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Rep Power: 2  | Formal Michgan Coach Bo Schembechler dead at 77...
Quote:
Bo Schembechler is gone, and gone with him is the living proof that it's not necessary to win a national championship to be considered a great coach.
Bo had won 194 games and 13 Big Ten Conference championships in 21 seasons at Michigan when he retired in 1989. Including his six seasons at Miami (Ohio), he won 234 games in his career, 10th on the all-time list. Of the nine coaches in front of him, seven won national championships, and the other two, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner, coached in the pre-poll era.
Schembechler would have liked to have finished No. 1. He would have liked a better record in 10 Rose Bowls than two wins and eight losses. But Schembechler never gave the impression that it bothered him all that much.
He mastered the regular season, the grind of a 10- or 11-game schedule in which he demanded that his players work as hard and care as much as he did. You didn't have to spend more than 10 seconds with Schembechler to understand the passion that drove him.
He could be passionate about simple things. He was not complicated, and he certainly was not a sophisticate. Before Mitch Albom wrote about Tuesdays with Morrie, he wrote about Saturdays with Bo. Albom ghosted Schembechler's autobiography "Bo," and he describes with great insight the joy Schembechler derived from a hamburger. It soon became the greatest hamburger anyone had ever had.
In August 2005, I interviewed Schembechler in his office in Schembechler Hall, which houses the football program. He had begun a tradition, carried forward by his successors Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr, of bringing in a music professor to teach the freshman players how to sing the Michigan fight song.
When I asked him why he thought that important, Schembechler replied in his customary tone, somewhere between a roar and a command.
"You've heard 'The Victors,'" Schembechler said. "If you sing it badly, it really sucks!" There would be no detail too small for Michigan football. When his players sang "The Victors" in the locker room after a victory, Schembechler saw to it that they sang well.
Schembechler cared about running the ball, and he cared about defense. His first team at Michigan, in 1969, allowed 13.5 points per game. He didn't have another team allow that much scoring until 1981.
Schembechler finished four victories short of his mentor, Woody Hayes. That's the same number of games he lost to Hayes during the 10-Year War that Schembechler's Michigan waged with Hayes' Ohio State from 1969 to 1978.
On some level, Schembechler appreciated that. He had played for Hayes at Miami and followed him from Miami to Ohio State. Schembechler worked for Hayes -- first as a graduate assistant, then as a full-time assistant 1958-62.
Bo loved Woody. He reminded the crowd -- and it was a crowd -- at his news conference Monday in Ann Arbor that he had ties to Ohio State.
"There are guys there that are really close friends of mine," Schembechler said. "I never brought it up when I coached, but I have close ties at Ohio State. Unfortunately, I even have a graduate degree from there. They made me go to school while I was a graduate assistant. Â… There's no other team I would rather play, no other coach I would rather go against than the old man."
When he left the podium, I intercepted him.
"What was the graduate degree in?" I asked.
"Physical education," he said, chuckling at the idea that it would have been in any other discipline. Schembechler lived to coach.
After he retired, his love for all things Michigan found an outlet as athletic director. In March 1989, Schembechler made the difficult decision to fire basketball coach Bill Frieder on the eve of the NCAA Tournament. Frieder had agreed to take the coaching job at Arizona State, effective at the end of the season. Schembechler announced that Frieder's season ended effective immediately.
"A Michigan man is going to coach Michigan," Schembechler announced.
Schembechler promoted assistant coach Steve Fisher, who promptly coached the Wolverines to six victories and the national championship.
Bo remained a presence in Schembechler Hall until this very week. It's hard to believe he will no longer be there. Someone asked him Monday whether he would speak to the Wolverines this week.
"You have to understand," Schembechler said, "these kids that are playing were 3 years old when I coached, so I don't think they remember much about what I did."
And then, as if to contradict himself, he said, "Although they practice in a building with my name on it, and I hang around there."
He spoke to the Wolverines on Thursday, the day before he died. He already had decided that he would not travel to Columbus for the game. He said away games had become too big of an obstacle.
"I did purchase a 50-inch plasma TV," he added with relish.
Schembechler nearly died on the eve of a big game once before. At age 40, he suffered a heart attack on the night before the 1970 Rose Bowl, the game Michigan reached via its 24-12 victory over No. 1 Ohio State in 1969, the biggest upset in the 103-year history of the rivalry.
Schembechler always felt as if he had gotten a second chance at life after that heart attack. In fact, he lived nearly as long after that heart attack as he had before it. He lived long enough to see that he revitalized Michigan football. His successors, Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr, both worked on Schembechler's staff.
His legacy will live on Saturday and for years beyond. Schembechler might have been a Michigan man with an Ohio State degree, but there was never a man more Michigan than Bo.
| I'm in an Ohio State family, I can root for Michigan one bit, but you still have to respect the man for everything he has done for that University, national championship, conference Championships, and so much more...R.I.P. Bo Schembechler...
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