Bill McCartney, a football coach who in the 1980s took the University of Colorado from perennial losers to national champions, but who later left behind his $350,000 annual salary to refashion his locker-room message about prayer and sacrifice into a sprawling men’s evangelical movement, died on Friday in Boulder, Colo. He was 84.
The cause was complications of dementia, his family announced in a statement released by the university.
As the founder of the Promise Keepers, a men-only Christian group based in Denver, Mr. McCartney reached his greatest influence in 1997, when an event he staged in Washington drew an estimated half-million men to the National Mall. They sang, hugged, knelt and repented for their sins.
Historians described the movement as “one of the fastest-growing religious revivals in American history,” The New York Times reported afterward on its front page.
The group then lost momentum — but regained it in recent years, when new leaders relaunched it as a vehicle for supporters of Donald J. Trump to express a newly assertive Christian masculinity.
The Promise Keepers asked their adherents to commit to seven promises, all of which linked manliness with virtue. Among them were promises to honor Jesus Christ, establish brotherly bonds with several men, build strong marriages and practice sexual “purity.”
“A man’s man, a real man, is a godly man,” Mr. McCartney told a crowd of men struggling with homelessness and addiction at New York’s Bowery Mission Transitional Center in 1997. “A man’s man is a tender man.”
Mr. McCartney often preached to small groups, but he was best known for staging rallies attended by tens of thousands of men at football stadiums — venues where he had established special credibility as a coach.
In 1982, when Mr. McCartney took over the University of Colorado football program, the team had won only seven games over the previous three seasons.
As a recruiter in a family’s living room and as a coach of young athletes, he developed a reputation as a loving disciplinarian. “You’ve got to have rules with real strength,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1990.
His team was widely credited with toughness in the 1989-90 season, when players rallied around one another after the death from cancer of Sal Aunese, who had been the starting quarterback the previous year. The Buffaloes won 11 straight games, including victories over their rivals Nebraska and Oklahoma, on their way to the Orange Bowl in Miami.
They lost to Notre Dame, but they earned a rematch the next year and won, gaining the No. 1 ranking among college teams in an Associated Press poll of sports journalists.
Mr. McCartney won the Bear Bryant Award for the nation’s best college football coach in 1990 and was rewarded by the University of Colorado with a rich 15-year contract.
Just months earlier, at Sal Aunese’s funeral, Mr. McCartney had made a remarkable admission: His daughter, Kristyn, had just given birth to a child by Mr. Aunese.
“Despite my feelings and sense of betrayal, as a Christian I was obligated to forgive Sal,” Mr. McCartney wrote in 1990 for the Christian publication Guideposts.
Already, in the mid-1980s, Mr. McCartney had drawn scrutiny from the American Civil Liberties Union for conducting prayer sessions with his players before games and team meals at Colorado, a public university. But in the months after Mr. Aunese’s death — a “spiritual crisis” for the coach, The Times reported — religion took an even greater hold on his life.
He founded the Promise Keepers in 1990. The group’s first meeting drew 4,200 men to a basketball court in Boulder.
He drew more attention, and criticism, in 1992, when he was a leading proponent of a Colorado ballot measure, passed by voters, that prevented the state from enacting protections for gay men and women against discrimination. Mr. McCartney was widely quoted calling homosexuality “an abomination of God.”
His popularity only grew. By September 1994, The Times reported, a typical Promise Keepers rally was attracting 52,000 people. That November, after 10 consecutive winning seasons, Mr. McCartney quit football to devote himself to the organization. The Promise Keepers did not pay him a salary; he described the group as his “calling.”
He found that his evangelism was not unlike coaching. “I like to be around guys, to exhort them, challenge them,” he told The Times in 1997.
By the mid-1990s, the Promise Keepers had a budget of about $100 million, employed 345 people and could claim that millions of men had attended its events nationwide. One gathering was considered the largest ever of American clergy: 39,000 men of God.
Regular meetings consisted of men sobbing and chasing their tears with high-fives. They chanted, “Thank God I’m a man!” Thousands promised to be better husbands and fathers.
Mr. McCartney made serious efforts to include Black Christians. “We don’t feel their pain,” he sermonized in 1993. “The white man is in a stupor.” His daughter had given birth to another child by a former player of his, making him the grandfather of two interracial children, the first half-Samoan and the second half-Black.
His push for biracial fraternity did not change others’ perception of him as a misogynist and homophobe. In a 1997 letter to The Times, Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women at the time, described the Promise Keepers’ message as a “feel-good form of male supremacy.” In 2005, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center cited the group’s founding in a chronology of the anti-gay “crusade” of “the radical right.”
Nevertheless, men involved in the group often extolled its all-male atmosphere. “When a man sees a stadium full of other men crying, he figures it’s all right to cry too,” Donald Burwell, a Promise Keepers organizer in Detroit, told Time magazine in 1997. “With women there, he might not get that honest.”
William Paul McCartney was born on Aug. 22, 1940, in Riverview, Mich. His father was a Chrysler auto worker who instilled in his three sons a love for the Roman Catholic Church, the Irish, the Marines, the Democrats and Notre Dame football. Bill was captain of his high school football and basketball teams.
After failing to get into Notre Dame, he was accepted to the University of Missouri, where he played linebacker and helped beat Navy in the 1961 Orange Bowl. The next year, he received a bachelor’s degree in education. He went on to coach high school football and basketball in Michigan. Both his teams won state championships in 1973.
The next year, the University of Michigan hired him as an assistant to the head football coach, Bo Schembechler.
Around that time he attended a conference of the Campus Crusade for Christ and became a born-again Christian, converting from Catholicism. He began waking up at 4 a.m. to read Scripture and developed what he called a “compulsion” to evangelize to friends and strangers alike.
The vast 1997 Washington rally, called “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men,” seemed to augur that the Promise Keepers would be a major phenomenon in American life. But the event turned out to be the group’s high point. Several months later, with its system for collecting donations in disarray, the organization laid off its entire staff. It soon reconstituted itself as a smaller organization, although it continued to hold meetings that attracted thousands of men for several years.
In 2013, Mr. McCartney was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. A few years after an announcement in 2016 that he had dementia, the Promise Keepers were reimagined by a new generation of leaders.
Under Mr. McCartney, the movement had aspired to be nonpartisan. Now its gatherings host Republican politicians and hard-right provocateurs like Charlie Kirk.
“It’s not the same Promise Keepers,” Mark DeMoss, a former spokesman, lamented to The Times last year. “Promise Keepers was launched to help men in their marriages and their families, not to elect the next president or the next Congress.”
Mr. McCartney is survived by his daughter; three sons, Michael, Thomas and Marc; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Lyndi (Taussig) McCartney, died in 2013.
Years into Mr. McCartney’s evangelism for Promise Keepers, with its emphasis on how to be a more loving and spiritual husband, he encountered a crisis in his own marriage. In 1993, the couple’s pastor told The Times, Mr. McCartney confessed to an extramarital affair right before leaving to coach in the Fiesta Bowl. Mrs. McCartney said she spent subsequent months reading nearly 100 self-help books, struggling with bulimia and contemplating suicide.
The couple began attending Christian couples therapy. Mrs. McCartney spoke about raising four children without much help and making disorienting moves for the sake of her husband’s career. In his public speaking, a remorseful Mr. McCartney began to discuss suffering from “career idolatry” and having failed “miserably” to take care of his wife and children.
In 1997, Mrs. McCartney told The Times that “we’ve still got a long way to go” but that their marriage had improved. During a recent trip to Ixtapa, Mexico, she said, they had gone out to a romantic restaurant on the night of her birthday. The couple talked for three hours straight.
“I didn’t believe it: three hours,” she said. “It was a record.”