Bowl Games, Especially Against Clemson, Evoke Memories of Woody Hayes

Forty-two years ago this week, the Ohio State Buckeyes flew into New Orleans days before Christmas and almost two full weeks before the Sugar Bowl, in which they would face the SEC champion Alabama Crimson Tide in the only matchup ever between good friends and legendary coaches Woody Hayes and Paul “Bear” Bryant.

And since they had arrived so early, as Hayes always preferred before a bowl game, they grew restless. It didn’t take long for a group of Buckeyes to discover the iconic bar, Pat O’Brien’s, and once there, of course, they indulged in the legendary drink that the bar is known for.

“We were sitting around this one large table and we were all pretty smacked because we had all Hurricanes in front of us,” All-American linebacker Tom Cousineau recalled. “Woody walked in there but I never noticed him until he sat down at our table. He was talking to us like it was no big deal, because he figured those Hurricanes were just fruit punch.”

As the severely buzzed group of players pensively waited to see what their sometimes-unpredictable head coach would do next, they silently hoped and prayed he would not lift one of those giant red drinks to smell the overwhelming scent of alcohol. Then he suddenly did something even more shocking — he picked up one and took a big gulp.

That’s when all hell broke loose inside the bar just off Bourbon Street.

“He finally figured out that the juice was just for coloring,” Cousineau said. “He got up and threw that Hurricane against the wall and the race was on. I fell out of my chair and was crawling along, going from table to table to get out of there without him seeing me.”

Every Buckeye inside the bar tried their individual best to elude the coach to escape the bar unnoticed. Some ran, some crawled and others tried to tuck themselves into the restroom until all the dust settled. It was, to put it bluntly, every man for himself.

“I think the guys he caught ran laps or something like that,” Cousineau said.

On New Year’s Day in the Superdome, the Buckeyes played as if they had been hitting the Hurricanes more than each other during the entire week of practice. Alabama blasted them 35-6, which was the worst bowl loss in Ohio State history, embarrassing Hayes mainly because of his close relationship with Bryant.

Nobody knew it then, but that lopsided loss would kick off what was to become the worst year in Ohio State football history.

Before the Sugar Bowl kicked off that day, Bryant had called the most-highly recruited quarterback in Ohio high school history, Art Schlichter, whom then-Pitt assistant coach Jackie Sherrill once called the best prep quarterback since Joe Namath, from the Alabama locker room. Officially, Schlichter had narrowed his choices to Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State and Michigan, but in the end there was no way he was headed to the school up north, or south to play for Bryant or east to play for Paterno “in the middle of nowhere,” as he put it.

“I was born in Ohio, raised in Ohio and I will die a Buckeye,” he said.

THE OFFENSE CHANGES

Just as importantly, Hayes had guaranteed him that he would change the Buckeyes’ offense to a more of a wide-open passing attack and away from his conservative signature running game that often featured a robust backfield of three running backs in the red zone. It was a change that Ohio State longtime offensive coordinator George Chaump had longed for, and with Schlichter committed to the Buckeyes, Hayes had no choice but to give in.

To say Woody Hayes was a complex man is to say the earth is round. The truth is, he had more sides than an Octagon. He hated change, but he had determined before those August practices began that he would start his prized recruit at quarterback and move two-year returning starter Rod Gerald from quarterback to receiver.

“I had practiced with the first team from the first day of camp,” Schlichter said. “But the practices were closed to the public and to the media, so only the coaches and the players knew it and they were all sworn to secrecy. I told a few people – (high school coach Fred) Zechman, my parents and a few buddies – but it never got out in the media. I never could have done that today without it becoming public knowledge.”

Ahead of the season-opener at Ohio Stadium against Penn State, a team Schlichter had spurned, Hayes wanted every advantage possible. Truth is, he didn’t care much for Joe Paterno and vice-versa. They were extreme competitors and had clashed in recruiting several times. Their teams had played twice before, with Hayes’ Buckeyes winning both games in 1975 and ‘76.

But Paterno had a crucial advantage by the third Saturday in September that year and he knew it. His Nittany Lions had played two games and won both before they faced Ohio State. It was a scheduling inequity that would never occur today. And with Hayes and his coaches fully realizing they were about to start a true freshman at the most-important position, they had the element of surprise but had no idea of what to expect from their new offense. Penn State, on the other hand, had one of its best defensive lines in years, led by tackles Matt Millen and Bruce Clark.

As the final week of practice commenced, Chaump had even convinced Woody to employ some five-receiver, no-back sets. It was no less shocking than if Frank Sinatra had been talked into singing rap.

“We had a great game plan ready for Penn State,” Schlichter said. “But just before the game, Alex Gibbs, the offensive line coach who had Woody’s ear, convinced him the line wouldn’t be able to hold up if we sent so many receivers out at one time. Against George’s wishes, Woody scrapped much of what we had done successfully for a month in camp and tried to simplify things.

“Woody and Gibbs were satisfied with the changes, George was furious and I was confused.”

The public and media had no idea who would start the game at quarterback, but Gerald had stated to several people that he definitely was starting the game. And it would turn out that he was telling the truth – he just wasn’t starting at quarterback.

After the opening kickoff sailed into the back of the end zone and before the Buckeyes’ first play that day, nine players huddled on offense. Then Gerald and Schlichter jogged onto the field together and the stadium of 88,202 fans roared. When Gerald broke the huddle and split far to the right, that was the moment it was revealed that he had been moved to receiver. On the very first play, Schlichter took a five-step drop and drilled his first pass to the Buckeyes’ best receiver, Doug Donley, near the right sideline for a 6-yard gain. The stadium roared again. One play later, he completed an 18-yard pass to Gerald over the middle for a first down and the fans roared even louder. After three plays, he was 2-of-2 for 24 yards – and that in itself was similar to statistics of Ohio State quarterbacks for entire games in the past.

Four plays later, the first drive of the new season ended with Schlichter’s first career interception. On the next series, he connected with Gerald again, this time for a long gain down the right sideline to Penn State’s 15, but Gerald fumbled while fighting for extra yards. That was as close as Ohio State would come to scoring the entire day as Schlichter followed by throwing four more interceptions. His five that day are still the school’s single-game record. Penn State’s Matt Bahr kicked four field goals and and the Nittany Lions scored one touchdown to win 19-0. Millen and Clark had pummeled him for much of the day and often let him know about it, too.

“After one pass, Millen caught me with his helmet in my ribs and said, ‘How’s that feel freshman?’” Schlichter recalled. He said, ‘”Stay down! Don’t get up!’”

After the game, after the media had departed and few players remained in the locker room, Schlichter was summoned to see the head coach. He was expecting a real butt-chewing.

“I limped into his tiny office in the bowels of the stadium and there stood 65-year-old Woody Hayes, naked as a jaybird,” he said. “It was never a pretty sight to see him naked, but especially after the most-disastrous game I had ever played.”

The coach took several minutes to offer encouragement, lifting up his freshman emotionally.

“Let me tell you something,” he started. “Don’t let this get you down. Don’t listen to any of those goddamn critics. By the time you leave here, you will be the greatest quarterback to ever play at Ohio State!”

Following that game, however, Hayes scrapped much of what Chaump had installed and returned to the I-formation, featuring a lot more option. Schlichter, a true dual-threat quarterback, continued as the starter and had 13 rushing touchdowns that season to lead the team in scoring, but tossed 21 interceptions (also still a school single-season record) against only six touchdown passes. After the Buckeyes lost to Michigan 14-3 to finish 7-3-1, the school almost-reluctantly accepted the only bowl bid available, a Gator Bowl invitation to face Clemson.

THE GATOR BOWL

Hayes always wanted to win more than just about anybody else, but especially this particular bowl game. The loss to Michigan was the third in a row to his protégé’ Bo Schembechler. And that crushing bowl loss to Bryant a year earlier also lingered. There also was a loss to Purdue that season and the wolves in Columbus were circling like that hadn’t in at least 12 seasons, contending that the coach was way past his prime and it was time for new and younger blood to lead the storied program.

There were only a handful of bowl games back then, and the Gator was regarded as one of the best after the majors of the Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange, even though it was played pre-New Year’s Day on November 30. The matchup with a team from South Carolina especially had Hayes fired up during pre-bowl practices.

“He was really stressed that week, probably more than usual,” said Larry Romanoff, then the team’s head academic advisor who was close to Hayes. “Those three straight losses to Michigan were weighing on him and he always wanted to win, but he really wanted to win that bowl game.”

Hayes invoked all kinds of storylines for his players to hate the Tigers, starting with the Civil War of all things. He did his best to make it a North-versus-South battle.

“Those southern bastards kept your ancestors in slavery,” he would tell many of Ohio State’s black players over and over again before the game. “And they killed my granddaddy in the Civil War! Now is the time to get revenge!”

Other than that, the Buckeyes knew little about Clemson, which had a 10-1 record but had lost its head coach, Charley Pell, who was hired by Florida following the final regular-season game. Assistant Danny Ford, who was only 30, would take over. The Tigers weren’t much of a football power in those days and would not even sniff a national championship in their football history until four years later. But they did have some talent, they had won 10 games and they were plenty motivated to face a Big Ten power like Ohio State.

“We didn’t know anything about Clemson,” guard Ken Fritz said. “I am not sure many of the guys could have told you what state they were from. But they were ready to play us.”

During the three weeks leading up to the game, Hayes and Chaump conducted a mini-camp of sorts focusing on nothing but the passing game, which had been largely shelved since the loss to Penn State. Schlichter had completed only 87 passes that season.

“That was exactly what we needed,” Schlichter said of those December practices. “That is when I improved the most and I finally felt comfortable as a college quarterback.”

And it showed: Schlichter completed 16-of-19 passes for 205 yards and had scored on a 1-yard sneak to cut Tigers’ lead to 17-15 when the Buckeyes got the ball back and started driving again in the final minutes of the game. Schlichter had completed three straight passes as they moved down the field again on their final possession, until they faced a third-and-five at Clemson’s 24-yard line.

Guard Erne Andria shuttled the play into Schlichter, who relayed “24 TUBA” in the huddle. Donley would run a go pattern down the right sideline, while running back Ron Springs would circle out of the backfield and settle down in the middle of the field beyond the first-down marker.

“I was right there (on the sideline) when they called it,” Cousineau said. “We were right there in field position where we could kick a field goal. The instructions were very clear to Art: ‘If the play is not there, throw it away so we can kick it.’ I can remember that conversation like it was yesterday.”

Freshman Bob Atha had kicked 6-of-9 field goals that season and a 41-yarder, if the Buckeyes had gained no yardage on third down, was well within his range.

“That is true,” Schlichter confirmed. “They told me, ‘DO NOT THROW AN INTERCEPTION!’”

The footnote of what happened next that was never mentioned was that Donley was wide open down the right sideline for what would have been the go-ahead touchdown, but Schlichter never saw him.

“Yeah, I had beaten my man,” Donley confirmed. “I was about as open as I had been all season.”

After Schlichter dropped back, he pump-faked just as Springs worked his way around the right end to the 20-yard line. A reserve nose guard by the name of Charlie Bauman, who had re-entered the game just before the play, tried to rush to the right but made no penetration, so he started to circle back to the middle of the field. Just then, Schlichter spotted Springs and threw a soft pass toward him. Bauman cut in front of it and intercepted the pass and started running to the left. Schlichter, after throwing his hands up as if ‘What did I just do?’ jumped on Bauman and they rolled out of bounds on the Ohio State sideline. Bauman stood up and raised the football as if it were his prize, before Hayes grabbed him, turned him somewhat and delivered a right cross under his chinstrap and above the shoulder pads.

And with that — something that Buckeye players had seen often in practice but always laughed off once the coach turned away his attention — Ohio State football history was changed forever.

Woody Hayes had done something he had done hundreds of times before – he had struck a football player in a fit of rage. The huge difference this time was that it was an opposing player.

Keith Jackson and former Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian were calling the game for ABC that night and never mentioned Woody’s punch. “I don’t know what triggered the action here on the sideline,” Parseghian said. After a replay was shown only once, Jackson said, “Well … you can’t tell there. I don’t see anything that would have triggered it, but a lot of glum faces.”

They went off the air not realizing what caused the melee.

Many Ohio State officials and players, present and former, believed Hayes’ blood-sugar balance was way off that night, and that week leading up to the game for that matter. He was a lifetime diabetic and often did not pay attention to his insulin balance.

“I really think that contributed to it,” Archie Griffin once told me. “He just didn’t take care of himself.”

“We noticed,” Andria added. “He was not making sense before the game.”

Guard Ken Fritz, whose picture while restraining the coach after the punch appeared in newspapers from coast to coast the following day, said as much earlier this week.

“His sugar was way off. I could tell by looking into his eyeballs,” Fritz said. “His eyes were all glassy as I held him. I don’t think he knew where he was or what was happening. He was out of it. He just kept saying, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’”

Once the field was cleared after the ensuing melee, Hayes got a 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalty two plays later, giving Clemson a first down and enabling the Tigers to run out the clock. When that happened, Cousineau walked toward the Ohio State sideline, screaming at his coach. “I just wanted to get the ball back one more time,” he said. “But that ended it.”

As soon as the game ended, Hayes had enough wherewithal to remove his hat. Romanoff walked along the coach’s right side as they made their way from the sideline to the locker room. These were the days before head coaches were surrounded by security and police officers escorting them on and off the field.

“Fans were always trying to grab his hat as a souvenir,” Romanoff said. “That’s why we were there, or to make sure nothing worse happened to him.”

On this night, once the ABC cameras left Hayes as he neared the entrance to the locker room, a Clemson fan tried to grab him and punch him.

“The guy wearing a Clemson shirt just appeared as we reached the tunnel and tried to grab him and we were trying to keep the guy off of him,” Romanoff recalled. “He just kept fighting to grab Woody and we were trying to keep him from grabbing him.”

THE AFTERMATH

The Buckeyes and assistant coaches rode the team buses back to their beachfront hotel that night and woke up the next morning, New Year’s Eve, 1978, still not knowing what would happen to their beloved coach. Few of them had seen the replay, but they had a pretty good idea that the end to a legendary career may indeed be history. After receiving his orders from Ohio State president Harold Enarson, athletic director Hugh Hindman met with Hayes at the team hotel and gave him a choice: He could resign or he would be fired. Hayes initially refused and Hindman relayed that he would be fired and left the room.

Hayes called his trusted friend, Columbus Dispatch columnist Paul Hornung later that night and gave him his version. He said he had resigned, which is the story Hornung filed that night on deadline. But Ohio State’s official stance was that he had been fired. And that is the version that made all the wire services and newspapers that Saturday.

A few seniors did not board the team’s morning flight back to Columbus. The team’s best player, Cousineau, who would be taken with the first pick of the NFL draft that April, was headed to Honolulu for the Hula Bowl.

“I was disconnected from the aftermath,” he said. “I was done. I got on a plane the next day and headed to Hawaii. When we landed, I heard the news (of Hayes’ firing) and suddenly everybody wanted to talk to me about it.”

As the team’s charter was ready for takeoff from Jacksonville to Columbus the next morning, Hayes was not aboard.

“We sat there in the airplane and it was so quiet,” Romanoff recalled. “That’s when we saw a police cruiser drive onto the tarmac and he got out and got on the plane.”

Romanoff recalls that Woody’s familiar voice came over the intercom as soon as he boarded. Some players have said over the years that his announcement came just before landing in Columbus. Whenever it was, his message was clear: “This is your coach … I want to tell you that I no longer will be your football coach at Ohio State.”

And that was that.

“I’ll never forget that plane ride home,” Fritz recalled. “It was very quiet. Nobody said a word. Then Woody came on at the end and told us he no longer was our coach. That’s how we found out.”

“The city of Columbus and in fact the state of Ohio seemed to be under a dark cloud,” Schlichter wrote in his autobiography I co-wrote with him, titled “BUSTED.”

“It was you read about. It was all people talked about. It was before ESPN existed, but what happened in the waning moments of the Gator Bowl topped the national news. The whole thing was horrible. Imagine what a burden that was for an 18-year-old kid like me to carry. No matter what I accomplished later in my career, I would always be known as the guy who threw the pass that got Woody Hayes fired.

“One of college football’s biggest legends, the man beloved in Ohio, the man who recruited me and who had eaten Thanksgiving dinner with our family, the man who promised to change his offense for me, the man who told me three months earlier I would become the greatest quarterback in Ohio State history … would no longer get to do what he lived to do – coach football. And somehow, I had to live with that.”

There are those, such as Romanoff and the coach who followed him, the late Earle Bruce, who always believed Woody was about to retire on his own accord after the Gator Bowl, if the punch had never happened. He was 65 but frankly looked older. He had diabetes and heart issues. He rarely slept more than five hours in any given night. He didn’t eat right. And it appeared that the Michigan program was surpassing Ohio State’s.

“He had lost to Michigan three straight times and the pressure was building,” Romanoff said. “I really think there was a chance he would have retired anyway.”

Hayes once called Bauman at his dorm room and by all accounts, they had a nice conversation. Bauman once said 20 years after the game, “It wasn’t a big deal for me then and it isn’t a big deal for me now. I don’t have anything bad to say about Coach Hayes. He made a mistake. We all make mistakes. I mean, he didn’t hurt me or anything.”

As the decades have passed, anyone who played for or worked for or knew Hayes undergoes the same dilemma when confronted with a critic who usually hails from out of state. They may ridicule the coach, his legacy, his temper or what happened on the night of the Gator Bowl. Their dilemma is whether to spend the time and effort to explain who Hayes really was, what he stood for, and repeat the stories of his thousands of good deeds, or just ignore the ignorance and let it pass.

“No, I don’t waste the chance,” Romanoff explained. “Every time I respond to it. All the time I respond. I want everyone to know what a great person he was. Nobody in the history of college football cared about his kids, his players, like Woody Hayes did. Nobody cared about people like he did.”

Romanoff has a million stories of Woody’s caring. Here are two of his favorites.

“One night after practice, he looks at me and says, ‘How are you doing with your work? Are you caught up?’” he asked. When Romanoff said he was good, Woody said, “Grab a football and go get the car. We are going up to Mount Sanai in Cleveland. There’s a man there dying of cancer whom I want to visit.”

Romanoff did the driving and Hayes visited the cancer patient, presenting him the signed football.

“Then we drove back to Columbus and he watched film for three or four hours into the morning,” he explained.

Hayes was known for never cashing his checks earned for speeches or personal appearances. He would accept them and then shove them in a drawer in his desk, but rarely cash them. After all, money never meant much to him, unless it could be used to help someone in need.

“One day I was there when he starts talking to the janitor at St. John Arena and the man is explaining about being way behind on his bills,” Romanoff explained. “Woody reached into his desk and took out a few of those honorarium checks and endorsed them over to that janitor. He did things like that all the time.”

Hayes’ daily hospital visits to the sick, dying and lonely are legendary, even when the Buckeyes were on the road, but Romanoff even heard another that he had never heard before. He was giving a tour of the Woody Hayes Athletic Facility three or four years ago when man taking the tour told him about his mother’s job as a nurse in the neo-natal unit at University Hospital.

“Do you know that Woody would show up at 3 or 4 in the morning and help the nurses feed the babies?” he asked Romanoff. “My mom always talked about that. She said that he did it all the time.”

Romanoff laughed, “Can’t you just picture Woody holding a baby while feeding it with a bottle? The man was amazing. He never slept. He never stopped giving.”

Somewhere out there today are dozens of adults, ages anywhere from 40-70 who were bottle-fed by Woody Hayes as newborns, and yet they would have no idea.

“That was his life. All he did was give, give and give some more,” Fritz said. “That’s how I remember him, how we all remember him, and how I wish everyone remembered him – not for those 30 seconds they saw on TV that night at the Gator Bowl against Clemson … “

Romanoff retired from the athletic department recently after serving more than 40 years in various capacities. Schlichter went on to become the greatest quarterback in Ohio State history over the following three seasons, at least to that point, just as Hayes had predicted. (He then encountered serious legal trouble due to a gambling addiction and his latest stint in federal prison is in its seventh year. He is due to be released next August). Springs, who died in 2011, produced a son, Shawn, who would become an All-American cornerback at Ohio State. Ford coached 16 seasons – 11 at Clemson and five at Arkansas — and had 121 more wins after his first-ever victory that night in Jacksonville. Bauman has kept a low profile and never talked much about the incident which made him the answer to a college football trivia question. It is believed that he has lived most of his life in Cincinnati.

And Ohio State’s winningest coach, a man who compiled a 205-61-10 record and won five national titles and 13 Big Ten titles in his 28 years at the school, died on March 12, 1987 of heart failure in the modest Upper Arlington home. It was the same home that he and his wife Anne had purchased after he became head coach of the Buckeyes in 1951.

To this day, he is still beloved by his former players and assistant coaches.

“We all loved that man,” Fritz said. “There was not an evil bone in his body. He was a great, great man. We all feel that way.”

And now, 41 years after he coached that final game, Ohio State still has yet to defeat Clemson in three post-season meetings, which included an Orange Bowl loss six years ago and a 31-0 loss in the College Football Playoff three years ago, a loss which eclipsed that 29-point Sugar Bowl loss to the Crimson Tide as the worst post-season loss in school history.

The Buckeyes’ next attempt comes Saturday night in Glendale, Ariz., in a heavenly matchup of two 13-0 teams, the winner of which will be one game away from a national championship. Ohio State’s first-year coach, Ryan Day, who has a perfect 16-0 record, was born two months and 14 days following that Gator Bowl. He was born on March 12, 1979, the same day in which Hayes would die eight years later.

Saturday night, if at least for a brief moment, players from that ’78 team who are now in their late 50’s or early 60’s, likely will think back to that damp, foggy night in Jacksonville so many years ago when so much happened and so much of their lives were changed forever.

“It really was a shitty season, a nasty week leading up to the bowl game when it rained all week and then a really nasty night for the game,” Fritz said. “And then it got worse …

“We have to win this game, right? This has to be the time we get back at Clemson and finally beat them, doesn’t it?”

Jeff Snook, a 1982 Ohio State graduate, has written 13 books about college football. His columns can be read at jeffsnook.net