Eddie Wilson is one of the great quarterbacks in Arizona football history and one of the foremost positive-thinkers in the history of anything.
There’s got to be a connection.
“The sun will always come up and you’d better get up with it,” said the Chandler, Ariz., native who quarterbacked the Wildcats in 1959-61, before freshmen were allowed to compete.
He graduated from UA in 1962 with a degree in biological sciences.
Eddie just completed his second hitch with the Army football team and has departed West Point along with the head coach he served, Bobby Ross. Ross retired at 70 and was replaced by his offensive line coach, Stan Brock. Wilson will be replaced as quarterbacks coach of the Black Knights, but ever the optimist, he said, “At least we get to come home to Arizona.” He owns a place in Goodyear.
Following a five-year National Football League career with the Kansas City Chiefs, New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins, he began coaching at his alma mater in 1967. He was on the staff of Wildcat coaches Darrell Mudra and Bob Weber from 1967-71.
After that, he was an assistant under Hank Stram with the Chiefs and then coached at Florida State, Duke, Wake Forest, Army, Cornell, back to Duke, one year as head coach at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., eight years at Georgia Tech and the past three years in a return engagement at West Point.
Wilson has served under some of the grandest names in the sport: Stram, Bob Blackman, Maxie Baughan, Homer Smith, Lou Saban, George O’Leary and Bobby Ross.
Wilson and his wife, Nancy, have a retirement home in on the 15th fairway at Pebble Creek Golf Course in Goodyear. He and Nancy ?- it’s the second marriage for both ?- have six children.
Eddie was the triggerman of one of the most exciting offenses an Arizona team ever put on the field. In the backfield with him were halfbacks Bobby Lee Thompson and “Jackrabbit” Joe Hernandez, and fullback Walter Mince
Thompson, Hernandez and Wilson were known as the “Touchdown Trio,” and they led the Wildcats to a 15-4-1 combined record in 1960 and 1961. In their last 16 games that record was 14-1-1. The 1961 team broke into the AP Top 20 for the program’s first ranking.
“Nine of those games we won in the last quarter of play,” Wilson said. The Cats scored with no time left, on a Wilson pass to Larry Williams and beat New Mexico 22-21 on Oct. 21, 1961, in one of the most memorable last-gasp drives.
“Larry made some great catches on that drive,” Wilson said. “One of them was called ?'The Catch’ by the media, and to this day Larry keeps a picture of that reception. He’s one of my best friends and an outstanding person.”
Although the speed of college football and those who play it has increased dramatically over the years, Wilson is convinced the Wildcats of 1960-61 had one of the fastest backfields of all time.
“Joe and Bobby Lee both ran the 100 yard dash in 9.7 seconds,” Wilson said. “And Walter, who was big for those days at 6-foot-3, 215 pounds, ran it in 9.8.”
A true red-and-blue Wildcat, Wilson said he loved his time at UA and considered it an honor to play under Jim LaRue, “who, in my mind, is one of the greatest coaches Arizona ever had.”
Eddie remembers almost every play of his college career. One of them he’d just as soon forget.
“My senior year we tied Nebraska, 14-14, in Lincoln,” he said. “And the thing that galls me to this day is, we had been in a two-minute drill and we got within field goal distance.
“I was the field goal kicker and punter. Well, we lined up for what would have been the winning kick. The ball was snapped and I was approaching it when the referee stepped in front of me waving his arms that the game was over!”
The next three weeks, the Wildcats defeated Hardin-Simmons, Oregon (on the road) and New Mexico before suffering their only loss of the season, a stunning 27-23 upset at West Texas State.
Wilson credits LaRue and Hank Stram with being guiding lights of his coaching career, but said Wildcat assistant Ron Marciniak gave him some of the best advice ever.
“I was having trouble kicking field goals ?- couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” he said. “One day Coach Marciniak told me, ?'Eddie, you can’t miss these kicks! Think how your mother would feel if she sat in the stands and you missed a field goal to win a game.’
“That made me feel so bad, picturing my mom in the stands crying after I’d missed a winning field goal,” Eddie said. “That may have been the best advice I ever got.”
He has followed the Wildcats in every sport over the years. “I think Arizona has one of the best athletic directors in the country in Jim Livengood,” he said. “I have the highest respect for Jim.”
Wilson said he hasn’t met the current UA football coaches, “but I was so excited when they started that winning streak at the end of last season, I felt like I was there on the sidelines.”
He said he hopes to drop down to Tucson one day soon and meet the staff of Coach Mike Stoops. “I’d like to watch their practices now and then,” he said. ?'That would be fun.”
The 66-year-old Wildcat great remains extremely fond of his alma mater. “It’s a great school and it always has been,” Wilson said. “Nobody’s prouder than I am to be a Wildcat.”
