Out of the Pocket: Football, Fatherhood, and College GameDay�Saturdays
400
Out of the Pocket: Football, Fatherhood, and College GameDay�Saturdays
400Paperback
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Overview
Kirk Herbstreit is a reflection of the sport he loves, a reflection of his football-crazed home state of Ohio, where he was a high school star and Ohio State captain, and a reflection of another Ohio State football captain thirty-two years earlier: his dad Jim, who battled Alzheimer’s disease until his death in 2016.
In Out of the Pocket, Herbstreit does what his father did for him: takes you inside the locker rooms, to the practice fields, to the meeting rooms, to the stadiums. Herbstreit describes how a combination of hard work, perseverance, and a little luck landed him on the set of ESPN’s iconic College GameDay show, surrounded by tens of thousands of fans who treat their Saturdays like a football Mardi Gras.
He takes you into the television production meetings, on to the GameDay set, and into the broadcast booth. You’ll live his life during a football season, see the things he sees, experience every chaotic twist and turn as the year unfolds. Not to mention the relationships he’s established and the insights he’s learned from the likes of coaches and players such as Nick Saban, Tim Tebow, Dabo Swinney, and Peyton Manning, as well as his colleagues, including Chris Fowler, Rece Davis, and his “second dad,” the beloved Coach Lee Corso.
Yes, Kirk Herbstreit is the undeniable face and voice of college football—but he’s also a survivor. He’s the quiet kid who withstood the collapse of his parents’ marriage. The boy who endured too many overbearing stepdads and stepmoms. The painfully shy student who always chose the last desk in the last row of the classroom. The young man who persevered through a frustrating Ohio State playing career. The new college graduate who turned down a lucrative sales job after college to pursue a “no way you’ll make it” dream career in broadcasting.
Inspiring and powerful, Out of the Pocket “proves the importance of perseverance and family” (Peyton Manning).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982171025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atria Books |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2022 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 183,335 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Gene Wojciechowski is a New York Times bestselling author whose titles include The Last Great Game: Duke vs. Kentucky and the 2.1 Seconds That Changed Basketball. He joined ESPN in 1998 and has won a Sports Emmy and Edward R. Murrow award during his last nine seasons as a features reporter on College GameDay. Wojciechowski also serves on ESPN’s coverage of the Masters, the PGA Championship and assorted SportsCenter projects. He lives in Wheaton, Illinois. You can follow him on Twitter @GenoEspn.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: My Dad, the Superhero
Imagine that your dad had the secret entry code to the Hall of Justice, which was built by Superman, designed partly by Wonder Woman, and bankrolled by Batman. Your dad would take you inside a place that few kids—or just about any outsider—ever saw in person. Then he would introduce you to the rest of his friends in the Justice League of America.
It would be the best day—made possible by the best dad—a kid could have.
Thing is, I didn’t have to imagine it. It was my life when I was a kid. The only differences were that the Hall of Justice was the Ohio State football facility, and the Justice League of America was actually the Buckeyes of Columbus, Ohio.
Superman was legendary Ohio State head coach Woody Hayes. Batman was running back Archie Griffin, the only two-time Heisman Trophy winner in the history of the award. Big Ten MVP and Rose Bowl–winning quarterback Cornelius Greene was the Flash and a wonder.
My dad, though, was my superhero. He had a lifelong crush on Ohio State; I have a lifelong crush on Ohio State. He taught me the game; I teach my kids the game. That was my common denominator with my dad, the string that stretched across our lives: college football… Ohio State football.
Jim Herbstreit’s first love was Buckeyes football. As a grade schooler, he wrote a detailed essay about Ohio State’s 1949 Rose Bowl victory against Cal. He came to Columbus from Reading High School (just north of Cincinnati) as an undersized and underdog 5-foot-8, 150-pound running back and defensive back, small even by 1957 standards. When he was a freshman, he would sit by himself in a deserted Ohio Stadium, close his eyes, and imagine the Horseshoe filled to the brim, all 78,677 fans watching him making his way to midfield as a Buckeyes captain for the pregame coin toss.
It was a crazy, preposterous dream. But the dream didn’t know the willpower of my father.
By his senior season in 1960, my dad was voted by his Ohio State teammates as a co-captain, the highest honor you can receive from your football peers. Of course, you’d know none of this had you walked into our house.
There was no man cave, no trophy room dedicated to his football career. The walls featured no framed photos of him in his No. 45 Buckeyes jersey, no evidence of his later becoming one of the youngest major college assistant coaches in the country, no sign of his lifelong friendship with two giants of the game: Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler. His letterman jacket was in hiding. It was a modest house owned by a modest man. He had taken down all the newspaper clippings, all the pictures before his two sons were born. “I didn’t want either one of my boys to feel intimidated,” he would later tell a Columbus Dispatch sports columnist.
Only one memento was displayed in public. It sat atop the fireplace mantel for all to see: his Ohio State Captain’s Mug. You can buy a lot of things in this world, but you can’t buy one of those. You can’t buy the trust and respect of your teammates. You have to earn it.
The rest of his football artifacts were stored in cardboard boxes in the basement. As a little kid I would rummage through those boxes, fascinated by all things Ohio State football. Nothing captured my attention more than the black-and-white newspaper photos of him that my mom, Judy, had collected. I’d concentrate on his determined face as he was running the ball. I’d stare so long that I could separate the pixels on the newsprint. That’s him! That’s No. 45, Jim Herbstreit. That’s my dad. He was sort of a football Zeus to me.
My mom and dad first met in high school. She was from Fort Worth, Texas, and had moved to the Cincinnati area after her father, an engineer, transferred to a job at the General Electric headquarters. My dad was a year older than my mom, and he used to carry her books as he walked her home from school. He grew up poor. My grandfather delivered Lance crackers, and they lived paycheck to paycheck in an eight-hundred-square-foot house. My uncle Rick, my dad’s younger brother, told me it was not a house filled with hugs and warmth. My grandfather was a tough German immigrant who had survived the Great Depression. Self-reliance mattered more than warm and fuzzy.
The romance between my mom and dad almost ended a year later, when my mom’s family moved to the San Fernando Valley, just a little north and east of Los Angeles. They wrote letters to each other every day. My mom saved each one of them.
They got engaged during my dad’s sophomore year at Ohio State. My mom came back to Ohio and lived with my dad’s aunt and grandmother in Cincinnati until the wedding in December 1959. There was no living together, no wink-wink arrangements. This was the 1950s.
During the 1958 season, when my mom was living with Dad’s aunt and grandmother and my dad was playing ball at Ohio State, there was an incident—and it was my mom’s fault.
According to my mom, Woody Hayes had a rule for the night before a home game: the players weren’t allowed any contact with their girlfriends or, in my mom’s case, fiancées. There were no exceptions.
My mom decided she would become the first.
She missed my dad so much that on a football Friday she borrowed a car and made the nearly two-hour drive from Cincinnati to Ohio Stadium, where the team was going through a late-afternoon practice. She saw my dad come out of the stadium, honked the horn, and stole a few minutes—and a kiss—through the car window before the Ohio State coaches shooed her away.
As she made the long drive back to Cincinnati on Highway 3, her car ran out of gas. By then it was dark, and she realized she had no money, except for a single dime in her purse. She walked to a pay phone at a gas station and, out of desperation, called the Ohio State football office. Of all people, Woody Hayes answered the phone.
Between sobs, she told Woody, “Oh, Coach, I know I wasn’t supposed to see Jim, but I only saw him for a few minutes. Now my car has run out of gas. It’s so dark. I’m so scared.”
Woody’s voice grew soft.
“Judy, calm down, calm down,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. Where are you?”
My mom gave him the gas station address.
“You stay right there,” Woody said. “Keep your car locked and roll down the window just a little bit.”
An hour or so later, a car pulled up behind hers, the headlights filling her rearview mirror. It was my dad, in Woody’s car. Woody had given him twenty dollars to give to my mom for the drive home. And just in case, he sent along a five-gallon can of gasoline. From that moment on, nobody could criticize Woody Hayes in her presence.
My dad was one of the smallest players on the team. In those days, Ohio State’s roster had only four players who weighed more than 225 pounds. The school would do publicity photos of my redheaded dad being held up by some of the bigger guys on the team. That didn’t stop him from playing both ways, as well as returning kickoffs and punts. He was fast, and he was fearless.
It was interesting to go back and look at the team’s 1960 media guide, which was edited by Wilbur E. Snypp, the athletic department’s director of publicity. It was only 56 pages. The 2020 OSU football media guide was 293 pages, thick enough to stop a bullet.
My dad’s player bio was concise: “HERBSTREIT, James, 21, 5-8, 164, senior… from Reading, OH… was a regular right halfback last season, playing a total of 269 minutes… one of the fastest backs on the squad… will concentrate chiefly on defense this year… is an excellent defensive back, with quick reactions and a good sense of timing… majoring in history… hobbies are fishing and photography… was a regular shortstop on the Ohio State baseball team last year… won 13 high school letters… was an All-Ohio halfback… caught six passes last year, tops among the backs… carried the ball 14 times in 1959… wants to teach or work in personnel after graduation… wears glasses off the field… led Ohio State in punt returns and kickoff returns last season… will start in the deep defense this year.”
And just to give you an idea of where college football was sixty-plus years ago, how about this:
“The 1960 season might be described as a year of ‘transition’ at Ohio State as the Buckeyes plan to employ platoon football. This marks a radical departure from the ‘iron man’ tactics used so successfully the past seven years.”
This was a different era. The heaviest player on the 1960 Buckeyes’ roster weighed 248 pounds. Compare that to OSU’s 2020 roster, which had 44 players who weighed more than that, including 17 players who were 300 pounds or heavier. And until 1960, Ohio State’s starters almost always played offense and defense.
My dad’s 1960 Ohio State team scored 209 points. Ryan Day’s 2019 team, the one that reached the College Football Playoff semifinal game, scored 656 points.
Sure, the 1960 team played only nine games compared to the 14 games the 2019 team played. But you get the idea. Even the 2020 Ohio State team, which played a COVID-19-reduced schedule of only eight games while reaching the CFP Championship, scored one and a half times as many points as my dad’s team during his senior season.
College football in my dad’s era was almost prehistoric compared to today’s game. Even the road hotels sounded old (the 1960 OSU media guide had detailed team travel itineraries—can you imagine Alabama’s Nick Saban allowing that to be made public? Never happen): the Lincoln Lodge Hotel at Illinois, the Albert Pick Motor Lodge at Michigan State, the University Union at Purdue, the Cedar Rapids Montrose Hotel at Iowa.
College football wasn’t a 24-hour/7-day-a-week/365-day-a-year obsession like it is today. My dad and his teammates had full-time jobs during the summer. They had other aspirations. The NFL was an afterthought. James Lindner, a center, worked for a brick company. Offensive guard Charles Foreman and halfback Robert Klein worked for a construction company. Backup quarterback Bill Mrukowski worked for a lumber company. Guard Rodney Foster repaired bicycles. Star defensive end Thomas Perdue wanted to play pro baseball. Paul Martin, who played guard, end, and halfback in 1959, wanted to be a social worker. Guard Oscar Hauer, whose family escaped Hungary just before communist Soviet troops invaded the country in 1956, listed his ambition as “to graduate from college.” Guard Aaron Swartz said the same thing. Linebacker Gary Moeller wanted to coach football after he graduated—and he did, for forty years, including as a head coach at Illinois, Michigan, and the Detroit Lions. He coached the Wolverines to a Rose Bowl, and his 1991 team featured a wide receiver who would win the Heisman Trophy: Desmond Howard.
During my dad’s era, college football still had a certain innocence to it. But don’t kid yourself—Woody was a demanding coach (as were his assistant coaches, including an offensive line coach named Schembechler), and his teams bent to his will. He liked to say, “You win with people,” and he was right. But Woody also believed that you won by wearing down an opponent. He was proud of his “three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust” offense. He once said, “Three things can happen when you pass, and two of them are bad.” His players played physical, and if they didn’t, they didn’t play at all. They loved Woody, but they also feared him.
My mom often tells a story about a defining moment in the 1960 season—and, she says, in her life, and eventually in the life of our family. During a game that season, Woody got mad at my dad and questioned my dad’s toughness. A few plays later, my dad came up on run support as a defensive back and hurled himself at the blocker and the running back right behind the blocker. He knocked both of them down. My mom, who was several months pregnant at the time, cheered like everyone else in the Shoe. It was a spectacular play.
Except that my dad didn’t get up after the hit. He tried, but he couldn’t regain his balance. Instead, he staggered, fell back to the ground, and then crawled helplessly in a circle.
My mom raced down from her seat to the field, the whole time thinking, “I’ve lost the father of my child. I’ve lost him.” She was in a panic.
The team trainers took my dad to the locker room, but they wouldn’t let my mom in to see him. To this day, my mom says that tackle affected him, changed him, damaged him. His smile was never the same. It was something only a wife would notice, but she is convinced the head injury changed who he was for the rest of his life.
My dad didn’t return to the game, but he did return to the lineup the following game. I never asked him about the tackle or the effects it might have had on him. But in those days there was no concussion protocol, and the helmet equipment wasn’t remotely comparable to the state-of-the-art headgear that players wear now. If anything, it was a sign of weakness if you didn’t shake off a hit like the one my dad had sustained.
Meanwhile, the 1960 media guide was right about one thing: Ohio State wasn’t a national championship team, but the Buckeyes did finish 7-2, including a season-ending 7–0 win against Michigan. Back then, either you won the Big Ten championship and represented the conference in the Rose Bowl, or you stayed home. Ohio State, which finished third in the standings, stayed home. Minnesota played Washington in Pasadena.
Running back Bob Ferguson was a consensus All-America pick. Quarterback Tom Matte, a converted running back who completed a grand total of 50 passes that year, finished seventh in the Heisman voting, just behind a Pittsburgh tight end named Mike Ditka.
My dad didn’t earn any national or conference awards, but he did have that Captain’s Mug, which meant everything to him. Think about it: My dad grew up in the Cincinnati area without much attention paid to him by college recruiters. He was small, sort of an afterthought kind of athlete. They’d say, “That Jim Herbstreit plays his heart out, but he’ll never get a scholarship from Woody Hayes.” And then he did get a scholarship. Not only that, but he started on both sides of the ball, became a team captain, and led the Buckeyes in interceptions as a senior. To Woody—and to my dad—being an Ohio State captain was the highest football honor you could receive. It was the greatest thing you could ever do in a Buckeyes uniform.
My dad had that mug, and he also had a wife, a tiny apartment in Columbus, and, on March 24, 1961, he had his first child, a daughter, Teri. What he needed was a job. His initial plan was to get a graduate degree and then a teaching job in California.
Once again, Woody came to the rescue. This time he didn’t send his car, twenty dollars, and a gas can. Instead, he convinced my dad to delay his teaching career for a coaching career—not as an Ohio State graduate assistant, but as a twenty-two-year-old full-time defensive backs coach. That would never happen today. Suddenly my dad went from a team captain to now coaching his former teammates. He was basically the same age they were. Imagine walking into the staff meeting room, this time with Woody not as your coach but as your boss.
Coaching didn’t pay much, not even at Ohio State. Woody’s salary in 1951 was $12,500. In 1978, his final season at OSU, it was $43,000. He lived in an unassuming two-story, white-framed, three-bedroom house in Upper Arlington. According to USA Today, the top 55 highest-paid coaches in college football make anywhere from $3 million to $9 million per year. Just think what Woody would have made in today’s market.
My dad spent two years on Woody’s staff. Money was tight. If Woody made only $12,500, you can imagine what a new assistant made. There were times, my mom said, when her meager grocery allowance meant having to decide between buying a can of tomato paste or a small jar of meat. My mom chose the meat because she thought Teri needed the protein. She buttered the pasta noodles instead. To help save money, my dad ate at the Ohio State training table.
As a player and as an assistant coach, my dad revered Woody. But he was never afraid to stand up to him if he thought “the Old Man” (that’s what the players and assistants always called Woody) was wrong. Other assistants would recoil—how dare this kid question the legend. But Woody, said those who knew him best, appreciated my dad’s willingness to make his case. My dad picked his spots, though. There were limits.
During his first season as an assistant coach, Ohio State tied TCU in its opening game and then ran the table, finishing the regular season 8-0-1, ranked No. 2 in the country, and atop the Big Ten standings. They were going to the Rose Bowl to face UCLA, the same team they had beaten in the second game of the season.
But the Ohio State faculty committee, worried that football was becoming too important at the school, voted to turn down the Rose Bowl invitation. Thousands of students protested in the streets of Columbus, but it was Woody who helped defuse the situation by having several of his team captains talk to the demonstrators.
In 1963, Schembechler left Woody’s staff and returned to his alma mater, Miami (Ohio). He brought my dad along as the defensive backs coach. It was a step up in pay, and he would have more of a voice in the defensive philosophy.
Miami was known as “the Cradle of Coaches.” Sid Gillman, Woody, Ara Parseghian, Bo, and later Bill Mallory, Dick Crum, and Randy Walker were all head coaches there. Weeb Ewbank, Paul Brown, Red Blaik, John Harbaugh, and Sean McVay played there. Jim Tressel, Dick Tomey, John Mackovic, Larry Smith, and Walker were assistant coaches there.
The relationship between my dad and Bo was different from the relationship between my dad and Woody. That’s because Bo was different. At the time, Bo was trying to make a name for himself as a young head coach. He was a master motivator. He was also a hard-ass. He was the bad cop on the staff. My dad was the good cop.
A year later, my dad quit coaching to work for a prominent Columbus family, the Yasenoffs, who had strong ties to Ohio State and were a major presence in the business community. He stayed in the job until 1965, the year my brother John was born. Then he returned to coaching, this time at the University of Akron as a defensive coordinator.
I came along on August 19, 1969, just as my dad, now thirty years old, became Mallory’s defensive coordinator at Miami. Woody played a major part in that, too. I know this now because in October 2020, I received a handwritten note from Ellie Mallory, Coach Mallory’s wife of nearly sixty years (Coach Mallory died in 2018). She had found a 1969 Miami football media guide while going through some of her husband’s files.
“Woody Hayes called Bill and said, ‘You need to hire Jim Herbstreit as your DC,’?” she wrote in the note. “Of course Bill said, ‘Yes sir’ and called your dad for an interview and hired him! Your folks and their then-two children lived in a house where the present Miami University football stadium is located.”
At the end of the note, she wrote: “Your folks raised you right!”
It was so thoughtful of Ellie to write, and, yes, my mom has mentioned that we lived where Yager Stadium now sits on the Miami campus. To supplement my dad’s salary, my mom babysat neighborhood kids in the months before I was born.
I was a big baby, almost nine pounds at birth, and my mom said I beat on her stomach throughout the pregnancy. My dad wanted to name me Tom—long last name, short first name. He was overruled.
“He’s not a Tom,” said my mom. “He’s a Kirk.”
She had decided I had a strong personality and that “Kirk” reflected that more than “Tom.” So I was named Kirk Edward Herbstreit, the middle name in honor of my paternal grandfather.
After a month, I weighed nearly fourteen pounds. My mom took me to visit my grandmother, who was astounded by my size.
“I can’t believe it—that’s a baby?” she said.
At age one, I weighed thirty-three pounds, about a dozen pounds more than the average. The three kids shared a single room, and Teri says I was so big I could stand up in my crib and turn on the light in the middle of the night. Then I’d just fall back down and laugh.
The first-ever football game I attended was on September 13, 1969: Xavier at Miami. I was three weeks old. Miami won.
Sometime after the end of the season, my dad walked away from coaching, this time for good. The reason? Depends on who you ask. My mom said he quit coaching because he was unhappy. My dad told people he left in an effort to save his marriage. Whatever the reason, the decision would forever impact our lives.
In 1970 we moved to the Dayton area—Weybridge Drive in the suburb of Trotwood, to be exact. My vocabulary as a two-year old was limited. When anybody asked what I wanted for Christmas, it was always the same answer: “Candy, gum, and balls.” Baseballs, footballs, Wiffle balls, Ping-Pong balls—I had a fascination with throwing them, bouncing them, hitting them, trying to catch them. I didn’t understand football, but there was something about it that got my attention. Teri remembers my pulling the pacifier out of my mouth as a little kid, getting into a football position, and telling everyone, “Ready, guys!”
My dad taught me the game, or at least the basics of it: how to hold the football, how to tuck the ball into the V of my elbow, how to grip the laces, what the rules were, how to tackle. Even when I was four or five years old, I was drawn to the competition of it, to the team aspect of it. I would go outside and force my way into the games with the older kids on the block.
“Me not chicken, guys!” I would tell them.
I was the young towhead, the kid with white-blond hair… thick even then, sturdy, big for my age. I didn’t want to get left behind. The older kids slammed me to the ground on tackles, but I never cried. I wanted to prove to them—and to my older brother, John—that I belonged. I looked up to John. In the neighborhood, on the playgrounds, and on the fields, he did what older brothers always do: look out for their little brothers. He always had my back. If a kid tried to rough me up, he’d have to answer to John.
There was no question about my favorite team. Like father, like son. My childhood world revolved around the Buckeyes. Even then, just as my dad had done when he was a kid, I dreamed of playing for Ohio State. I was like a lot of little kids in Ohio.
Some people watch a football game on TV and carry on a conversation with someone else in the room, or take a phone call. They’re watching, but they’re not completely locked in. My mom has a photo of me at five or six years old, and I’m sitting on my dad’s lap while watching a game on TV, and I am completely locked in. I’m the same way today. There could be a kitchen grease fire behind me and I wouldn’t notice it once the game began. There’s another photo of me as a little kid sitting by myself on the living room couch. I’ve got my favorite blanket and I’m watching all the bowl games on New Year’s Day. My parents couldn’t get me to budge from that spot, or from the games. I fell asleep in that same spot. And they have a picture of me wearing an Ohio State shirt as the national anthem is playing before a game. I’ve got my hand over my heart and I’m saluting as the anthem is playing. Like I said, locked in.
My block was like a lot of blocks in Trotwood. We had a mix of nationalities, races, religions—not that it mattered to me. I just wanted to play sports. All we did in the early 1970s was go to school and then, the minute we were out of school, we played every game imaginable: four-square, freeze tag, baseball, Wiffle ball, football… whatever. We had mud ball fights (some kids wrapped the mud around rocks). We played on swing sets. We caught crawdads from the creek and watched them snap at each other. We caught garter snakes and, as dusk turned to night, we cradled fireflies in the palms of our hands. In the winter we’d play hockey on the ice patches. In the summer we rode our bikes everywhere.
We were like a scene from the movie The Sandlot or an episode of The Wonder Years. We played barefoot in blue jeans and T-shirts, or no shirts at all. Half the time our parents had no idea where we were—and that was okay. They just knew we were outside being kids. All the parents in the neighborhood looked out for the all the kids. They were like your aunts and uncles.
There were no cell phones, no internet, no laptops, no YouTube, no LOLs, no emojis, no Instagram, no nothing. The only phone in the house had a long curled cord, was attached to the kitchen wall, and was shared by everyone. The TV got three channels, and that’s if the rabbit ears worked. Cable? There was no cable when I was a little kid. Color TV was a luxury. Your entertainment was each other. Your block, your neighborhood, your best friends—they were all right there. It was the center of your life. Well, that and football.
It was glorious. It was perfect. I wish every kid could experience it. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a second of it.
My dad never forced me into sports. There was never a “You WILL play football!” command. If anything, he was the opposite of that. He wanted us to find our own way.
But I already knew I was crazy about the game. I loved listening to my dad tell his stories of playing for Ohio State, of coaching with Woody, of his friendship with Bo, who had become Michigan’s head coach in late 1968 and had won his first game there about a month after I was born. I loved hearing about the football traditions at Ohio State, about this too-huge-to-be-believed stadium nicknamed “The Horseshoe,” or “The Shoe” for short. Dad was a great storyteller.
Most of all, I loved hearing about The Game, which is what the annual Ohio State–Michigan meeting is called. It was first played in 1897, and beginning in 1917 it was played every year until COVID-19 issues ended the streak in 2020.
In our house, there was no debate about the greatest rivalry in sports. My dad had played and coached in The Game. He had lived it, and we lived it with him. Nobody—and I mean nobody—took the Ohio State–Michigan game more seriously than my dad. The Game was sacred to him, and that feeling trickled down to all of us, especially me.
On that particular game day, there was a different vibe in the house. It wasn’t, “Hey, here we go. Let’s have some fun today. We’ll cook out, have some laughs, then settle down for a leisurely afternoon of football with the Buckeyes.” Nuh-uh.
This was war. Football war. In our house, it was the USA (Ohio State) versus the USSR (Michigan) during the height of the Cold War. It was not silly. It was not cute. We all woke up in the morning and it was game on.
My dad was a good friend of Bo’s. But when Bo was on the Michigan sideline, you’ve never seen anybody pull harder against his friend—against Michigan—than my dad. There’s a reason why they called the period between 1969 and 1978, when Woody and Bo were going at it hard in that rivalry, “The Ten Year War.” During those ten years, Michigan went 5-4-1 against the Buckeyes, and each of those losses gutted my dad. And me.
That rivalry became a centerpiece of my life. When I was growing up, we played electric football. You had a metallic playing field and there was a little motor that caused the board to vibrate. The vibrations caused your team of miniature plastic players to move against the other team. Completing a pass was almost impossible. There was a tiny piece of felt in the shape of a football. You placed the felt in the quarterback’s hand, pulled a lever on the quarterback’s arm, aimed, and hoped.
We had a dog (not surprisingly, his name was Woody), so there was a dent from where he walked across the board. The players would sort of drift into the dog’s paw mark. Every year as a little kid I would ask Santa for a new electric football game. And every year, Santa would deliver the game. Only years later did I learn that my dad had stayed up late on Christmas Eve meticulously repainting each of the miniature players, from Pittsburgh Steelers black and gold and Dallas Cowboys blue and metallic silver to Ohio State scarlet and gray and Michigan maize and blue. They didn’t sell the game with college teams, so my dad would paint the pants, jerseys, and helmets, even the jersey numbers. When I tore open the package on Christmas morning, I just assumed that’s how it came: Ohio State versus Michigan. It must have taken him forever to paint everything just so.
When you’re a little kid, you think your parents are perfect. But to have a dad who played for the team you worship, who played for a mythical figure in a football-crazed state, who was a team captain, who later coached for the mythical figure, well, that was next-level perfect. And my mom also loved sports. When she was growing up at her family’s house in Fort Worth, she used to throw the football with her dad in the front yard. They were a Dallas Cowboys family, too.
I was five or six when my dad took me to my first Ohio State practice… to the Hall of Justice. It was only about an hour-and-fifteen-minute drive to Columbus. Archie Griffin, who had won the Heisman in 1974 and would win it again in 1975, let me put on his helmet, the one with the iconic I-bar face mask on the front. It was covered with Buckeye leaf stickers on the top and sides (and paint marks from opposing players’ helmets), and it felt so heavy on my head. But I couldn’t wait to tell the kids the next day at Westbrooke Village Elementary about wearing Archie’s helmet.
Better yet, sometimes my dad would take me to the Horseshoe for a game, and if the Buckeyes won, we would go inside the locker room and Woody would let me sit on his knee as I asked him about the latest victory. It was all over for me then. Seriously, how do you beat that? It was like sitting on Santa’s knee and having him ask you want you want for Christmas. What do I want? I’ve got it! There was nothing I wanted more as a six-year-old than to talk Ohio State football with Mr. Ohio State Football himself.
My dad occasionally took me to Ohio State functions that featured former players. Some of his old teammates would gesture toward my dad, nudge me on the shoulder, and say, “That little son of a bitch right there? Let me tell you, kid, the Old Man always said that pound for pound he was the toughest player he ever had.”
The Old Man… Woody.
My dad was supposed to play for Miami University. That was the original plan. All that changed the day my dad helped his high school win a baseball playoff game, and then went directly to the track (he wore his track uniform under his baseball uniform), put on a pair of track cleats, and ran in the state finals of the 100-yard dash. In the crowd that day was Woody. Not long after that, my dad wasn’t going to Miami University anymore.
Table of Contents
Prologue ix
Chapter 1 My Dad, the Superhero 1
Chapter 2 The Pact 19
Chapter 3 Elk Pride … and the Art of the Puke 37
Chapter 4 The Best Damn Fan in the Land 53
Chapter 5 Nobody's Ail-American 77
Chapter 6 End of the Misfit 99
Chapter 7 Worth the Wait 113
Chapter 8 Now What? 139
Chapter 9 The Decision 155
Chapter 10 The Sweat-Stained Miracle 181
Chapter 11 The Rookie 197
Chapter 12 A Father's Day to Remember 221
Chapter 13 Transition 249
Chapter 14 My Second Dad 261
Chapter 15 The Diagnosis 281
Chapter 16 Moving On 285
Chapter 17 "He's Gone" 307
Chapter 18 Bill Murray, Katy Perry, and Dark, Cold Buses 315
Chapter 19 The Herbstreit Method 325
Chapter 20 Perspective 337
Chapter 21 A Proud Father 361
Acknowledgments 371
Notes 379
Credits 381
