New Buckeye Football Book Out

[sandgk]

There is a new book out covering some of the Buckeye Football History;
Here is the review from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. He did have couple of slights against Coop in the review - though probably with deserved cause.

'Buckeye Madness: The Glorious, Tumultuous, Behind-the-Scenes Story of Ohio State Football' by Joe Menzer.

Woody Hayes gets in his hits, but there are plenty of misses in 'Buckeye Madness'

Sunday, August 21, 2005

By Jon Caroulis


Sometimes it wasn't enough for Woody Hayes to punch his players, an opponent or a TV cameraman. At a practice, the one-time head football coach of Ohio State University punched himself out to make a point with his players.

Few coaches achieved such infamy as did Hayes, who is as famous for his violent outbursts as he is for his success. No wonder Joe Menzer devotes many pages to Hayes. But while reading about Hayes and his temper or his on-the-field battles or his largely unreported charitable acts, there's one question Menzer doesn't address: Why?

Why did this man, who grew up in apparently normal circumstances, who hid a big heart underneath his big exterior, who believed he had a duty to educate his players, have such an inflammatory nature?

It was that rage that drove him to succeed and contributed to his dismissal, and it should have been explored.

This is only one area where Menzer simply skims the surface. The author, an Ohio native, might have spent years researching and writing this book, but it has the feel of being rushed (possibly to coincide with the start of the college football season?).

There's plenty to read and enjoy, but it is a half-hearted attempt to give you the "behind-the-scenes story" of a college football powerhouse.

For starters, Hayes was preceded by Paul Brown, who achieved legendary status of his own as a high school, college and professional football coach in Ohio and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. There's almost nothing about Brown's years at OSU.

The only time Menzer really spends on Brown is when a later Buckeye coach, John Cooper, had to be persuaded to attend Brown's funeral.

If Hayes wanted to be remembered for anything, it was beating hated University of Michigan. Some of the best battles between UM and OSU tested Hayes against Glenn "Bo" Schembechler, who had once been an assistant to Hayes.

Not once is Schembechler quoted about what it was like to face his former mentor. We only get recycled quotes from newspaper stories. If Schembechler wasn't approached for an interview, he should have been; and if he was and declined, that should have been reported.

Menzer covers the Carolina Panthers for The Winston-Salem Journal and has written books on North Carolina college basketball and NASCAR, two subjects in which the sport is a larger-than-life experience for fans.

So it's natural he would tackle a program that has inspired great loyalty and passion such as OSU. But there needed to be more.

And in some cases, less.

Football coaches talk in cliches, but that doesn't mean the writer has to use them, too. At times the only way to distinguish between the coaches' cliches and Menzer's is that the coaches' comments are surrounded by quotation marks.

Hayes was succeeded by Earl Bruce, another of his disciples, who had success -- but not enough -- at OSU for 13 years.

Next came John Cooper, an outsider from Arizona who also had success in Columbus but never clicked with the school's fans or alumni "because he didn't understand the history and tradition" at Ohio State, said former players and fans.

Menzer repeats this assessment so many times that the reader has to wonder what the point of the repetition is.

To his credit, Menzer writes about the program's warts (some of which came about after the team, led by Jim Tressel, captured a national title in 2002): There's Art Schlichter's notorious gambling problems, players arrested on drunken driving charges, and Maurice Clarett, who could be the poster boy for what's wrong with college sports -- money.

Clarett claimed Ohio State boosters handed him cash, cars and CDs by the handful.

But a book that also features Hayes visiting sick children in a hospital and giving a child's unemployed father money for her medical bills deserves a read, albeit a quick one.



<!-- Former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes -->

<hr>(Jon Caroulis is a freelance writer in Philadelphia.)

[tibor75]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...pot/index.html



Welcome to the SI.com Book Club. Each month we'll review a sports book and offer an excerpt. August's selection: Buckeye Madness.

There are places in this country where the passage of time is marked by three seasons: football, recruiting, and spring football. Places such as Columbus, Tuscaloosa, Ann Arbor and Baton Rouge where the local football coach is either deified or vilified, depending on his record. These are the places where college football is king.

There are books that attempt to explore and explain this phenomenon, not only for the already converted to revel in, but so that the uninitiated might understand. Buckeye Madness is not such a book.

Instead, sportswriter Joe Menzer, an Ohio native and unabashed Buckeyes fan, has crafted a fairly straightforward history of the program after the arrival of legendary coach Woody Hayes in 1951. Menzer's account is geared to those whose closets are already full of Buckeyes gear.

Early on in Buckeye Madness, former Ohio State offensive tackle Dave Foley, a captain on Hayes' undefeated 1968 national champions, gushes about how current coach Jim Tressel has helped return the program to its former heights. Tressel took over in 2001 for John Cooper, a carpetbagger without Ohio ties who won lots of games (.715 winning percentage over 13 seasons) but too often lost the wrong one (2-10-1 against Michigan).

"If you live in Ohio and you don't wear scarlet and gray now, you're an oddball," Foley says. "And it used to be that you could go around town even in Columbus and see a bunch of people in Michigan shirts ... And that's horrible, isn't it?"

That question, for Menzer and his target audience, is purely rhetorical. Obviously, any Columbus resident who roots for Michigan is a deviant. Why that passion runs so deep and the many colorful ways is which it can express itself, though, are not the subjects of this book. Rather, the importance of beating Michigan is treated as a self-evident truth, which it probably is to the book's likely readers.

Still, Menzer professionally executes the task he sets for himself. Particularly entertaining are the passages on Hayes. The coach best known outside Ohio for swinging at a rival Clemson player in his final game is presented here as the charismatic, driven, uncompromising man that established the legend in the first place before its national unraveling.

We learn that Hayes was a history buff who chased after his players to get their education; a humanitarian who regularly visited hospitals and gave freely to the sick with no attendant publicity; a blocking-and-tackling fundamentalist known for his conservative "three yards and a cloud of dust" rushing attack but flexible enough to unveil an early version of the no-huddle offense.

Hayes was also something of a nutjob, exploding into rages that his players and assistants dubbed "megatons" or, if they really got out of hand, "hundred-megatons." When an assistant once suggested that the staff turn in after four hours of fruitless late-night film viewing, Hayes became so agitated that he literally beat himself up, punching his own face until he developed two black eyes.

The coach also regularly slugged players in practice, though the way Menzer describes it, the players were usually more amused than alarmed. Hayes' outbursts are mostly played for comic effect, as in look-at-what-the-crazy-old-coot's-doing-now, rather than as the frightening side of runaway competitiveness. Maybe that was really how it played out, though the fact that Hayes knew how to beat Michigan (16-11-1) also earns him the benefit of the doubt in Buckeye land.

The book opens and closes with the 2002 national championship under Tressel, a born-and-bred Ohioan whom Menzer sees as a worthy heir (unlike Cooper) to Hayes' throne. The subsequent string of player arrests and the whole ugly mess with running back Maurice Clarett are touched on, but Menzer has clearly come to praise the Buckeyes, not to bury them.

If you know a Buckeye fan -- and there certainly seem to be plenty around, considering that they can jam more than 100 of them into a New York City bar every fall weekend -- Menzer's book would make a fine addition to their library. Others might want to try something like Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer by Warren St. John, a New York Times writer and Alabama fan who spent a year with the Crimson Tide's most hardcore supporters to help answer the question: Why do I care? The response to that more general question should be of interest to fans of any school.

[BB73]

Obviously, any Columbus resident who roots for Michigan is a deviant.

No reason to limit this to Columbus residents.

[sandgk]

Originally Posted by BB73

No reason to limit this to Columbus residents.

Cross the border its all down to in-breeding don't you beleive?

[Oh8ch]

Picked up the book at the library today. The firs chapter starts off with the speech JT gave to the players before the Fiesta Bowl. You know, the speech he didn't give that was actually written by Ken Pryor.

So much for Menzer's credibility.

[Dryden]

Originally Posted by Oh8ch

You know, the speech he didn't give that was actually written by Ken Pryor.

Isn't that the same fake speech that I just noticed Golferdow01 has quoted in his sig?

[tibor75]

that made the urban legends web site

http://www.snopes.com/