War As They Knew It
Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest Back to Book Detail
Chapter 1
What Kind of Game?
Did it matter that Otis was one of Hayes's favorite players? Or that Otis's father roomed with Hayes for two years at Denison University? Or that Hayes had known Otis for years—and that Otis had spent his whole life preparing to play fullback for Woody at Ohio State?
Hell yes. Of course it mattered. With such close ties to Woody Hayes, Otis knew goddamn well not to fumble.
Hayes turned and rammed through the first two rows of players, then attacked with such force that Otis's Coke popped up in the air. And as he pounded away, Hayes screamed that Otis would never play for Ohio State again.
The Buckeyes had seen the flash of Hayes's temper many times. Normally, there was a way to prepare for it: make him stand on your right side. Hayes was left-handed; when he stood on your right side, he had to take a step back to throw that left-fisted punch, and you had a chance to get out of the way.
But Otis, wedged into the third row, had nowhere to go, and at that moment, so much seemed to be ending. The season was lost— Ohio State's record was about to fall to 2–3. There were rumblings that if Hayes lost the big season finale at Michigan, he would be fired. Otis, a sophomore, thought his career was finished (and in fact, he would be benched for the rest of that Illinois game and the two after that).
Had a picture been taken at that moment—an image frozen and passed around the nation, designed to provoke an instant reaction— most people would have reached quick, obvious conclusions: Hayes and Otis would never speak again; the coach would lose the respect of his players; and the Woody Hayes era at Ohio State would probably end. Every conclusion would have made sense—and every one would have been wrong.
Jim Otis never considered leaving Hayes's program; his love for the coach only grew stronger over time. As for the other players, Hayes sometimes angered them, but he never lost them. His influence on them was overwhelming.
The sheer size of a football team limits individual interactions between the head coach and each player, but Hayes was so powerful in those moments that many Buckeyes would say he was like a second father to them. He insisted that they graduate, and when they did, he coaxed many of them to go to law school. Some players considered him so morally incorruptible that long after they left Ohio State, they feared disappointing him.
Hayes told his players that their closest friends in the world would always be their Ohio State teammates. That was true, but when those friends got together, they inevitably started talking about Hayes so much that they started to sound like him. Hayes had such a profound effect on his players that years after he died, they would often speak of him in the present tense: "Woody has two rules: no drugs and no haters," they would say. Or: "He is the best teacher. When he goes to the board in a classroom, he is magnificent."
And on the topic of endings: the Buckeyes would win their final four games of 1967, saving Hayes's job. From there, they would put together one of the most dominant stretches in football history. And their excellence would trigger the greatest decade in the most storied rivalry in college football.
Nothing ended in that cramped locker room at Ohio Stadium.
This was actually one of the great beginnings in the history of sports.
But the Buckeyes could not possibly know that at the time. They just knew the Old Man was pissed off again. And that somebody ought to detach him from Jim Otis.
One of Woody's assistant coaches, Hugh Hindman, pulled him off.
Bo Schembechler was lost in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It was a snowy night in late December 1968, and Schembechler and his staff had piled into two cars in Oxford, Ohio, and headed north. They had left Miami University in Ohio for the University of Michigan, if only they could find it. Except for Schembechler and his defensive coordinator, Jim Young, none of the coaches had ever been to Ann Arbor. Now they were lost.
Where to go? Schembechler couldn't ask for directions to the school's football facility, because there wasn't one; the Wolverines had a dingy locker room tucked into a corner on the second floor of Yost Fieldhouse. The locker room had few toilets and poor ventilation; the resulting smell was so foul, players wanted to run out as soon as they could. But that was risky: the stairs outside the locker room were built for small men in loafers, not football players in cleats. When the players got downstairs, they had to go outside, through a parking lot, over a set of train tracks (or over couplings if there was a train stopped on the tracks), through another parking lot, and finally into Michigan Stadium, where they could begin practice.
Schembechler could have asked for directions to the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society, which was being held in Ann Arbor that week. SDS had been founded a few years earlier by Michigan alumnus Alan Haber and Michigan Daily editor Tom Hayden, and it had become the most powerful student organization in the country. As the Vietnam War became more unpopular, SDS grew in size and influence, and now it was about to crumble under its own weight, leaving splinter groups that favored more violent methods. (Haber had left Ann Arbor and SDS because there were too many factions pulling the organization in different directions.) But Schembechler, a thirty-nine-year-old footballaholic with a military buzz cut and very little interest in politics, surely didn't know about the convention.
If he got closer to campus, Schembechler could have listened for the strains of "2 + 2 = ?," one of the first anti-Vietnam rock 'n' roll songs. Written by Ann Arbor native Bob Seger, it outsold the Beatles in local stores; it would be rereleased in the autumn of 1969, as Seger's song gained resonance by the week.
But Schembechler was unlikely to listen to rock 'n' roll, or a protest song, and especially a rock 'n' roll protest song. Dissent did not sit well with the coach. (His new players would discover that quickly.)
Schembechler and his assistant coaches pulled over to a pay phone, called somebody from the athletic department, and finally found the campus. The university was on break, and because of a fuel shortage there was no heat in the campus buildings. The coaches had to meet Michigan athletic director Don Canham in the Pin Room of the Colonial Lanes bowling alley. Colonial Lanes was owned by Canham's friend Bob Ufer, who was broadcasting Michigan games on tiny WPAG in Ann Arbor.
After first making overtures to Penn State coach Joe Paterno, Canham had hired Schembechler for a salary of $21,000, only $1,000 more than the coach had made at lower-tier Miami. Schembechler's assistants planned to discuss their contracts in the Pin Room at Colonial Lanes, but that was a problem, because there were no contracts. Canham told the coaches they probably had five years to build a consistent winner. If the coaches failed, Canham said, they would all be fired—Canham included.
As Schembechler and his staff settled into Ann Arbor, Woody Hayes and Ohio State wrapped up the 1968 national championship by beating Southern California in the Rose Bowl. It was the fourth time Hayes had won at least a share of the national championship—among modern-day coaches, only Alabama's Bear Bryant had comparable credentials. Hayes celebrated by staying up until 6 a.m. editing the game film, then catching a flight to his favorite vacation spot: Vietnam.
This was Hayes's fourth trip to Vietnam. He spent most of his time showing Rose Bowl film to U.S. troops (they were eager to see Southern California star O. J. Simpson) and taking messages to relay to the troops' families when he returned home. Though much of the United States had grown disenchanted with the war, Hayes described it as his "best" trip. The national championship surely contributed to his mood. The 1968 team was considered Hayes's finest, but that distinction wasn't supposed to last very long; the 1968 Buckeyes started eighteen sophomores, so the 1969 team was expected to be even better.
Everything was looking up for Woody Hayes in January of 1969. Three weeks after he left for Vietnam, his old friend Richard Nixon would be inaugurated as president of the United States. The Ohio State Marching Band would perform at the inauguration. Nixon had opened the new year by watching Hayes's Buckeyes beat USC. (Anne Hayes, the coach's wife, had watched the Rose Bowl with a special guest: Tom Brownfield, a marine pilot who was recovering from burns suffered in Vietnam.)
Hayes and Nixon had met in 1957, when Nixon was vice president and the nation's most prominent football fan. Nixon later said that when he met Hayes for the first time, he wanted to talk about football and Hayes wanted to talk about foreign policy . . . so naturally, Nixon said, they talked about foreign policy. In conversation and on the football field, Hayes went right where he wanted to go. He now had a direct line into the White House, and calls would be made in both directions.
Ostensibly, Hayes was just another celebrity on a Bob Hope– esque tour of Vietnam. But the coach saw his trips as tours of duty. He ate in mess halls with troops. He insisted on boarding choppers to dangerous areas, against the advice of military personnel. He asked troops for their parents' phone numbers, and when he got home, he called dozens of parents to pass along messages from their children.
On this Vietnam trip, Hayes met Colonel George Patton III, whose father, the famous general, was one of Hayes's biggest heroes. The colonel was stunned at how much Hayes knew about his dad, but nobody who knew Woody Hayes would have been surprised. Two shelves of his tiny office at Ohio State were filled with Patton books. Hayes knew military history well enough to teach it—which he often did, to anybody who would listen.
Hayes rarely spoke of his own service in the Navy in World War II, though he privately (and proudly) told friends he was the only enlisted man to rise to the command of two ships. It's unclear whether he was actually the only man who achieved that, or how he could even confirm it. In any event, he did not dwell on the point. Hayes was far more inclined to speak of career military men—or even make them part of his program.
In 1967, when Jim Otis finally emerged from his fumble-induced benching to run for 149 yards against Iowa, he gave the game ball to Marine Corps general Lewis Walt, a friend of Hayes and one of the chief U.S. commanders in Vietnam. Walt also spoke to the Buckeyes at halftime of the 1968 Purdue game; with the score tied 0–0 and the national championship in jeopardy, Hayes turned his locker room over to a Marine general.
Why not? To Hayes, military conflict was not just a passion he pursued outside of football. It was as much a part of his coaching as blocking sleds. For years, when an Ohio State quarterback wanted to change a play at the line of scrimmage, he barked "Patton!" (if the Buckeyes were advancing on the ground) or "LeMay!" (if, like Air Force general Curtis LeMay, they preferred to annihilate their opponent through the air).
Hayes said the first safety blitz was not designed by Amos Alonzo Stagg or Pop Warner; it came from English admiral Lord Howard, who split the Spanish Armada in 1588, confusing the Spanish and securing victory. Germany lost World War II because it was caught in a double-team block from the Allies on the west and the Russians on the east. When the weather was nasty, Hayes held practice outdoors, telling his team, "If you're going to fight in the North Atlantic, you have to train in the North Atlantic." To emphasize the point, he wore a T-shirt at every practice, no matter how cold it was.
Hayes was infatuated with successful plans of attack, and though his teams were known more for stifling defenses, he was an offensive coach. He barely spent any time with the Buckeyes' defense. Hayes and his offensive assistants met in the Biggs Facility on the Ohio State campus, while the defensive coaches worked over in the school's basketball venue, St. John Arena. Hayes gave his defensive coaches only a few directives, and chief among those was that when the opposing offense had the ball near a hash mark (i.e., close to a sideline), the Ohio State strong safety would be on the wide side of the field. That way, the offense would either run into the strong safety—one of the best athletes on the team—or be trapped, like a retreating army, against the sideline, which Hayes referred to simply as "the alps."
Bo Schembechler quickly figured out the lay of the land in Ann Arbor, which was not the same thing as understanding the landscape. George Mans tried to help. Mans was one of two coaches whom Schembechler had retained from the previous coaching staff, and he knew that in early 1969, the distance from Oxford, Ohio, to Ann Arbor was much greater than it appeared on a map.
Although Mans didn't use these words, the reality was that if the University of Michigan had not already had a football program in that winter of 1969, nobody would have dared start one.
The sport was built on rigidity, a single authoritarian leader, repression of personal desires in favor of the team, and brute force. The campus favored experimentation, individual expression, free love, and peace. The university was a buffet of causes—racial harmony, sexual freedom, nuclear nonproliferation, Marxism, gay rights—and everybody seemed to pick at least one. The stunning part was the completeness of it all; Ann Arbor seemed like one city in which the Establishment's power was limited.
In March of 1965, a group of faculty announced they would can- cel classes for a day to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They eventually backed down and decided on a different approach: they would hold an extra class at night at Angell Hall, one of the main academic buildings on campus. Approximately three thousand students showed up for what became known as a "teach-in," the first of its kind. It would be copied by faculties around the country, and it put Ann Arbor at the forefront of the antiwar movement. By 1969, university president Robben Fleming had publicly stated his opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
When students protested, Fleming would plead with police: Let them protest. He even helped. In 1968, students had taken over the school's Administration Building, demanding higher black student enrollment. Fleming, figuring that he had plenty to do outside his office that day, simply let them stay there; every once in a while he would drop by and ask, "How are you coming?" The students left with the impression that their demands would be addressed.
The power of Students for a Democratic Society was diminishing, but only because more radical groups were gaining prominence. In March 1969, two months after Schembechler arrived, a faction of SDS called the Jesse James Gang locked itself in a room with a military recruiter to prevent interviews from taking place. Fleming refused to call the police. The Gang and the recruiter remained in the room for five hours. (The students were disciplined under the campus judiciary system.)
A year earlier, Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton told an interviewer that if white people wanted to help, they could form a White Panther Party. Ann Arbor residents Lawrence "Pun" Plamondon and John Sinclair took Newton's advice and created the White Panther Party. The party pushed a program of "rock 'n' roll, dope, and fucking in the streets," and one of its stated goals was "the end of money." Sinclair and Plamondon promised a "total assault on the culture."
Adding to the sense that everything was under siege, a serial killer had been terrorizing the Ann Arbor area, strangling and sexually assaulting young women; between 1967 and 1969, seven were killed and left nude or seminude where they could be easily discovered. The killings, known as the Michigan Murders, ended with the arrest of a twenty-one-year-old Eastern Michigan University student, John Norman Collins. Even the new Briarwood Mall on the outskirts of town contributed to the feeling that the town was slipping away from the townspeople, who feared downtown businesses would lose customers to the mall.
Because the counterculture movement was not just political but cultural, it seemed even greater than it was. Long hair, tie-dyed T-shirts, and bell-bottom pants were in style, even for political agnostics. Not everybody was a hippie, but to people of the previous generation, everybody appeared to be a hippie. The school's central campus was filled with "longhairs." When a longhair was arrested, the local sheriff, Doug Harvey, was known to have the young man's hair cut off.
Sometimes a group of conservative, middle-aged men would drive by and watch the longhairs through the car window, as one might watch animals on a safari; these men were Michigan football coaches on their lunch break. The coaches, both amused and appalled by what they saw, would soon return to their offices. Their players could not distance themselves so easily. They split time between the athletic grounds and the rest of the university, and it often seemed like they were attending two different schools or leading dual lives.
Michigan lineman Dan Dierdorf, one of the most talented players in school history, rarely wore his letter jacket on campus. As a large man with short hair, Dierdorf could not possibly blend in, but he tried. There were good reasons to stay anonymous. In the fall of 1967, Michigan freshman Pete Newell was chatting with a classmate before an introductory philosophy class. Newell played for the freshman football team (first-year students were not yet eligible for the varsity) and the classmate asked him about his game the previous weekend. The professor heard the question and looked at Newell.
"Game?" the professor asked. "What kind of game?"
A freshman football game, Newell replied.
"You're a football player?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing in my class?"
Newell was crushed. He had come to Michigan for the education as much as the chance to play Big Ten football, and now here was this professor basically telling him that was impossible. Newell decided not to tell any other professors that he played football.
In the autumn of 1967, Michigan's big rivalry game against Ohio State had only drawn 64,144 people to 101,001-seat Michigan Stadium. Periodically, reporters would ask Bob Forman, the executive director of the Michigan Alumni Association, if there was a serious movement afoot to fire coach Bump Elliott. Forman replied truthfully: No.
After the 1968 season, Elliott resigned anyway. His final team had been surprisingly successful; unranked at the start of the season, the Wolverines had climbed all the way to No. 4 in the country entering their last game, at Ohio State. But then Ohio State clubbed them, 50–14. It was Woody Hayes's greatest triumph to that point, and even more humiliating for Michigan than the score indicated.
Late in the game, with Ohio State leading 44–14, Hayes sent star Jim Otis back onto the field to score another touchdown. The Buckeyes then tried for a two-point conversion, which the Wolverines took as Hayes's attempt to rub it in. In fact, the two-point attempt was simply miscommunication—when Hayes realized what was happening, he tried to get his team to call timeout, but it was too late. When the game ended, Ohio State fans mobbed the field, forcing some Michigan players to use chairs as shields as they waded through the crowd to the locker room. When they got there, junior tight end Jim Mandich pulled the returning players together and told them, "We will not forget this." They vowed revenge.
Two months later, they were playing for a new coach. When Schembechler's hiring was announced, players immediately split into two camps: those who had never heard of Schembechler and those who wished they had never heard of Schembechler.
One of Michigan's running backs, Billy Taylor, grew up in Schem- bechler's hometown of Barberton, Ohio, and briefly considered joining him at Miami (Ohio). But when Taylor saw the hard-driving coach up close, he decided he was "nuts." Dierdorf had also been recruited by Miami but wasn't interested; when Miami assistant coach Jerry Hanlon showed up at Dierdorf 's high school unannounced, Dierdorf slipped out the back door and went home. On one of Schembechler's first days at Michigan, Dierdorf sat in the coach's office and thought, This can't really be happening. Not only was Schembechler the new head man, but Hanlon was now Dierdorf 's position coach.
Schembechler knew about the fears; they seemed to please him. In individual meetings with the players who had rejected him at Miami, he snarled, "You thought you were getting away from me, didn't you?" Elliott was beloved by his players. He rarely raised his voice and treated them like adults, not replaceable parts. The Wolverines had heard him use profanity just once—before a game at Duke in 1968, when he was annoyed that the visitors' locker room was so far from the field, he snapped and said, "Let's go kick the shit out of them!"
Schembechler suspected the players were soft. His conditioning drills seemed designed to return them to simpler times, when Neanderthals roamed the earth.
One drill was called the "Slap and Stomp." Two players would face each other in a wrestling ring and keep their feet moving as they slapped and pushed each other. The purpose of the drill was a mystery. During spring practice, Schembechler held two full practices a day, every day. He made the Wolverines hop up the fieldhouse steps— sometimes on one leg, sometimes with another player on their back.
At times, the players felt like caged animals—especially when Schembechler put them in cages. He had his reasons: the coach wanted his offensive linemen's first move to be out, instead of up, so he told them to assume their stance in a cage, where they had no choice but to jump forward. Nothing was left to chance. Schembechler wanted his linemen three feet apart—he measured with a yardstick, and if they were off by more than an inch or two, he would smack them in the calf with the yardstick. Sometimes he smacked them so hard that the yardstick broke.
Some players left the program. Many thought about leaving. And some who stayed did so simply to spite Schembechler. (That was fine with the coach—he didn't care what motivated them, as long as something did.) In Schembechler's first month on the job, a player named John Prusiecki walked into his office. Prusiecki hadn't played much the year before.
"I'm quitting," Prusiecki told Schembechler.
"You can't quit!" Schembechler barked. "Who do you think you are to quit?"
"This isn't the Army. I can quit if I want to quit."
Schembechler looked at Prusiecki.
"Okay," the coach finally said. "What's your name?"
Prusiecki cleared out his locker and started walking out of Yost Fieldhouse. He saw the sign that Schembechler had hung there, almost taunting those who thought about leaving the program: THOSE WHO STAY WILL BE CHAMPIONS. Prusiecki grabbed a magic marker and wrote underneath, "And those who leave will be doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, bishops, generals, statesmen and captains of industry." And then he left.
Prusiecki was not alone. The only reason the players did not stage a full mutiny was that Schembechler was working even harder than they were. When players passed the athletic campus late at night, his car was usually in the parking lot.
Don Canham, the athletic director, liked that Schembechler was a "details man." Every assistant coach had specific responsibilities. (Larry Smith, for example, was in charge of finding the players who avoided Schembechler by hiding behind the steel support posts at Yost Fieldhouse.) Under Schembechler, meetings began five minutes early: players who showed up at 1:57 p.m. for a 2 p.m. meeting were considered late. Even his personal life was a model of efficiency: between the 1967 and 1968 football seasons, he had met his wife, Millie, married her, and adopted her three children. Now he was preparing for the birth of his first child.
As Prusiecki discovered, Schembechler was not going to let some nameless player change how he operated. With every near-rebellion, the coach grew more intense. At one practice, Schembechler got so mad at assistant coach Dick Hunter that he chased Hunter down the practice field—a fifty-yard sprint, one coach chasing after another, while the players watched in amazement, wondering what Schembechler would do if he caught his assistant. Tackle him? Beat him up? Luckily, they never found out—Hunter outran his boss. Another time, safety Barry Pierson and Mandich got in such a wild fight, it even stunned Schembechler. He kicked Pierson out, then turned to his tight end.
"And Mandich!" Schembechler screamed. "You precipitated the fracas!"
Players tried not to laugh.
Precipitated the fracas?
Who says that in anger?
As they were discovering, Schembechler's greatest gift was with the language. He spoke every sentence like nobody had ever uttered those words before—hitting the phonetic high point of every word, making it his own. This skill pre-dated his desire to coach. When he was a student at Miami from 1947 to 1951, he aspired to be a sportscaster; as he walked to class with friends, he would announce a baseball game being played in his head.
Schembechler surely would have been an excellent sportscaster, but it was probably best that he never pursued that dream. Most sportscasters of the day had a signature phrase, and Schembechler's was "son of a bitch." Once you heard him say "son of a bitch" (and it didn't take long), you wondered why anybody else would even try. When warning players to stay away from alcohol (at this point, the coach was comically oblivious to the drug culture), this is how he phrased it: "Don't dissipate your body." They didn't necessarily take the advice, but they remembered the words.
Ann Arbor had not always been a leftist stronghold. From 1931 to 1957, the city's mayors were all Republican. In 1952 and 1956, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Democrat Adlai Stevenson by a ratio of more than two to one in Ann Arbor. In a 1960 campus straw poll, Richard Nixon beat John F. Kennedy for president (though ultimately Kennedy barely carried the city).
But the city's political profile had changed at a startling pace; in less than a decade, the campus had become a counterculture mecca, and the effect was jarring. In 1960, Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara had lived in the Geddes neighborhood in Ann Arbor. He would take peaceful evening walks through the university's Diag, the unofficial center of campus. McNamara had left Ford to be the U.S. secretary of defense. In that position, he oversaw the escalation of the war in Vietnam. By the end of the decade he would not have been welcome in Ann Arbor at all.
The actual number of true believers in "the movement" was hard to quantify, but it seemed like the radicals were swallowing up new chunks of society at every turn.
It was the kind of development that deeply upset Woody Hayes. He preferred the 1950s, when "the air was clean and sex was dirty." He did not understand how so many people could openly question military leaders, the president, or other authority figures.
He told his players many times, "We're tearing down all our heroes in America."
It pained him to say it. Hayes had many heroes. Most had a military background, but one of his favorites was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century author, poet, and philosopher. Hayes owned a copy of almost everything Emerson had ever published, and he quoted him as a religious zealot might quote the Bible. His favorite essay was "Compensation," which began:
"Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught."
Hayes himself was not a particularly religious man. He said his religion could be summed up in the words of his mother, Effie: "God made you and put you on earth, and the rest is up to you." In that sense, he was devout. Woody Hayes saw every waking moment as a chance to shape the world.
Hayes spent more time in hospitals than some doctors; he would drop in, ask the nurses, "Who hasn't had visitors today?" and make his rounds. He did not advertise his hospital visits—if a reporter had written about them, he would have been furious—but because of his fame word filtered out, and Ohio State fans often asked him to visit sick friends or family members. He almost always complied. Hayes told his players they had been blessed with the chance to play the world's greatest sport for Ohio State University, but the proper response was not to pay back Woody or Ohio State.
"You can never pay back," he said, "but you can pay forward."
Hayes repeated it so often, people assumed he had coined the saying. He was quick to correct them. This too had come from Emerson's "Compensation":
"In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from who we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort."
Hayes rarely enjoyed any downtime, even with his own family. He often slept on a cot in his office instead of at home with his wife, Anne. (They had a son, Steve, who was a student at Ohio State's law school.) Hayes had very few hobbies and was not inclined to relax with friends. He much preferred an intense discussion of world affairs.
Every conversation had a purpose. Whenever possible, Hayes dined at the Ohio State Faculty Club, where he would engage other members of the faculty in a conversation about the Battle of the Coral Sea or ancient Greece or something of similar gravity. The Faculty Club appealed to him because it was open only to faculty members and their guests, and Hayes, in addition to being a football coach, was a tenured professor in the department of physical education. He was especially proud of that, because his father, Wayne Hayes, had been the schools superintendent in his hometown of Newcomerstown, Ohio.
It was fair to wonder why a man with such disparate interests and such a deep desire to affect society would devote his life to coaching a game. To Hayes, that was a flawed question. Football was not just a game to him; he believed that within the Ohio State football program one could find the ethos that had made America great. Football players sacrificed for the betterment of the team. They did not question their coach. They stayed clear of drugs (or so he believed). Hayes often said his players were the finest students on the Ohio State campus, because the combination of athletics and academics forced them to work harder than other students.
Football created heroes for a country that badly needed them. Following the basic tenet of his mother's "religion"—God created him and the rest was up to him—Woody Hayes's Sunday mornings were spent not at church but behind a film projector.
Hayes rarely sought publicity of any kind, but he liked the public nature of the football program. Unlike most coaches, he never hid in his office. His phone number was listed and his address (1711 Cardiff Road) was common knowledge in Columbus. He was proud to have his team's discipline and tenacity on display every Saturday in the fall. The people in the stands could learn from it. Like most esteemed lecturers, he did not appreciate when people questioned his teachings; in postgame press conferences, he often gave terse, coarse answers to the most innocuous questions.
Hayes did not even like when his assistant coaches suggested a change. He believed his program had an inherent rightness—or even righteousness—and that others should feel the same way. In 1956, he had given small loans to poor players out of his own pocket, and was so sure this was within the spirit of amateurism that he told Sports Illustrated about the loans without prompting. The Big Ten placed him on probation for his transgression, but the coach did not believe he had done anything wrong.
"To believe your own thought," Emerson wrote, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius."
With the exception of his military service, Hayes lived his entire life in the state of Ohio. He grew up in little Newcomerstown, on the east side of the state; attended Denison University, thirty-two miles outside Columbus; and only coached in the state. Hayes was proud of that. He felt that Ohio represented all that was great and pure about America, and Columbus was central Ohio in every way: geographically, culturally, temperamentally. It was a city of steeples and front porches, and it was dominated by three pillars of the Establishment: the state government; more than three dozen insurance companies with headquarters there; and Ohio State football.
The Buckeyes were more than just a local team. They were the prism through which Columbus viewed itself. The passion was so great that it had consumed the three men who coached before Hayes; Paul Bixler, Carroll Widdoes, and Wes Fesler had all resigned at least partly because of the intense pressure, earning Ohio State its tag as the "graveyard of coaches."
Hayes had survived for eighteen years in Columbus. By 1969, coming off one national championship with another one surely on the way, he had raised his profile. He was not just the head coach at Ohio State. To many, he was Ohio State.
Hayes understood instinctively that the key to longevity in Columbus was beating Michigan. In 1934, Ohio State coach Francis Schmidt had spoken for his whole school when he said the Michigan players "put their pants on one leg at a time, the same as we do!" Since Schmidt's declaration, any Buckeye who beat Michigan received a miniature pair of gold pants.
While other coaches fled from that pressure, Hayes elevated the rivalry's importance. He made it clear that the Ohio State–Michigan rivalry was not just between schools but between states. He said the rivalry started in 1836 when President Andrew Jackson forced Michigan to cede Toledo to Ohio in order to gain statehood. (One hundred and thirty-three years later, Toledo was still split territory: Michigan fans were as prominent in the city as Ohio State fans.)
Hayes was famous among fans and reporters for never saying "Michigan"—he always called it That School Up North. This was not just a show for the public. Hayes's players and assistant coaches never heard him say the word "Michigan." It was always—always—That School Up North.
Some figured this was just a motivational ploy. Others believed that Hayes had a certain disdain for Michigan, which thought of itself as a "public Ivy," academically superior to other Big Ten schools. (By 1969, Ann Arbor's radical bent surely didn't endear the town to him.)
Whatever Hayes's true feelings, his public comments clearly made him more popular in Columbus. The city felt like an overgrown college town. Its chief industry, insurance, took hold in the first half of the twentieth century, when businessman Murray Lincoln determined that the risks in rural areas were lower than in urban ones, and insurance rates should reflect that. Woody Hayes, a champion of the American small town, would have agreed instinctively. Lincoln's company, Farm Bureau Mutual, grew so much that in 1955 it changed its name to Nationwide.
Like Murray Lincoln, Hayes had a philosophy that meshed with his vision of Middle America. More than any other great coach in football history, he thrived on simplicity.
In 1961, Ohio State had no more than a dozen offensive plays— that's all the Buckeyes ran for the entire season. That meant that in a given game, every play would be called a few times, and his favorite plays (basic off-tackle runs) were called so often, everybody in the stadium could recognize them. The team had Paul Warfield, who would go on to make the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a wide receiver— but Hayes put him at running back and defensive back, and Warfield barely caught any passes.
When he wanted to pass that season, Hayes would often remove his normal running quarterback for a superior passer, telegraphing his play preference to the other team. Ohio State used a single snap count the whole year—when the quarterback shouted "Go!" the center would snap the ball. Naturally, opposing defenders figured this out rather quickly. "They're snapping it on ‘Go!' " they told each other excitedly, as though they had just cracked some top-secret code.
The Buckeyes would just laugh. They had reason to. That year, with a dozen offensive plays, gross misuse of one of the best re- ceivers in football history, and the most obvious snap count imaginable, they won the national championship.
And they won it largely because of coaching. Hayes demanded that his players repeat a technique one thousand times, until every muscle and joint moved in precisely the right way. Then he would make them do it again. He wanted to take the entropy out of the game; he loathed fumbles, penalties, and any other mental errors, and his teams seldom made mistakes. If every man executed his individual assignment better than the opponent, then Hayes's eleven would outplay the other coach's eleven on that play—and if that happened repeatedly, his troops would march down the field efficiently.
Patton said wars were fought with weapons but won by men. Woody Hayes let others invent new weapons. He made sure he had the best men.
His players quickly discovered that it was not enough to perform the same technique again and again; Hayes wanted maximum effort on each attempt. To that end, he used extreme motivational techniques. If a player made a mistake in practice, Hayes often hit himself in the head—not just the occasional slap to the forehead, but all-out punches to the face.
At other times, he would take off his glasses and step on them (he went through a dozen pairs a year) or take off his watch and break it. Players suspected that some of it was an act—there were whispers that Ohio State trainers cut Hayes's hats before practice, to make them easier to tear later—but they knew it wasn't all an act, and part of Hayes's genius was the mystery. Players could never quite tell when he was acting and when he had lost his mind. It was not the sort of question one asked.
One of the stars on that 1961 national championship team, offensive lineman Daryl Sanders, had two dreams about Hayes when he was in college. Actually, Sanders had the same dream twice. (That's how thorough Woody Hayes was—his players even repeated their dreams.) In the dream, Woody was in full tirade mode at halftime when men in white lab coats walked into the locker room and carried him away. Then Sanders's position coach stood up and said, "It's okay, men. Let's go! "
The position coach was named Bo Schembechler.
Like many people, Bo Schembechler heard the legend of Woody Hayes before he saw it—and like many people, Schembechler didn't believe his ears. In the spring of 1949, he was an offensive lineman and left-handed pitcher at Miami University, which meant he skipped spring football practice to play baseball. His buddies told him about this crazy new coach, who grabbed players and screamed like they'd never heard before.
Schembechler figured nobody could be that tough. He was wrong.
Once he returned to the football field, Schembechler quickly joined in the team pastime: hating Woody Hayes. It was easy, and they were good at it, but by the next year, Hayes was . . . well, maybe not beloved, but appreciated. The Miami players realized that his methods produced winning results, and that Hayes gave as much as he asked.
Schembechler became especially fond of the coach—without ever saying it, Schembechler and Hayes saw their own stubbornness and fire in each other. At the end of that season, the Ohio State job came open. During a game of handball, Hayes asked Schembechler if he had any idea who should get the job. Schembechler told Hayes he deserved it. Then they resumed playing handball, a game that suited their dispositions: man against man, alone in a room with no equipment.
Before Hayes left for Ohio State, he told Schembechler to take summer classes and that Hayes would make sure the tuition was covered. (Schembechler was on an athletic scholarship, but it did not automatically cover the cost of summer classes.) As Schembechler was nearing graduation, he received a bill for the classes. He could not afford to pay it. He called Miami athletic director John Brickels and told him of Hayes's promise, but Brickels said he knew nothing about it.
Schembechler then called Hayes at Ohio State. Hayes promised to take care of it—and did. Schembechler never found out how Hayes paid the bill; it was quite possible that he paid it himself. Woody Hayes never worried about money, except when somebody else didn't have enough. When he got to Ohio State, he regularly turned down pay raises. (He said he was doing his part to fight inflation.)
The handball games resumed a few years later, when Hayes hired Schembechler as an assistant at Ohio State. Their lockers were next to each other. Hayes would call Schembechler at 6 a.m. on Sundays and tell him that if he didn't come down to the handball court in the next twenty minutes, he was obviously not man enough to face him.
Officially, Hayes decried profanity, but in competitive situations he could not help himself. He and Schembechler would paint the air blue. Schembechler, the younger man and better natural athlete, always won. One day Schembechler was annoyed at having to play and he let Hayes win. Woody then told all of his assistants he had beaten Bo at handball. It was as if all the other games didn't count because Woody Hayes didn't count them.
That bullheadedness could be infuriating, but it was part of what made Hayes so successful. In Schembechler's first year on Hayes's staff, he tried to suggest a different blocking scheme for one of Hayes's running plays. Hayes insisted he was wrong, Schembechler persisted, and they went back and forth until Hayes finally said, "Oh yeah? How many games did you win last year?" Schembechler had been an assistant under Ara Parseghian at Northwestern. The Wildcats had gone 0–9.
Schembechler shut up.
Despite the arguments (or maybe because of them), Hayes loved having Schembechler on his staff. Schembechler lived for football, and he had no inclination to establish a personal life outside of his work—he was even married, briefly, to Hayes's secretary.
Hayes and Schembechler were so alike that Ohio State beat reporters took to calling Bo "Little Woody." Schembechler told them he didn't understand the moniker and he resented it. But privately he would chuckle. He knew it was accurate. So did Hayes. In another handball game, after the 1963 season, Schembechler told Woody that he wanted to leave Ohio State to take the Miami head coaching job.
"You can't take it," Hayes said. "You're going to be the next coach at Ohio State."
Hayes then explained that he only planned to coach for three to five more years. Schembechler was skeptical. He left for Miami. If Schembechler had stayed he would have hung on forever: Hayes would coach sixteen more years at Ohio State.
At least Schembechler would have had job security. Hayes proudly told people he had never fired an assistant coach. If a coach wasn't getting the job done, Hayes would somehow make up for it.
Oh, Hayes had often told coaches they were fired; it was his way of ending the conversation and letting the assistant coach know who was in charge. Most assistants had to be fired a few times before they caught on. When Hayes told assistant coach George Chaump he was fired during Chaump's first meeting at Ohio State, Chaump walked out of the meeting embarrassed, only to hear Woody call after him: "George, goddammit, get back here! I never fired anybody—I'm not going to break my record on you."
Schembechler thought that if he showed similar loyalty—and got similar on-field results—then his players would deal with his brutal methods. Other Michigan coaches weren't so sure. They advised him to ease up. But Schembechler would not soften. He told his coaches they had been hired to beat one team: Ohio State. If they needed extreme measures to do it, that was fine with him.
They were practicing karate. They would get up before the sun rose over southeast Michigan and repeat all sorts of kicks and punches. It was an odd skill set, and it is unclear why they needed it, but they were determined to topple the biggest and most powerful foe they had ever faced: the U.S. government.
There were maybe thirty of them in a park in Detroit, radicals with revolution in mind. Of the thirty, around a dozen had attended the University of Michigan. Others had lived in Ann Arbor. Most had been part of Students for a Democratic Society. They were sure that the peaceful demonstrations of the antiwar movement did not go far enough. The United States was bombing its enemy, so why couldn't they?
One of them, a young man named Bill Ayers, had tried to walk on to the Michigan football team a few years back. Ayers was a 145- pound offensive lineman; the Michigan program had been down, but not that far down, and Ayers never joined the team. Now he was on a different kind of team: fighting the Vietnam War . . . fighting the status quo . . . fighting, fighting . . . and now he was in Detroit, punching the early-morning air.
More than a year had passed since President Lyndon Johnson spoke of "peace in Vietnam" in a nationally televised address. The night of Johnson's speech, Ayers and school president Robben Fleming shouted at each other through bullhorns on the steps of Fleming's house. Despite Fleming's antiwar, tolerate-the-protests stance, he was still considered part of the Establishment to many radicals, and Ayers would let him know it with his favorite greeting: "Fuck you, you motherfucker!" Fleming was not the type to curse back.
"Congratulations," Fleming told Ayers on the night of LBJ's address. "You've won. The war will end soon."
That was March 31, 1968. Now it was the summer of 1969 and the war had not ended. Ayers and his comrades were going to do something about it. They formed their own guerrilla army. Inspired by a lyric from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), they called themselves the Weathermen.
In mid-June 1969, Michigan safety Thom Darden was relaxing in front of the Michigan Union. The area was known as a good spot to check out girls. That reputation was about to be enhanced. He thought he was watching a drama club practice when the actors, both male and female, stripped off their clothes and ran naked down South University Avenue.
A riot was under way. Well, the police called it a riot; others said they were merely trying to "liberate" South University Avenue. (Fleming, the university president, said most of the rioters were not students, and as always, he begged police not to overreact.) It lasted two days. There were forty-seven arrests and twenty-two injuries, but what Darden would remember most was people having sex in the street as pedestrians watched and celebrated.
On the second day of the uprising, police tear-gassed a number of people in front of East Quad, including Pun Plamondon of the White Panthers, who became disoriented and ran into a stop sign, splitting his forehead. The next day, Plamondon joined Michigan student leaders in denouncing the massive police presence on the rooftops along South University. They then led the crowd toward a plaza by the Michigan Union, where they drank beer and smoked pot next to the newly acquired sculpture there: a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cube, balanced on one of its corners, which could whirl around with just a little push.
Bo Schembechler surely never saw the riot/liberation. He spent his days over on the athletic campus, working the dawn-to-midnight shift. On his only real break from work that year, he took his family to the Leelanau Peninsula on the western side of Michigan for what was supposed to be a two-week vacation. After five days, Schembechler left to attend a football clinic in Milwaukee. He picked up his family on his way home.
Another time, restaurateur Win Schuler held a picnic for the Michigan and Michigan State staffs. The highlight was supposed to be a donkey race between Schembechler and Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty, but alas, nobody informed the donkeys. They refused to move. The race was declared a draw (which must have annoyed Schembechler, who hated ties).
Though it failed, the Win Schuler picnic was an appropriate promotion for Michigan in 1969: new athletic director Don Canham loved unconventional marketing and Schembechler loved hamburgers. The coach's sole concern was football; he had given up handball and regularly blew past his recommended daily allowance of junk food, which he ate while he worked.
Canham had been the Michigan track coach before becoming athletic director, but unlike most athletic directors, he was a highly successful businessman. His company, Don Canham Enterprises, sold video, athletic, and educational materials. When Canham became athletic director in 1968, the company was valued at $5 million, renamed School-Tech, and put into a trust. Canham immediately sat down with outgoing athletic director Fritz Crisler to look at the budget. The department was projecting a $200,000 loss.
"Fritz," Canham said, "whaddya say we put the athletic department in a trust and work at School-Tech?"
Canham stuck around, but School-Tech was never far from his thoughts—he knew he could always go back to his company if he got fired, so he was free to run the athletic department as he chose. He was full of ideas. Canham remembered the 37,000 empty seats for the 1967 Michigan–Ohio State game, and he was determined not to let it happen again. In July 1969, with 25,000 tickets still unsold, he advertised the game in Ohio newspapers. It was a highly unusual move. Football games were seen as community events, not commercial ventures. But Canham wanted a sellout, and when Ohio State fans gobbled up the remaining tickets, he got it.
Some Michigan boosters thought Canham had gone too far. In truth, he was just getting started. A few years earlier, on a track team road trip to UCLA, he had walked into a campus bookstore full of UCLA pennants and sweatshirts. This was unusual. Canham asked UCLA athletic director J. D. Morgan how the athletic department got into the sweatshirt business, and to Canham's surprise, Morgan said UCLA wasn't really in the sweatshirt business. The bookstores had complete rights to the items.
Canham filed that away. When he became athletic director at Michigan, he immediately designed several logos on his kitchen table at home—a block "M" with a wolverine in the middle, a block "M" with the word "Michigan" written through it—and slapped them on all sorts of items: T-shirts, ashtrays, playing cards. Other schools weren't even selling sweatshirts, and here was Canham, hawking everything.
Canham was a born salesman. As a student at Michigan in the early 1940s, he bought used sweatsocks for eight cents a pair, then resold them for a quarter. A man who has sold used socks for a 200 percent profit tends to feel he can sell anything. In Canham's first year as athletic director, he expanded the athletic department mailing list from 100,000 to 400,000, and paid for the increased mailing partly through merchandise sales.
This could be big, Don Canham thought. Really big.
How revolutionary was Canham's vision? In 1969, Woody Hayes's old tackle Daryl Sanders interviewed for a job as president of something called NFL Properties. In that role, he would be in charge of all merchandising for the pro football league. But Sanders didn't like what he heard at the interview. He got the impression the company was happy just to break even.
Canham thought the ceiling was higher. But not even he understood just how high. Before he left work each day, he walked through the hallways to make sure everybody had turned the lights off. The electric bill wasn't going to pay itself.
"I do not wish to treat friendships daintily," Emerson wrote, "but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know."
When Bo Schembechler got the Michigan job, Woody Hayes did not send him a note or a card. Hayes did not even call his protégé to wish him well. This is what Schembechler expected, and maybe even what he preferred. Their kinship was based on being so much alike, and one way they were alike is that they did not express their deepest feelings. Besides, Hayes had never fraternized with a coach from That School Up North before. He was not going to start now.
Their relationship—which started as coach-player, then became coach-assistant—was about to enter a new phase: competitors in the nation's most storied football rivalry. To a generation of football fans, their names would be intertwined. NCAA rules in 1969 allowed schools to appear on national television only three times in a two-year span, so for many fans the only chance to see Woody Hayes or Bo Schembechler was when Ohio State played Michigan.
In all the years of their rivalry, Hayes and Schembechler would rarely speak to each other. There would be a few exceptions: on the field before their annual season-ending game; at Big Ten meetings in the summer; and on a few occasions when circumstances were so grave that even these two men had to confront their feelings. In this time of self-enforced separation, a decade would pass, each man's public image would change drastically, and their country would become a much different place. And yet their competition would be so intense—and the value they placed on it so great—that in the ten years in which they rarely communicated, Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler would become closer than ever.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Rosenberg
