There’s no whistle hanging around his neck, but Tom Hayes is still coaching.

The interim head coach of the Kansas University football team in 2001 is the owner of the soon-to-open Tanner’s Bar & Grill at 15th Street and Wakarusa Drive.

Wednesday afternoon, Hayes was running around the inside of the sports bar coaching not players but employees of the restaurant. Specifically, he was instructing them on the fine points of hanging the various sports memorabilia on the business’ walls.

With almost every piece that a worker would touch, Hayes would have an order on how to hang it, making sure it was tilted just right or that it wasn’t a quarter of an inch too high or low on the wall.

“Coaching is all about paying attention to detail and making sure you are prepared,” Hayes said. “All successful business people are concerned about the details and are prepared.

“You can bet that I’ll be paying attention to everything because that’s just what I do. I can’t help myself.”

Hayes will open the doors on the 5,900-square-foot bar and restaurant at 5 p.m. Friday. It will be the 12th location in the Tanner’s Bar & Grill chain, which started 20 years ago in the Kansas City area.

It features a full bar, including 28 television sets in the eating area and two in the bathrooms. The restaurant serves steaks, pork chops, Mexican dishes, about 10 different hamburgers and a variety of sandwiches.

Hayes said the concept seemed like a natural for Lawrence because of the city’s strong interest in sports and the large number of Kansas City-area students already familiar with the Tanner’s chain.

Former Kansas University football coach Tom Hayes, left, discusses decorations with his wife, Cindy, at Tanner's Bar & Grill at 15th Street and Wakarusa Drive. The sports bar will open Friday.

“The name recognition we already have is going to be very big for us,” Hayes said.

The venture marks Hayes’ first step back into the public spotlight since serving as the interim head coach in 2001, when Terry Allen was fired with three games left in the season. Hayes, winless in his three-game stint, applied for the full-time job, but KU picked Mark Mangino. Before Hayes’ interim head coach gig, he served as assistant head coach at KU during the 2001 season.

The decision to trade the ultra-competitive world of college football for the ultra-competitive world of the restaurant industry revolved around his daughter Sarah. She’s a senior at Lawrence High School, and Hayes said he didn’t want to move his family to take another coaching job.

“We decided to take a break from the direction we had been going for the past 32 years and put down some roots in Lawrence,” Hayes said.

Before coming to KU, Hayes had stints as an assistant coach at Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and with the Washington Redskins in the National Football League.

He said opening the restaurant and leading a “team” of about 60 employees had been a good way to help partially satisfy an itch to get back into coaching. He said the organizational skills, the people skills and the ability to make lots of decisions were similar in both professions.

“In football, when you have to make a decision every 25 seconds in front of 80,000 people, that prepares you pretty well for the pressure of the business world,” Hayes said.

But Hayes admitted it still wasn’t the same as patrolling a football field on a fall afternoon.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can tell you that at 54 years old, I still miss coaching,” Hayes said. “I miss the teaching and spending time with the players.”