Woody Hayes was one of the greatest football coaches in history---and one of the most fascinating.   More than a brilliant coach, he was a complicated, contradictory man.   The former history teacher ran his football empire as an absolute monarchy, but   had a surprisingly altruistic side, hidden from the public,. and author John Lombardo uses his extensive sports-writing experience to craft an accurate portrait of one of the most complex and fascinating figures in football.   
      First and foremost, Woody Hayes was a coach---and his achievements are stunning.   While at Ohio State, he won five national titles, and thirteen Big Ten Conference championships, made eight Rose Bowl appearances, and earned two national Coach of the Year awards.   Moreover, Hayes’s lifetime coaching record, 238--72--10, puts him in the first rank of college coaching immortals.   No other coach won more games in a shorter period.
      Countless interviews of former players, assistant coaches, and friends shape the image of Hayes and his career, which spanned the mid-1940s to the late 1970s during a tremendous period of change in American society.   A Fire to Win is an honest and revealing biography of Hayes, a man who ranks in the pantheon of football coaches.

 

John Lombardo, a sportswriter based in Chicago, is the author of Raiders Forever: Stars of the NFL’s Most Colorful Team Recall Their Glory Days.  Lombardo lives in Winnetka, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters.  

Chapter One

Newcomerstown

Woody Hayes was entirely a small-town man. None of the national championships, the bowl games, fame, glory, and power that came from lording over college football would ever shake Hayes’s firm believe that all that was right in the world came from rural America, where love of country, hard work, and loyalty made America great.

It was this philosophy that would send Hayes to speak at nearly every Elks club, Masonic lodge, and Moose hall that asked, giving him the chance to lecture his audience on the virtues of small-town life. In return Hayes would be honored with a key to the city, a chicken dinner, and a modest speaking fee. The fee invariably would never see the inside of his pocket. Instead, he often would donate the money back to the club, or sign the check over to the local high school football team that was invariably in need of new equipment. Even when the speaking fees increased well into five figures, he would quietly sign the money over to a hospital or a charity. Sometimes he simply tucked the check into his jacket, where it would be forgotten until the garment was sent to the dry cleaners.

“I speak at a lot of banquets in small towns, because small towns have so many great people,” Hayes said during those boilerplate speeches. “All the presidents came from small towns. The largest town that a president came from was in that state up north,” he said, referring to former president Gerald Ford, who hailed from Grand Rapids, Michigan. The standing joke would always bring a chuckle. So deep was his disdain for rival Michigan, that even during these friendly talks Hayes, who counted Ford as a friend, would refuse to mention the state of Michigan by name.

Hayes’s own tenets were forged in rural Ohio, first in Clifton, a tiny mill town along the banks of the Miami River some seventy-five miles southwest of Columbus. It was there that he was born on Valentine’s Day in 1913, the third and youngest child of Wayne Benton and Effie Jane Hupp Hayes. Woody was eight years younger than his sister Mary and two years younger than his brother Ike. Unlike his more independent older brother, young Woody was doted upon by both his sister and mother and stayed close to the women in the house.

“As the youngest, I don’t think there was any doubt I was spoiled,” Hayes said.

In 1915 Wayne Hayes moved his family to nearby Selma, where he took a job as school superintendent, another step in his career as an educator.

Wayne was the visionary of the family, an intense man who, with his eleven brothers and sisters, was expected to work the family homestead in Noble County, Ohio. The family had deep Ohio roots. Woody’s great grandfather David Hayes was a blacksmith and joined the Union army during the Civil War. He was killed during the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, leaving Wayne’s father Isaac an orphan at eight years old.

Wayne was bright, ambitious, and resourceful, and the family farm wasn’t enough to hold him. Most nights after chores and dinner, Wayne’s mother would sit him down and school her son in reading and arithmetic, building the foundation for his future for a life off the farm.

Wayne saw teaching as a way to better himself. During the early 1900s Ohio was still primarily a rural state, with small, unincorporated towns and hamlets dotting the countryside. High schools in these areas were either distant or absent altogether, so kids who completed the eighth grade could take the Boxwell Examination, that, if successfully completed, could serve as a substitute to a high school diploma. Wayne passed the test, posting a score high enough to qualify him to teach the eighth grade---beginning his long, slow march toward becoming a college graduate and a school superintendent. The Hayes family was serious about education.

Achieving high school equivalency by passing the Boxwell Examination was one thing, but attending college was for the wealthy and privileged, not for farm families from Noble County, Ohio. Though married and the father of three young children, Wayne was undeterred by family and financial hurdles that lay before his educational goals. He attended six different colleges at night and during the summers, before eventually earning a degree from Wittenberg College in 1920. Woody was seven years old when he saw his father graduate from college. Wayne Hayes was thirty-eight. The memory would stay with Woody forever; his father’s perseverance serving to motivate and inspire when things turned dark, as they often did, given Woody’s high-octane, combustible personality.

The degree brought new opportunities and prosperity to the Hayes household, and in 1920 the family moved northeast to Newcomerstown, Ohio, population 4,500, where Wayne accepted a job as superintendent of schools. It was a sizable step up, compared to the tiny towns like Clifton and Selma where the family previously lived. Wayne earned twenty-eight dollars a month when he first began teaching in the early 1900s. By 1920 he had saved enough money to buy a modest white frame house at 488 East Canal Street, just east of downtown and near a stretch of water that used to be part of the historic Ohio Canal. After spending years working his way across Ohio, Hayes would never move his family again.

Woody was seven years old when his father settled his family in this quintessential 1920s small town, nestled in a valley along the Tuscarawas River. Hardworking folks lived in the village bisected by the Ohio Canal; outside the town limits farmland checkered the hilly countryside.

It was in essence a company town, with the Clows Pipe Works and the Heller Tool Company serving as the two main employers. The heavy industry, combined with the county’s rural population, provided enough economic stimulus to make the town a bustling place. The country’s interstate system was still a long way off from crossing through Ohio. Instead, highway 29 funneled traffic through the heart of the downtown, helping pump commerce into the heart of Main Street. But travel was still difficult, and people who lived in Newcomerstown stayed put. There was a feed store, grocery, clothing store, hardware store, tannery, and even a cigar factory---all located within a few blocks of each other---where the locals spent their money, creating a self-sufficient place where one could buy whatever was needed.

Farmers would come into town on Saturday mornings to shop, eat, and perhaps, on summer afternoons, to linger to listen to a local band play uptown on Main Street. The locals would also hold town picnics at Mulvane Park. A summer social highlight was the tricounty fair held in the centrally located town, bringing together residents of Tuscarawas, Coshocton, and Old Washington counties, hoping to have that year’s blue-ribbon-winning crops and cattle.

The local schoolchildren would swim in the river during the summer and ice skate on it during the winter, and if they collected enough bread wrappers from the local bakery, they could go to the movie house for free. Farmers and other rural folk would gather at the Grange Hall for meetings and dinners. Sunday mornings were for church, and afterwards families either went to a church dinner or to a neighbor’s house for meals, dressed in their Sunday best. These get-togethers were formal affairs and provided a way of socializing after a long week of work, but they also helped establish a social pecking order within the town, a town so small that everyone helped each other, but also knew everyone else’s business. Whenever a child contracted scarlet fever, the doctor would quarantine the family by placing a large red sign outside the house to serve as a loud warning of the then deadly disease, but also to signal to neighbors to leave food on the front porch of the unfortunate family.

There were dozens of towns in the Ohio Valley like Newcomerstown during the early 1900s, but the small village on the river had already made a name for itself, thanks to the baseball heroics of Denton “Cy” Young. Young grew up on a farm outside of town and moved back to his boyhood home after his Hall of Fame baseball career ended in 1911. He managed the local semipro team, sponsored by the Clows Pipp Works, in his retirement, and sometimes he would wear his old Cleveland Indians uniform to remind himself and the locals of his days of fame. The old lefthander would even break out his old Boston uniform on special occasions, like July 4th or Labor Day.

Young took a liking to Woody and hired the earnest youngster to do small jobs around the farm, paying him a nickel to groom the local baseball diamond. Cy’s fame was not lost on the impressionable Woody. Young would regale him and other locals in farmyard smokehouses with stories of past stardom, of pitching duels against Walter Johnson, and of other glories that come from winning 511 big league games.

“That man could make me feel grown up when he said `Woodrow,’ and that’s what he always called me,” Hayes said. “Here’s a man who would sit in front of Denver Reed’s smokehouse and talk about pitching, and he pitched for twenty-two years. But he was a humble man. He never made himself look good. Never.”

It was a time when sports began to enter the collective consciousness of America, with stars like Young, Johnson, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig elevated to hero status. Listening firsthand to Young tell his stories instilled in Hayes an idealistic and virtuous notion of sports, one that would strongly influence the impressionable young man.

But it wasn’t all ice-cream socials and Main Street bands. Newcomerstown could be a rough-and-tumble place, especially compared to the more prosperous neighboring town of New Philadelphia, the county seat located fifteen miles to the north. Life could get difficult in the seemingly idyllic village. Hard work didn’t always pay off and f...