Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Jennifer at Synaesthesia and I have engaged in a desultory dialogue about college sports, limited to a great extent by my need to spend Saturdays watching football instead of blogging. She is at a large land-grant university in the Big Ten, and is peeved at the ability of sports to suck economic and psychic resources out of the university, as well as at the boorish behavior it engenders in its fans. I agree with her, and think it’s a weird shotgun marriage between an entertainment conglomerate and a high-stakes public venture charged with educating people and raising the level of discourse and technical competence in our society. It makes as much sense for colleges to sponsor football teams as it would for municipal fire departments to operate waterslide amusement parks. (Actually, that makes a LOT more sense).
But that’s my intellectual side (undernourished and of feeble incandescence) talking. My sentimental side says there’ll be time enough in the bleak midwinter (see below) to discuss this as well as the lunacy of a region (Seattle) that can’t fill potholes, or properly route and fund any sort of non-highway mass transit, spending half a billion dollars blowing up one stadium and replacing it with two. My sentimental side says THIS IS MICHIGAN WEEK, FERGAWD’SSAKE, the 100th renewal of the Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry, and, for another week or so, I’m just gonna go with it.
Thursday night I’ll board a redeye flight from Seattle en route to Charleston, SC, where I’ll join my two OSU-alum brothers and a couple of their less-savory friends for the weekend to roast oysters and bay like Low Country curs at the television during the game on Saturday. This gathering will not be characterized by the angst and interpersonal complexities of The Big Chill (those were Michigan grads, after all), it will be awash in blood lust and gluttony. The explanation of how these OSU fans can spend all that money and travel time and miss the stadium where the game is actually being played by 900 miles will have to await a more lucent and reflective moment.

Those of you who are aware of such things may note that Ohio State is playing Wisconsin in Madison tonight, and may ponder why a person as seemingly committed to the team would not take the serendipity of his Milwaukee layover to extend it a few hours longer, scalp a ticket and attend the game.
I have to say it crossed my mind, even earlier in the week. If I had friends who were already going, or knew people in Madison, I might have done it. Back in the 70s and early 80s, when I had first moved to Seattle and we were lucky to be able to see the Buckeyes on TV twice during the season, and air travel was a once-every-couple-years luxury, there is no question that I would have bent my plans 180 degrees in order to attend a game if I were within 500 miles.

Bottom line, though, It seems I’ve been away from Ohio and the Buckeye Culture long enough that, well, I’m just not FROM there anymore. One of the most telling symptoms was when I demurred last December when my brothers were drumming up a trip to the Fiesta Bowl for the National Championship game. I watched the game, of course, in a sports bar in Seattle with a congregation of other Buckeye refugees, but really didn’t regret not attending, even after it turned into one of the best college games ever played. Earlier, this might be an occasion for angst or regret, like losing a part of childhood, but I find myself curiously unmoved at the thought.

You probably won’t hear this level of denial and ostentatious declaration of clean thought and action in a 12-step program. Also note that my travel plans have me in Seattle well in advance of the (televised!) kickoff.

My son and I hopped a redeye last night to the place he calls “the land of excessive school spirit”, Columbus, OH. I’m here to play with the Ohio State alumni band (aka TBDBITL) on Saturday night when OSU plays University of Washington. Coincidentally, my son is a student at UW, but there’s no big football rivalry - he pays virtually no attention to sports in which he doesn’t participate. I’m dragging him along because it’s a rare chance for him to hang with his uncles (my brothers) and my parents.
The OSU band reunion is different from class reunions in that it is “vertical” rather than “horizontal” - it spans a wide range of ages. The oldest participant (attending and playing) is in his 90s, and the oldest marching participant is in his 80s. At the other end, last year I sat behind two women who had just graduated the previous year. One leaned to the other and whispered excitedly, “I’m pregnant!” There will be around 650 alumni band members participating.
The game was played at night, an infrequent occurence at Ohio Stadium, and the atmosphere was celebratory and electric - you might get a sense from the picture above. Since they erected that scoreboard with eye-candy video in the south stands, it’s really weird to be marching up the field and look up and see yourself as you’re performing.

I took this picture just before we did our pregame show at the ‘71 Rose Bowl

A couple days ago I was inspired to dredge up a story from my OSU days. It was the spring of 1970, during the Cambodia bombing campaign, and campuses all over the country were in turmoil. Each school approached these events according to its own personality, as I will relate.

I was more cynical than passionate about political issues at the time, and in my more cynical moments it seemed to me that Ohio State, with 50,000 students on campus and a Big Ten sports culture, approached student activism as more of an opportunity to party than to make a lasting political statement. In the core of any demonstration, of course, were truly dedicated activists, but milling at the periphery, and outnumbering them by a lot, were gawkers, sunworshipers, frisbee-throwers.

Many saw the demonstrations as a way to get classes cancelled and grading liberalized. For instance, two of my classes that quarter offered students the opportunity to state the lowest grade they’d accept, and to take ‘pass/fail’ if that grade wasn’t achieved.

Anyway. With this image in mind of how demonstrations went down at OSU, envision this one day on the Oval (a large grassy area at the heart of campus). Several podiums had been constructed for that day’s events, one run by the Black Student Union, one by someone like the SDS, and one apparently by the faculty senate, with crowds clustered around each one.

I had stopped at the ‘faculty senate’ one between classes and heard one or two earnest but unheeded profs plead for an orderly protest process that kept classes open. I think they saw the political upheaval of the day as perhaps the teaching opportunity of a lifetime, and didn’t want to be cut out of the dialogue. They garnered mostly derision from the committed and ennui from the groundlings on the periphery.

Suddenly, there was a disturbance from the back of the stage, and in a moment a ham-sized fist reached forward and grabbed the microphone. The body attached to the fist next emerged, and it was Woody Hayes. Some cheered, as many hooted, but everyone hushed a bit as Woody launched into a garrulous but impassioned exhortation. In the end, though, it was typical of a pep rally stump speech, minus the player introductions.

As he seemed to be winding to a close, he exclaimed, “If there’s one thing I teach my players, it’s not to HATE!”. This was apparently just one toke over the line, even from one of iconic stature. A girl who had been following intently stood up and yelled, “WE HATE MICHIGAN!”, and the place just erupted in chanting and howling. Woody was somehow disengaged from the microphone and squeezed from the stage.

In the next several days, the Kent State killings took place, our demonstrations became more chaotic and violent, and the National Guard stationed itself on the Oval to prevent anyone from congregating there. Tear gas permeated the air, even to the 7th floor of my dorm. One day, word came that the school would close at noon, and everyone had to be off the campus by 4pm. In no mood to go home, I decided to head for Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon and my girlfriend (now wife). A friend offered me a ride to Wheeling, and as we drove off campus, Columbus police were arresting students who were hitchhiking as a method to comply with the precipitous order to vacate.

Arriving on the Carnegie Mellon campus, I found a large congregation of students on a lawn in front of a makeshift stage, all seated on the grass. The president of the university was speaking, and answering questions from the audience. They were following Roberts Rules of Order. Carnegie Mellon does not play in the Big Ten.

School did eventually resume at Ohio universities, except of course for those four kids at Kent State. I took the picture above of Woody on the floor of the 1971 Rose Bowl just before we did our pregame show. We lost to Jim Plunkett and Stanford that day, and whiffed at the first of 4 or 5 national championships that would elude Woody during the 70s. Woody was enough of a wingnut that you had to cringe sometimes when he opened his mouth. But I credit him for his commitment to his values (even if I didn’t share all of them), and for taking the risk to speak that day when he could have hidden out and watched film.