By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Tribune Reporter

MINOCQUA, Wis. - We next meet Norm Ellenberger - yes, that Norm - in what may seem an unlikely place. And then again, for someone whose life even at its most damnable has always played out on a basketball court, we might expect he'd be quite at home here.

At 71, the man once synonymous with University of New Mexico basketball for better and mostly for worse has found his latest hoop dream in the frozen tundra of northern Wisconsin as the head coach of a high school varsity team.

The girls varsity team.

But this is not his attempt to rise from the ashes of the 1970s scandal that came to be known as "Lobogate."

That's been done. Magnificently.

Nor is it a plummet from the heights of coaching alongside the likes of basketball icons Bobby Knight and Don Haskins or his most recent feat as assistant coach of the Chicago Bulls.

Basketball is basketball, he says.

And northern Wisconsin is, well, very, very north.

"I am completely fulfilled here," Ellenberger says in the luxurious tone of a man who has lived long and hard enough to know what fulfillment should feel like. "It's the ultimate wonderful experience."

Yes, there are changes as we might expect after Ellenberger's unceremonious departure from UNM 25 years ago.

Gone are his signature ropes of turquoise-and-silver squash blossoms. The lacquered brown sweep of hair is now abraded like a well-worn carpet by age and an anxious, angry hand. His face crinkles in a patchwork of creases when he smiles, and he smiles often. His back bows a little, a concession to the only age-related ailment he admits to.

But the glimmer in his eye, the bawdy wit, the athletic passion and the mind of a man who looks at basketball both as a forensic scientist and a lover are all as sharp and sure as ever.

He is not so much the Stormin' Norman of the Lobo years as he is Reborn Norm, unfettered by the baggage of his bygone era, at peace with the road he has taken and thrilled by the new one he now travels, so close to heaven and so far from anything else.

It may be the winter of his life, but Ellenberger is still having a hot time.

The northwoods of Wisconsin is a place to get lost in, to escape into, an area where outsiders and mavericks mix in effortlessly with the hardy, homey lot of rosy-cheeked cheeseheads who find no discomfort in thermal underwear and ice beneath their snow tires.

Ellenberger visited friends here in greener, warmer summer days. He was with the Bulls then, but the ego mollycoddling of pro ball had left him hungry for a team he could nurture, not just baby-sit.

"The NBA is showmanship. It's atmosphere, a facade, really," he said. "It wasn't what I wanted after a while."

When an opening for a girls' basketball coach at Lakeland Union High School in Minocqua came available, one of the friends suggested Ellenberger apply.

"He wasn't concerned about going from the Bulls to girls high school basketball," said the friend, Kirby Redmond, whose daughter plays on the team. "He loves to teach. He's a teacher. He's having the time of his life."

Ellenberger was hired by the school during the summer and instantly set about revamping the girls basketball program on all levels, even holding clinics for other coaches.

And in typical Ellenberger fashion, he rankled the status quo folks who weren't used to taking girls basketball seriously.

"This is not recreation. This is not gym class. This is not the YMCA," he explains.

Al Wooldridge, athletics and activities director at Lakeland Union, admits Ellenberger brought new excitement to the school, but not everyone was so excited.

"To be an athlete the way Norm wants you to be an athlete, it's tough," Wooldridge said. "He enforced practice and didn't give vacation time off to his players. Some of the girls found out the hard way that he meant it. Two of them were let go. You don't do that with Norm."

Redmond remembered the shock some girls had to the "optional" practices three times a week last summer. The girls, he said, learned quickly there was no option.

"Sometimes that meant getting here at 6:30 in the morning," he said. "If any other coach would have asked that of them, they would have balked; they would have said, `Are you kidding?' But they took to Norman. They respected him."

Ellenberger calls the ponytailed players of the Lakeland Union Fighting Thunderbirds his "little darlin's" when he's happy with them and "girls" when he's not. Most of all, he calls them athletes.

"I tell them they're the most fortunate kids in the entire school because of the horse they're riding," he said. "When they look in the mirror after they're done, they will know who they are as a person."

They know, all right. The little darlin's went 18-2 for the season, which ended Feb. 17, and were 12-0 in conference play. They clinched the conference championship, rivaled the school's best conference record of more than a decade ago, and drew more fans to the games than the school had ever seen.

Not enough, Ellenberger says.

He's still a bit sore about those two losses.

"We got too fat, too cocky," he said. "But sometimes you have to go back two steps to get one step ahead."

He doesn't mention that each game slipped away by one point, and one game went into overtime.

The younger, flashier, polyester bell-bottomed Ellenberger used to walk into an Albuquerque hot spot and every head would turn, glasses would be hoisted and a salute would go out to the "Storm" passing through.

These days, waitresses and pub owners shout howdy, pour his favorite nut brown ale, ask him how the team's faring. At Bent's Camp in Land O' Lakes, Wis., his favorite hideaway, a waitress shoos off customers from "his" table, in front of the big-screen television, when he's in the house.

But the fanfare ends there.

Ellenberger doesn't mind.

"It isn't a big deal to rub elbows with a high school girls basketball coach," he said. "It's not a social event."

If heads turn these days, it's because they're ogling Cyndi, his wife of two years - a lovely, lithe woman with beach-babe honey hair, the ubiquitous sunglasses perched upon her head, and the sinewy Eddie Bauer physique of a woman capable of hoisting a canoe on her back and then paddling it into distant waters, farther and faster than most men her age.

That age, we should mention, is 32, meaning that when she was just a babe crawling at her mama's knee in the little farming town of Kewaunee, Wis., her husband was already making his run at the hallowed pantheon of Lobo gods.

She chuckles - no, belly laughs - at the confusion, consternation and downright envy their age difference creates. She is used to being referred to as his daughter.

"Anything to get back at him," she says. "It's just funny."

Theirs is a love based on basketball, on the hedonism of health and the independence born of being comfortable in their own skins - toned, wrinkly or otherwise.

"It's a good match," she says simply.

It's her second; his third.

"I'm tired of raising wives," he says, not altogether joking. "My next wife's going to be an old hag."

They met at Indiana University six years ago when she was a grad student in exercise science and he the assistant basketball coach under the mercurial Bob Knight. Before their first date, Cyndi said, she asked a friend to find out for her just how old Norm was.

"She told me he was born in 1932," she said. "I thought, wow, that's older than my father. We dated for a whole year before I told my parents about him."

They married four years later in a surprise ceremony on the beach in the Bahamas where they were celebrating her 30th birthday.

"He tells me we're going snorkling, then having lunch and then getting married," she said. "And that was that."

Like Norm, Cyndi coaches girls high school basketball. She's also the cross country and track coach and the wellness teacher at the Conserve School, a swanky college prep boarding school near their home where tuition is $26,500 a year and snowshoeing is part of the curriculum.

The Ellenbergers are part of each others basketball programs. In summer, he trains her girls and she trains his to abide by school athletics rules that limit a coach's purview in the offseason.

They constantly critique each others' games, talk strategy, cheer - and jeer - each other. They breathe basketball. Together.

"She's got a lot of locker room in her," Norm says of his wife. "She's a tough old broad."

They're as active as any jock couple, provided that couple has the time, money and stamina to hike the Colorado high country, fly-fish in British Columbia, scuba dive in the Caribbean, or canoe, kayak, ice fish or snowshoe across Crooked Lake right outside their cabin door.

For a couple of high school coaches, they live quite well thanks to pension funds from Norm's former employers, including UNM, and a few well-placed investments during the years.

They're going to Aruba for spring break this year. It's like the saying emblazoned on the spare tire cover of Cyndi's Jeep: "Life is Good."

"She and I are very compatible, not just in our wants and desires but in the way we flow, the way our lives flow," Ellenberger says.

Cyndi's parents, we should note, adjusted well to their septuagenarian son-in-law.

"They love him," she said, curling an arm around his. "Everybody loves Norman."

Ellenberger still gets revved up on game days. He can hardly stomach a bite, can hardly sit still. He paces the floors at school like a caged tiger, waiting, plotting.

Four hours before his girls take the floor, he walks them through the game and then lets them leave for awhile to hang out doing what he calls girlish "foo foo crap."

They must return to the gym in time to watch the junior varsity girls play. They find him hunched on his favorite spot on the bleachers, scribbling notes, dressed now in black pullover and khaki pants, roughly the school colors of black and gold.

They know not to disturb him, and so they sit two bleachers away. From time to time, he eyes them like a farmer checking his crops for signs of leaf mold.

"You can just feel the vibrations and attitudes," he says. "You can see kids in their best form."

When his game begins, he's a whirl of intensity, barking; his hands shooting from his body like sparks.

"Wake up! Let's go! Let's go!" he shouts.

There had been obscenities.

"He gets a little, ah, enthusiastic," Athletics Director Wooldridge said. "He gets a little flamboyant on the court. We had to tell him, `Norm, control your language.' And he does a wonderful job of it, mostly. Maybe there's still a few `goddams' now and then, and he's bitten his lip a few times. But he's done well."

Ellenberger's work with the Fighting Thunderbirds appeared to be ending before it ever began when in July the local Lakeland Times ran front-page stories about his fall from grace at UNM - and the basketball world in general.

"I got my ass hammered by CBS, ABC, and now this little punk paper comes along," he said. "All that was was a very small-town insignificant newspaper trying to find something fun to write about."

But it left him explaining - again - how things had gone down, how a man who had once brought basketball to dizzying heights had brought it to its knees in a sordid flurry of NCAA violations.

The allegations included falsifying players' transcripts and bribing prospective players and their families with cars, cash, hotel accommodations and plane tickets.

Ellenberger was convicted in 1981 on 21 counts of fraud and served probation until 1983.

He was fired from UNM in 1979.

"Being fired from New Mexico was a struggle, a personal struggle because I loved UNM," he said. "It was a big part of me that I can never forget."

But he hints he was just the fall guy, that the rot went far deeper and higher than him.

"The real story has never fully been told," he said. "But I'm going to leave it at that."

Ellenberger's criminal record had not shown up on Lakeland Union's background check, and that became the bigger issue.

Because of Ellenberger, the school discovered only Wisconsin records were being searched. The system was repaired.

And so was Ellenberger's stature in the Minocqua community.

Ellenberger's girls wrote a letter to the newspaper in his support.

"We do not understand why certain people are digging up old news from almost three decades ago," they wrote in the July 31 letter. "Please take time to get to know Norm Ellenberger before you form an opinion. We know him, we respect him, and we like him."

The school board agreed.

"Does what happened 30 years ago affect today? We had to weigh both sides," Wooldridge said. "The board of directors each said OK, he should stay. God knows we have other skeletons in the closet in this community and people with far more questionable backgrounds."

Ellenberger may have never forgotten UNM or the pain he caused, but he said he has forgotten to worry about it much.

"I am completely cleansed from that," he said. "That is not my problem. Time takes care of that. I have no burden."

As if Minocqua wasn't far enough off the beaten trail, the Ellenbergers chose to make their home on the lip of a lake surrounded by the Sylvania Wilderness in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

It's an hour's drive on the back roads from their cabin to Minocqua - 1 hours in winter weather.

The cabin, which sits 8 feet off the lake, now frozen over, is one of only eight in the area and the only one likely for hundreds of miles with chile ristras dangling near the front door.

New Mexico is everywhere in the Ellenberger home. It's in the Jemez and Hopi pottery nestled among Norm's collection of loon sculptures carved in soapstone by Inuit Indians. It's in the green chile, bagged in the freezer, ready for use on the Ellenbergers' weekly New Mexican nights when friends gather to enjoy Norm's famed green-chile stew and a healthy batch of margaritas - and maybe a little 10-mile snowshoeing excursion, if they can keep up with him.

If not on the basketball courts, Ellenberger is most in his element outdoors, pointing out the types of woodpeckers that feed on the suet bundles he plants in the trees, ice fishing for walleyes or feeding the herd of deer that wander close enough that he can look them in the eye.

"I think every day I see something in the wild that makes me smile," he says.

In the hinterlands of Wisconsin, where it's easy to get lost, Ellenberger has found himself.

Still, both Norm and Cyndi Ellenberger say they would love one day to move back to New Mexico. They visit at least once a year.

"Part of me is still back there and always will be," he says.

They dreamed of living someday in the Sandia Heights home he built 25 years ago with a sweeping view of the city where he once held sway.

In June, the home was destroyed by a fire caused by an errant bottle rocket. Eight months later, it's still that way, unrisen from the ashes.

There's no hurry, Ellenberger says, to move, no hurry to leave, no hurry not to have fun. To teach. To breathe basketball, as always.

"I'm not working now," he says. "This is the furthest thing from work. This is just flowing. That's fun."

THE NORM FORM

1955: Butler University graduate. Played football, baseball and basketball under coaching great Paul D. "Tony" Hinkle.

1956: Pittsburgh Pirates player.

1957-64: New Haven (Conn.) public school basketball coach, assistant coach in three other sports.

1964-67: Monmouth (Ill.) College basketball, baseball and football coach.

1967-72: University of New Mexico assistant basketball coach under Bob King.

1972-1979: UNM men's basketball head coach. One of the most successful and colorful in Lobo history, with a 134-62 record and four postseason tournaments. He was fired after he came under investigation for rigging players' academic transcripts in a scandal known as "Lobogate."

1980: Albuquerque Energee women's professional basketball coach.

1983-85: Albuquerque Silvers men's professional basketball coach.

1986-1990: Texas-El Paso assistant basketball coach under Don Haskins.

1990-2000: Indiana University assistant basketball coach under Bobby Knight.

2000-2003: Chicago Bulls assistant coach.

2003-current: Lakeland Union High School girls basketball coach.

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