Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–66
I had an interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago. I have a friend; he got fired
from his job last summer as athletic director at USC. His name is Mike Garrett. Mike has
decided he would like to be athletic director at Caltech. Now, he’s a very unusual candidate for
athletic director for Caltech. They’re considering him. I hope it doesn’t hurt his chances that
he’s a friend of mine. Mike is a Heisman Trophy winner. He has a Super Bowl ring from
playing with the Kansas City Chiefs. He has a law degree, which he got while he was playing
pro football. He has for seventeen years been running an $80-million-a-year program at USC,
where every year he had to raise it all from scratch. And he clawed his way up out of the lower
part of society and brought his family with him. Could he give Caltech something? Could he
give our students something? I think he could, if they’re smart enough to hire him. He called
me and said, “They put me off until January.” I said, “That’s because we’re academics and we
take the Christmas holiday. Exams are over, Mike. They just gave up on the committee work on
the athletic director job.” I said, “How’d your interviews go?” He said, “Very interesting.
Would you like to guess what the student athletes wanted?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said,
“They want to win.” I said, “Everybody wants to win. Are they willing to pay the price?” He
said, “These kids were. I can help them.” And that’s the whole trick of teaching.
Well, I have to tell a story. Garrulous old professors are full of stories. When Stephanie
and I got married, I was about to go off and do a month of public lectures in Australia, and we
took two of the girls—Karen and Kerstin. We were going to different cities in Australia. I was
giving public lectures, university lectures, losing my voice. And one weekend they hadn’t
scheduled us and so we went to a sheep station that was owned by somebody. Have I told you
this story?
ASPATURIAN: No. I’m laughing because the idea of a sheep station sounds pretty good to me.
TOMBRELLO: I am a big-city boy. I would have rather been in Sydney, I think, or Melbourne, or
Adelaide, but we’re out in the boonies with a gazillion sheep. So they ask Stephanie what she’d
like to see, and she says, “Well, I’d like to see a sheepdog work, and our youngest”—Kerstin
was six at the time—“would like to pat a lamb.” The guy says, “Done.” And so we go out and
there’s this little dog of no discernible breed—these are not shelties—a little black dog. It moves
a million sheep, and at the end of it there’s a lamb sitting in front of our daughter. Stephanie
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