Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

It seems that contact with the University of Michigan football program just brings out the worst in people. Wayne Woodrow Hayes, for instance, who would be skipping hand in hand with Mother Theresa through the Elysian fields of eternity were it not for a nationally-televised outburst or two in Ann Arbor. (Well, that and that Clemson thing.) It certainly brought out the worst in the architect who designed their stadium. And then there’s the sad case of former UM head coach Gary_Moeller, a good Ohio boy lured to the dark side, and his eventual destruction.
I bring this up not simply because I have nothing worthwhile to say - two news items in the last 24 hours underscore yet again this unhappy affinity. In the first, a fellow has been arrested in Ann Arbor for allegedly stalking coach Lloyd Carr and posting threatening emails. The fact that the guy has never attended the university didn’t immunize him from the curse. The most chilling part of the story for me personally, however, was this:

Akinmusuru was arraigned Thursday on charges of using a computer in a crime, malicious use of telecommunications and malicious annoyance by writing, campus police spokeswoman Diane Brown said. He faces up to one year in jail if convicted. (emphasis mine)

I thought I was reasonably safe prattling away here as long as I avoided slandering or libeling anyone except people everyone hates anyway. “malicious annoyance by writing” lowers the prosecutorial bar significantly. You guys are all having a good time, right? Can I pour you another drink or anything?
The second episode involves the University of Wisconsin band, which is now on Double-Secret Probation for unspecified depravities on its bus ride home from Ann Arbor:

The school is not releasing details on what happened during the trip to the Sept. 23 game. But Chancellor John Wiley described it in a letter to the band’s director as behavior “that can be seen as anything from boorish and offensive to patently dangerous and unlawful.” Wiley warned in the letter he would consider suspending activities and travel of the band or replacing its leadership if there were more reports of “gratuitous vulgarity, sexualized banter or joking, hazing, or other forms of demeaning conduct.”

I may be just another old crock, but I’m shocked and dismayed to hear of this from an august fellow Big Ten musical institution. When I was in the OSU band, our bus rides were used for studying, or writing letters to our mothers, or attending to our devotions. In its more delusional moments, Wisconsin likes to think of itself as the Stanford of the corn belt. Since the Stanford Band is blacklisted at more stadiums than Janet Jackson’s breasts, the Badgers may be making concrete progress toward that goal.
Let’s hope this contagion doesn’t extend westward on I-94 to East Lansing, where my Buckeyes will play the Spartans tomorrow.

My Buckeyes played Iowa last night in Iowa City. Night games on the road are a real horror-show for a visiting team, as the fans have had an extra 6 or 7 hours to tailgate beyond their normal kickoff, and the atmosphere is electric, loud. Night games used to be the exclusive province of LSU and a few other southern schools, but ABC/ESPN has, belatedly, begun featuring a nationally-televised Saturday night game. I think they had to await the passing of Lawrence Welk before the environment for ratings competition was favorable.
For us on the west coast, inured to being jarred out of bed at 8:59 am for a 9:00 kickoff, the night kickoff is downright civilized. Last night, for the first time, Mrs. Perils deigned - no, actually requested - to accompany me to the sports bar where OSU alumni gathered to watch the game. Perhaps she wanted to see firsthand her competitor for my passion; maybe she also wanted to ensure that it was only about the football.
Since OSU won, it was a congenial, if raucous, experience. Interspersed between plays, we had interesting conversations with our neighbors. It took Mrs. Perils a quarter or more to get the hang of this. Due to my long experience, I have an internal clock that somehow knows when the ball is about to be snapped, and I adapt the diction of my conversation so that I can apply a period to a sentence just in time to turn to the TV and watch the play. My interlocutors in these environs are similarly endowed, and respect and appreciate my reciprocation. Mrs. Perils, on the other hand, could have been flagged several times for compound-sentence violations extending through the snap. Our neighbors were very courteous, however, and applied the advanced technique of pretending to follow a conversation, even feigning eye contact, while actually being totally engrossed in the play on the television. The fortuitous placement of TV screens in every possible sight line in this sports bar greatly facilited this ruse.
One fellow we talked to graduated from OSU a year after I did, in accounting, no less. We compared notes about a couple of common professors and the highlights - highly expurgated in my case - of our careers. He had first worked for, then purchased a franchise of, a farm implements manufacturer, sold it, and seemed to be simply at loose ends. He had flown to Seattle the previous week from a midwestern city in order to interview outfitters for a prospective Kilimanjaro climb. This was sufficient entree for a substantive conversation with Mrs. Perils.
Another fellow next to us I’d seen at these gatherings before. He’d alway seemed sort of terse, wrapped pretty tight and not very tolerant of errant play by the Buckeyes. Here’s someone, your biases tell you, whose personal and professional life is a shambles and who places all of his need for personal affirmation on the backs of a sports team. Well, under cross-examination by Mrs. Perils, it turns out he has a PhD from OSU in something like solid state engineering, and works for a large local software company not known to suffer fools.
Fine. I’ll always have the ‘71 Rose Bowl. Oh, wait, we lost that one.
As the game wound down and OSU was busy killing the prisoners, the TV cameras flitted around the stadium focusing on the glum faces of the Iowa students. Each time the camera would alight on a crestfallen, Hawkeye-imprinted visage, the whole room in loud unison would say, “AWWWWWWWW!” While this was amusing, I turned to a guy next to me and said, “Well, when time runs out, those kids will still be 19 and screwing their brains out.”, a point no one could argue.
Later, after we’d gotten home, I was surprised (and maybe she was, too) to hear that Mrs. Perils was a little hoarse. Like maybe she’d been cheering. A good night’s progress for our football agnostic.

I emerged from the sports bar Saturday afternoon to brilliant sunshine, and the dark-spot-xray feeling of guilt and dread borne by all men who slink out of a bar in broad daylight. Except I was feeling guilty for expending one of the last precious summer days inside, instead of outside frenetically recreating. Here’s what I saw as I exited:

Click any photo to enlarge

Ace up my sleeve: I had bussed to the sports bar with the idea that my route home might include a walk up Queen Anne Hill and down to Fremont, where they were hosting the Oktoberfest.
I called Mrs. Perils and offered to meet her there, and started walking. I passed through the Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World’s Fair:

As I waited for her in Fremont, I took in the sights:

These confections, called Shishkaberries, put me in mind of Middle Earth sex toys:

As I passed this booth, I heard the woman saying, “And if you miss any more payments, we’ll extract this one, and this one, and so on. You should get your credit situation straightened out pronto, or you’ll never straighten your spine again.”

Once Mrs. Perils arrived, we decided that we really didn’t want to spend $20 apiece to sample beers - we’re just not really big beer drinkers, and the band that started playing didn’t really grab us. Instead, we left the Oktoberfest and ambled up to an old favorite, El Camino, and enjoyed excellent margaritas and happy-hour appetizers for about the same cost.

And walked home just as the sun was setting.

On Saturday, my Buckeyes played Penn State, a worthy opponent and one of the “big” games of the year. I decided I wanted company in either my misery or ecstasy, so I bussed down to the sports bar near the Seattle Center where our alumni club was meeting to view the game.
While I’d stop short of calling our particular distemper a “religion”, I’ll note that the following two photos are the closest I’ve come to viewing stained glass from the inside in several decades.

Click any photo to enlarge

You might think these guys are taking afternoon tea, handicapping the candidates for the Man Booker prize, except…

OSU sealed its victory in a tough contest with two interception returns for touchdowns in the fourth quarter. The following video was made during the celebration after the second of these:

OSU Fans Celebrate Interception vs. Penn State - Click to play (2.9 mb)
Also in the room, and in some places at the next table, were members of the Penn State alumni club. Remarkably, there was no woofing or trash talk between the groups (although plenty of vociferous cheering). Below, their fans break camp as, onscreen, their young quarterback wanders disconsolately to the locker room after the game.

On to Iowa City for a prime-time night game this Saturday.

Last weekend flew by, and I hardly spent any time online. I see that certain criminal elements failed to heed my offer of amnesty, and that summer is still missing and about to grace milk bottles coast to coast.
I’m in the midst of a whacked-out travel itinerary that, after flying home to Seattle from Detroit yesterday (Monday) afternoon, now has me on a morning flight today (Tuesday) back to Milwaukee for a mixture of work, a board meeting and (gulp) golf. More about that in another post. I had made my reservation for the band reunion quite a while ago. Then my client scheduled a board meeting this week, and changing my original itinerary to SEA-DTW-MKE-SEA was just about the same cost as the two round trips I’m embarked on now and, to tell the truth, I was happy for the evening home even though it means more flight time. Also on the plus side, I get a couple thousand more miles toward 2007 elite status should Northwest Airlines survive.
The band reunion was a bit hectic, as usual, but once again a lot of fun. To recap for the handful of you who aren’t my relatives, parole officers or court-appointed psychological evaluators, I was in the marching band when I attended Ohio State, and thus am allowed to participate in the alumni band reunion held each year at an early-season football game. Between 600 and 700 of us attend this event each year to renew acquaintances, and to play and march in both the pregame and halftime shows. In order to present a show that we won’t be ashamed of, we are very busy Friday night and Saturday morning rehearsing.
Friday night, we have a sit-down music rehearsal where we play through all the show music and review our formation charts. It’s interesting how quickly we start sounding reasonably good. It helps that there’s a core group in Columbus that plays together all year. (But don’t you have to wonder at a local culture that wants fight songs played at weddings and funerals?) Here are a couple of videos from the rehearsal:

Buckeye Battle Cry Click to play (5.3 mb)

Carmen Ohio Click to play (6.0 mb)

Saturday morning, we have to be in our seats for a final census about 7 hours before kickoff. This kills us on days when we have the usual 12:30 kickoff, as that translates to a 5 am start time. This year, however, ABC made our game a 3:30 pm regional telecast, so we got a reprieve to 8 am. That’s still early, considering that we’ve usually stayed out late Friday night catching up with each other. The Saturday schedule is as follows:

• Music rehearsal 8 am - 10:30
• Outside for marching/playing rehearsal until 12:30
• Quick lunch, then assemble in St. John Arena, the old basketball venue, for Skull Session, an open-to-the-public dress rehearsal at 1:30
• Form up & head to the stadium for the pregame show.

You can get an idea of the range of ages at the reunion from the photo below, taken at our outdoor rehearsal. Just from my personal perspective, there were no women in the band when I was in it. And, with regard to the fellow pictured, there’s a haunting, understated eloquence in the “42, 46-48″ on his jacket, and all that is implied in the caesura of that comma:

Click any photo to enlarge

While the alumni band members straggle and saunter from the end of one run-through to the next, the student band arrives for its rehearsal with us in style:

Click to play (8.5 mb)

Two very dramatic moments occur during the Skull Session rehearsal/performance. One is a fairly recent addition to the ritual. In an attempt to acquaint the players with the myriad components of what makes a football Saturday at Ohio Stadium, Jim Tressel has been walking the team through the Skull Session and having one of the captains give a short speech. The arena is always full, and the crowd always appreciative. The second is when the varsity band enters the arena to an up-tempo cadence. Since the crowd is laden with band parents, siblings and SOs, the response is deafening:

Team Entrance Click to play (8.8 mb)

OSUMB Entrance Click to play (7.2 mb)

Somewhere in this sea of red, we’re supposed to form up and march to the stadium.

After our pregame show, we had to wait on the sidelines for the flagraising and the playing of the national anthem. During the anthem, I noticed this group of women doing some arcane dance routine. I asked one of my bandmates what they were doing, and he said, “They’re doing signing. For the deaf…and for the dumb (referring to me).”

The following series of pics were taken by someone (thanks, Mark!) sitting in the stands. I picked out the photos that had me in them, and you can follow the arrows to find me.

Damn! We’ve got “diagonals”! That means our vertical and horizontal spacing is spot-on.



Gotta love that halftime score!

Happy New Year! Welcome to two thousand and sick.
New Year’s has alway seemed like a superfluity to me. I suppose you need it to form the the outer border of the holiday week, but by the time the actual day comes, you sort of wish you could put it in the bank for sometime when there’s better weather. Especially given the odds of your not feeling very well that day.
This year, then, should have seemed even more over-the-top, with the official holiday coming on the January 2nd. Usually, you can assuage your various New Year’s Day maladies with comfort foods and bowl games, but this year there were no bowl games on New Year’s Day to serve as a Cotton-y/Rosey/Fiesta-ive/Sugary/Orangular (it’s a word, shut up) cushion on Sunday. Fine. The gym was closed all day anyway, so I didn’t have to embarrass myself there. We just took a long walk for some marginally-needed items, and awaited Monday.
Because Monday was Bowl Game Day. I started nipping at the bowl game bottle early, as we do here on the west coast when there are interesting games in the eastern time zone. My plan was to check out the inconsequential games emanating from north Florida - the ones that seem like they should be a tropical vacation but, since they’re played in Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa, are most often chilly teases with mushy fields to play on. If you’re keeping score at home, you’ll know I would be pointing all day to the Fiesta Bowl contest between Notre Dame and my Buckeyes.
I had received an email from the Seattle cell of the nefarious al-Buqai organization that we would be meeting at a sports bar next to the Space Needle, hoping for an explosive crowd for a 5:00 pm kickoff. My plan was to get a good buzz on from the morning games, go running with a gym workout in the early afternoon, then clean up and head for the sports bar for the evening orgy, two rust belt teams duking it out in the Sonoran desert.
As I was watching the early games, the annoying subscript banners that they fling onto the screen to cater to the ADD population that comprises the bulk of thier audience kept saying that the Fiesta Bowl kickoff would be at 4:30 Eastern, 1:30 Pacific. My presumption was that my guy was right, and the network that would be broadcasting the game was laughably wrong, so I sat and sipped coffee, getting up the energy to head for the gym.
Then, at about 1:00 they showed a live feed from Tempe of the OSU and Notre Dame players going through their warmups, and I started to panic. I went online and discovered that, indeed, I had only 20 minutes to get to the bar for kickoff. I quickly shaved, dressed, and rummaged through my closet for OSU gear. I came up with my wool marching band jacket, and headed for the car.

The game started badly, with Notre Dame taking the opening kickoff and scoring in less than 3 minutes. At that point we realized that we were sharing the sports bar with an equally large and vocal Domer contingent. As the ND guy scored, someone in their crowd pulled up a trumpet and started blasting their godawful fight song. I thought, “this is going to be an awfully long night if they can score at will, and this guy has any chops at all”.
As it turned out, though, his mouthpiece would stay dry well into the third quarter, as we dominated the game. I tried, at one point, to venture over to their side of the bar to photograph the musician, but he wouldn’t reveal himself, and someone gently but firmly made it clear that I should quickly return to the OSU side of the venue.
The outcome was extremely satisfying, as I had garnered a couple of bets from my business contacts in the upper midwest, where Catholic Notre Dame fans run as thick and spearworthy as salmon used to run in the Columbia River.
The win also would seem to give me the latitude to watch the final two bowl games, Penn State vs Florida State in the Orange Bowl and Texas vs USC in the Rose, with a patronizing sense of detachment and noblesse oblige.
However. I revere the Rose Bowl, and love the bowl system. The folks who whine every year that college football should have a basketball-style playoff have never been around college football long enough to develop a sense for what makes it appealing. In the bowl system, those whose fall social schedule revolves around attending games and supporting their teams get to plan vacation trips 3-4 weeks ahead of the event, and head for some sunbelt city (except for the inexplicably-sanctioned Motor City, Liberty, and whatever that joke they play in Boise is called -bowls) to have a good time. They spend up to a week at the game venue partying and discovering a city that’s probably outside their normal purview, and, once the games are played, half the teams come home winners. The teams and bands and students also get an off-campus experience to savor through the bleak winter quarter. If that kind of thing appeals to you in the first place.
If there were a playoff, few traditional fans, and fewer students, would attend the 3 - 4 week marathon of games, and all but one team would suffer year-long frustration. Who would this benefit besides corporate sponsors and long-distance observers with no connection to a particular team and tradition, or the game itself?
Which brings us to tonight’s Rose Bowl. Well, it’s only half a Rose Bowl, because only one of the participants comes from the PAC-10/Big 10 traditional pairing. I feel it’s a desecration of hallowed ground for a Texas or Oklahoma to set foot in the Arroyo Seco, to insinuate their fly-over apostasy into Olympian real estate. And the ultimate indiscretion to win the damn game, as Texas has the last two years.
Here’s a link to better days, where you can hear a recording of my OSU marching band in the 1971 Rose Parade and the Doppler effect of my 21-year-old self crossing over from my childhood to … a childish arrested adulthood, for these last couple of days, anyway.

As I’ve intimated previously, I’m on the third and final leg of my two-week quest to singlehandedly rescue the airline industry. To recap:

• 11/6 - flew Seattle - Milwaukee
• 11/11 - Milwaukee - Seattle
• 11/13 - Seattle - Tucson
• 11/15 - Tucson - Seattle
• 11/16 - Seattle - Detroit - Charleston, SC
• 11/20 (today) - Charleston - Detroit - Seattle

The Milwaukee and Tucson trips were for business. The Charleston trip has been a renewal of a family tradition we’re establishing that has my brothers, my mom and whatever friends of my brothers whose social needs are sufficiently dire trekking to my middle brother’s house in Charleston to watch the Ohio State - Michigan game and roast oysters in either commiseration or exhilaration.

From here on, perhaps only Nancy and her husband and my immediate family will be even mildly interested. And it’s been awfully quiet over there at Nancy’s blog since The Game - she’s over there pretending that her impending motherhood is more important.

A little background for the uninitiated - All three of us - I and my two younger brothers - graduated from Ohio State. Our parents and maternal grandparents attended OSU as well, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the OSU-Michigan football game has become a focal point of our shared experience. From oldest (me) to youngest, we brothers span 10 years, so we’ve had a wide range of exposure to this annual rite.

My first Michigan game was when I was in high school. My maternal grandparents had season tickets each year at OSU, and bought four Michigan tickets when the games were played in Ann Arbor. They would drive up to our place near Toledo and take my Mom & Dad, but this one time I got a ticket because someone decided not to go. I recall watching the OSU backfield of Paul Warfield (later Miami Dolphins), Matt Snell (NY Jets) and QB Don Unverferth (nowhere. OSU quarterbacks at that time were there to hand the ball to the running backs) playing against Michigan QB Bob Timberlake. That’s all from memory, so sorry if I overlooked some NFL Hall of Famers that just didn’t register.

The first Game that meant something to me occurred in 1968. Prior to 1968, OSU’s football fortunes had been in decline, and choruses of “Goodbye, Woody” wafted through Ohio Stadium during the 1967 season, my freshman year. Then, in 1968, a group of “super-sophs” including Rex Kern, Jack Tatum, Mike Sensibaugh, Stan White, John Brockington, Jim Stillwagon and others hit the scene (freshmen could not play on the varsity team in those years), and a juggernaut was launched that revived OSU football, Woody’s career, and allowed Woody and Bo Schembechler to “brand” the OSU-Michigan game as the football version of the final battle in the Lord of the Rings.

The 1968 season saw the Buckeyes march through the season undefeated, gathering momentum and believers along the way. We had Michigan at home that year and beat them 50-14. After scoring our last touchdown, Woody went for a 2-point conversion instead of kicking for 1. When someone asked him why, legend has it that he said, “Because I couldn’t go for 3.” Here’s the postgame scene in Ohio Stadium. (click on any of these pictures to enlarge):

I wasn’t in the band that year, didn’t try out until the next year, but I had a pretty fine season ticket in C-deck, right in front of the press box. In case you’re rubbing your eyes in disbelief, don’t - that’s $14 for the whole season.:

That 1968 team beat O. J. Simpson and USC in the Rose Bowl to win the national championship, and rolled through the 1969 season so impressively that sportswriters thought the only competition they could get was in the NFL. In those years, only the Big Ten champion could go to a bowl game, and there was a “no-repeat” rule that barred us from returning to the Rose Bowl even if we won the Big Ten title outright, so the game in Ann Arbor was to be our bowl game and, we were sure, our coronation as repeat national champs and, in our minds, the team of the century.

Michigan, under new coach Bo Schembechler, dealt us a bitter 24-12 defeat that day, one of only two games that that class would lose in their 3 years at OSU. It was my first year in the band, and, though I’d lived one of my dreams by playing in The Big House, it was a forlorn bus ride back to Columbus.

In the 1970 season OSU again ran through the season undefeated and took a #1 ranking into the Michigan game, and we had them at home this time. The picture below is of our band just after we took the field for pregame. The crowd noise was so loud that many of us couldn’t hear the drummers, and could only take the beat by watching their feet. That pregame entrance was one of my biggest thrills ever.
We beat Michigan that year and played Stanford and Jim Plunkett in the Rose Bowl.

With the Tatum-Brockington-Kern class gone in 1971, we were a pretty ordinary team. We even lost to Northwestern at home! Michigan, on the other hand, had a powerhouse team coming into The Game, which was played that year in Ann Arbor. Surprisingly, we held our own against UM and, with 2 minutes left, had the ball and could have been driving for the winning score. Then, a Michigan defensive back intercepted a Buckeye pass after, from my vantage, palpably interfering with our receiver. No interference penalty was called, and Woody went nuts. He raged around the field berating officials and, at one point, destroyed the yardline markers on his sideline.

Our director felt that it would be best if the band left the stadium at that point as, even in normal years, people would grab at us and swipe mouthpieces and clothing. Our seats were on the sideline on the floor of the northeast corner of the stadium, right by the goal line. I was packing up my stuff and pulling on my long overcoat when the drum major approached me with the goal line marker that he’d just lifted off the field while everyone else in the stadium was apparently watching Woody’s tantrum. He asked me to slip it under my coat and carry it to the bus. In that atmosphere, with 100,000 potential assassins in the stands and a narrow tunnel to squeeze through to freedom, it was like Wile E. Coyote handing Road Runner a stick of dynamite. Too young and stupid to know I could die, and flattered that he’d asked, I did it.

Back in the bus, he and I pulled it apart - it was an “A” shape with two identical faces. I had to rat through several boxes in the basement to find what Mrs. Perils calls my “piece of the true cross”, but find it I did, and it’s pictured below, the relic of my final game in an OSU band uniform.

OK, on to this year’s OSU-Michigan tailgate in South Carolina. My Atlanta brother and his wife have taken up brewing beer as a pastime, and arrived with something like 250 bottles of several different varieties, all of it quite good.

The grill was out for lunch, with brats and chicken and lots of other goodies.


Somehow, we had more TVs strung around than you get in most sports bars.

We were ahead at halftime, but not by much. My youngest brother, fueled perhaps by some of his excellent home brew, reduces the tension by attempting to play Lawn Boy football. I was hoping the blade was disengaged.

Things start to look grim in the third quarter as Michigan runs off 11 unanswered points. We notice at this point that Michigan always seems to score or recover fumbles when our mother is in the vicinity. We rolled her up in a throw rug and locked her in her bedroom for the crucial fourth quarter.

The Buckeyes’ winning drive at the end of the game is the ticket for Mom’s release from lockup (she’s in the middle below). My youngest brother is on the left, his wife on the right.

Finally, the oysters meet their fate. They tasted damn good this year, and my middle brother and his wife put on a terrific party. We stood around this fire far into the night savoring the game, the beer and the oysters.

Almost forgot this - as I was checking in at the Charleston airport for my long slog back to Seattle, I espied this on the counter (click to enlarge text):

One wonders which den of academic relativism at OSU sends its graduates into the world unable to spell the name of its mascot, but it was still a hoot to see this deep in the heart of SEC country.

I’ll talk about the marching band reunion a bit, but first a little background. I was conceived within view of Ohio Stadium - my parents were students at OSU and living on Lane Avenue (sorry, Mom. She’d hasten to assure you they were married), so there may be some predestiny involved in my arriving at this juncture. I was introduced to the Ohio State marching band in the early 60s when my parents got a couple of their records. I was already a Buckeye fan, had started to play the trumpet, and was transfixed by the sound of a first-rate all-brass band playing a ripping repertoire of school songs, classic marches and concert pieces. From that point on, I always had it in my mind to play in the band if the opportunity arose.
Eventually, the opportunity did arise, I tried out for the band and made it. They have a grueling week of tryouts, both for their up-tempo high-stepping marching style and for playing acumen. I began my lifelong running regimen in preparation for band tryouts. The pride of the shared achievement creates a bond among bandsmen, especially in your “row” of people playing the same instrument, as you practice, travel and perform at places like Ohio Stadium, the Rose Bowl (I got there in 1971) and, yes, even Michigan Stadium.

Here’s my Mom, me and the future Mrs. Perils at the 1969 homecoming game.
For the last 30-some years, the band has been sponsoring a reunion at an early-season game. This year, over 650 alumni participated. They allow us to perform in the pregame and halftime shows, designed so that we can rehearse music Friday night, walk through our formations and find our spots at an early Saturday morning rehearsal, and not embarrass the organization at game time.
When I was in the varsity band, the first time I saw the alumni band I swore I’d never participate in it when I graduated. I disdained their comparative lack of precision and general dishevelment, and resented having to share precious field time with them. For many years, I kept this promise to myself. However, my youngest brother, 10 years younger, made the band and, in his senior year, wanted me to come to the reunion, and I did. On the field that day, our routes through our respective Script Ohios came close and he glanced over to me as he made a turn, and in that moment I was glad I’d done it, and knew why I would come back in the future.
That’s a compelling aspect of our reunion - it’s “vertical” as well as “horizontal”. A normal class reunion is “horizontal” - everyone’s the same age, and you were all in school together. The OSUMB reunion has that characteristic, but there are also people from a wide range of years - this year, from 1934 to 2004. A good friend of my brother’s played in the alumni band this year while his son played with the varsity band. I remember sitting at a rehearsal a few years back. I had just turned 50, I think. Sometime during the rehearsal, they announced the passing of one of the older members, one who had been in attendance the year before. Later in the rehearsal, a young woman trumpet player leaned over to an acquaintance and whispered excitedly, “I’m pregnant!” So it has this whole birth-and-death thing going on.

This clarinet-playing fellow predates October, 1934, when the band became all brass and percussion. He must still have his faculties - everyone else seems to be scrambling through their charts at this Saturday morning practice while he looks pretty self-assured.
There’s another kind of crossing-over occurring as well. Each year, there’s a new crop of alumni band members who were in the varsity band the year before, and they’re looking across the divide from the other side for the first time. I mean, all of us in the alumni band gaze wistfully at our counterparts in the varsity band, with their crisp turns, sharp uniforms, near-perfect playing and their youth in general. It’s a lot harder, I think, for these first-year alumni to apprehend that Stygian separation.
It’s a lot of fun, though, mixing with people from so many different years, to hear their various Michigan game and bowl game experiences. This year, the current members of C Row threw a party Friday night and invited C Row alumni. We were properly venerated (veneration is not a social disease), and they caught us up on new traditions (a seeming oxymoron, but it illustrates how one can become prehistoric). We had no sympathy when they complained about a bus trip where they were forbidden to put South Park on the bus’ video system. Our bus rides across the bleak late-autumn Big Ten terrain involved some singing, a hazing ritual that resulted in people arriving in downtown Chicago in their underwear and an old-school Greyhound driver, Feasel, who might swerve the bus violently when someone was using the lavatory.

Old and young C Row members. I’m front row, third from left.
And it’s also still a dead-flat thrill to strut onto the field while over 100,000 cheer, and awesome to look up at the huge video screen and see yourself marching toward it.

The NCAA men’s basketball championship is tonight and, although I really don’t have an emotional stake in the outcome, I always get a little pang around this time of year because it reminds me of the torrid 3-year affair I conducted with my first sports love.

My mom and dad both attended Ohio State, and there was never any question about where our sports loyalties resided. I was sort of a chubby, unathletic kid, though, and the sports gene pretty much lay dormant until the winter of 1959 - 60. That year, a once-in-a-lifetime recruiting class became sophomores and eligible to play at Ohio State, including Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, Mel Nowell and Bobby Knight. I must have contracted my dad’s enthusiasm, and we started setting aside time on the evenings - Saturday and Tuesday, usually - when they played, and we’d strain our Toledo-area radio’s capability to pull in the Columbus radio station (WTVN) carrying the games.

As this first wondrous season unfolded with victory after victory, we at some point got caught up in scorekeeping. My dad must have seen a bonding opportunity in this virtual sport, an opportunity that hadn’t germinated in the freezing duck blinds and torpid bobber-watching forays he’d tried in vain to entice me with, and he made the most of it. He had scoresheets printed (mimeographed - these were the old days) at his office with the hallowed starting five filled in, and blanks for subs, and, as we listened to the radio broadcast, we assiduously recorded field goals attempted and made, free throws attempted and made, and personal fouls. We’d compare notes at halftime and at the end of games, and compute the shooting percentages for individuals and the teams, and try to do it fast enough to compare ours with the post-game wrap-up on the radio.

We also filled in the opponent’s ledger, and tracked vaunted enemies like Terry Dischinger (Purdue), the Van Arsdale Twins (Indiana) and their wonderfully-monickered coach Branch McCracken, and of course the hated Bill Buntin and Cazzie Russell of Michigan.

We were aided greatly in this endeavor by undoubtedly the most egregious homer announcer I’ve ever heard, a guy named Joe Hill. His call was so precise that it was amazing how close our radio-informed statistics would track the official numbers. And, an added bonus, Hill would really scourge the refs if he felt we were being jobbed, and, for the first time in my life, I tasted the seething vintage of the sports fan’s hatreds.

The Buckeyes won the national championship that year that Lucas and Havlicek were sophomores, and went on to post a 73-6 record over the three years those guys played. They were beaten, however, in each of the next two national championship games by Cincinnati. I honestly think I lost my religion the Sunday morning after the second Cinci loss. Sitting in church with my eyes closed, seeing nothing but the Blade’s “CINCI WINS!” headline emblazoned in Hiroshima-sized type on my retinas, I finally knew the universe for the cold and brutal place that it is.

Ohio State had a couple of good years after that with Gary Bradds, another all-American, at center, but, for me, bra sizes began to replace field-goal percentages as my stat-du-jour, my dad began to suffer stress from occupational angst and personal demons, and our period of Buckeye bonding dissipated.

Still, we had it, that period of delirious sports lust, and its corollary, the searing heartache of defeat and entitlement forfeited. Good fortune, time and mobility allowed my dad and I to enjoy each other’s company until he died last fall, and I’ve had satisfying adult relationships with other sports teams, but I always feel a little nostalgia during March Madness for those nights by the radio, brow furrowed and pencil poised, urging Big Luke to sink another of his soft hooks.
(Pictures from The Golden Age of Ohio State Basketball by Lee Caryer)

Bonus shot - Basketball cognoscenti familiar with the scowling, silver-haired visage of Bobby Knight might get a kick out of the shot below, taken at the Cow Palace after the 1960 national championship game:

Well, Michigan gave Ohio State a good thrashing Saturday, so the fever has banked itself for another year. There will be a respectable bowl game, maybe even a top-tier BCS bowl (OSU is 10-2, after all), but, as in many past years, the bowl game will be an afterthought and an inadequate consolation to losing to Michigan.
I had flown to Charleston, SC to watch the game on TV with my brothers, their wives and a couple other of their friends. One of my brothers lives in Charleston, the other lives in Atlanta, so it seemed appealing to gather in the warmest venue among us. The weather cooperated - it was in the mid-70s and sunny, and I kind of gloated when I put on sunscreen for the day Saturday, instead of layers of scarlet and grey padding against the historically frigid Ann Arbor gamesite climate. When I was in OSU’s marching band, there were times when playing Michigan we slathered our valves with antifreeze (we were an all-brass band) and used plastic mouthpieces to avoid the “timmy licked the flagpole and now his tongue is stuck and has to be cut off” possibilities of the more musically appealing metal mouthpieces..
All in all, I’d say we took the defeat with an unaccustomed grace. I think winning the national championship last year imbued us with a kind of magnanimity and noblesse oblige this year, and we watched the season unfold with an heir’s detachment, the national championship like a trust fund that insulated us from the life-and-death gut-wrenching anxiety of watching games. There’ll be time enough to savage the coaching staff next year, when the anesthetic will have worn off.
The oyster roast was nicely stage-managed by my Charleston-resident brother. I prefer my oysters raw to cooked, relishing the saline juice and coppery tinge to the meat. However, I enjoyed the preparation this weekend. My brother built a fire in the middle of his field and eventually coaxed a hot bed of coals. He spread them out, put a grate over them and poured out a bushel of oysters in their shells. We took care to pluck them off the fire just as a seam formed in the incomprehensible construction of the shells. The result muted somewhat the sea-born taste, but the chargrilled quality that replaced it was quite satisfying, and no doubt safer from a bacteriological standpoint.