bury Michigan? when they closed coffin, there was someone else inside
Inspired by Bob Ufer as he said on the radio on November 20, 1976.
“Ohio Came To Bury Michigan, All Wrapped In Maize And Blue The Words Were Said, The Prayers Were Read And Everybody Cried But When They Closed The Coffin, There Was Someone Else Inside!
The Bucks Came To Bury The Wolverines – But Michigan Wasn’t Dead, And When The Game Was Over, It Was Someone Else Instead.
Twenty-Two Michigan Wolverines Put On The Gloves Of Gray, And As Cavender Played “The Victors”, They Laid Woody Hayes Away!”
I was raised on Woody Hayes.
Woody Hayes lived under my bed and if I got out of bed in the middle of the night, Woody might grab me and take me off to Columbus.
Now I live in Carolina.
And nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina and write silly things about a football game up North.
But who cares.
Michigan has now won one thousand and one college football games.
A Roman using roman numerals would add it up like this, MI.
those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason, makes proud
Readers of this blog with know that 1) I am a fan of the University of Michigan Football team and 2) I have been tracking the accumulated wins of the football program to 1000 wins for some years.
I predicted this win would come in 2023 but along came Covid.
No matter, I figured nothing could stop the wins from piling up until Michigan was the first team ever in organized american football to win 1000 games.
Never did I imagine that HOW they won those games would be called into question.
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
The saying is Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Literally from the Latin it can be translated as Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.
Boy howdy but does that seem to fit the bill.
The Coaching staff at Michigan had to have lost their minds and all reason to embrace and allow such a nutzo-dumbo scheme for stealing signs from other teams as is being documented in the newspapers daily.
I keep asking why?
Then I remember how Tom Clancy adapted the phrase.
He wrote, “Those whom God wishes to destroy … he first makes proud.“
There it is.
Caught with no alibi and no explanation.
Proud.
Pride.
So dumb.
I have been waiting for this day for years and it’s dead sea fruit that turns to ashes in my mouth.
At one point in my life we lived across the street from Dr. Julius Franks who was the first All American Football player at Michigan who happened to be black.
I was despondent after a game that Michigan lost one weekend and he looked at me and said, “None of that. No time for that. Got to get back up. Got a game next week. No time for that.”
As a side note, Dr. Franks once took me and my sons to a Western Michigan Football game (where he was a Regent (ex-officio) and on the drive we talked about everything under the sun.
Without warning, I changed the subject and asked, “How did your team do against Notre Dame?”
Remember this was on a long drive on a fall afternoon and we had been talking about everything under the sun.
“Beat them!“, Dr. Franks responded without hestitation, “We went down there and Beat them!”
It had been more than 40 years ago.
So Michigan has won 1000 games.
It isn’t the way I planned to feel.
It isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.
But no time for that.
Nope, none of that.
So for me and the boys of 811 Packard in Ann Arbor.
And for the years of living with 4 guys in a 2 person apartment.
It’s a story that will be adjudicated — by the Big Ten, by fans, by media, by courts, by Connor Stalions’ vacuum company investors — with only a passing nod to due process, objective truth or reasoned context.
After all, it’s OK to discern the opponent’s signs from TV copy, or the all-22, or to call up former graduate assistants to dish on their old team, but it’s not OK to buy a ticket, sit in the stands and watch. Whether that makes sense might be a worthy question, but the only issue at hand is whether Michigan broke a rule — a literal written rule and, perhaps, the unwritten rule in which gamesmanship is OK unless it’s overly convoluted, entirely stupid and executed by a guy with a hilarious name.
Whether any of this makes sense might be a worthy question.
I am reminded of something my brother Jack once said.
Jack went to Michigan in late 1960’s as was as close to being a hippie as any one in our family.
Not sure how much, but I do think he took part in the anti-war protests that made Ann Arbor and Port Huron famous.
All I know for sure is that there is a story of Jack talking with one of his Ann Arbor buddies, both of them now respected lawyers, and the buddy said my bother, with some relief, ‘aren’t you happy that Ann Arbor Police announced they had just cleaned house and threw out all those records from when we were in school?’
I also remember a summer afternoon where Jack fell in the lake with his wallet in his back pocket.
Like you do in those moments, he emptied his wallet of everything and spread it out to dry and wonder of wonder, there was his 15 year old draft card.
He looked at if for a minute.
Then he got some matches and lit it on fire and watched as his draft card burned up.
“I thought it would feel like more,” he said.
But I digress.
Jack would watch Michigan football games with us as a family and he was such a fan, he made notes of almost every play on a yellow pad as he watched.
I asked him once what he did with his notes and said “nothing, he just took notes to keep from falling asleep.
So about 20 years, in a marketing effort, the University of Michigan made these cutouts, twenty five feet high, out of steel panels from the words of the Michigan fight song.
These panels were fastened to the outside of the stadium is what became known as the ‘Halo’.
It lasted two years as the the fans and alumni went nutz.
How ugly.
How crass.
How stupid.
How dumb.
Awful.
Didn’t seem to be particularly well executed.
Ugliest.
I I asked Jack what he thought.
He was silent then he said, “Entirely Appropriate!”
Wading through sign-gate, I know exactly what he means.
same of truly rude, giant or smelly person made an impression
So what do you say when a guy like that dies?
John Feinstein, who wrote the bestselling book about Knight called “A Season on the Brink” said last week in the Washington Post that Knight’s two biggest flaws were pretending that he didn’t care what people thought of him (when he actually cared too much) and always having to have the last word, even if it hurt others and himself.
Still, Feinstein wrote, “He made an indelible impression on anyone who met him.”
That’s true.
But the same could be said of a truly rude person, a truly giant person, or a truly smelly person.
Making impressions is an incomplete summary of a life.
My student era at the University of Michigan started in January, 1981.
It is a long and goofy story on how I got into Michigan and a lot of things, bizarre once-in-a-lifetime pieces of the administrative puzzle had to fall into place to get me into the place, but that’s for another time.
Just say that my roommates claimed Michigan changed admission rules to make sure it would never happen again.
It was the longest of long shots that I would be a student at Michigan at the beginning of 1981 but I was so sure the bet would pay off that I figured out a way to buy student season’s tickets to Michigan Basketball.
So it was that after a whirlwind two weeks that saw me find a place to live, I boarded at a frat house, sitting in class taking notes in History of Imperial Russia while looking out the windows through the iconic columns of Angell Hall while hearing the Michigan Bell Tower strike the hours that I found myself going to my first University of Michigan game as an official student.
That game was Michigan versus Indiana.
Michigan and Mike McGee versus Indiana and Isiah Thomas.
Bill Frieder versus Bobby Knight.
I had been to a lot of Michigan Basketball games.
Michigan was famous for having one of the quietest, hard to impress, hard to get to a reaction from crowds in all of college basketball.
But not this night.
Because of Bobby Knight.
Electricity was in the air.
And it was focused on one person.
Bobby Knight.
It was kinda scarry.
My sister had been in the same building years earlier when the infamous ‘Free John Sinclair’ rally was held.
Sinclair, a Michigan Student and part of the anti war era, had been arrested on drug charges and sentenced to 5 years in jail for having two cigarettes made of weed.
To everyone’s shock and surprise, John Lennon and Oko Ono showed up.
To everyone’s shock and surprise, Mr. Lennon refused to perform any Beatles songs.
Still, my sister remembered, Mr. Lennon, in a very spooky almost sinister way, controlled that audience.
I felt that with Mr. Knight.
If he gestured, the crowd oooooooooooooooooooed.
If he looked at something the crowd urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred.
And he was just standing there watching warmups.
Once the game started the crowd went crazy.
Knight was hard to please as a coach and unfortunately for his team, they were losing to Michigan.
Knight yelled.
The crowd roared.
Knight shook his fist, the crowd almost wet its collective pants in glee.
Knight turned and kicked the scorers table and the crowd lost its mind.
With just under two minutes to go, and Indiana down by 6 points, Knight had had enough and walked off the court.
Just left his team to figure out how to lose by themselves.
Who does that?
And they crowd went absolutely bananas.
And Michigan won.
Beat Isiah Thomas.
But more, beat Bobby Knight.
And every person there that night, felt they had had a personal role in the way victory played out.
No Haiku For You 