(4)
"HE FARTED IN OUR FACE!" Hayes yelled.
He stood before the team, before the first day of spring practice, talking about Purdue coach Jack Mollenkopf. And how Mollenkopf had acted during the second half of that 41-6 win against Ohio State the previous season. He didn't even stand on the sideline
"HE SAT ON THE BENCH WITH HIS ARMS FOLDED!"
And there was his derby hat.
"IT WAS TIPPED OVER HIS EYES!"
He was worked up now. He wanted his players worked up, too. Did they know Purdue's starters sat almost the entire second half" And that Leroy Keyes, the great Purdue running back, was so worn out by playing them he played golf the next day? That's what he said! Golf! That won't happen again!
"And if you guys don't beat Purdue, I guarantee you one goddamn thing,", Hayes said. "When Mollenkopf comes out to shake my hand after the game, I'll beat him up at midfield!"
With that, he took a framed glass picture and threw it against the wall. The players began yelling. And jumping. And woofing.
"WOOO-WOOO-WOOO!"
They ran out to practice field like a stampede on the Western plains. George Chaump, attending his first Ohio State practice, thought this was a speech a coach would give before a national championship game, not before the first of 20 spring practices, six months before the next meaningful kickoff.
But then it was a spring full of surprises. And decisions. Never before, never after, would these coaches have the smorgasbord of talent in one incoming class. The question was how to blend it among some talented upperclassmen. How to create the best team of it all. Who would start? Who would play where? And if you moved this guy over here, could you move that guy over there? It was a game of chess, with knights becoming bishops, bishops becoming rooks, players moved to new positions and coaches measuring the team's overall strengths against individual talents.
Take Jan White. He liked track more than football. He set the Pennsylvania high-school 110-meter hurdles record as a senior. He had only started playing football in junior high, because the coach promised to teach him to run faster. He quickly discovered that was a line to get him on the field. Even as he starred in football, even as coaches beat a path to his doorstep, White had considered attending Southern Cal mainly because the warm weather and palm trees spoke to his runner's heart.
But this spring the team needed a tight end, since senior Rufus Mayes was moving from there to his natural position of tackle. The coaches struck on White as the obvious choice. Never mind that at 6-2 and 205 pounds he didn't have the prototypical tight end's build. Never mind his speed would be lost much of the time at tight end. Never mind, too, that White argued against the move, saying he liked running free as a receiver more than playing inside amid bumper-car traffic.
White was their best option at tight end. So he now was one.
"I don't know anything about blocking in the line,", White said.
"We'll teach you,", said Hugh Hindman, who coached the tackles and tight end.
"But I don't want to learn,", White said.
Suddenly that spring, instead of lining up wide by himself, White was a measured 24 inches from a 250-pound Mayes or Dave Foley. Across from him, a defensive end or linebacker acted like a sledgehammer against him all year. Even when he went into a pass pattern, there were bodies bumping him. He went into survival mode, just trying to get through each day in one piece. Gone, forever to White that spring, were the days of running free as a receiver. And since he now was a tight end?
One day that spring, Bruce Jankowski looked at the lineup posted before each practice and saw he was now a receiver. That's how the news was broken to him. Unlike White, he was pleasantly surprised. He had arrived the previous fall and discovered one hole in his halfback game for this offense: He didn't know how to block. He didn't need to know in high school, since he always has been the guy getting the ball. But as a halfback in Hayes' offense, blocking was a primary role. He had to learn. And he had to block well, if he wanted to play. And that was a problem at first.
"I was a crappy blocker," he said.
He developed quickly enough to become a decent blocker that season. But it didn't solve the underlying issue Jankowski faced involving the backfield being loaded with stars. Three of the players he had competed with as a freshman - Brockington, Hayden and Tatum - eventually would be first-round NFL draft picks. Then there was Dave Brungard, the returning starter. And Jim Otis was the returning starter at fullback, so he'd get the ball most of the time, anyhow.
Jankowski saw enough talent to figure his future wasn't at running back. Wingback, maybe. Except Larry Zelina had been put there with the previous year's starter, Ray Gillian. He also had played some split end in practice as a freshman. He liked it, too. He quickly realized that he was a more natural receiver than a running back. So when he saw his name listed as a receiver, he readily accepted it.
That spring, there were no games won, no championships grabbed, no stadium applause given. Yet something tangible had happened in practice. The upperclassmen, who had merely practiced against these freshmen the previous fall, realized it in the most routine of moments. Just running sprints after practice felt different, linebacker Mike Radtke sensed. He saw what speed the team now had, what gifted athletes the freshmen-turning-sophomores were. They had known they were good from practicing against them the previous season. But it was different now. They were eligible to play now. Radtke pushed himself harder in practice to stay up with them. In so doing, he knew, all of the upperclassmen were being pushed to be better.
The coaches could see it all coming together, even if there were moments that suggested otherwise. Some plays, Lou McCullough would order his defense to blitz an offense trying to learn the nuances of George Chaump's changes. Just for fun. Just to watch Mt. Woody erupt. -Megaton - was what these tantrums were called, a code word passed down through the years inside the team that typically referred to the unit of measure for a nuclear weapon's power.
"We got him mad now,", McCullough would chuckle to his defense. "Look at that megaton!"
This would have an added affect on Hayes beyond just a momentary meltdown. He would question anew this newfangled offense. Its I-formation and more-open alignment took him beyond his comfort level. At 56, he wasn't sure about such dramatic change. Hadn't he been successful with the Robust T? And now he was changing a central principle of that success?
Some days it was too much for him.
"Men, we're all going to get our ass fired, listening to some damn high school coach," he'd tell his assistants.
The other coaches talked him off the ledge at such moments and the learning would resume. For the previous two seasons, these coaches had wondered about their jobs. Now they were breathing a bit easier. They was how much better this team was than the previous seasons. They understood why, too. In the spring report every assistant was required to write for Hayes, Tiger Ellison summed up all the coach's thoughts in these three sentences:
"Most of our freshman came through as expected. Our future rests with 14 sophomores. Lose them and we start packing."
(5)
One morning near the end of his freshman year, Rex Kern woke up and realized he couldn?t get out of bed.
Worse: He could barely move at all.
As Kern had moved from basketball season to spring football, he was nagged by what seemed like a hamstring problem. It had flared up in basketball. It hampered him in football. He had to miss some practice and, during the spring game, taped the hamstring heavily so he could play.
But now, as doctors investigated this latest issue, the diagnosis wasn't a hamstring issue anymore.
It was his back.
Nor was it something he could tape up and play on. He had a ruptured disc that needed surgery. His athletic career was in jeopardy. So was his college education.
At the time, many players didn't return to big-time sports after major back surgery. And it was an unwritten rule in college sports that the scholarship actually was tied to playing. The team physician, Jud Wilson, said everything would be fine, that they'd just go in and clip off the offending piece in his back. Kern trusted him. His faith told him whatever happened was for the best. But for a 19-year-old whose life had revolved around sports to that point, and whose game revolved around speed and passing and being hit, this was serious business.
Kern had never been seriously hurt before, much less undergone surgery.
What added to the strangeness was he didn?t even know how this injury had occurred. As best he could guess, he had injured his back while high jumping in a physical education class. As he twisted his body one day, he felt a twinge in the back. But it hadn't even kept him from playing basketball that day or football that spring.
After surgery on June 19, 1968, Kern was resting in his hospital bed when Hayes asked to see his parents in the hall. When they returned, they informed their son what Hayes had said: No matter whether he plays another down of football, his scholarship would be honored, as would Hayes' recruiting pledge to make sure a degree was earned. It was Earle Bruce's story from 1951 all over again. For a family preparing for the worst-case scenarios, this lightened the concern considerably.
The Kerns were a quintessential Midwestern story. Trenton ran a two-chair barber shop in Lancaster. Rex would sweep the floors as a youth. He once tried to cut a friend's hair, and the comical result suggested he'd find a career elsewhere.
Rex means "king" in Latin, so people imagined greatness had been forecast for Kern from the start. Of course, his parents joked the only Rex either of them knew in naming their second son was a dog on his mother's side.
Trenton played baseball growing up, but his wife supplied the athletic genes for Rex. Jean Ritchie was all-everything in Amanda, a star in softball, basketball, track, seemingly whatever sports she tried. Trenton would tell their sons that if their mom and her sister weren't saddled with the daily chores of the family farm they could have competed in the Olympics.
Sports came naturally to Rex, too. He stood out at every level in any sport. At 5, he began playing baseball, and, perhaps since it was his first sport, his first goal was to make the major leagues. At Lancaster High, he was a three-year starter at third base, hit .460 as a senior and led the school to the state semifinals. The Kansas City Athletics drafted Kern that summer. Later, as people marveled that he played football and basketball at Ohio State, George Hill, who was Kern's high-school basketball coach and later an Ohio University assistant, said in 1969, "As good as he is in football and basketball, the boy could be a major league baseball player."
Basketball quickly became his favorite sport as a kid. That isn't surprising. Woody Hayes gave the personality of football by remarking no one ever made a tackle with a smile on his face. But basketball players smiled. It was a fun game to play. Even in winter, Kern would sleep with his clothes on so he could wake up and immediately play basketball before school with his older brother, Keith. Just like with many teammates, the championship Ohio State basketball teams of the early 1960s inspired him. He often would be Mel Nowell, John Havlicek or Larry Siegfried on the Lancaster courts.
"I could never be Jerry Lucas,", he said. "I could never throw up the little "Johnson & Johnson soft baby hook." - That was the expression TV announcer Jimmy Crum coined for the shot. It showed just how closely Kern followed the games.
He was a three-year starter at Lancaster High, averaged 23 points as a senior and left with the school's scoring record. He also jumped center despite being only 6 feet and typically guarded the opponent's biggest man. As his sophomore turned to his junior year, it was the college basketball coaches who began to come around. Ohio State coach Fred Taylor reached out to Kern then, a full year before Woody Hayes would make contact.
Football, meanwhile, was all sandlots and backyards for Kern until seventh grade. One day, watching a Pop Warner team practice, he began throwing passes on the side with a friend. He immediately was asked to play quarterback. Unlike the other two sports, football appealed to his unbounded aggressiveness. As the starting safety, he led the team in tackles his junior and senior years. By then, his quarterback talents were obvious, and he was blessed with sound coaching, which he would accelerate his progress in the coming years. The quarterback option he became renowned for at Ohio State, for example, wasn't learned in college. He was taught its intricacies at Lancaster High.
At 6-feet and 175 pounds, Kern didn't cut an imposing figure. He did have one physical gift that contributed to his reputation as a magician with the ball in the coming years. As George Chaump marveled at Kern's ball-handling skills, he was struck by the size of Kern's hands. Chaump measured them. They were 8 1/2 inches from the tip of his finger to the start of his wrist and middle. The stretched span from his thumb to his index finger was 9 1/2 inches. Decades later, when Chaump was asked to write a chapter on "Perfecting Quarterback Fakes" in a coaching book, he would offer Kern's hands as an example of how size does matter.
Still, from normal size to boyish looks, the first impression of Kern didn't translate into a superstar. When tackle Dave Cheney met him in August of 1967 at the annual Ohio All-Star Game, he observed Kern closely in practices. He had read all about Kern's talent, and they were part of Ohio State's incoming freshmen class. But in those practices leading up to the game, Cheney detected nothing special in Kern's play.
"Then we got in the game and you saw it right away,", Cheney said. "We didn't practice a lot together, as you can imagine, and Rex was a master of the broken play. That's when I first noticed how good he was. We'd run a play and, if something broke down, Rex would take off. You could just see he was a different talent."
Kern's athletic gifts were matched by a good aura he projected. He carried himself in a way teammates admired. The first word most of them used to describe Kern was: Leader. The second word: Tough. One description backed up the other in the athlete's world, and he expected those attributes of himself, too.
His leadership was an invisible force, like gravity, something tangible that
all players felt, black or white, young or old, star or reserve. He had a gift, Bruce Jankowski observed, to match the moment with not just the proper thing to say, but the proper tone to say it. In the huddle, he could be serious and tell Foley, "Duke, we need this block," or Jankowski, "Ski, you've got to beat him. You got to get open." But after a good play in the tensest of games he also could smile and say, "Hey, we got that one, didn't we? Let's keep it going."
"He made everyone feel part of the team,", Jankowski said. "And he made you feel real good about yourself, made you feel like an instrumental part no matter what your role was."
If Kern's in-game manner was serious, the full scope of his personality stretched far beyond that. He had all the red-haired look and mischievous nature of Huck Finn. In this regard, he wasn't the stuffy star on the marquee. He was just one of the boys. He threw water balloons at passersby with some teammates from the high up in their dorm room. He'd tickle a piece of grass against Hayes' neck in a practice, and they'd all silently chuckle when Hayes slapped at it like a mosquito. He had one of the team-best impersonations of Hayes, too.
"Do a Woody,", teammates would ask him. If he felt the moment was right, he'd jut his jaw and rock on his heels and bust into a, "Mmm-hmmm, sons-of-bitches, mmm-hmm."
Hayes sometimes, would catch Kern in the act. But if he cared, he didn't show it. He, too, was caught under Kern's spell. Teammates quickly picked up on it. Jim Stillwagon would break into a Woody imitation around Kern and tease, "Aw, my boy, Rex. This is my son. You can't hurt my son."
On the 1968 team's picture day, Hayes looked at Sensibaugh wearing jersey No. 3. "That's not your high-school number,", Hayes said. "Don't you want to wear your number from high school? What was it anyway?"
"No. 10,", Sensibaugh said.
Kern's number.
"Oh,", Hayes said, walking away.
If Kern's personality and leadership skills were tangible, his toughness gave him credibility. What later became evident on the football field before millions was seen in the privacy of a basketball practice Kern's first winter in Columbus. Since freshmen weren't eligible, he was relegated to helping the varsity. Being a newcomer, he was tested. One practice, Kern saw a lane to the basket and went in strong for a lay-up. As he went up with the ball, he was nearly decapitated by a beef sandwich consisting of Bill Hosket, a 6-8, 225-pound senior who would be an Olympian and NBA star, and Dave Sorensen, a 6-8, 220-pound sophomore who also would have an NBA career.
Kern's nose was broken. His lip was bleeding. Trainer Ernie Biggs took one look and told Taylor to sub in another player. But as Taylor motioned to do so, Kern went back on the court and took the ball. He ran the same play. He made the same move. This time, when he went up for the lay-up against Hosket and Sorensen, he made sure to score the basket.
Even that freshman basketball season, the tug of football always was there. Hayes called him to the side one day before basketball practice began or the coaches had hit the court.
"Rex, come with me, I need you to help me recruit,", Hayes said.
Kern said he couldn't. He had to practice. There was a game the next night. Hayes insisted. "Have you talked to Coach Taylor?" Kern asked.
Hayes stomped off. Ten minutes later, he returned and said it was fine for Kern to come with him. They drove a few hours through a wicked snowstorm to Avon Lake to watch Dick Wakefield play a basketball game. The storm was so bad Hayes actually had sent Wakefield a telegram saying he wouldn't be attending the game as he had promised. But there Hayes was, driving 60 mph in awful conditions. "All of a sudden we hydroplane, do a complete 360, and come out heading in the same direction,", Kern said. "I'm scared to death. Woody stopped talking for 10 minutes."
They made the game and Wakefield became a star receiver at Ohio State. But the upshot for Kern, other than being told by football coaches never to ride in a car when Hayes is driving, was the basketball starting lineup the next night. He wasn't in it. He sat the bench. All the other players were put in the game. Finally, an assistant told Kern, "We're under orders not to play you tonight." They thought he skipped practice the day before. Hayes hadn't asked anyone to take him.
One of Kern's disappointments at Ohio State would be that he never had a real chance to play basketball. He started on the freshmen team. But the football season ran so long and his body was so damaged in 1968 that he never would have the time to be the Nowell or Havlicek from his youth. Football quickly became his public identity. By that sophomore season's end, a sign would be placed at the city limits of Lancaster: "Welcome to Kernville."
But as he sat at home the summer before that season, waiting for his back to heal, wondering what his athletic future was, such a possibility seemed far away. He did very little for nearly six weeks. The question of his back was always there, but he didn't dwell on it. His optimism carried him through, as did his faith. For the first several weeks after surgery, his most significant exercise he didn't involve any running or jumping or stretching at all.
It consisted of bowing his head in prayer.
