The Lazarus Man has a secret past--
He's FSU grad Robert Urich

By Susan Bullington Katz
Special to the Florida State Times

If it hadn't been for FSU football...

Well, who knows what might have happened had it not been for FSU football? But it was while playing football at Florida State that Robert Urich took a knee in the helmet during the Alabama game. That 1966 injury took him off the field and put him behind the camera -- filming football games for Coach Bill Peterson.

Combine that with his own talk show (Mini-Break) on the FSU TV station and a B.A. in broadcasting, and he was on his way to becoming one of TV's most prolific stars.

Now, after Magnum Force, S.W.A.T., Vegas, Spenser: For Hire, and Crossroads, Urich is returning to nighttime television drama in Lazarus Man, which started in January.

Set in Texas just after the Civil War, the series features Urich in the title role, a stranger discovered after having been buried alive. The Lazarus Man has no memory of what's happened -- only a pocket full of Northern gold coins in his expensive Southern clothes. And, like The Fugitive, he's on the lam, trying to find out who he is before the guys who want to do him in know he's alive and take after him again.

Urich is proud of the historical authenticity of the show and sees Lazarus Man as educational as well as entertaining.

"I talked to a guy who watched the first episode with his 10-year-old son, and they both loved it," he said. "That made me feel good. [Education]'s not our primary goal, but that doesn't mean it can't be intelligent and thought-provoking, and I think it's always more interesting when it's based in fact."

Fact-based shows are nothing new for Urich. For three years he was host of National Geographic: Explorer, winning a Cable Ace Award and an Emmy for it in 1992. And in addition to Lazarus Man, Urich is still host of the half-hour show, National Geographic: On Assignment.

Since millions of Americans know Urich as Dan Tanna and Spenser, the natural question arises: how is Lazarus Man different from Dan Tanna? "Well, first of all," laughs Urich, "he's considerably older! Dan Tanna's 27, and this guy's 49, all right?"

And he's a bit of a way from the days of Mini-Break, but Urich remembers it well. It was in the late '60s, the days of Laugh-in, and the hour-long Mini-Break was live on Friday nights.

"It was like Letterman," says Urich. "We would interview people coming to campus, and we would do little skits and pranks. We'd say, `The next girl who comes down to the studio wearing a bikini, we'll give her dinner for two at Giannello's pizza house!' Very politically incorrect these days, I suppose, but then it was just for laughs."

He also was active in the theater department, and thought even then about becoming an actor. "But," he says, "it wasn't something you came back and told your steel-working father. So I sort of flirted with it."

His first part was in a production of The Cave Dwellers. "I played a mute -- no lines -- so I didn't have to worry about not remembering them!"

And all along he was playing football, or filming it. A football scholarship paid his way to Florida State, for which Urich thanks his biology teacher back at Toronto (Ohio) High School. Urich had made a name for himself playing on his high school team, and the biology teacher had been the coach when Bill Peterson played there. The biology teacher sent footage of the Toronto football games to Peterson, who by then was coach at FSU. In short order, Urich was on a plane to Tallahassee.

It was the end of February, Urich remembers, and when he left home in Ohio, the ground was covered with three feet of snow. By the time his plane set down in Tallahassee, it was 78 degrees.

"On the way to campus," he says, "they took us by the Reservation, and there were girls picnicking by the lake and people out on sailboats, and this was in February. I said, `Where do I sign up?'"

After FSU, Urich went to Michigan State University for a master's in broadcasting research and management, still skirting the notion of wanting to be an actor. Finally he went home and told his father. "I expected him to go through the roof," he says. "And he took this funny little pause and said, "Bob... you'd make a good cowboy!"

"He passed away 12 years ago," says Urich, "but I'm thinking now he must be smiling and looking down and thinking, `Yep, my boy has finally hit his stride.'"

The Lazarus Man is being shot in Santa Fe, N.M., so Urich and his wife, Heather, a former actor, have rented a house there for when they're not in their home in Park City, Utah. They also have a summer home in Canada, between Toronto and Montreal, and are thinking of buying some property in South Carolina.

While he was checking out some resort property there, in fact, he went out into the resort lounge and found several people sitting around watching an FSU football game.

"I went `Yeah!'" says Urich. "I come to the South and people will know about Florida State, and they can root with me! I'm in Utah and I'm watching the Seminoles on TV, and it's like, `What's wrong with Bob? Don't go in that room! He's watching Florida State!' Now I might have some company, which is what I need, somebody who understands that kind of fervor."