A Bang and a Whimper
In “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot’s despairing ode to post-WWI Europe, the poet concluded that the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper.”
Well, for the two colossal football coaches in Ohio State University history, the blustering bully Woody Hayes and the buttoned-down Boy Scout Jim Tressel, their respective downfalls are not either/or matters. Woody went out with a big bang while Tressel desperately held on as long as he could before finally succumbing with a whimper. And fair or not, they will be forever linked together by both their successful records and – shall we say – the denouement of their corresponding careers.
It would take a team of early 20th century Austrian psychiatrists at the top of their game to precisely pinpoint the mental condition of Woody Hayes when he threw that fatal punch at a Clemson player in the Gator Bowl over 30 years ago. And even they would end up shrugging in nervous bewilderment.
Classic literature may be the only place to find a match for the cosmic context of that thrashing forearm delivered by the rotund Woodman. (To this day, that remains the greatest single moment in my lengthy TV-watching career. I sprung not one, but two full steps out of my late-’70s “relaxation” mode to an upright position and remained there – frozen – for what seemed a lifetime.)
On that eerily predictable night, Hayes could have passed for a near-dead Captain Ahab, strapped to Moby Dick by his own tangled harpoon lines, yet still grimly flailing away at the source of his doomed obsession. For long-time Woody watchers, this finale was not surprising since, in the practices leading up to the contest, his rambling reincarnation rants were rumored to have become more and more disjointed and, during the game, a wild-eyed Hayes feverishly stalked the sidelines and appeared to be, quite literally, frothing at the mouth. According to a friend of mine who played for Woody in the early ’70s and was in the post-game locker room that night, Hayes wandered amongst the undressing players muttering something to the effect that he was glad he punched a southern boy because the South killed his great-grandfather in the Civil War.
Even before he began flying over the cuckoo’s nest late in his coaching career, Hayes was viewed as a hypocritical embarrassment just about everywhere but Ohio, where the state’s Pravda-like sports media dutifully clicked pictures of him at Disneyland cozying up to Mickey Mouse and generally treated him with a reverence normally reserved for the patron saint of a small Sicilian village.
Never mind incidents like Woody’s drunken appearance at an early ’60s Indians’ game in which he had to be asked to leave following a salty outburst directed at the Tribe’s Cuban-born first baseman Vic Power. Never mind his ritualistic tearing up of sideline markers or his near-pathological berating of officials. Never mind how, with sweaty unctuousness, he would gush about sportsmanship even though he was the absolute worst sport imaginable in defeat – while in victory, he loved nothing more than to gloat about piling up the score on over-matched foes. And, lest anyone forget, never mind his “kill the hippies” right-wing Republicanism.
In fact, never mind anything and everything because the obsequious Ohio media kowtowed to him shamelessly while most of his ex-players – sounding strangely as if they were suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome – used the exact same weirdly robotic phrases in praise of his greatness over and over and over to anyone who would listen.
Well, if Hayes can be compared to Ahab in his maniacal pursuit of his own doom, then Tressel is like another Melville character, the Christ-like Billy Budd, who ended up hoisted on the petard of his own goody goodness. If Woody was a blustery train wreck, easy to see and hear coming, then Tressel was the king of smiles, appearing to be perpetually benevolent as he snuck around in the shadows. Known adoringly as the Vest, Tressel won the hearts of the cultish OSU fans when he was first hired by announcing to the crowd at a basketball game the exact number of days it was until the Michigan football game.
Starting with that too-cute-by-half meeting, the love affair of Tressel and OSU Nation floated merrily along despite some big bowl losses and a pair of program hiccups via Maurice Clarett and Troy Smith. And all the while, as they have done for the past 50 years, Buckeye boosters – succored by a suck-up media machine – boasted as to how superior OSU’s program was to, say, the cheaters in the SEC or, for that matter, everywhere else in the football world besides Columbus. And anyone who deviated from the party line about Tressel’s scarlet and grey sanctity was suppressed by an ever-vigilant and powerful alumni “brotherhood” that surreptitiously makes and breaks careers while goofily swaying along to the tune of “Hang on Sloopy.”
And even until the very end, with the entire program under scrutiny and Tressel having admitted to withholding information about ineligible players from his bosses and lying to the NCAA, there were only a few who urged the coddled coach to do the right thing. Most remained close to the Vest, defending him with the claim that he loved his players not wisely but too well; that he just simply cared too much for his “kids'” welfare both on and off the field; and that his lifetime of unmatched goodness (and victories over Michigan) vastly outweighed his totally understandable, selfless peccadillos.
Nonsense. The message Tressel sent to those players who broke the rules is “No matter what you do, I’ll cover for you. I’ve got your back and I’ll out and out lie if it means helping OSU win football games.” And, had he kept his job, the message he’d be sending to the parents of kids that he might recruit would be, “Don’t worry mom and dad, if your son messes up, I’ll keep my trap shut and sweep things under the rug. You can count on me.”
That’s the legacy of this particular hollow man who finally threw in the towel after months of seeming to be willing do anything to hold on to his position, no matter what that did to the Ohio State football program. I never thought I’d say this, but watching how Tressel whimpered along before finally slithering out the door has made me respect the way Woody ended his career with a bang.
[Photo via Johntex]
Larry Durstin is an independent journalist who has covered politics and sports for a variety of publications and websites over the past 20 years. He was the founding editor of the Cleveland Tab and an associate editor at the Cleveland Free Times. Durstin has won 12 Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards, including six first places in six different writing categories. LarryDurstinATyahoo.com
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