For about as long as Washington State has played football, its fans have judged the merits of its coaches on how often they tweaked the patrician schools on their schedule – the underdog making life delightfully miserable for the front-runners.

Inevitably, that has meant dishing out discomfort to the hated rival across the way, the Washington Huskies. Jim Sweeney did it, and so did Dennis Erickson and sometimes, Mike Price. Perhaps nobody was better at it than Jim Walden, who died Thursday at 88 after a short illness.

This one rattled the Cougar fan base, not only because Walden squeezed respect from the Huskies, but because at his death, he was fit and lively, with three engagements for lunch on the calendar in the next couple of weeks.

In an exchange of texts with me, his wife Nancy, wrote, “I guess God had other plans for him and needed a rebel coach up there to shake things up and get under Don James’ skin one more time.”

James, the stoic Washington coach from 1975-92, had a 6-3 edge on Walden, but that record was worth an asterisk. Twice, in 1982 and 1983, the Cougars beat the Huskies as double-digit underdogs, each one denying Washington a trip to the Rose Bowl. Those came a year after Washington did precisely the same thing to WSU.

“I always said, ‘Don, I’d have traded two for one,’ ‘’ Walden joked with me in an interview seven weeks before his death.

Those games carried sizzling implication, not to mention bolstering a suspicion that in some cases, some Cougar fans would celebrate Husky setbacks as readily as their own successes.

As Hugh Millen, the former UW quarterback, described WSU fans in my Apple Cup rivalry book, “Too Good to Be Through,” “I think the Cougars are their favorite team on Saturdays, and the Huskies’ opponent is their second-favorite team. And I think some Saturdays, that actually flips.”

Given the straits facing Walden the year he took over at WSU in 1978, his record there over 100 games, 44-52-4, doesn’t really capture his impact. He was the caboose in a chaotic train of four coaches in four years at WSU, following Sweeney, Jackie Sherrill and Warren Powers.

But he got the ’81 Cougars to the Holiday Bowl, the school’s first post-season appearance in 50 years. Earlier this year, that team was named to the WSU athletic hall of fame.

“The reason it was so gratifying to me was, these are the guys that took a chance to come to Washington State when everybody was telling you the next coach was leaving,” Walden told me.

That was his only bowl game at WSU, in an era when winning seasons – he had two more – weren’t always good enough for the post-season.

That was something that set Walden to howling, as if he needed any prompting to try to right a wrong. If the man had an opinion, he would leave no question what it was.

After an unsettling loss once to Cal, Walden said, “We got run over by a damn mo-ped.”

As time went on, he increasingly questioned the volume of support from WSU fans, In 1983, he complained at a booster gathering, “To hell with everybody who talks spirit and not support, because I’m getting sick and tired of having to overcome this.”

Outbursts like that brought James, who died in 2013, to the memorable zinger early in the week of an Apple Cup against Walden: “I’m a 2,000-word underdog.”

Walden and James and their wives seemed to get along well, something I mentioned to James in a 2010 interview. He hedged, alleging that in the controversial 1984 debate between Brigham Young and Washington for the national title, Walden had lobbied coaches to vote for BYU. When I broached the subject to Walden in 2023, he adamantly denied it.

A change in WSU administration finally pushed Walden over the edge after the 1986 season – “You can wear people out,” he said, “and I thought maybe I was into that area” – but he made a career misstep in taking the job at Iowa State, which was deathly short on manpower, and after a 28-57-3 over eight years, he was out.

“I will say this,” he told me. “I wish to hell I’d have had a (transfer) portal my first year at Iowa State.”

There's a bit of whimsy in the fact that Walden didn't really coach his last game at Iowa State. He was banned from the sideline, and from orchestrating in the coaches' box, after lambasting Big Eight officials for a non-call on a quarterback-roughing incident. "I sat with the radio guys," Walden said.

He got out of coaching and hooked on with WSU’s beloved radio play-by-play man, Bob Robertson, for 11 seasons. They put a crimson-and-gray tinge on the proceedings, and that seemed fine with Cougar fans.

Well into his 80s, Walden was hosting radio shows in Des Moines and Spokane, willing to visit his Mississippi twang on sports guests and fans alike. When I asked him in May what occupied him, he replied, “What do I do for fun? Go out to dinner. Visit with people.”

My old paper, the Seattle Times, ran an old photo today with his obit, taken at a Pullman restaurant before the 1986 Apple Cup. It shows James, looking a bit bemused at Walden, whose mouth is agape in laughter.

Forty years later, at a time of fraying rivalries, it’s a fitting epitaph, both for a relationship and the upstart who enlivened it.