I used to think that Woody Hayes was delusional when he saw Michigan spies in the windows of the Fawcett Center, which has a nice view across Olentangy River Road of the Ohio State football practice fields.
Spies? Really? I know OSU had the fences surrounding the fields covered so no one could see in, but spies with binoculars on the upper floors of the 12-story high rise? Seriously?
Then along comes that wacky Jim Harbaugh, the Michigan coach who once famously guaranteed a win over Ohio State as the Wolverines’ quarterback, and now we begin to see a pattern. The picture starts to sharpen into focus now that a grunt on Harbaugh’s Michigan staff has been caught sneaking into and scouting the games of Wolverines’ future opponents – against NCAA rules – and stealing their signs.
Maybe Harbaugh guaranteed that 1986 victory because of something he learned from one of the Michigan spies behind those Fawcett Center windows. No wonder those cheating SOBs at Michigan were so ready for some of Woody’s off-tackle plays.
But regardless how much (or how little) cheating helped Michigan win games, I do think we owe a little thanks to Harbaugh for breathing some life into a rivalry which hasn’t been the same since the Big Ten created its football championship game in 2011 and turned OSU-Michigan into the second last game of the conference season.
OSU fans, sickened both by the cheating and the way Michigan’s coaches, players and fans tried to play the part of the victims in the wake of Harbaugh’s three-game suspension, have suddenly remembered all of the reasons they hate Michigan.
Isn’t life grand?
Thinking about this stuff again got me digging into some of the stories and columns I wrote during Michigan week over the years – I loved calling up former players and coaches and sharing their memories — and just for fun, I decided to revisit some of them here.
For starters, it’s worth noting that the tradition of Michigan paranoia didn’t start with Hayes and the spies he thought he saw in the windows of Fawcett Center. It was going full tilt under OSU coach Francis Schmidt in the 1930s.
”We’d have a walk-through practice at Michigan Stadium on Friday,” said Esco Sarkkinen, who played for Schmidt in the ’30s and coached at OSU through the Hayes Era. ”But you didn’t go out there with your jersey number. You’d exchange it with someone else. You’d wear someone else’s jersey just in case someone was watching practice.
”And not only that, we’d put extra people in our formations. Say we were in punt formation or a single wing or double wing, we always had 12 or 13 people. Two of them didn’t mean anything . . .”
Jack Graf, quarterback on Schmidt’s 1939-41 teams and later an assistant coach at OSU, said that Schmidt “was skeptical of everything,” which might have been why he protected his team against his opponents’ spying.
”I can remember we were up at the Dearborn Inn the night before one of the (Michigan) games,” Graf said, “and some newspaper people from Detroit came over and wanted a picture of him working on plays or something.
”But they had a map, a map of maybe Michigan or Ohio (that was supposed to look like plays), and there were a lot of people there, and he said, ‘You’re trying to make a (fool) out of me and you’re not going to do it. And he was real bitter about it. He said, ‘Dammit, you’re not going to do it. You’re not going to do it.’ ”
In 2000, former Heisman Trophy winner Howard (Hopalong) Cassady came to town to have his number (40) retired by the school.
“The main reason I’m up here is to see Michigan get their (butt) beat,” a grinning Cassady said. “And it just so happens they’re going to retire my number at the same time.”
Cassady wasn’t kidding. In his day, OSU players used to think that beating Michigan was the only thing that mattered. Hating Michigan is what they did 24, 7. Hating Michigan is no longer what it used to be.
“We practiced all year for them,” Cassady said. “We were always ready for them. From day one, that was always on your mind. The seniors, they talked about it all the time.
“If you’re a sophomore or a junior, you’d better be hurting somebody. Anybody standing, you knocked down.”
He was particularly fond of a story about the 1955 game at Michigan.
“We go to Michigan and we’re in the locker room, and Woody’s got us all set,” Cassady said. “And they had the tunnel, and our locker room was above theirs. And we know through the years, that you come running down the tunnel, cheering and really fired up, and just as you get to their locker room, they storm out. So Woody says, ‘Hey, start yelling and screaming and run out and when they get ready to run out, stop and come back in.
“So, we ran out the door, went part of the way down there, and then here comes Michigan, zoom, up in front of us and out onto the field. And we stop and go back in the locker room and sit down. We’re sitting down there laughing our — off and they’re out on the field waiting. And we’re not talking two minutes here. We’re talking like 10 minutes. The umpires have to come up the tunnel and come into the locker room and say, ‘Hey, you guys gotta get out there.’ So, then we come storming out and we’re laughing our a—- off at them and they’re really ticked. Yeah, they had a bad day all the way around.”
Hop was one of the world’s nicest men. When he was a coach for the Triple-A Columbus Clippers baseball team, he used to sign autograph late into the night after the games and usually delivered the prized signatures with a few kind words and a smile.
But that Michigan hatred was in there somewhere, learned straight from the master, a man who swore spies were trying to watch his practices Michigan week, a man who once saw short-skirted Ann Arbor waitresses as a ploy to distract his player, a man who would never call Michigan by name.
“There were spies,” Cassady said. “There were. No doubt in my mind.”
Maybe you are beginning to get the picture here. It was a lot more fun when Woody had uniformed policemen guarding the practice field and even local reporters weren’t permitted inside the North Facility building that grew into Woody Hayes Athletic Center. You imagined that Woody and his coaches were huddled in there, hating those Wolverines with every fiber of their beings and adding a secret wrinkle to the off-tackle play.
And maybe they did. Beating Michigan trumped everything else.
“My freshman year, we were undefeated going into the Michigan game and I’m kicking off,” Tom Skladany said. “And I’m leading the team in tackles (on kickoffs) because they usually don’t block the kicker, and Woody tells me not to go downfield at all because he doesn’t want to get me hurt.
“But it’s the first kickoff and the game is on national TV and the adrenaline is pumping and I went downfield anyway, and a guy clips me from behind and really lays me out. John Hicks helps me up – he’s saying, ‘The old man told you not to run downfield and now you’ve got yourself hurt’ – and after I limp to the sidelines, the doctor and (trainer) Billy Hill examine me. Woody comes over and asks how I’m doing, and they say that I’ve got a broken leg and a dislocated ankle.
“And Woody says, ‘Well, we can forget about kickoffs. Do you think he can still punt?’ “
Skladany and Hicks laughed so hard that it took them a few minutes to recover.
“That says something about the intensity of the man,” Skladany said. “He wanted to win so bad that he thought he was doing me a favor by not making me run down the field on a broken leg. All I’d have to do is stand there and punt.”
Those players really seemed to hate Michigan, if for no other reason than Woody practiced for Michigan every week. You always knew how he felt about them, or at least you thought you did.
“I don’t think there was ever a football coach who was as fine a psychologist as he was,” former OSU equipment man John Bozick said. “He was a great psychologist. How do you win people? You get their attention.”
And his Michigan fixation did get their attention.
“Exactly,” Bozick said. “And what do they do when you’ve got their attention? They listen to you. That’s exactly what he did with the kids. He had their attention. He had them ready.”
In the process, Woody got everybody ready for Michigan. It’s why some old-timers around here still get worked up every time they see a Michigan license plate or a Michigan hat, although at least some of those people probably have been institutionalized. The ones still on the street probably don’t realize that at least some of that hatred stuff was probably staged.
“Yeah, some of it was probably exaggerated,” Bozick said. “But I can tell you this: He really disliked them. I don’t know about hate, but he disliked them like crazy.”
But that story about Woody pushing his car across the state line just so he wouldn’t have to buy gas and give tax money to the state of Michigan just seems like something that was made up. Nobody would really go that far, would they?
“Oh yeah, that’s true,” Bozick said. He grinned. “He did it. I think some of that stuff was made up, but I don’t think that one was.”
Seriously?
Bozick shrugged.
“You know how he was,” he said. “You don’t think he’d do that?”
