together this summer when he threw a 50th birthday party for himself and Jacquie at their house. They hired a band and invited 150 people. Wiseman, one of Foster's best friends, surprised him by driving 11 hours from Nokomis.
As they reunited in the driveway, their friendship of nearly 40 years still the same, Wiseman looked at Foster -- once the kid who used to tackle him into a hedge during backyard games, now the coach whose success created hundreds of new friends, always the everyman who won't forget hauling refrigerators and selling pizzas. He saw tears streaming from behind Foster's sunglasses.
Contact Darryl Slater at (804) 649-6026 or dslater@timesdispatch.com.
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