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usatoday

LSU's Miles takes easy approach

BATON ROUGE ? He was coming off his one and only losing season as a head coach, 4-7 in his first year at Oklahoma State in 2001.

But that was the least of his problems. A regular exerciser, Les Miles took a jog one morning that mid-December. He returned home with a tremendous headache and feeling nauseated. When the headache did not go away, he saw a doctor in Stillwater, Okla.

Then he saw a doctor in Oklahoma City for an MRI. He was told there was a cyst on his brain causing intracranial pressure and a buildup of fluid. Surgery was needed to remove part of the cyst.

"Well, first of all, you deny it," Miles, in his third season as LSU coach, said recently. "I mean they told me that, and I shrugged my shoulders. 'OK, so what? Let me go.' And I went recruiting. I mean, I left the hospital, and I went recruiting."

The pain came back, though, and Miles had his moment of clarity. He stopped recruiting.

"It was creating a blood circulation problem," Miles said. "All they had to do was remove it and everything would be fine."

Miles, 53, called his role model, retired Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, a fellow Ohio native for whom he played guard at Michigan in the mid-1970s and coached under in 1980-81 and 1987-89. Through Schembechler, who had heart surgery, Miles found a doctor in Cleveland to perform the procedure.

Cleveland is 25 miles from Miles' hometown of Elyria, Ohio. It was where Miles and his friends occasionally went for fun. They saw the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin in the World Series of Rock concerts at Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie in the mid-1970s.

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