Few bronzed images have ever captured the essence of their subjects as well as the one that stands defiantly at the entrance of the athletic complex at Ohio State.
For Buckeyes football fans, this is where you go to validate your lifetime of autumn Saturdays. This is why you wore that scarlet and gray sweatshirt every day in high school. This is where you go to reaffirm why you hate Michigan.
This is where the eight-foot-tall statue of coach Woody Hayes stands, his hands cocked at his hips and his bespectacled stare riveted on some distant off-tackle plunge.
The athletic complex bears his name. The sculpture in front is affixed to a marble pedestal with Hayes’ upper body angled aggressively forward, a faithful but ultimately unflattering pose considering the circumstances that led to his dismissal.
When the statue was dedicated five years ago in honor of the late coach’s 100th birthday, Hayes’ son Steven loved it, praising the monument for capturing his father’s intensity.
Sculptor Alan Cottrill was pleased, saying, “That’s the essence of the piece. It was easy for me, I’m one intense SOB.”
It takes one to sculpt one, I suppose.
Forty years ago, I spent a Sugar Bowl week following Hayes, the SOB, around. I found his reputation to be well deserved.
I thought of Woody and that week because, in a wry coincidence, Hayes’ old school will take the football field here tonight also without its regular head coach.
Hayes, ever tempestuous, had his run-ins with Big Ten administrators. Frustrated near the end of the 1971 Michigan game, Woody angrily ripped apart the sideline and first-down markers, causing him to be ejected and suspended for one game.
At the 1973 Rose Bowl, he pushed a camera into a Los Angeles Times photographer’s face – Shovegate, they called it – and Hayes was hit with a fine and a three-game suspension.
But Woody Hayes was who he was. It wasn’t his nature to apologize, not even after he told guests at a 1969 football banquet that the Vietnamese victims of the My Lai Massacre deserved to die.
He admired Lincoln and Churchill and was both a student and teacher of history.
I wonder what Woody, his bronze feet now nailed to stone, would have thought of Urban Meyer, a successor with feet of clay.
Who knows? Hayes worked in a different time, when verbal indignities were considered earnest coaching.
He didn’t approve of the annual Playboy All-America team, because he didn’t want his boys flying off to the Hugh Hefner mansion where, Woody was certain, temptation awaited.
The Cowboys’ Gil Brandt, whose job it was to annually select the Playboy team, loved Woody anyway.
“He was a special individual,” Brandt said Friday. “I cherish the letters he sent me.”
Brandt used to regularly visit Hayes at Woody’s cluttered 8-by-10 campus office. Brandt arrived one day and asked to attend practice so that he could scout receiver Paul Warfield.
“ ‘I’ve got a better guy, Greg Lashutka,’ he told me,” Brandt said. “So they do a passing drill and Lashutka drops three passes. Woody went crazy.
“Greg Lashutka later became the mayor of Columbus.”
Hayes was a man of resolute habit. He walked to campus each day from his home on nearby Cardiff Street. His daily coaching attire was a simple gray T-shirt. His favorite “lunch”: a chocolate creme pie from the local Big Bear store. When he would go on a recruiting trip to Michigan, Hayes would fill up the gas tank in Columbus, rather than buy petrol in the state of the Buckeyes’ arch rivals.
But to some OSU fans, weary of his recurring outbursts, Hayes’ act had worn thin even before the Gator Bowl night when he punched Clemson’s Charlie Bauman, prompting his firing.
Brandt called his old friend after the incident and invited Hayes to join the Cowboys traveling party at the Super Bowl.
“He was an amazing man,” Brandt said.
Hayes’ penultimate Ohio State team in 1977 lost its final game to Michigan, denying the Buckeyes a cherished trip to the Rose Bowl. Consigned to the Sugar Bowl, the team looked upon the New Orleans game as an unfulfilling consolation prize – no beach, no Hollywood, no Disneyland.
Woody sensed as much and was surly to us in the media all week. One damp day, practicing at rusty old Tulane Stadium, Hayes decided that he didn’t want reporters around, no matter what the published Sugar Bowl protocol said. So he cursed us and told us to get lost.
A couple of days later, a Bear Bryant-coached Alabama team bludgeoned the bored Buckeyes 35-6.
All in all, though, I enjoyed my week spent with the old SOB.
Intensity isn’t always pretty. But Woody Hayes was no paper tiger, not like the Buckeyes’ text message-deleting, suspended current head coach.
Hayes’ statue on campus reflects his unique essence. Plus a distinctly Woody message, though I’m not entirely certain what that is.
Welcome to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, it seems to say. Either that, or get lost.