BYU sports teams have won 17 MWC championships since Holmoe became athletic director on March 1, 2005, but he nearly severed his tie to the school before it took root. He was not a member of the LDS Church when he arrived at BYU as a football recruit from California in 1978, and he nearly quit.

"I was way out of my element in a very different culture, homesick for my family and felt like a fish out of water," he said.

A BYU professor appeared to take a special interest in Holmoe, who later realized the man treated every student that way.

"The sweet spirit that radiated from (Joe Wood) was what first softened my heart to the gospel of Jesus Christ," Holmoe said.

Small gestures can change another person's day, he added, and should be extended to everyone.

"We must learn to reach out to those we don't know, to the discarded, the sick, those less fortunate, the inflicted, the lonely and those we don't necessarily understand."

Holmoe said most BYU students accept the scriptural premise of loving others as brothers and sisters, but "the issue is not so much that you don't accept a stranger as a brother or sister, as much as it is you simply have not conditioned yourself to serve them."

Holmoe chose to play defensive back for BYU because other schools ignored him after he suffered an injury in high school. He played on BYU teams that won Western Athletic Conference championships in 1979, '80, '81 and '82. In the NFL, he won Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers in 1984, '88 and '89.

He added college football conference championships as an assistant coach at BYU (1990 and '91) and Stanford (1992). Then he was part of another Super Bowl title in 1995, when he was the defensive backfield coach for the 49ers, who were quarterbacked by Holmoe's former BYU teammate Steve Young.

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