Holly's father was a physician who hailed from Detroit and her mother is a Midway native. She, like Bronco, enjoyed a rural upbringing. While Bronco grew up in Alpine, keeping busy with cutting horses, she grew up in Missoula, working with show horses.

In the mid-1980s, a friend who knew both Bronco's family and Holly's family suggested that Bronco, who was playing football at Oregon State, and Holly, who was enrolled at the University of Montana, meet each other.

The friend encouraged Holly to write Bronco a letter. "I wrote, 'Dear Bronco, my name is Holly,' " she recalls. "How dorky is that?"

Dorky or not, it was effective because the two began dating after that. It was a long-distance relationship that the two tried to manage with trips and phone calls between Corvallis and Missoula. After a year, the relationship waned. "He says I broke up with him," Holly says, "but I think he broke up with me."

Over the next 10 years, they say they didn't have any communication with each other. "I completely wrote him off," Holly recalls, though she adds that she kept up with Bronco's career through mutual friends, and she knew that he was an assistant coach at Oregon State. After graduation, she was living in Montana, running her travel agency and dating a lot. "I was 30," Holly says. "By LDS standards, I was an old maid, but I was not feeling a rush to get married. I was perfectly content."

Then, one day at the Salt Lake International Airport, Holly got off a flight from California where she had been visiting her then-boyfriend, a bull rider on the pro rodeo circuit. Suddenly, she saw a man wearing an Oregon State football jacket. "Do you know Bronco Mendenhall?" she asked him.

"Yeah," the man replied, pointing to the same gate that she had just walked out of, "he's sitting by me."

Holly glanced over and saw Bronco, who was catching a connecting flight to New Orleans for a coaching convention. The two became reacquainted during an hourlong conversation at the airport.

"It was the same gate that I had arrived in and he was leaving from, and I knew right then. It was a done deal. He was the one," Holly recalls of her chance encounter with Bronco. "Our conversation was deep, intelligent. It was weird. It felt like it was meant to be. We had clicked before, but the timing wasn't right. When we were dating, I wasn't sure I wanted to marry a football coach. I thought I needed more. We had both matured."

Bronco and Holly were married 18 months later, in 1997. When he proposed, he had just been fired at Oregon State. "Our honeymoon was going from Montana to Louisiana (after he was hired at Louisiana Tech)," she says.