Ex-Lobo football star was a gregarious man
Chuck Clausen, a Highland grad, went on to long coaching career
Chuck Clausen, a big, friendly bear of a man who wrestled and played football at Highland High and the University of New Mexico, left Albuquerque in 1963 to begin a coaching career that took him all over the map.
But Clausen never lost his love for Albuquerque and his alma mater.
“I consider Albuquerque my hometown,” he wrote in a January 2015 post on The Red Menace, a UNM fan website. “... Would have loved to have coached the Lobos and retired in Albuquerque, but things have worked out just fine.”
Clausen, a longtime college and NFL assistant football coach who worked over the years for Marv Levy, Lou Holtz, Woody Hayes and Dick Vermeil, died on Christmas Eve in Gainesville, Ga. He was 75.
Three times, in 1973, 1979 and 1991, Clausen applied for the UNM football head coach-
ing job. Largely because he had no head coaching experience, he was passed over.
Clausen’s only stints as a head coach were in wrestling, at Gallup High School and at Washington High School in Fremont, Calif.
Former UNM athletic director Gary Ness, who played football for the Lobos with Clausen, remembers his teammate as a player so intense and emotional that he sometimes lost the ability to speak — but also as a friend with an infectious brand of enthusiasm and a winning personality.
“He had so much bluster, and a very imposing physical presence,” Ness said Monday in a phone interview. “(But) he was a gentle giant. He would do anything for you.”
Clausen came to Albuquerque in 1956 from Iowa with his family. His father, Dick Clausen, was UNM’s head football coach in 1956-57. The younger Clausen was a high school AllAmerica football player and a state champion heavyweight wrestler at Highland.
After his father left Albuquerque to become athletic director at the University of Arizona, Clausen enrolled at the University of Iowa but transferred to UNM after one year. He was a starting center and linebacker for the Lobos, helping them win the inaugural Western Athletic Conference championship his senior year in 1962.
“He was an excellent player,” Ness said. “He was big for a linebacker in those days (230 pounds) and immensely strong.”
Clausen doubled as a heavyweight wrestler for the Lobos.
In 1968, after brief stays at Gallup and Fremont and a year as the defensive coordinator at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, Clausen was hired by Levy at The College of William & Mary in Virginia. Levy had been an assistant at UNM under Dick Clausen and was the Lobos’ head coach in 1957-58.
The following year, Levy left for the NFL and Holtz took the William & Mary job. From there, Clausen worked for Hayes at Ohio State (1971-75) and for Vermeil and Marion Campbell with the Philadelphia Eagles (1976-85). Clausen earned a Super Bowl ring from the Eagles’ loss to the Oakland Raiders in SB XV.
Clausen was an assistant for the Atlanta Falcons and the San Diego Chargers before retiring from coaching in 1991. He worked in commercial real estate in Gainesville, Ga., some 55 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Throughout, Clausen consistently listed Albuquerque as his hometown. For a couple of years in the early 1980s, Clausen ran a youth football camp here. He prevailed on several NFL players, including Eagles star running back Wilbert Montgomery, to appear in them.
Occasionally over the years, Ness said, UNM players from the early 1960s would get together for fun and reminiscences. Clausen, he said, was front and center during those gatherings.
“We’d meet up in Taos or somewhere and go camping together, and so forth,” Ness said, “and (Clausen) would come.
“It was really fun to see him. I’ll miss him.”