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By COLTER NUANEZ
Bozeman Chronicle
On a mid-August day in South Texas in 2008, Mike Kramer rises with the sun. The only certainties of this day, just like all other days in this current existence, will be the sweltering heat and the fear of instability.
The crop of the season is corn. The crop, like the harvesting crew Kramer leads, is foreign to him. He grew up on a wheat farm in southwestern Washington, but becoming a husker was something new. Each day is challenging and strenuous, both because of the straining nature of the work and because of the circumstances that brought him here.
None of the eight men Kramer shares a small trailer with each night speaks English. They’ve come to America as migrant workers from places like Romania, Russia and South Africa. During this particular summer, this portion of the Lone Star state is prime ground for hurricanes. During the two months Kramer’s crew is husking in Texas, they endure the Tropical Storm Edouard and Hurricane Ike during one of the state’s most devastating weather seasons in memory.
There is no health insurance for such workers. Kramer’s family is thousands of miles away. But one of the most successful football coaches in the history of the Big Sky Conference needs a job and a place where no one knows his name. So Mike Kramer is in Texas, harvesting corn.
Looking back now, all he can do is shake his head and say, “That’s a scary life.”
Flashback to 2007, a little more than a year before Kramer returned to his harvesting roots. He had just finished his seventh season at the helm of the Montana State University football team. The Bobcats were fresh off their fifth straight winning season. The prior season, the team advanced to the quarterfinals of the Division I-AA playoffs.
In Bozeman, he is a folk hero, an instantly recognizable figurehead known around town as “The Big Human.” He is credited with restoring balance to the state’s greatest rivalry after defeating the Montana Grizzlies three times in four years after 16 consecutive losses. This is not the football played for bids to multi-million dollar bowl games, but for Kramer and Montana State football, these are heady times.
But his success is quickly forgotten, replaced by a free fall both dramatic and swift, for the coach and the program he led.
He was fired that May of 2007, his abilities as a coach and a leader challenged, sending him on a mid-life odyssey that would see him move 10 times during the next three years.
What caused a proud man who had spent nearly his entire adult life with ties to the Big Sky Conference to be thrown so far away from the game he loves? And what makes the tale of his trail back so compelling? To hear Kramer tell it, it’s pretty simple.
“In America, we go to a movies to watch the good guy win, but only after he overcomes some sort of adversity,” he says. “In sport, that’s particularly true for me. For us, here, that’s what makes this such a challenge.”
Here is Pocatello, Idaho, the home of Idaho State University. The challenge facing Kramer is fixing one the most broken football programs in America.
The Bengals have won just five games during the last five seasons and are currently riding a 26-game road losing streak. ISU hasn’t defeated a Division I opponent since November of 2009.
“I’m at my best when our backs are to the wall,” Kramer said while standing on the brand new field turf at Holt Arena following his team’s first practice of fall camp earlier this month. “I’ve proven that throughout my coaching career. I’ve also proven that I’m not great on top.”
But the struggles don’t stop between the sidelines. The NCAA has also banned Idaho State from post-season play because of the team’s academic showing — called Academic Progress Rating — and the university’s inability to improve those marks the last two years. Within the Football Championship Subdivision and among its 126 teams, Idaho State is one of just three in the country to face such a ban.
“We needed a resurrection of sorts because we’ve been dead for a long time here,” said Idaho State athletic director Jeff Tingey, who hired Kramer in November of 2010. “We needed something that was more than just a new coach to help the program. Coach Kramer gives us that opportunity. A lot of times in the Big Sky Conference, we hire an up-and-comer, someone who is on the way up who is looking to have success for the first time to get a step up for the next job. We needed someone who’s had success, been proven.”
Although ISU’s season opener against Washington State is still weeks away, one veteran Bengal can already see the difference.
“The first thing Coach Kramer and his staff gave us when they got here last fall was they instill this discipline,” said Bengals senior linebacker A.J. Storms, a preseason All-America selection and a finalist for the Buck Buchanan award given annually to the top defensive player in the FCS. “We have talent and we’ve had talent in the past. Now, we have direction for why we do things. He is the type of guy who is not only going to show us how to play the game, but how to finish a game, how to be a winner.”
To speak with people around the Big Sky, it’s clear that admiration for Mike Kramer’s accomplishments run deep. His 53 league wins while at Eastern Washington and Montana State are the third-most in conference history. He is the only head coach to be named the league’s Coach of the Year three times. Tingey first got the idea to hire Kramer from Big Sky Conference commissioner Doug Fullerton.
Take the respect and deep roots (Kramer played his college football at the University of Idaho when the Vandals were Big Sky Conference members) and add to the mix that Kramer shared a pair of Big Sky titles while at Montana State. Throw in that MSU beat the rival Grizzlies three out of four times between 2002-2005 and it might seem peculiar why a man with a distinguished resume was fired so swiftly. If that were the case, if you think that, you weren’t living in Bozeman in 2007.
In August of 2007, two months after MSU athletic director Peter Fields and then-president Geoff Gamble ended Mike Kramer’s contract, Sports Illustrated wrote a defining depiction of the cultural struggles in Bozeman that stemmed from the conduct of Montana State athletes.
George Dohrmann’s story “Trouble in Paradise” told of a previously untouched sanctuary that had been torn by out-of-state athletes selling drugs. The magazine’s headline read: “Two former athletes allegedly murder a drug dealer. An ex-football player is charged with heading a cocaine ring. Montana State is coping with a crime wave—and with Bozemanites who feel the Division I-AA school’s recruits from distant cities are endangering their idyllic town.”
While the headlines and the story may have been sensational, there was no denying the just of the issue: seven current or former MSU student-athletes, six who were recruited by Kramer to play football at MSU, had been charged with serious crimes.
And Ricky Gatewood was the last straw.
Three days before Kramer’s firing on May 18, 2007, Gatewood, a former Montana State star wide receiver, was accused of running a drug ring that imported 11 pounds of cocaine into Montana over a 23-month period. During his trial, Gatewood admitted to using money from his athletic scholarship at MSU to start the distribution ring.
Gatewood was an all-Big Sky Conference wide receiver in 2004 and 2005 for the Cats. He signed with the Oakland Raiders in 2006 and, before his arrest, was expected to have a tryout playing baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies.
His arrest was the sixth in a year involving a current or former Montana State football player.
In December of 2006, former football players Derrick Davis and Edward Sullivan and current MSU cornerback Andre Fuller were arrested on drug charges. Fuller and Davis, who played seven games at cornerback for the Cats in 2005, were charged with selling cocaine. Sullivan, who played wide receiver for MSU in 2003 and 2004, was charged with selling marijuana.
In early 2007, Demetrius Williams was arrested and charged with conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute cocaine after it was determined that he was the kingpin of the ring involving Gatewood. He played briefly for the Bobcats in 2003.
The worst, though, came in June of 2006. Former MSU football player John Lebrum — a redshirt in 2003 before leaving the program — and then-current MSU basketball player Branden Miller were charged with killing Jason Wright. The victim, a suspected cocaine dealer himself, was shot 10 times in a field off Huffine Lane west of Bozeman. Miller eventually pleaded guilty to his role in Wright’s death and was sentenced to 120 years in prison; Lebrum, who lived with Fuller at the time of the murder, pleaded guilty to robbery and is serving 40 years.
The slew of arrests shocked the Bozeman community, perhaps even more than the 2004 arrest of one of Kramer’s assistant coaches, Joe O’Brien, for distributing methamphetamine.
One letter to the editor published in the Daily Chronicle adequately summed up the feelings of many in the community. “How far are we, as individuals and most importantly as a community, going to let this deplorable behavior on behalf of the athletic department at MSU go?” read the letter. “Shame on us as a community for not being more outspoken, for not holding the school accountable long ago. They are destroying the quality of life and general peace of mind in my hometown.”
The uproar from the community put pressure on the MSU administration to do something. That something was to cut ties with Kramer.
“Looking at the football program as a whole and in light of the recent criminal activities of former student-athletes connected to it, I believe there is something broken with our football program and we need to take decisive steps to fix it,” Fields said in the press release announcing Kramer’s firing. He went on to say the football program was experiencing a “crisis in leadership.”
Speaking now, Kramer believes he was made the university’s fall guy. He says he knew nothing of the illegal activity and doesn’t think he should be held responsible for it.
“It’s pretty simple: To be fired for actions of players not even in your program … it was totally unfair,” Kramer said.
“Ricky Gatewood: played for us in 2005, left the program, arrested in 2007. I didn’t even know he was still in town. Demetrius Williams: played in 2003, dismissed in 2004, arrested in May of 2007. That’s 1,000 days. What’s the statute of limitation for a guy who was in your program at one time? Andre Fuller: arrested in December 2006, dismissed later that week.”
Kramer continued, “All the issues that these guys had, had they been occurring at the time they were on the team, we would have dismissed them from the team at that time. Every time we knew of any sort of violation of rules, guys were gone. Gone. I can’t escort them out of town on the rail. But I certainly wish I would have. The common thought of anybody, white or black, no matter where you’re from, is if you are dismissed from the program, you go back to where you came from.”
On May 18 of 2007, Kramer and Fields had just returned from Denver together. An hour after arriving in Bozeman, Fields — who declined an interview for this story — called Kramer into his office and gave him an ultimatum: quit or be fired.
“‘If you can’t have that, go see the president’ is what he told me,” Kramer said. “So I went to see the president, and he yelled at me for about two hours.”
Gamble cited emails he’d received from MSU alumni, boosters and dignitaries expressing their disgust with the scandal and what it said about their university, Kramer recalled. Gamble also cited the football team’s own academic struggles under Kramer, struggles that had caused MSU to lose three football scholarships.
“We have this whole suite of criminal activities, but there are academic issues and compliance issues. They all are in the realm of leadership issues,” Gamble told the Chronicle in 2007.
But Kramer felt he was wronged, that the university had used him as a scapegoat. So in the fall of 2007, he hired Billings attorney Cliff Edwards and sued the university.
The process to get the case into a courtroom was tiresome. Court dates kept getting pushed back. A judge retired. While the lawsuit dragged on, Kramer returned to his family’s farm in Washington. During the fall of 2007, he traveled around the western and southeastern United States, watching various football programs in action, trying to increase his football IQ in case a suitor came calling.
Kramer wanted to get back into coaching, but it became increasingly apparent, even with all the wins and the conference championships, that his professional opportunities were being hindered as much by the lawsuit as by his messy ending at MSU.
So, in the summer of 2008, Kramer joined a harvesting crew.
“I did it kind of as a way to get away because, obviously, no one I was working with had a clue who I was or what was happening,” Kramer said.
That next spring, Kramer interviewed for the head coaching position at Ventura Community College in Ventura, Calif. Based on his experience, the job at the small school should have been his.
But “a few people down there were pretty frank with me,” he said. “They said, ‘As long as you are in a lawsuit, you are going to be unhirable.’”
So last year, when attorneys for Montana State approached his own attorney about a settlement and after more than three years away from the game of football, Kramer decided it was time to move on. The state of Montana paid him $240,000.
Still, today, Kramer is dissatisfied with the way he was, in his words, forced out the door.
“The crimes themselves were heinous, no question; the death of anybody, the drug activity of any kind anywhere is reprehensible, and I’m glad that whatever authorities were involved did their job and got those guys off the street,” he said. “I applaud that, I think that’s wonderful. I’m a taxpayer, too. I don’t want drugs sold in my town, in my community any time, anywhere, by anybody ever. But to blame me, to say I’m responsible for that behavior, there’s a pretty weak cause and effect there, hence the paycheck I got. It’s a shock I will never recover from.”
Through its athletic department, Montana State this week declined to comment for this story.
With the lawsuit behind him, Kramer felt liberated. He spent last season working for his former assistant Paul Wulff at Washington State University as an assistant coordinator of football operations. He made less than $24,000 in salary, a far cry from the six-figure paychecks he collected annually at MSU.
Then, toward the ends of October of last year, Kramer got a call from a number with a 208 area code. It was Tingey calling from Pocatello. By the end of the next month, Kramer was announced as the 25th football coach in the history of Idaho State.
On the day the Bengals opened camp, Kramer took a few hours to savor the moments before his squad hit the new orange-and-black turf in Holt Arena. He called his attorneys. He called some of his brethren in the coaching fraternity. He called friends and family.
“It was very poignant, very emotional. I tried to dismiss it yesterday, but I got caught up in it a little bit today,” Kramer said following the Bengals’ first practice. “I don’t know if I can ever get it closed. I will try. I said what I had to say, I did what I had to do. I don’t ever want to be accused of being a bad leader again.”
A return to the Big Sky means a return to a place Kramer called home in more than one way. Including his time as an assistant at MSU during the mid-1980s, Kramer spent 10 of his 56 years on earth as a Bozeman resident.
On Oct. 29, Idaho State will come to Bozeman to battle the Bobcats. Kramer says his return to Big Sky country will be bittersweet, if nothing else.
“It’s going to be gawd-awful; not bad memories, wonderful memories, just absolutely the greatest feeling in the world to go back there and be there,” Kramer said. “Ten years of my life is there. I still own my house there. My daughter lives there. Missing it when we leave will be the worst part.”
By COLTER NUANEZ
Bozeman Chronicle
On a mid-August day in South Texas in 2008, Mike Kramer rises with the sun. The only certainties of this day, just like all other days in this current existence, will be the sweltering heat and the fear of instability.
The crop of the season is corn. The crop, like the harvesting crew Kramer leads, is foreign to him. He grew up on a wheat farm in southwestern Washington, but becoming a husker was something new. Each day is challenging and strenuous, both because of the straining nature of the work and because of the circumstances that brought him here.
None of the eight men Kramer shares a small trailer with each night speaks English. They’ve come to America as migrant workers from places like Romania, Russia and South Africa. During this particular summer, this portion of the Lone Star state is prime ground for hurricanes. During the two months Kramer’s crew is husking in Texas, they endure the Tropical Storm Edouard and Hurricane Ike during one of the state’s most devastating weather seasons in memory.
There is no health insurance for such workers. Kramer’s family is thousands of miles away. But one of the most successful football coaches in the history of the Big Sky Conference needs a job and a place where no one knows his name. So Mike Kramer is in Texas, harvesting corn.
Looking back now, all he can do is shake his head and say, “That’s a scary life.”
Flashback to 2007, a little more than a year before Kramer returned to his harvesting roots. He had just finished his seventh season at the helm of the Montana State University football team. The Bobcats were fresh off their fifth straight winning season. The prior season, the team advanced to the quarterfinals of the Division I-AA playoffs.
In Bozeman, he is a folk hero, an instantly recognizable figurehead known around town as “The Big Human.” He is credited with restoring balance to the state’s greatest rivalry after defeating the Montana Grizzlies three times in four years after 16 consecutive losses. This is not the football played for bids to multi-million dollar bowl games, but for Kramer and Montana State football, these are heady times.
But his success is quickly forgotten, replaced by a free fall both dramatic and swift, for the coach and the program he led.
He was fired that May of 2007, his abilities as a coach and a leader challenged, sending him on a mid-life odyssey that would see him move 10 times during the next three years.
What caused a proud man who had spent nearly his entire adult life with ties to the Big Sky Conference to be thrown so far away from the game he loves? And what makes the tale of his trail back so compelling? To hear Kramer tell it, it’s pretty simple.
“In America, we go to a movies to watch the good guy win, but only after he overcomes some sort of adversity,” he says. “In sport, that’s particularly true for me. For us, here, that’s what makes this such a challenge.”
Here is Pocatello, Idaho, the home of Idaho State University. The challenge facing Kramer is fixing one the most broken football programs in America.
The Bengals have won just five games during the last five seasons and are currently riding a 26-game road losing streak. ISU hasn’t defeated a Division I opponent since November of 2009.
“I’m at my best when our backs are to the wall,” Kramer said while standing on the brand new field turf at Holt Arena following his team’s first practice of fall camp earlier this month. “I’ve proven that throughout my coaching career. I’ve also proven that I’m not great on top.”
But the struggles don’t stop between the sidelines. The NCAA has also banned Idaho State from post-season play because of the team’s academic showing — called Academic Progress Rating — and the university’s inability to improve those marks the last two years. Within the Football Championship Subdivision and among its 126 teams, Idaho State is one of just three in the country to face such a ban.
“We needed a resurrection of sorts because we’ve been dead for a long time here,” said Idaho State athletic director Jeff Tingey, who hired Kramer in November of 2010. “We needed something that was more than just a new coach to help the program. Coach Kramer gives us that opportunity. A lot of times in the Big Sky Conference, we hire an up-and-comer, someone who is on the way up who is looking to have success for the first time to get a step up for the next job. We needed someone who’s had success, been proven.”
Although ISU’s season opener against Washington State is still weeks away, one veteran Bengal can already see the difference.
“The first thing Coach Kramer and his staff gave us when they got here last fall was they instill this discipline,” said Bengals senior linebacker A.J. Storms, a preseason All-America selection and a finalist for the Buck Buchanan award given annually to the top defensive player in the FCS. “We have talent and we’ve had talent in the past. Now, we have direction for why we do things. He is the type of guy who is not only going to show us how to play the game, but how to finish a game, how to be a winner.”
To speak with people around the Big Sky, it’s clear that admiration for Mike Kramer’s accomplishments run deep. His 53 league wins while at Eastern Washington and Montana State are the third-most in conference history. He is the only head coach to be named the league’s Coach of the Year three times. Tingey first got the idea to hire Kramer from Big Sky Conference commissioner Doug Fullerton.
Take the respect and deep roots (Kramer played his college football at the University of Idaho when the Vandals were Big Sky Conference members) and add to the mix that Kramer shared a pair of Big Sky titles while at Montana State. Throw in that MSU beat the rival Grizzlies three out of four times between 2002-2005 and it might seem peculiar why a man with a distinguished resume was fired so swiftly. If that were the case, if you think that, you weren’t living in Bozeman in 2007.
In August of 2007, two months after MSU athletic director Peter Fields and then-president Geoff Gamble ended Mike Kramer’s contract, Sports Illustrated wrote a defining depiction of the cultural struggles in Bozeman that stemmed from the conduct of Montana State athletes.
George Dohrmann’s story “Trouble in Paradise” told of a previously untouched sanctuary that had been torn by out-of-state athletes selling drugs. The magazine’s headline read: “Two former athletes allegedly murder a drug dealer. An ex-football player is charged with heading a cocaine ring. Montana State is coping with a crime wave—and with Bozemanites who feel the Division I-AA school’s recruits from distant cities are endangering their idyllic town.”
While the headlines and the story may have been sensational, there was no denying the just of the issue: seven current or former MSU student-athletes, six who were recruited by Kramer to play football at MSU, had been charged with serious crimes.
And Ricky Gatewood was the last straw.
Three days before Kramer’s firing on May 18, 2007, Gatewood, a former Montana State star wide receiver, was accused of running a drug ring that imported 11 pounds of cocaine into Montana over a 23-month period. During his trial, Gatewood admitted to using money from his athletic scholarship at MSU to start the distribution ring.
Gatewood was an all-Big Sky Conference wide receiver in 2004 and 2005 for the Cats. He signed with the Oakland Raiders in 2006 and, before his arrest, was expected to have a tryout playing baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies.
His arrest was the sixth in a year involving a current or former Montana State football player.
In December of 2006, former football players Derrick Davis and Edward Sullivan and current MSU cornerback Andre Fuller were arrested on drug charges. Fuller and Davis, who played seven games at cornerback for the Cats in 2005, were charged with selling cocaine. Sullivan, who played wide receiver for MSU in 2003 and 2004, was charged with selling marijuana.
In early 2007, Demetrius Williams was arrested and charged with conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute cocaine after it was determined that he was the kingpin of the ring involving Gatewood. He played briefly for the Bobcats in 2003.
The worst, though, came in June of 2006. Former MSU football player John Lebrum — a redshirt in 2003 before leaving the program — and then-current MSU basketball player Branden Miller were charged with killing Jason Wright. The victim, a suspected cocaine dealer himself, was shot 10 times in a field off Huffine Lane west of Bozeman. Miller eventually pleaded guilty to his role in Wright’s death and was sentenced to 120 years in prison; Lebrum, who lived with Fuller at the time of the murder, pleaded guilty to robbery and is serving 40 years.
The slew of arrests shocked the Bozeman community, perhaps even more than the 2004 arrest of one of Kramer’s assistant coaches, Joe O’Brien, for distributing methamphetamine.
One letter to the editor published in the Daily Chronicle adequately summed up the feelings of many in the community. “How far are we, as individuals and most importantly as a community, going to let this deplorable behavior on behalf of the athletic department at MSU go?” read the letter. “Shame on us as a community for not being more outspoken, for not holding the school accountable long ago. They are destroying the quality of life and general peace of mind in my hometown.”
The uproar from the community put pressure on the MSU administration to do something. That something was to cut ties with Kramer.
“Looking at the football program as a whole and in light of the recent criminal activities of former student-athletes connected to it, I believe there is something broken with our football program and we need to take decisive steps to fix it,” Fields said in the press release announcing Kramer’s firing. He went on to say the football program was experiencing a “crisis in leadership.”
Speaking now, Kramer believes he was made the university’s fall guy. He says he knew nothing of the illegal activity and doesn’t think he should be held responsible for it.
“It’s pretty simple: To be fired for actions of players not even in your program … it was totally unfair,” Kramer said.
“Ricky Gatewood: played for us in 2005, left the program, arrested in 2007. I didn’t even know he was still in town. Demetrius Williams: played in 2003, dismissed in 2004, arrested in May of 2007. That’s 1,000 days. What’s the statute of limitation for a guy who was in your program at one time? Andre Fuller: arrested in December 2006, dismissed later that week.”
Kramer continued, “All the issues that these guys had, had they been occurring at the time they were on the team, we would have dismissed them from the team at that time. Every time we knew of any sort of violation of rules, guys were gone. Gone. I can’t escort them out of town on the rail. But I certainly wish I would have. The common thought of anybody, white or black, no matter where you’re from, is if you are dismissed from the program, you go back to where you came from.”
On May 18 of 2007, Kramer and Fields had just returned from Denver together. An hour after arriving in Bozeman, Fields — who declined an interview for this story — called Kramer into his office and gave him an ultimatum: quit or be fired.
“‘If you can’t have that, go see the president’ is what he told me,” Kramer said. “So I went to see the president, and he yelled at me for about two hours.”
Gamble cited emails he’d received from MSU alumni, boosters and dignitaries expressing their disgust with the scandal and what it said about their university, Kramer recalled. Gamble also cited the football team’s own academic struggles under Kramer, struggles that had caused MSU to lose three football scholarships.
“We have this whole suite of criminal activities, but there are academic issues and compliance issues. They all are in the realm of leadership issues,” Gamble told the Chronicle in 2007.
But Kramer felt he was wronged, that the university had used him as a scapegoat. So in the fall of 2007, he hired Billings attorney Cliff Edwards and sued the university.
The process to get the case into a courtroom was tiresome. Court dates kept getting pushed back. A judge retired. While the lawsuit dragged on, Kramer returned to his family’s farm in Washington. During the fall of 2007, he traveled around the western and southeastern United States, watching various football programs in action, trying to increase his football IQ in case a suitor came calling.
Kramer wanted to get back into coaching, but it became increasingly apparent, even with all the wins and the conference championships, that his professional opportunities were being hindered as much by the lawsuit as by his messy ending at MSU.
So, in the summer of 2008, Kramer joined a harvesting crew.
“I did it kind of as a way to get away because, obviously, no one I was working with had a clue who I was or what was happening,” Kramer said.
That next spring, Kramer interviewed for the head coaching position at Ventura Community College in Ventura, Calif. Based on his experience, the job at the small school should have been his.
But “a few people down there were pretty frank with me,” he said. “They said, ‘As long as you are in a lawsuit, you are going to be unhirable.’”
So last year, when attorneys for Montana State approached his own attorney about a settlement and after more than three years away from the game of football, Kramer decided it was time to move on. The state of Montana paid him $240,000.
Still, today, Kramer is dissatisfied with the way he was, in his words, forced out the door.
“The crimes themselves were heinous, no question; the death of anybody, the drug activity of any kind anywhere is reprehensible, and I’m glad that whatever authorities were involved did their job and got those guys off the street,” he said. “I applaud that, I think that’s wonderful. I’m a taxpayer, too. I don’t want drugs sold in my town, in my community any time, anywhere, by anybody ever. But to blame me, to say I’m responsible for that behavior, there’s a pretty weak cause and effect there, hence the paycheck I got. It’s a shock I will never recover from.”
Through its athletic department, Montana State this week declined to comment for this story.
With the lawsuit behind him, Kramer felt liberated. He spent last season working for his former assistant Paul Wulff at Washington State University as an assistant coordinator of football operations. He made less than $24,000 in salary, a far cry from the six-figure paychecks he collected annually at MSU.
Then, toward the ends of October of last year, Kramer got a call from a number with a 208 area code. It was Tingey calling from Pocatello. By the end of the next month, Kramer was announced as the 25th football coach in the history of Idaho State.
On the day the Bengals opened camp, Kramer took a few hours to savor the moments before his squad hit the new orange-and-black turf in Holt Arena. He called his attorneys. He called some of his brethren in the coaching fraternity. He called friends and family.
“It was very poignant, very emotional. I tried to dismiss it yesterday, but I got caught up in it a little bit today,” Kramer said following the Bengals’ first practice. “I don’t know if I can ever get it closed. I will try. I said what I had to say, I did what I had to do. I don’t ever want to be accused of being a bad leader again.”
A return to the Big Sky means a return to a place Kramer called home in more than one way. Including his time as an assistant at MSU during the mid-1980s, Kramer spent 10 of his 56 years on earth as a Bozeman resident.
On Oct. 29, Idaho State will come to Bozeman to battle the Bobcats. Kramer says his return to Big Sky country will be bittersweet, if nothing else.
“It’s going to be gawd-awful; not bad memories, wonderful memories, just absolutely the greatest feeling in the world to go back there and be there,” Kramer said. “Ten years of my life is there. I still own my house there. My daughter lives there. Missing it when we leave will be the worst part.”