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It was by far the hardest we ever worked on an interview.

Paul Panisko and I were joined by brand-new Montana Tech football coach Chuck Morrell on our old sports radio show KBOW Overtime shortly after he arrived in town to take his new job. I believe it was in January of 2011.

Now, most people were not going to stack up in comparison to the recently-retired Tech football coach. When it comes to giving interviews, nobody can beat Bob Green.

The shoes to fill were bigger than the ones worn by Shaquille O’Neal.

So, the bar of expectations was set pretty low as we introduced the new coach to the Mining City. Paul and I quickly realized that we set it too high.

The show was broadcast live from the Coaches Corner inside the Metals Sports Bar & Grill. It was a show that was very informal, and we always just asked questions off the top of our heads.

I don’t remember one time in 15 years of the show that we ever wrote down a question ahead of time. That night, though, we should have.

We did our homework for this interview, though. But it didn’t help.

Paul would dress up a question to Coach Morrell, and he would answer with one word. Then I would ask a question. Again, a one-word answer.

For a half an hour, Paul and I peppered the coach with questions about taking over the job, what he was looking forward to, the recruiting season, the history of Tech, his past as a player and a coach and replacing a legend like Green.

Sometimes we got a full sentence answer from a question. Most of the time, though, it was one- or two-word answers.

That half an hour felt like seven days.

Morrell was clearly a no-nonsense guy, and he did not know us at the time. He had no reason to trust that we were not the kind of guys who would try to get him with a “gotcha” question.

Interviewing him that night was only rivaled in difficulty by the time I interviewed swimming superstar Erin Popovich, when she was in middle school. The super-shy Popovich just kept shrugging her shoulders when I asked questions, but at least it wasn’t a radio interview.

I was thinking about that interview with Morrell as I watched him call the defensive plays for Washington in the National Championship football game Monday night.

The guy came to Butte guarded as can be, and he left, well, as a Butte guy. He says he plans to move back to the Mining City when he retires from coaching.

By the time he left to join his best pal Kalen DeBoer as an assistant at Fresno State in December of 2019, Morrell was one of the easiest interviews. He wasn’t on the level of Green, who used to wait until your pen stopped moving to go on to the next sentence, but he was always a lot of fun to talk to.

In my 25 years or so working as a sportswriter, Morrell has to rank among the very best coaches to interview. He easily ranks among my favorite coaches.

He was always honest and upfront. He never sugarcoated anything, and he never asked me to sugarcoat anything for him.

Dealing with a coach as a sportswriter is always interesting because no two coaches are alike.

I never got to interview Montana Grizzlies legend Don Read, who passed away last week, but I met him once in 1995. Nearly two years later, Coach Read was back in town to announce a Grizzly game on television. I was at a practice waiting to talk to Coach Mick Dennehy, and Read was at that practice.

Coach Read was walking off the field and looked my way. From about 25 yards away, he recognized me, said my name and walked over to shake my hand.

Read remembered every name. He could have been a politician.

I succeeded Tom Mullen was the sports editor of The Montana Kaimin, the University of Montana student newspaper. Tom was lucky enough to interview Coach Read, who used to take his phone off the hook and shut his office door for interviews.

Dennehy could not have been a politician, and he certainly never took his phone off the hook. He didn’t like interviews with anyone, but he was always good to me for one reason.

We were both Butte guys.

Amazingly, Mick was not the toughest interview at the University of Montana. That distinction went to volleyball coach Dick Scott. I felt like I was talking to an angry Mike Ditka after matches the Grizzlies didn’t win.

I was able to build a great relationship with Coach Scott, though, and working with him prepared me for interviews with John Thatcher when he coached the Butte High boys’ basketball team.

Thatcher is the only coach to threaten to beat me up in an interview. I’d like to think he was joking, but I’m not entirely sure.

The most brutally honest coach I ever dealt with was Meg Murphy, who is also one of the greatest coaches I ever got to interview. Whether she was talking about a poor performance from a player, an official or even herself, Meg never held back.

Marilyn Tobin was also brutally honest as the volleyball coach at Montana Tech. One time I asked her if there were any positives that she could take out of a home conference loss.

“Yes,” Coach Tobin said after giving me a look to tell me I asked a stupid question. “I didn’t shoot any of them.”

Arie Grey, Butte High’s football coach, doesn’t fall into the “open-and-honest” category like Murphy and Tobin. He talks to me in coach speak every time I talk to him.

I could say something like, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Arie would respond, “We’re on to Cincinnati.”

He smiles more than Bill Belichick, but he doesn’t always say much more.

Of course, there is nobody I want my son to play for more than Coach Grey, a guy who truly gets the reason he is coaching high school football.

I could say the same about Don Peoples Jr. The Butte Central coach, though, is a million times more open than Coach Grey.

Some coaches need to be recorded because the talk so fast, especially after a game. Current Montana Tech football coach Kyle Samson definitely falls into that category.

Coach Samson’s father, Mark, was the exact opposite. I never used a recorder when talking to Mark Samson, whether he was coaching high school or in college. 

Most of the time after a game, a writer is looking for a minute and a half — 2 minutes, tops — from a coach. Mark Samson was always at least a half hour interview.

In all the years working as a sportswriter, though, no coach ever changed as much as Morrell. He certainly did not trust me or Panisko that first night on Overtime.

By the time the Orediggers won his first game — on a double-overtime walk-off touchdown run by the great Pat Hansen — Morrell was pretty warm to us.

By the time his Orediggers knocked off Carroll College later that season, Morrell was the best interview in town.

I can’t wait to have him as a guest on my podcast when he comes back to Butte this summer.

Even though the championship game didn’t work out the way we wanted, it will be fun to hear Coach Morrell’s take on the great season by his Washington Huskies.

There will not be many one-word answers this time around.

— Bill Foley, who is on to Cincinnati, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.