Wulff completes a long road home (Minnesota wrongful death lawyer)
Not at the news that nobody knew where his mom was. Not at the weekend expeditions when his cousins would drive out into the Northern California farmland, digging for the woman who disappeared.
Paul Wulff never cried, not when he went through junior high as somebody different, the kid with the bizarre family tragedy in his background. Not when he grew to man size, dedicating himself to weightlifting and getting better and bigger and stronger. He never cried, not through the newspaper stories and all the lingering questions, not through an entire adolescence growing up without a mom, and really, a dad.
He never cried.
There would be plenty of time for tears later.
Trying to dig up a body somewhere
So much to do, so little time. Paul Wulff strides into a motel lobby, straight and tall, trimmed down now considerably from a generation ago, when he played center at Washington State on the best offensive line in the school's history.
He needs to recruit. He needs to rebuild a sagging culture. And oh yes, he needs to go just up the hill with his wife, Sherry, to their new house and decide on interior paint colors.
Tuesday, he begins his first fall camp as coach of the Cougars. Who knew that when he was hunched over, cradling a ball he'd snap to Timm Rosenbach on the 1988 Aloha Bowl team that effectively ignited Dennis Erickson's coaching career, that Wulff would someday be back here, making it his team?
"The odds are so far out there," Wulff says reflectively. "I knew if it ever came to this, there'd be so many people interested."
But there wasn't anybody quite like Wulff, no other candidate who embodied what it meant to be a Cougar. Nobody else who had lived in a trailer in the early days of working up the road coaching at Eastern Washington, or won as much while given as little as he was at Eastern.
Nobody else who had been to hell and back.