Funny story. When Fish and I were in a Vegas casino about ten to twelve years ago, we ran into Hayden. He was being inducted into the Holiday Bowl hall of fame. Fish bent down and kissed his feet. Needless to say, we were kicked out of the casino. (Just kidding about the last part, but we did see Hayden and talked briefly).
oldmanTED said:
Punch tarnished Hayes' career <!---##CCI#[/Text]--->[font=arial,helvetica]
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[/font]<HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- END IMAGES, CUTCREDIT AND CUTLINE --><!-- START BODYTEXT INCL. BYLINE and BYCREDIT --><!---##CCI#[Text Tag=byline Group=All]--->By Chris Dufresne <!---##CCI#[/Text]--->
<!---##CCI#[Text Tag=bylinecredit Group=All]--->Los Angeles Times<!---##CCI#[/Text]--->
<!---##CCI#[Text Tag=body Group=All]--->Charlie Bauman invaded the enemy sideline, a punch was thrown and, sure as there was going to be a sunrise, there was going to be a firing.
It was as simple as that.
Twenty-five years ago Monday, on Dec. 29, 1978, during the final seconds of a second-rate Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., legendary Ohio State head coach Woody Hayes lost his head and lost his job.
"Who could you compare him to now?" Hayes biographer Alan Natali wondered recently. "There's no one left."
The final act in Hayes' brilliant, yet contradictory, college football career came with an ironic twist.
Ohio State trailed Clemson in that Gator Bowl, 17-15, in the final minutes when, on third-and-five at the Clemson 24, Buckeye quarterback Art Schlichter let go a forward pass.
A pass!
The play Hayes hated more than Michigan.
A pass!
Hayes held so religiously to the ground that running plays at Ohio State were named after George S. Patton.
Woody's philosophy was, "I will pound you and pound you until you quit."
He said three things happened when you passed, and two of them were bad.
Imagine the internal combustion building in this 65-year-old behemoth, after three straight losses to Michigan, playing a bowl game on the Atlantic coast instead of the Pacific -- and having this Gator Bowl come down to a pass!
Schlichter misled Ron Springs across the middle, and Clemson sophomore Bauman stepped in for the interception and rambled toward trivia-answer history.
In a blink and one bam, that was it, the twilight years of increasing frustration released into the end of a fist. Hayes sucker-punched Bauman, and, the next day, after 28 years and 205 Ohio State victories, he was gone.
Keith Jackson, ABC's legendary play-by-play announcer, didn't see the play, didn't have a replay of it, didn't make mention of it on the air and, 25 years later, has still not heard the end of it.
"The media decided to hang my butt," Jackson said.
For those with deep connections to the Scarlet and Gray, that Gator Bowl memory is etched like the moon landing.
Bo Schembechler, then Michigan's head coach and a former Ohio State assistant, was attending the Big Ten dinner of champions in Southern California.
"I was in the Rose Bowl that year," he said Sunday. "I was sitting at the head table and (Big Ten Commissioner) Wayne Duke came up and said Woody had just hit a Clemson player. And I knew then, I said, 'Geez, it's over.' -- It was never the same without the old man, without fighting him."
Randy Gradishar, whom Hayes called the greatest linebacker in Ohio State history, shrieked from a Pittsburgh hotel room.
Steve Snapp, Ohio State's assistant sports information director at the time, remembers the air leaving him in the Gator Bowl press box and hearing himself mutter, "Oh no."
Natali, who would later become an English professor and author of a critically acclaimed book on Hayes, described watching Hayes' career end on national TV as "an almost hallucinatory experience. It was bizarre, it was unnerving. You knew it was just one of those epochal moments where, really, college football was not going to be the same after that."
Bauman, the innocent Clemson bystander, wondered how a reporter had found him, living quietly these days, in Ohio of all places.
"Google search?" he asked.
Yep.
Bauman did not want to rehash the details. He said his role in the play is a historical footnote.
"That's all it is," Bauman said. "He made a mistake. He made other mistakes, and so have I. Everybody makes mistakes."
It is a testament to the power of Hayes' personality that, 25 years later, he is a man still worthy of a discourse.
His legend in Columbus has only grown; you'd be surprised how many of the middle-aged men attending Ohio State games look like Hayes. It is a common practice for people in Columbus to dress up as Woody Hayes for Halloween.
To outsiders, Hayes morphed into a bobbleheaded cartoon figure, a man remembered for his clandestine Rose Bowl practices and Yosemite Sam fits of temper.
To Ohioans, however, Hayes was blood. He was born in Ohio and died there. He coached at Ohio State from 1951 through 1978, won or shared 13 Big Ten titles and helped push Ohio from an agrarian to a modern mind-set.
Hayes could be complicated, complex, nice, savage, bombastic and benevolent -- all before lunch.
He was, for 28 years, a fixture you could not take your eyes off and a man judged in your own prism.
He was egocentric but not materialistic. When he died on March 12, 1987, relatives found thousands of dollars' worth of uncashed checks in his coat pockets.
That punch Woody Hayes put on Charlie Bauman, 25 years ago?
Well, it connected with a lot of people.
• • •
Alan Natali grew up in Pittsburgh, yet was drawn to Hayes like a moth to light.
Years later, he would write the book, "Woody's Boys," but on Dec. 29, 1978, he witnessed Ohio State-Clemson in his apartment in California, Pa.
"My wife at the time had just gotten sick and tired of football being on the television," Natali recalled. "She said, 'That's it, I can't stand it anymore, if you want to watch football, go into the back bedroom.' So I went into the back bedroom, and there was a little 5-inch, black-and-white television. I had to sit on the edge of the bed with my nose pressed nearly to the screen to even make out what was happening."
And when he saw the punch?
"I wasn't sure I had seen what I thought I had seen," he said.
At the point of impact, Natali remembers thinking, "Here is the moment at which, however you feel about him, it's going to coalesce. If you love him, you're going to say, 'That poor guy, they goaded him into this moment.' If you hated him, you're going to say, 'It's finally going to happen to that SOB.' "
Natali became fascinated with Hayes and started researching his life while preparing a magazine obituary on the coach.
Hayes won 238 college games at Denison, Miami University and Ohio State, and his share of detractors.
He had no hobbies beyond football. He saw the game as the embodiment of American values. "Without winners there would be no civilization," he said.
Before Charlie Bauman, Hayes would dress down sportswriters, elbow hecklers and hurl haymakers at a Los Angeles Times photographer and an ABC cameraman.
"You ask, why are we talking about him now, why is he still interesting?" Natali said. "One reason was because he was so deeply and publicly flawed. I think it was the mistakes he made that made him that much more compelling and interesting."
• • •
Randy Gradishar watched the 1978 Gator Bowl in a Pittsburgh hotel room with Denver Bronco teammate Tom Jackson.
Gradishar was an All-America at Ohio State in the 1970s and one of Hayes' favorite players.
When Hayes lunged at Bauman, Gradishar looked at Jackson.
"I said to Tommy, 'Woody's gone, Woody's done, that's the last straw,' " Gradishar said. "I felt real bad, not for me, but for Woody and the legacy he built, to go out that way."
Gradishar says the public had Hayes all wrong.
"What you see on the news is what you remember, even though you don't know him," said Gradishar. "We all go off the deep end sometimes. Woody just happened to do it in front of millions of people."
Gradishar regrets that few people remember the Hayes he knew, a coach dedicated to his program and his players; a coach who demanded excellence on the field and in the classroom.
"Every time you talked to him, it was, 'How are you doing in school, when are you going to graduate, are you going to be a doctor or a lawyer?' "Gradishar said.
Years after Hayes' firing, Gradishar visited him in Columbus.
Over dinner, Gradishar said, Hayes apologized to him for the way he left the program.
"He was very sorry for what he had done," Gradishar said. "He felt bad about his actions, and for Woody, that was big. I saw a humble man. There was always a spirit of humility with Woody. Out in public, you didn't sense that."
• • •
Neither Keith Jackson nor his color analyst, Ara Parseghian, saw the punch, and no replay of it was available.
"All we saw was the momentary flash out of the corner of the eye," Jackson said. "There were 143 people on the sideline. You couldn't see a lot."
Jackson did a lot of fight coverage for ABC in those days. At the Gator Bowl pregame news conference, he presented Hayes with a pair of souvenir boxing gloves.
"I didn't realize they were something he was going to use," Jackson said.
• • •
Steve Snapp had a sick feeling when he left the Gator Bowl press box for the locker room.
"I guess I thought I knew it was over," said Snapp, who is now assistant athletic director at Ohio State. "I didn't think it would happen that quickly, but he had been told that one more incident of that type and they'd have to let him go."
Snapp received official word of Hayes' firing at 7:30 the next morning.
Hayes sometimes made Snapp's job as liaison to the media difficult. But Snapp came to love Woody, even if the coach did ask him once to take one for the team.
Ohio State used to travel in two planes. The first unit and the coaches flew on one plane (known as Red One) while reserve players and the assistant sports information director flew on another (Red Two).
Once, on approach to Penn State, the pilot told Hayes he might have to divert to Harrisburg because of fog.
Hayes would have none of it.
"Send in Red Two," Hayes said. "If they make it, we'll go in."
:youmad:
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