Archie Griffin gets statue at ‘House that Harley Built’, so is one for Chic coming next?

When fans arrived at Ohio Stadium today for Ohio State’s football season opener against Akron, they were greeted by a statue of Archie Griffin.

You’d have to be out of your mind to oppose a statue for Griffin, one of the great players in school history, the only two-time winner of the Heisman Trophy, a terrific role model and one of the world’s nicest guys. Griffin is a Columbus native, and if the city decided to erect a statue of him on the spot outside of City Hall vacated by Christopher Columbus, it would be difficult to oppose it. Who better to represent the city than Archie?

But it’s funny how things work. For more than twenty years, Ohio State’s previous two athletic directors rejected suggestions from historians, old-timers and many devoted fans that Chic Harley, a local kid who became the school’s first huge football star, should have a statue outside of the Horseshoe. The stadium was built because of explosion in interest in OSU football created by Harley and his OSU teams in 1916, 1917 and 1919, so much so that it became known as the House that Harley Built.

The ADs, Andy Geiger and Gene Smith, were always careful to explain that Ohio State had too many football heroes to single one out, and that if the school erected a statue to any one player, it would invite a flood of complaints from fans who thought another player should receive a statue. The argument that Harley was in a special class – he is responsible for that huge concrete structure that’s sitting there, for Woody’s sake – seemed pretty convincing, but they wouldn’t budge.

So, in comes a spiffy new Kansas-born athletic director from Texas A&M and before that Ole Miss. He hears that the Rose Bowl was putting up a statue to Archie to join four others that were previously erected in Pasadena, hears that they could also erect a duplicate of it outside of Ohio Stadium in Columbus and he’s all in.

The logic of this seems crazy to me. If you really want to erect a statue of Griffin outside Ohio Stadium, why wouldn’t you hire an Ohio artist or an Ohio State grad to do an original statue? That statue of Red Grange outside Memorial Stadium isn’t a copy. The one of Nile Kinnick outside Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium isn’t a duplicate. A program with a $64 million football budget can afford to honor its heroes with an original statue. Getting a “duplicate” seems kind of tacky.

And because the Rose Bowl was doing a statue, all that stuff about honoring one player with a statue opening the floodgates for others suddenly disappeared. Or maybe it didn’t. Last time I checked, Ohio State had around 70 consensus football All-Americans, a herd of famous football coaches and several worthy athletic directors, stadium architects and sports visionaries. Maybe it won’t be long before there are so many statues around the Ohio Stadium that there won’t be any place to park cars.

Again, no disrespect to Archie, but there’s a strong case to be made for Harley, who captured this city’s attention the way no athlete had ever done. He starred at East High School and decided to go to OSU, which was relatively new to the Western Conference (today’s Big Ten) and had never won much of anything in football. When he kicked a game-winning extra point to upset Illinois in the second week of his sophomore season – freshmen weren’t eligible — it was the Big Bang of Ohio State football. The program was never the same after that.

A school that had been lucky to draw 2,000 or 3,000 fans to a game about 10 years before suddenly needed seats for four or five times as many. The school would add temporary seats to meet demand and then would have to add more the following week. A team with no expectations before the 1916 went undefeated and won the conference title, then did it again in 1917, and talk about a new stadium began. The only game OSU lost in 1919 was the last one, against Illinois, when Chic played hurt and broke down and cried on the field after the game.

That seemed to be a precursor of what was ahead. He suffered from mental health issues beginning in 1921 while he was playing for the Decatur Staleys/Chicago Bears and was diagnosed with dementia praecox (now called schizophrenia) after the season. It was the beginning of a life mostly spent in mental hospitals. But he was so beloved that when OSU coach Francis Schmidt brought his team to Illinois for games in the 1930s, Schmidt would bus his team to the Danville (Ill.) VA Hospital 35 miles away where Chic was a patient and hold practices for him on the hospital lawn.

In the 1940s and 50s there was a lot of talk about naming the stadium for Harley, and it might have happened if the state hadn’t had a policy about not naming public buildings after living people. But the people of Columbus and Ohio still loved him.

In 1948, his condition improved enough that he was able to stay with family members in Chicago for short periods and he wanted to come back to Columbus and attend an Ohio State football game. Plans were made for a ticker-tape parade down High Street to welcome him back, and 75,000 people turned out, one-fifth of the city’s population.

By the time he died in 1974, most of his former teammates and fans were gone and the idea of naming a stadium after him had died with them. He still had his advocates, though. The late Russ Finneran grew up listening to his Uncle Joe tell him stories of Chic, who had once roomed with him. Fifteen or 20 years ago, you could often find Russ outside the stadium near the rotunda before OSU games, introducing himself to fans, telling them stories about Chic and explaining why he deserves to have a statue outside of the stadium.

He still does.