Three and Out (4 page)

Angell didn't get this, but what really rankled him were the reporters and students who valued these “men of brawn rather than the men of brains,” and he warned his peers that, with so much money “handled for such purpose, the temptations for misuse are not wanting.”

Current college presidents know exactly what Angell was talking about.

Yost didn't care. The minute he became Michigan's third athletic director, in 1921, he was on a mission to construct the very best athletic complex in the nation—and because Baird had set up the athletic department to keep its profits, Yost had the means to do so. “We've got the first field house ever built on a campus,” former athletic director Don Canham told me. “We've got the first intramural building. We've got the largest stadium in the country. That was no accident. That was Fielding Yost.”

That demand had been boosted by Yost himself by winning titles and popularizing the forward pass in 1925 and 1926 with his famed “Benny-to-Bennie” passing combination: Benny Friedman tossing to Bennie Oosterbaan. The forward pass had been legalized in the wake of the NCAA reforms of 1905 to spread the players out and reduce collisions, but two decades later it was still used primarily as a desperation measure. Yost and his stars demonstrated it could be used as an effective, controlled tactic on any down from almost anywhere on the field.

Friedman took the weapon to the embryonic NFL, where he set a record of eleven touchdown passes in 1927. New York Giants owner Tim Mara took note and bought Friedman's entire Detroit franchise just to get the quarterback. Friedman made Mara look smart when he shattered his own record with twenty touchdown passes in 1929. The NFL inducted Friedman posthumously to the Hall of Fame in 2005, along with Dan Marino and Steve Young, for expanding the forward pass that made those later careers possible.

Yost contributed more to Michigan's tradition than victories, buildings, and innovations. When he officially retired in 1941, his admirers put on a tribute in his eponymous Field House, broadcast on NBC radio and titled “A Toast to Yost from Coast to Coast” (which was also the title of a popular song).

After the speeches, Yost said, “My heart is so full at this moment and I am so overcome by the rush of memories that I fear I could say little more. But do let me reiterate … the Spirit of Michigan. It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan Men to spread the gospel of their university to the world's distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours.”

Whether you call it confidence or arrogance, Yost had it and spread it.

*   *   *

Michigan hit pay dirt again when it hired another innovative outsider, Fritz Crisler. In 1938, after Crisler's sixth season at Princeton, Michigan invited him to name his price—and he did, asking for complete autonomy over the team (he knew Yost had all but sabotaged his first two successors), the position of athletic director (effective when Yost stepped down), and more money than any football coach had ever made: $15,000 a year. “I thought my terms were so far out of line,” Crisler confessed, “that they would be unacceptable.” But Michigan called his bluff, met his terms, and got a legend in the bargain.

During Fritz Crisler's tenure as Michigan's athletic director, from 1942 to 1968, the Wolverines won eighteen national titles, in everything from baseball to ice hockey to men's tennis—plus two in football.

But it was as a football coach that Crisler made his greatest impact.

In 1945, thanks to the war, Crisler had to fill his roster with a bunch of seventeen-year-olds—no match for Michigan's fifth opponent, the loaded Army squad, which was undefeated, ranked number one, and featured “Mr. Inside,” Doc Blanchard, and “Mr. Outside,” Glenn Davis, who would both win the Heisman Trophy.

Desperate, Crisler combed the rules looking for a loophole, and he found one in the substitution section. Before the war, players could enter or leave a game only once each quarter, but in anticipation of the player shortages World War II would create, in 1941 the NCAA started allowing players to come and go “at any time.” Eureka.

“Those three little words changed the game,” Crisler said. He divided his team into “offensive” and “defensive” units, creating the sport's first specialists.

“It was no ingenuity on my part,” Crisler claimed. “When the other fellow has a thousand dollars and you have a dime, it's time to gamble.”

The seventy thousand fans packed into Yankee Stadium were stunned to see Crisler substitute freely—and even more shocked to see Michigan hold Army scoreless in the first quarter and trail only 14–7 in the third before the far more powerful Cadets settled matters, 28–7.

Afterward, it was not Army's victory—which was expected—but Crisler's strategy—which wasn't—that had people talking. Two years later, 1947, the press dubbed Michigan's offense the “Mad Magicians” for their Globetrotter-like ball handling in the backfield. On a single play, as many as seven players might touch the ball. “For Michigan's specialists,” a
Time
magazine cover said, “poise, fury, finesse, utter abandon.”

Crisler's invention helped Michigan win national titles in 1947 and 1948. The platoon system—the most revolutionary innovation since Benny-to-Bennie unleashed the passing game—caught on fast and also necessitated aggressive, year-round recruiting, something Crisler himself loathed.

But no one ever questioned Crisler's loyalty to Michigan.

“Tradition is something you can't borrow,” he said. “You cannot go down and buy it at the corner store, but it's there to sustain you when you need it the most. I have watched countless Michigan football coaches, countless Michigan players call upon it time and time again. There is nothing like it, I hope it never dies.”

Converts, of course, make the most fervent believers.

Crisler's successor as Michigan's athletic director, Don Canham, confessed, “I was not a popular choice to succeed Crisler. I think the average Michigan alumnus was saying something to the effect of, ‘Who the hell is this track coach to take Fritz Crisler's place?'” The reason was simple: Canham's hiring marked the first split between the positions of football coach and athletic director since 1921.

But it worked exceedingly well. Canham modernized Michigan's marketing methods so dramatically that
Sports Illustrated
's Frank Deford felt compelled to write a major feature on him in 1975—the same year Canham started Michigan Stadium's string of 100,000-plus crowds—which resulted in summer workshops to teach athletic directors nationwide how to emulate Michigan's success. Soon, every school was marketing their teams the Michigan way.

If Canham's marketing methods received too much attention, his hiring skills received too little. He had the uncanny ability to pluck talented young coaches from the collegiate minor leagues. This savvy approach increased the candidates' devotion to Michigan and decreased the amount of money Canham had to pay to get them there.

Nonetheless, when Canham hired Schembechler, Michigan fans asked, Bo Who?

Canham realized that Schembechler's current employer, Miami University, could have thrown more money at Schembechler. But, he said, “they couldn't compete with Yost's hole in the ground or with the prestige of Michigan.”

Canham knew he was offering something special, and so did Schembechler. Although Schembechler made an ill-advised crack during an early speech about changing the team's funny-looking helmets (he maintained it was a joke, though others aren't so certain), he quickly received the help of Canham, Bob Ufer, and his predecessor, Bump Elliott. He learned Michigan's gospel and how to preach it.

When Schembechler and his assistants arrived in Ann Arbor, they had to dress in the second-floor locker room of Yost Field House, sit in rusty folding chairs, and hang their clothes on nails in the wall. “My coaches were complaining, ‘We had better stuff at Miami,'” Schembechler said. “I said, ‘No, we didn't. See this chair?
Fielding Yost
sat in this chair. See this spike?
Fielding Yost
hung his hat on this spike. And you're telling me we had better stuff at Miami?! No, men, we didn't. We have
tradition
here,
Michigan
tradition, and
that's
something no one else has!'”

Schembechler never introduced any eye-popping innovations like the forward pass or the platoon system. But he did plenty to advance Michigan's reputation for excellence, winning thirteen Big Ten titles in twenty-one years while running a famously clean program.

*   *   *

When Canham stepped down as athletic director in 1988, it marked the end of an era of unequaled steadiness and strength—sixty-seven years led by only three athletic directors, each one a leader in the field.

But after Schembechler succeeded his boss as athletic director—partly to ensure he could name the next football coach—it took him less than two years to realize that the new president, James Duderstadt, was intent on diminishing the AD position, and he quit.

“It didn't change until Bo left,” Canham told me, “and then it changed almost overnight.”

Those changes soon threatened the very foundation of Michigan athletics—and reverberated straight through the Rodriguez era.

 

2   MAN IN A HURRY

In 1901, the same year Fielding Yost ran up Ann Arbor's State Street to jump-start Michigan's modern era, a new village was incorporated just a couple miles down Paw Paw Creek Road from Yost's native Fairview, West Virginia. The Federal Coal and Coke Company had just opened a mine called Federal No. 1 and decided to call the new place Grant Town.

Rodriguez's grandfather Marion emigrated from Spain to work in that mine, and after Rich's father, Vince, spent a few years in Chicago with his wife and three young boys, they moved back to continue the family tradition.

“It's a different world down there,” said the soft-spoken Vince, sitting in the family's backyard on a beautiful spring day. “The hole is no wider than a trash can. You look up and see that circle of light getting smaller. It's scary at first, but after a while, you get used to it, until it's like going down to your basement.”

Maybe so, but your basement is not likely to collapse on you, as that mine did on Marion—three times. He always escaped, but he couldn't elude black lung disease.

“You could see it coming,” Rich said. “And if you've ever seen anybody die of black lung, you know it's pretty hard to watch. It's slow, and it's painful. It definitely made an impression.”

Unlike most of his classmates, who went down that shaft after graduation for $100 a day, Rich Rodriguez had other plans.

Ask Arleen Rodriguez when she knew her second son was going to be a coach and she'll tell you, “When he was born!”

When Arleen and Vince tried to get Rich to take a bath, he would hold his breath until he actually passed out—at thirteen months. Stubbornness was in his genes, and so were sports. From the time he could hold his rubber ball, all he wanted to do was bounce it off the wall, the stairs, and the roof. “That was his life,” Arleen says.

He also developed a unilateral rivalry with his brother Steve, who was just thirteen months older but much bigger, topping out in high school at 6'3", 250, and a natural athlete himself.

“When we taught Steve how to ride a bike,” Arleen says, “Rich learned the same day. Anything Steve did, Rich wanted to do it better.”

“And he
did
do it better,” Vince added.

Almost all of Grant Town's six hundred people lived off the mines, shopped in the company store, and sent their kids to Miner Camp for two weeks every summer—where Rich won Best Camper three years in a row.

“Looking back on it, we lived pretty modestly—not that I knew it,” Rodriguez told me. “We never went on vacations. Our house had no heat upstairs. I wore three sweat suits at night. And you'd wake up to see ice on the windows—on the
inside.
But we always had everything we needed, and everyone loved playing sports. That saved me.”

Most of the townspeople had emigrated from Poland, Italy, Spain, and Mexico, and were just as ambitious as Rich was.

“They did not come here for the hell of it,” said Joe Weir, Rodriguez's assistant high school football coach. “They were willing to work, but it made the town very competitive. If you're just playing marbles,
that
was really competitive. You wanted to win!
Everyone
was competitive.”

Locals like to point out that this cluster of tiny towns in north-central West Virginia has produced far more than its fair share of big-name athletes and coaches. The list includes Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff; Frank Gatski, an All-Pro center for the Cleveland Browns; Nick Saban, who grew up fifteen miles away in Monongha, and Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher, from Clarksburg. Mary Lou Retton's father grew up in nearby Fairmont and played basketball with Jerry West at West Virginia. Retton was a friend of Rich's dad, and Rich played ball against all her brothers.

Rodriguez's teachers often told his mother he was the smartest boy in the class, but Rich admitted that there were only three boys in his class. “It was small potatoes, man.”

The potatoes got a little bigger before Rodriguez's junior year, when four-hundred-student Fairview High School, Yost's alma mater, and three other small schools consolidated with North Marion to make it one of the bigger schools in the state.

Some of his classmates hated it, but Rodriguez thrived on the tougher competition. He was named All-State in football and basketball—leading the state in scoring part of his senior year, which helped his basketball team get to the finals—and became the school's first athlete to letter in four sports.