Woody Hayes, 1913-1987

Wayne Woodrow "Woody" Hayes, legendary football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, died of heart disease twenty years ago today. Richard Nixon, a longtime friend and admirer of Woody's, delivered the eulogy at his funeral. He talked about inviting the always gregarious Hayes to the White House - ""I wanted to talk football," he said, "and Woody wanted to talk foreign policy. You know Woody — we discussed foreign policy."

I'll always think of Hayes as he was described in Jack Tatum's autbiography They Call Me Assassin, a favorite of Little Large. It would be hard to read that book and come away thinking that Woody Hayes was just a sucker-punching tyrant. According to Tatum, he was a tough but generous surrogate father for generations of players, with a deeply loyal and sentimental side that was in direct contrast to his public image.

As for Hayes on Hayes, he summed up his coaching career in the most concise terms imaginable by saying, ""Nobody despises to lose more than I do. That's got me into trouble over the years, but it also made a man of mediocre ability into a pretty good coach." The trouble he speaks of refers primarily to his combustible temper, a force that boiled over in the 1978 Gator Bowl in perhaps the all-time greatest No Mas moment in college football history. Myself, I'll never forget it, eight-year old Large watching with his mom and wondering, "what just happened there? was that... the coach? sheesh..." No, it was not a courageous or laudable act by any means, but still it speaks to me of that rebellion of the heart in such incidents of despair that losing produces, those times when you just want to throw all class and decorum out the window and say, "fuck it... I'm killing that son of a bitch." If ever there was a man to throw such caution to the wind, it was Woody Hayes, and we here at No Mas are the first to applaud the damn-the-torpedoes spirit in all of its passionate anarchy.