COLUMBIA, S.C. —  The basic outline of the “what if” genre of sports writing is simple: “What would have happened if … ?”

That question usually leads to a warm-and-fuzzy hypothetical answer: “Wouldn’t it have been great for the Trail Blazers if they had taken Michael Jordan instead of Sam Bowie?” Or, “What if Bo Jackson’s hip had never been injured?” That kind of thing.

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This is not that story.

Our question today: What if Joe Morrison, who made South Carolina football cool for the first time in its history and led the Gamecocks through the historic 1984 Black Magic season — when the team started 9-0 and was as high as No. 2 in the nation — hadn’t died suddenly from heart failure on Feb. 5, 1989?

The answer: He would have been fired.

“Joe had to go,” said King Dixon, South Carolina’s athletics director at the time. “Regrettably, he passed on. I won’t say, ‘What if he didn’t die?’ He did die.”

Why did a coach beloved by many of his players and celebrated by most South Carolina fans have to go when he was coming off consecutive 8-4 seasons?

That’s this story.

“When Joe died … I never will forget when Alex Hawkins came up to me, going up to the memorial service, and Alex was not a religious person, but he said, ‘King, how does it feel to be saved the second time in your life?'” Dixon remembered.

Hawkins, who was one of the best and most colorful players in South Carolina history, was referencing the fact that his former Gamecocks teammate wasn’t going to have to fire Morrison, who was one of the most popular head coaches in school history.

That was going to have to happen, Dixon said, because of a steroid scandal that landed South Carolina on the cover of Sports Illustrated in October 1988; the fallout from that scandal was inevitable. It was going to take something that seismic to get Morrison out of Columbia. The public revelation one year earlier that Morrison had been supporting a child born out of wedlock for five years had hardly made a dent in his popularity.

Morrison coached at the school for six seasons, but in that time came so many of the moments that put the Gamecocks on the college football map: the 1984 Black Magic season; the adoption of “2001” as the team’s entrance music; the “Fire Ant” defense; the program’s only win over Southern Cal; a 1983 victory during which the upper deck of Williams-Brice Stadium’s east side began to sway because of the dancing fans and sparked the Gamecocks’ “If It Ain’t Swayin’, We Ain’t Playin'” rallying cry.

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“I think he made South Carolina football cool,” said Teddy Heffner, a Columbia sports talk radio host who has covered Gamecocks athletics for more than 50 years.

Morrison wore all black on the sideline and routinely watched practice leaning on a goal post with a Marlboro cigarette cupped in his hand.

“It seemed like every time you turned around there was this little thing more than just football,” said Bob Gillespie, who covered the Gamecocks for The State newspaper at the time. “Morrison has always had kind of a mystique about him, and I don’t know if he consciously cultivated that or it was just part of him. There was a lot of showmanship, either intentionally or accidentally, that got a lot of people excited.”

The Gamecocks won eight or more games in three of Morrison’s six seasons. Before Morrison, they had only had three eight-win seasons in the previous 89 years. After his death, it would be 18 more seasons before South Carolina accumulated three more eight-win seasons.

“I’ll tell you what I remember: just the love that so many Gamecocks fans had for him and the excitement that was always in the air that seemed like it hadn’t been there for years,” said Tommy Moody, a former South Carolina baseball player who now co-hosts a daily sports talk radio show.

Morrison was iconic before he even arrived in Columbia. He played for the New York Giants for 14 seasons primarily as a halfback, serving as the captain for seven seasons and eventually getting his No. 40 jersey retired. After his NFL career ended in 1972, Morrison became head coach at Chattanooga in 1973. From there, he went to New Mexico, leading the Lobos to a 10-1 record in 1982, the season that vaulted him to the South Carolina job.

Tommy Suggs, a former South Carolina quarterback and longtime analyst on the school’s football radio broadcasts, can still remember being introduced to Morrison over dinner at the exclusive Summit Club in Columbia when the coach came to Columbia to interview. Morrison brought along close friend and Pro Football Hall of Famer Sam Huff, and they told stories for hours. Morrison cut an imposing figure from the start, Suggs said.

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“We had a wonderful dinner,” Suggs said. “Joe had on his dark suit, white shirt and cowboy boots. Joe was a character in a lot of ways, as everyone knows. He brought an interesting feel to our program and some notoriety that we probably hadn’t had in the past with his style. As you would expect, there was a segment of our fan base that gravitated to that, and there was a segment that didn’t. They didn’t like the all-black, they didn’t like the smoking on the sideline, they didn’t like all the other things that came with Joe.”

“All the other things that came with Joe” was a long list, and it included an approach that struck some as leaning too far toward professional football.

“Joe was a good football coach, and he was a no-nonsense kind of guy,” said Heffner. “What kind of tells you his thinking about football is when Dick Bestwick (South Carolina’s athletic director in 1988) told Joe in a meeting, ‘Your job is to graduate football players,’ Joe looked at him and said, ‘No, it’s not. My job is to win football games.'”

While that is the reality in college football, it’s supposed to be the unspoken reality. Morrison’s professional approach extended to his monitoring of players at times, too, Dixon said.

“All those players absolutely loved Joe Morrison,” Dixon said. “He was strict in some areas and very loose in some other areas.”

Gillespie added: “Not much stuck to Joe, even after the steroid thing with Sports Illustrated and some of his coaches being very obviously guilty, it just never seemed to land on Joe. If he had lived longer, it might have. There is never a good time to die, but if there’s a good time, that was a good time for him and everybody else.”

Morrison died on Feb. 5, 1989, less than four months after an article co-written by one of his former players, Tommy Chaikin, and Sports Illustrated’s Rick Telander detailed rampant steroid use by football players that was common knowledge among the coaching staff.

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“It was common knowledge that we were using the stuff. I had bottles of juice all over the place,” Chaikin wrote. “Coaches would walk in and see the stuff, but nobody gave a damn.”

Eventually, three assistant coaches — Tom Kurucz, Jim Washburn and Keith Kephart — were sentenced to short stays in halfway houses after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the scandal. Assistant coach Tom Gadd was found not guilty by a federal jury.

“They weren’t horrible people,” Gillespie said of the coaches involved, “but they were going to do what they had to do to win.”

Morrison was never formally charged with any wrongdoing related to the steroid scandal, but its impact shook his standing at the university. The article was published in the Oct. 28, 1988, edition of Sports Illustrated. The Gamecocks lost three of their next five games to finish that season. They fell 34-10 to Indiana in the Liberty Bowl on Dec. 28. Thirty-nine days later, Morrison was dead.

From 1983 to 1988, Morrison compiled a 39-28-2 record. His .580 winning percentage was the best of any coach at the school since World War II, and he, for a while at least, made South Carolina a force in college football. Despite all that, he is not a member of the University of South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame.

“A lot of people have told me — lettermen, university officials — that the reason he is not in the Hall of Fame is because they were fearful of what was going to happen had he survived,” said Moody, who is the chairman of the Hall of Fame. “I think it would have been delved into a little deeper had they not had a change of regime at that time, and I’m afraid it would have gotten pretty nasty.”

Dixon, a former Marine and captain of the Gamecocks football team in the 1950s, was hired as the athletic director three days after the Sports Illustrated story broke. He had two main marching orders: Find a conference affiliation for the school’s athletic teams and clean up the image of the athletic department. The Gamecocks were already on NCAA probation stemming from an incident in which multiple basketball players were found to have sold their tickets for profit.

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The NCAA credited Dixon’s leadership, in part, for not giving the school a major punishment related to the steroid scandal, and Dixon still remembers his visit with infractions officials.

“I called them,” he said, “and said, ‘What if I come a day early and take a look at what you have in your file drawers about us?’ They said, ‘Did we just hear you say you want to come a day early? You need to come about two weeks early if you want to view our file on the University of South Carolina.'”

Morrison had to go, though, and Dixon was going to be the one who had to deliver the news. No one could have imagined it would happen the way it did, though. At the age of 52, Morrison was found unresponsive in a shower after playing racquetball with friends at a court in Williams-Brice Stadium. He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 9:03 p.m.

“Joe wasn’t one to exercise a lot and take care of himself, but no one expected that. No one,” Moody said.

Every sports media member who was in Columbia at the time remembers where they were when they learned of Morrison’s death. Heffner was working in the offices of The State, which are less than a mile from Williams-Brice Stadium.

“We got the word there was an ambulance that had gone to the stadium, so I made a couple calls and went to the hospital,” Heffner said. “I was at the hospital when JeVena (his wife) came in.”

Gillespie, then a columnist for The State, got a call from Bob Cole, another sportswriter at the newspaper.

“He said, ‘Joe Morrison died,'” Gillespie said. “It was just such a shock. It was the last thing you expected to happen.”

For Morrison’s players, it was more than shocking. It seemed impossible.

“He was just absolutely full of life,” said quarterback Todd Ellis, who was one of the top recruits of the Morrison era and played for the Gamecocks from 1986 to 1989. “He had hands that looked like a blacksmith’s. He was grizzled. Tough. Everything that he did, it looked like a man who played in the NFL for more than a decade. We all know he had personal habits that were not good for anybody, but coming out of that era, they were not unusual for him. We just all felt like he was invincible in a lot of ways.”

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For Heffner, who had developed what he considered a friendship with Morrison, the most important “what if?” is not how things would have played out at South Carolina if he hadn’t died but, “What if it could have been avoided completely?”

In 1987, Heffner said, Morrison was offered the head coaching job at Cincinnati, his alma mater, and wanted to take it, but assistant coach Joe Lee Dunn talked him out of it.

“Joe Lee said, ‘We’ve come too far to take that step backward,'” Heffner said. “Joe (Lee Dunn) told me he wondered if Joe (Morrison) had gone to Cincinnati if that would not have happened.”

He also had discussions about the Cincinnati Bengals’ head coaching job, Heffner said.

“I remember telling him one time that (university president James) Holderman had actually told Bob Marcum (South Carolina’s AD who hired Morrison) that it might be better for everyone if Joe moved on. Joe said, ‘Well, I wish to hell they had told me that when I was talking to the Bengals.'”

All the “what ifs?” are, of course, moot. Morrison has been dead for more than 30 years. His legacy, however people choose to remember it, has never left the football team. When current head coach Will Muschamp began wearing all-black on the sideline (because it made him look slimmer, he said), everyone was immediately talking about Morrison, the school’s original “Man in Black.”

“I know Joe had his issues, but he did so much for the University of South Carolina,” Moody said. “I was really sad about his death and the thing that had transpired at the end.”

(Photos of Morrison courtesy of the University of South Carolina Athletics)