It was a harsh awakening to the perils of being a football coachs wife.

For the first 20 years of her life, Eva Lindsey knew two places as her home: Budapest, Hungary, and Toronto. Then she married Dale Lindsey and it seemed as if a moving truck would always be parked in their driveway.

In the first year of their marriage, the Lindseys moved from Toronto, where Dale coached with the CFLs Argonauts, to New Orleans, where he was to begin a job with a new United States Football League team, and then in short order to New Jersey, because Dale couldnt pass up the chance to work for a very rich and idiosyncratic USFL owner named Donald Trump.

At one point, Dale was in Florida at training camp, the furniture was in New Orleans, and Eva was in Kentucky with Dales parents and his ex-wife, wondering what the heck she got herself into.

We get to New York, rent an apartment, Dale Lindsey recalled, and then Eva says to me, If you move one more time in the next year I will be back in Toronto and you will never see me again.

More than 30 years later, its a very funny story to both of them. In the course of their marriage, Dale Lindsey has held 15 coaching jobs. He has worked for seven NFL teams and three colleges, including USD, where the 69-year-old Lindsey is in his first year as the assistant head coach and defensive coordinator on Ron Caraghers staff.

His most cherished season came in 1994, when Lindsey led the Chargers linebackers during their Super Bowl campaign the highlight in seven years he spent in two stints with the Bolts.

Through it all, Eva was there, a 5-foot-1 Hungarian fireball, sophisticated yet tough, with a memorably thick accent, who did what is required of so many football wives: take care of the family, manage the house, be there for emotional support in good times and bad, and try to make your own life meaningful while your husbands passion is expended on a game.

The Lindseys finally found a place to call home, too. Even when they lost everything Dales football memorabilia and Evas family heirlooms and paintings when their house in Rancho Bernardo burned to the ground in the Witch Creek Fire five years ago, they rebuilt in the same spot because they couldnt imagine living anywhere else.

I have a fabulous life, Eva said.

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USD coach appreciates special life — and wife