Chatting with John Pease over breakfast recently, you wouldn’t picture him, back in the day, scrapping his way through an NFL training camp.

The mild-mannered-sounding Pease, now 72, comes across as a cerebral leader, a combination of the different men he coached with — the calmness of Don James at Washington, the character of a Tom Coughlin with Jacksonville — and the fire and the discipline of Jim Hanifan at Utah.

Those qualities led to a coaching career that earned much respect and lasted nearly 50 years on several levels — NCAA Division I, community college, the USFL, the NFL and finally, back to college, before Pease retired following the 2015 season.

“He had great passion for the game,” said Jim Hanifan, who along with Pease was in Coeur d’Alene last weekend for their longtime pal Dale Nosworthy’s annual fundraiser golf tournament for a friend. “And he was that way as a player. … he came out of college and he signed with the Rams. All you had to do was pick up the L.A. Times, and check out the Rams practice, and the one thing you’d always find was, that rookie, every fight, that John Pease won the fight. I don’t know if he’s going to make it, but he’s fighting his (butt) off. They loved him. That’s what he brought to the table. If you have a love for the game, that spews out, to players and other coaches.”

THAT PASSION started to become fueled when Pease came home following a stint with the Army and pursued a coaching job at the University of Utah, his alma mater. Hanifan was coaching the Utes at the time (he wasn’t the coach when Pease played at Utah).

Just out of the service, Pease coached 8-man football, and decided he wanted to make coaching his career.

“So I walked into (Hanifan’s) office and said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” Pease recalled.

Pease worked two years at Utah as a graduate assistant (where he first met Nosworthy, then a receiver for the Utes), soaking up whatever knowledge he could from Hanifan.

“He gave me a good introduction,” Pease said. “How to play the game hard … I think there’s a lot of unwritten laws in football, like if you get the chance to blow somebody’s knee out, you don’t do it. You learn how to play the game.”

Most of Pease’s coaching work was as a defensive line coach and/or defensive coordinator, while Hanifan is known as perhaps the top offensive line coach in football history.

Several stops later, Pease coached against Hanifan in the NFL.

“I knew, and all the players that I coached, knew that they were going to be very disciplined,” Pease recalled of Hanifan’s teams. “And that was always my big deal (as a coach); we were always going to be very disciplined, we were not going to mess it up.

“And there were some great games. They beat us once at Washington, when (Doug) Williams was the quarterback, we held them on three downs from the 1-yard line, and on fourth down the quarterback kept the ball, booted, and walked in all by himself. … so you learn, don’t forget any little detail.”

Pease reiterated what Hanifan has often said about Nosworthy, co-owner of the popular Nosworthy’s Hall of Fame restaurant in Coeur d’Alene.

“He was tough; a tough, tough, tough guy,” Pease recalled of Nosworthy. “Physical. We laughed, Dale might have been an awesome guard, because he had a mean streak, (but) legal. If he had a chance to blow you up on a play, he’d blow you up. Very aggressive, smart … helluva player. He (Hanifan) kept trying to steal him as a guard.”

AFTER TWO years at Utah, Pease continued on the nomadic journey typical of assistant coaches. Five years at Fullerton Community College. Three years at Long Beach State. One year back at Utah, followed by five years working under James at the University of Washington, from 1978-82, where Pease coached the defensive line.

“The thing that stood out about Don was, he was so calm,” Pease said. “So many coaches would scream and yell, ‘we’re fumbling too much,’ or ‘we’re throwing too many interceptions,’ or ‘we’re not in the right spot.’ Well, Don would say, ‘OK, why are we not in the right spot, how do we fix it?’ If you sat in a staff meeting at the University of Washington, you would not know if we’d won or lost. He’d say ‘John, we had two offsides, let’s work on the cadence ... ‘ Or, ‘we were aligned too wide on slanting … ’ Or he’d watch the film from practice and see two players who were running down the sideline with the ball on the inside arm — ‘could we coach them to get it in their outside arm?’ That was our meetings, and it was, ‘let’s get those things fixed.’ And if we lost the game, if we had three offsides, we had two holding penalties, ‘we need to find a way to get some help for our left tackle … ’ That was his whole thing.”

FROM SEATTLE, Pease coached all three years the USFL existed — with the Philadelphia Stars in 1983 and ’84, as well as when the Stars moved to Baltimore for the 1985 season. The Stars played in the league championship game all three seasons — winning the last two. After that, a combination of financial problems and an ill-fated decision to move the spring league to the fall led to the collapse of the league.

“Loved it,” Pease said of his time in the startup league, where he coached the defensive line for the Stars. “We had the best team. We were in all three championship games and won two of them. Of our 22 starters, — excuse me, 24 starters, including (our punter) and our field goal kicker — 21 played in the NFL the next year, when the league folded.”

Pease is of the crowd that blames Donald Trump, who owned the New Jersey Generals of the USFL at the time, for the demise of the upstart league. Trump circumvented the salary rules of the league at the time — where teams could only pay big wages to one or two players — by signing several name players, like Herschel Walker and Doug Flutie, to exorbitant deals.

“Trump said, ‘I’m going to pay them whatever I want to pay them, and if you can’t keep up … ’ And we couldn’t keep up, but we still beat them,” Pease said.

Pease said he “loved” being on the ground floor of a new league, “and being able to start in Deland, Fla., with busloads of players coming in … building that thing from the very beginning. It was a lot of fun.

“One of the rumors was, they were going to take the Generals and the Stars, and combine them, and put them in the NFL, and the L.A. Express, and Arizona and Chicago, I think we were going to get two or three teams out of it, but the NFL owners wouldn’t go for it. That would have been pretty good. Imagine us and the Generals, that would have been a formidable football team.”

AFTER THE USFL, Pease went to the New Orleans Saints, where he was defensive line coach from 1986-94. He joined Coughlin with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 1995, and was there through 2002 — a span where the Jaguars twice came within a game of reaching the Super Bowl.

Then it was back to the Saints for a couple of years.

He was lured out of retirement in 2009, and was assistant head coach and defensive line coach at Utah for a couple seasons. He came out of retirement again in 2015 as defensive coordinator and D-line coach at Utah, before retiring — for good, he says — in January.

While at Utah, he helped the Utes transition from one of the top teams in the Mountain West Conference to one of the better football programs in the Pac-12.

Pease said coaching at Utah was much like coaching at Washington — you weren’t going to win too many recruiting battles on California kids who wanted to go to USC or UCLA. But he said there’s plenty of talent in California to go around, and if you could find some good “character guys,” even better.

Pease recalled another Don James story.

“We go to the Rose Bowl,” Pease said. “We lose to Michigan (in ’81) … the next year, we beat (Washington State) to go … That was our meeting — ‘Well, Jim (Lambright, assistant coach at the time), we had two holding penalties, we’ve got to fix that. John, we had this and that … ’ and we had just clinched the Rose Bowl. Jim Lambright walked into his office and Don’s looking at his yellow pads from the previous Rose Bowls to see where we stayed, how practice went, and Jim said, ‘are we going to say something to the players?’ and Don said, ‘what do you mean?’ He said, ‘we’re the only team out there other than SC to go to two consecutive or more Rose Bowls.’ And Don looked at Jim and said, ‘we’ve got good players, we’ve got good coaches, we should play well.’”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.