War as they knew it : Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a time of unrest /

In the Vietnam era, Michigan and Ohio State fought it out on the football field. IN 1993, the second semester of my junior year at the University of Michigan, I enrolled in a highly unusual course called Theory, Strategy and Practice of Football. The class was taught in Schembechler Hall, the headquarters of the football team, and the professors were the coaches. On the first day, I raced to Schembechler Hall and entered a different world, one where the Socratic method of inquiry was not exactly embraced. Our "professor" addressed us sternly, saying we would be treated like football players. That meant no baseball caps, feet on the floor at all times, eyes forward. And absolutely no more tardiness: class would begin at noon sharp, with any stragglers dismissed immediately. A fellow student raised his hand and offered that classes ended at the top of the hour and began at 10 minutes past, so that students could make it from one course to the next. Starting at the exact moment the previous classes let out, he meekly explained, would be "a physical impossibil- _____" The coach cut him off. All he knew was that his class was supposed to start at noon, and we were starting at noon, period. We all nodded. The football program, unlike the poli sci program, was still run by Schembechler's dictum: "We are not going to debate this." And so, two days a week, I'd position myself next to the door in Constitutional Law and sprint for the exit 10 minutes before class ended. If there was an exam, I just had to write extra-fast. How exactly a left-leaning university could coexist with the militaristic culture of a football program is the subject of Michael Rosenberg's "War as They Knew It," an absorbing account that describes the rivalry between a pair of larger-than-life coaches, Bo Schembechler of Michigan and Woody Hayes of Ohio State, within the social and political context of its time, 1969 through 1978. The football was titanic - two powerhouses that spent the entire off-season obsessing about each other, and then the entire fall trampling the competition as a warm-up for their cataclysmic showdown. But Rosenberg, a columnist for The Detroit Free Press, also subtly portrays the social fault lines that ran both within and between the two campuses. (He and I briefly overlapped at The Michigan Daily, the college paper, but I spoke with him only once, while canvassing for votes during the second of my two unsuccessful campaigns for editorial page editor.) In Ann Arbor, left-wing politics managed to thrive alongside growing football fervor. At halftime of the 1970 Rose Bowl, the Michigan marching band formed a peace sign. In 1971, two-thirds of the football team signed an antiwar petition. The theme for the homecoming parade that year was "Bring All the Troops Home Now"; at halftime, the P.A. announcer called for a full withdrawal of American troops and an end to aid for Vietnam. The defensive lineman Pete Newell skipped the momentous 1969 antiwar rally in Washington to make a road game in Iowa. Afterward, Schembechler praised him before the players for being "out there in Iowa City with the rest of the team, and not in Washington with the damn hippies where he really wanted to be." To Woody Hayes, hippies were not merely a distraction but an existential threat. A longtime friend of Richard Nixon, Hayes began a coaches' meeting every morning with a Rush Limbaughstyle rant about current events. He once wrote scathingly about the permissive marijuana laws in a city that was home to "one Big Ten university." As Rosenberg writes, "the town, of course, was Ann Arbor." Hayes was less a conventional right-winger than a fanatical proponent of social order. He inspired his players to pursue their education and even lectured them on military history, of which he was an autodidact. He had no interest in money, regularly declining raises and leaving some paychecks uncashed. News of gasoline shortages prompted him to walk almost three miles to work daily. An amusing running joke in the book centers on his assistant coaches' struggle to find the team Friday night pregame movies that didn't subvert traditional values. (The years 1969-78 did not constitute a Hayes-friendly era in American film.) One assistant was relieved of this duty after picking "Easy Rider," which he thought was about a motorcycle race. The mention of lesbianism in "Slap Shot" prompted Hayes to shout, "This is TRASH!," berate the theater manager and storm back to the hotel. Hayes's tantrums came to define him publicly, just as Watergate defined his friend Nixon. Schembechler had played for and coached with Hayes, and learned the strategic value of tirades. But Hayes genuinely lost control of his faculties - tearing up first-down markers, shoving photographers and, in his final game, slugging an opposing player. (After the last incident, Ohio State fired Hayes, though his team's three straight losses to Michigan probably contributed to his dismissal.) In Rosenberg's most evocative passage, players from Hayes's 1968 national championship squad return to campus for a 10th-anniversary reunion, and are shocked at the lack of respect the current team shows the man they once feared. The decline of authority had finally brought down Woody Hayes, along with so many other institutions of the time. In this sense, he was ultimately prescient. Woody Hayes was a longtime friend of Richard Nixon and an enemy of all hippies. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.

America was embroiled in a real war, and college campuses were in turmoil. But in the country's heartland, no-man's land was the border between Ohio and Michigan, and the battleground rotated between the football stadiums at Ohio State and the University of Michigan. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the heyday of the rivalry between legendary football coaches Woody Hayes and his former assistant Bo Schembechler. Hayes' Ohio State Buckeyes had established themselves as one of the nation's best, while Schembechler had taken a moribund Michigan program and turned it into a consistent challenger to Ohio State's dominance. Though Rosenberg weaves a bit of the era's antiwar protests, drug use, and social unrest into his narrative, this is fundamentally the tale of an intense football rivalry and the two men at its center. Schembechler was a hard-nosed, old-school football coach but ultimately a reasonable, thoughtful man. Hayes, on the other hand, comes across as a manipulative, foul-tempered eccentric. This will appeal especially to Ohio and Michigan sports fans, naturally, but it will be of interest, too, to anyone who follows college football closely.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2008 Booklist

The yearly battle between Ohio State and the University of Michigan is one of the most intensely fought rivalries in college football, and one of its greatest eras began in 1969, when Bo Schembechler arrived in Michigan as the team's new head coach. Schembechler had been a former protégé of Woody Hayes, the legendary coach of Ohio State--who was so intimidating that one player used to be terrified that Hayes would kick him in the testicles during practice, despite never having seen him do it to another player. Rosenberg, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, tracks how the two coaches pushed their players to greatness over the next nine years (until Hayes was fired after punching an opposing player in the middle of a game) while trying to adjust to the social upheavals of the 1970s. His attempts to bring the radical student underground into the story are an intermittent distraction--the most powerful drama is out on the football field and in the locker room when every year Schembechler and Hayes went head-to-head. The story has its strong moments, including one of history's most notorious missed field goals, but it's the dual portrait of the old-school coaching legends that's the real attraction. (Sept. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

In college football from the late Sixties through the Seventies, the intense rivalry between Michigan coach Bo Schembechler and his mentor, Woody Hayes, the militaristic coach of Ohio State, made for great theater during a time of vast change on American campuses. This exploration of the beginning of Schembechler's legend and the close of Hayes's contentious reign treats both men fairly and seeks to place sensationalized actions and statements in their proper context. Rosenberg (Detroit Free Press) delivers a probing, sensitive, and insightful assessment of the two legendary coaches and of college football in general during a volatile era. Of interest to both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Detroit Free Press sportswriter Rosenberg views a tumultuous era in American history through the lens of the greatest rivalry in college football. During the late 1960s and early '70s, as the country experienced upheaval both at home and abroad, a different sort of battle was taking place on the football fields of the Midwest. As Rosenberg demonstrates, the Ohio State Buckeyes and Michigan Wolverines were the two most successful college-football programs during that time, and their success was driven by their respective larger-than-life coaches, Ohio State's Woody Hayes and Michigan's Bo Schembechler. Hayes was a legendary disciplinarian and staunch conservative who believed in the sanctity of the game and traditional American values (Rosenberg's title is adapted from the 1947 memoir by General George Patton, whom Hayes idolized), and he demanded diligence and obedience from his players. Schembechler learned the ways of the "Old Man," as Hayes was often known, while playing for him at Miami University (Ohio) and working as a graduate assistant at OSU when Hayes took over in 1951. The Ohio State coach had already won three national championships before Schembechler became head coach of the Wolverines in 1969, but neither coach would win a title during the next decade of their intense rivalry. Rosenberg brings each man to vibrant life, exploring their tireless dedication to the sport and their players, as well as their relationship to their schools, their country and each other (the two remained lifelong friends). The author draws a colorful portrait of the bitter rivalry between the two Big Ten powerhouses, and he mirrors their on-field clashes with sharp glimpses of the turmoil occurring on both campuses as student demonstrations increased and the country fell deeper into the Vietnam quagmire. Rosenberg should also be commended for resurrecting the accomplishments of former Michigan athletic director Don Canham, whose aggressive marketing efforts helped the Wolverines set nearly every attendance record since 1975 (since that time, Michigan has sold more than 100,000 tickets for every home game). An enjoyable, high-energy combination of cultural and sports history, and a must-read for all Wolverines and Buckeyes. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.