Petering out after six decades

Published 7:17 pm Sunday, December 31, 2017

LSU’s Jenkins takes one last stab at retirement after three previous attempts

ORLANDO, Fla. — Pete Jenkins is retiring.

Really.

And he means it this time.

Really means it.

Take it with a grain of salt if you must, but the 76-year-old legend will coach LSU’s defensive line for the final time in Monday’s Citrus Bowl against Notre Dame.

He’s tried retirement before and it didn’t quite take.

But this time, for sure, he’s positive of it.

“It’s time,” he said.

So Monday will end three separate stints with the Tigers under five head coaches — not to mention three high schools, nine other colleges (including four other Southeastern Conference schools) and a brief foray into the NFL.

“Semi-retire,” Jenkins clarified.

He’ll still return here to Orlando for his annual January-February side job, when he spends the first month tutoring NFL hopeful defensive linemen and the second working with a handful of current pro linemen.

Close enough. Monday will be his last time bobbing around a sideline, fittingly surrounded by purple and goal.

He has a simple explanation for what lured him out of one more failed retirement last year to rejoin the Tigers after Ed Orgeron was named interim head coach.

“It’s always been hard for me to say no to two things: LSU and Ed Orgeron,” he said. “I love LSU. That’s always been my first love.”

Since first leaving LSU in 1990 when Mike Archer was fired as head coach, he has coached in five spots in addition to two more LSU hitches. He first went back in 2000 to join Nick Saban’s staff for two years before his first attempt at retirement.

Then …

There’s a legendary tale in NFL circles of how he landed in the pros.

Andy Reid, then the head coach of Philadelphia Eagles, was seeking a defensive line coach.

It was 2007 and Jenkins had been semi-retired since leaving LSU after Nick Saban’s second year in 2001.

Reid had interviewed and vetted numerous coaches. The recommendation that kept coming up was that this guy had played for Pete Jenkins or that that guy was a Pete Jenkins disciple.

Finally, Reid leaned back and said, “Who the hell is Pete Jenkins? That’s the guy I want to talk to. Maybe we should hire Pete Jenkins.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” said Jenkins, who took the job and thoroughly enjoyed his three years in the NFL.

But he never sold the house he bought in Baton Rouge when he first joined Jerry Stovall’s staff in 1980.

So he had a place to live when the phone call came two Septembers ago after Orgeron was named interim head coach in the wake the firing of Les Miles.

Jenkins, who’d heard about the Miles firing but didn’t know Orgeron had been named his interim replacement, had just put one foot up on the recliner at his home in Destin, Florida.

“I was getting ready to put the other one up, and the phone rang,” he said.

It was Orgeron, of course, who suddenly needed a defensive line coach to replace himself.

“He said, ‘Can you be here tomorrow?’ I told him I can be on the way tomorrow. But I’ll be to work on Tuesday.”

The two knew the drill.

Orgeron also lured Jenkins out of retirement in 2013 when he was named interim head coach at Southern Cal to replace Lane Kiffin.

Orgeron didn’t get that job full-time.

Jenkins came back for one reason: “My goal was to be as helpful to him as I could. I was trying to help him get that job (full-time). That was my goal, to be as helpful to him as I could. I think he’s the right guy.”

Orgeron made allowances for Jenkins’ age, sparing him the grind of recruiting and insisting that the ageless wonder go home each day at 7:30 p.m.

That “limited” him to 13-hour work days.

“Sometimes I didn’t feel like I was carrying my weight,” Jenkins said. “He made some concessions for me. He didn’t feel like he did, but I wanted to carry my load.

“He’s been good to me. I tried to be good for him, but he’s been good to me.”

The two will stay in touch. They go way back.

Jenkins missed Orgeron’s brief, aborted attempt as an LSU player by one year — Orgeron left two weeks into August camp after signing with the Tigers in 1979.

But they first met a few years later when Orgeron, by then a fledgling coach after playing for Northwestern State, dropped by the old Belmont Hotel on Airline Drive in Baton Rouge where Jenkins was conducting an informal coaching clinic.

“I’d heard of him,” Jenkins said. “There was a crowd of folks in there, but we hit it off. He was eager to learn. We got to be friends.”

That was during Orgeron’s wild and rambunctious period, which included more than a few barroom brawls among other mischief.

“I knew him when he was BéBé,” Jenkins laughed of Orgeron’s nickname. “I call him Ed. He’s a different cat than BéBé. I loved BéBé, but he’s better suited to be Ed right now. He’s very good at this job.”

And that’s why Jenkins said he feels comfortable with the latest — and, he insists, final — retirement.

“I wouldn’t be leaving if this season hadn’t turned out like it did,” he said of LSU’s recovery to go 6-1 following the shocking loss to Troy (which — small world — was the school where Jenkins got his first college job in 1968).

“I would have wanted to coach another year if things hadn’t turned around,” Jenkins said. “But I feel really good about it. I feel like he’s in a great place. I feel like we’ve got the right guys in the right place at the right time. 

“I know. I was watching him.”