The record books tell us Washington State has played football for more than 100 years. And in all those decades, the Cougars have traveled to San Antonio, home of the Alamo, and the Alamodome, just four times. The first was during World War II. The second came more than 50 years later in the 1994 Alamo Bowl. The fourth will be next week for the 2018 version of the game.

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But this story is concerned with the third trip, one made in the midst of the worst period of Cougar football ever: A made-for-the-bottom-line matchup with Notre Dame in 2009. It ended as another in a series of blowouts of Paul Wulff’s team, a nationally televised landslide that intensified the pressure for a coaching change that wouldn’t happen for a couple years and 22 more losses later.

And there was one play in the Irish’s 40-14 victory that stands out, a play that meant nothing as far as the score or the statistical record. But it meant most everything for one player involved in it. When Toby Turpin blocked Notre Dame’s first quarter extra-point attempt, the ball bounced into the arms of Chima Nwachukwu, a son of Texas – with roots in Nigeria – making one of three appearances in his home state during his four-year Cougar career.

Nwachukwu, a 5-foot-11, 200-pound safety, took off down the sideline. Some 90 yards away was the Irish end zone. Get the ball there and Washington State would have two more points.

Mike Ragone wouldn’t let it happen. The 6-4, 250-pound tight end ran down Nwachukwu at the Notre Dame 8-yard line. The tackle made it, statistically at least, as if the play never happened. But it did happen. And it had consequences.

“My teammates killed me for that one,” says Nwachukwu now, laughing. “Even when we watched it in film review, my coach was, ‘How did you get caught by a tight end?’ It wasn’t even ‘good play’ or whatever … it’s basically a worthless play unless you score.”

It wasn’t just the insult. There was also an injury. Nwachukwu suffered a high ankle sprain on the play and wouldn’t return until the Apple Cup weeks later. It was an injury that lingered, and the next year included a hamstring injury that cost him even more games.

But those setbacks were just cogs in a wheel that turned Nwachukwu in a different path. Football began to fade. Nwachukwu found another calling: It led from Pullman to Austin to Cambridge, Mass., to Washington D.C. and now back to Boston.

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From an office in a Boston high-rise, Nwachukwu is able to look back at a Washington State career that included 39 losses.

And one huge win.

Like most high school football players being recruited by Power 5 schools, Nwachukwu had his eyes set higher. He wanted to play in the NFL. When then-WSU head coach Bill Doba and his Texas connection, assistant Leon Burnett, came calling, Nwachukwu was all-in. After all, Washington State had a history at that point of churning out NFL-ready defensive backs.

“I didn’t really know too much about Washington State before I started getting recruited,” he recalls. “I wanted to play in the Pac-10.”

Everything seemed right on schedule his freshman season. The Cougars won five games that year, but Nwachukwu started all 12 at cornerback. He was good.

He made nine tackles in his first game, in the Wisconsin madhouse that is Camp Randall Stadium. He had 13 tackles at No. 1 USC. He finished the season with 73 tackles, five pass breakups, an interception and Freshman All-American honors from The Sporting News.

Pretty heady stuff. Right on schedule. School, it was secondary.

“I had always kind of skated through, had been fine without studying,” he admits.

Doba was fired after a fourth consecutive bowl-less season. Wulff was hired from Eastern Washington. Everything changed – including just about any chance of victory. In Wulff’s first season, the Cougars won the Apple Cup against winless Washington, defeated FCS member Portland State and lost 11 games, all but one by at least three touchdowns.

Coaches like then co-defensive coordinator Chris Ball, named head coach at Northern Arizona University last week, pushed Nwachukwu to excel, to challenge himself even if the Cougars were trailing by 30 or more.

“Losing every single Saturday was really depressing,” Nwachukwu explains. “When you were with your teammates after the games, you couldn’t smile, you couldn’t laugh. It was frowned upon. It was just a really bad time.

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“Nonetheless, we learned a lot about ourselves. For me, the question was, in the midst of so much losing, how do you still win?”

As the joy of playing football receded, the excitement about school and civic engagement grew. Another coach showed up. Associate athletic director Bob Minnix, himself a former football standout and law school graduate, reached out and pulled Nwachukwu into the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.

“For me, (to win) was finding a way to refocus my energies into academics,” Nwachukwu says. “I learned there was more than football. I learned to excel in a different way. I value it for that. I’m not sure I really would have focused on school if we were winning.”

He became the Cougars’ representative at the Pac-10 Student-Athlete Advisory Committee conference and president of WSU’s group.

Academics, once an afterthought, began to take precedence. He was winning in one arena – twice he was named an academic All-America – and losing in the one everyone cared about. Over his last three years in Pullman, the Cougars won just five times.

Nwachukwu credits Minnix, who died in November 2017, for opening up a world beyond football, a world that seemed as foreign, maybe, as the one Nwachukwu’s father entered at his age.

The elder Nwachukwu, Chidi, immigrated to the United States on a student visa. He used it well, earning degrees from Princeton and Marquette. He taught in college for a spell and then became an entrepreneur, starting two successful businesses.

He was able to help his brother immigrate as well and then brought over Chima’s mother, Ngozi. They settled in Milwaukee and raised their five children.

But when Chima was 13, Chidi died of leukemia. Mom took the children and relocated to Allen, Texas, just outside of Dallas, to be closer to family. It was there Chima was indoctrinated into the cult of football, Texas style.

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“I think my identity was formed in football,” he says, looking back on his high school years. “I kind of became who I was out there in Texas by playing football. I excelled at it. It was who I was, my identity — my primary identity at least.

“Trying to learn who you are outside of that, you really didn’t have the opportunity in Texas, because you are always winning and you received adulation because you played football.”

His younger brother, Uzoma, would go on to play receiver at Texas A&M and spend time in NFL camps, including with the Seahawks in 2016. Chima? He went north, suffered the slings and arrows of more than three-dozen losses, excelled in the classroom and learned even more outside of it.

“(Football) is obviously still a big deal, but when you are losing, you have to find yourself outside of that identity a little bit.”

A large part of that new-found identity was rooted in the Palouse. It is a region of the land, built from the land by people who love the land. Hard work, effort, a willingness to get dirty, to nurture: they are all part of what it means to be from the area.

The Palouse flowed into Nwachukwu’s persona.

“It’s just the mentality you learn while out there on the Palouse,” he says. “It’s grit and grind. It’s that mentality. I’m blue collar. It’s nothing fancy.”

After graduating from Washington State – he received his final credits from Georgetown while interning for New York Senator Chuck Schumer – Nwachukwu returned to Texas.

In Austin, just down the road from San Antonio, he picked up a master’s degree in political science from the University of Texas as he worked to raise his LSAT scores. He knew he was headed into the law, just like the guy who replaced Wulff at Washington State, Mike Leach.

Armed with his degrees and good-enough LSAT scores, Nwachukwu was accepted at his dream school, Stanford. It was what he working for since before Ragone ran him down. Then he made a trip to Cambridge to check out another somewhat prestigious university outside of Boston.

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He fell in love with Harvard.

“When I visited, the atmosphere at Harvard just felt more comfortable to me,” he says.

He was comfortable enough to earn his degree, pass the bar and begin working in criminal prosecutions for the U.S. Department of Justice in the “other” Washington. His first job had a lot of parallels to the one he had at Washington State.

“There we so many similarities,” Nwachukwu explains. “You have to be competitive. You have an adversary on the other side, and then you have a ref, who is the judge, to hopefully call the game fair.

“But for me, the biggest thing is the preparation. You know how the fans only see the game? You spent so much time practicing, day in and day out, all those little things, and that’s kind of how it was with trial practice.”

After all the preparation, game day for a trial attorney comes in a courtroom.

“The jury and the judge, they get to see that one day when you are performing,” says Nwachukwu. “They don’t get to see everything else that you did beforehand. … If you don’t prepare, you look stupid.”

Nwachukwu had expressed an interest in being a government attorney in his Pullman days, but times were different then. So was he. The job wasn’t exactly what he envisioned. Neither was the leadership. When an opportunity came up to enter the private sector with the Boston branch of Jones Day, a job with less travel and in the same city with his girlfriend, Nwachukwu made the move, and that’s where you will find him today.

But a part of him is still in Pullman. It always will be. It is why, despite the 39 losses, he feels he won something even more important in his four years at WSU.

It’s an attitude, forged in the hell-like fires of defeat after defeat, that burns to this day.

“That’s the way I’m approaching everything, like I’m the underdog, like I’m the forgotten one,” he says. “In order to get anything, you have to grind and work harder than the next guy. That’s the mentality I learned on the Palouse.”

(Top photo courtesy Chima Nwachukwu)