Woody Hayes KO'd himself in 1978 Gator Bowl

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Bobby Knight grabbed one of his players by the shirt and twisted. Frank Beamer slapped a player on the sideline. Leo Durocher and Earl Weaver screamed at umpires until their faces turned purple. But no coach or manager in America's often violent sports culture ever lost it as completely as Wayne Woodrow Hayes.

Dec. 29, 1978, Gator Bowl, Jacksonville, Fla.: Hayes' Ohio State team is trailing Clemson 17-15 but threatening from the enemy's 24 in the final minute until Tigers linebacker Charlie Bauman intercepts a pass by freshman quarterback Art Schlichter. End of threat, but not of excitement.

Bauman's teammates cluster around him after he was knocked out of bounds on the Ohio State sideline -- rubbing helmets, exchanging hand slaps and doing all the other congratulatory things football players do. Then so suddenly that ABC's cameras didn't pick it up clearly, a white-haired man wearing a jacket and baseball cap charges into the midst of the melee and throws a right-hand sucker punch that lands on Bauman's collarbone.

The assailant is Woody Hayes, and the moment he delivers the punch, his 28-year career as an icon in Columbus and throughout Ohio is over at age 65. By the time the team returns home the next day, Hayes has been fired after winning 205 games, two national championships and making eight trips to the Rose Bowl. At the Columbus airport, police escort him from the plane to a car waiting on the tarmac, and he is driven off -- to his house and into uncharacteristic obscurity.

Yet 26 years after the incident and 17 years after his death, many Ohioans still venerate Hayes. He is remembered as a rough, tough, gruff coach who idolized Gen. George Patton -- but also as a man who cared about his players and who never pretended to be anything but what he was.

One of Hayes' admirers was Richard Nixon, and vice versa. At Hayes' funeral in 1987, the former president delivered the eulogy as more than a few tears fell. The old coach's rock-rumped methods appealed to a president just as singular and just as controversial.

Once Nixon called Hayes after an important victory and was put on hold until Woody had finished addressing his team. Another time, Nixon invited Hayes to the White House. Said the president afterward: "I wanted to talk football, and Woody wanted to talk foreign policy. You know Woody -- we discussed foreign policy."

Was it more than a coincidence that Hayes' career ended just as disastrously as Nixon's had four years earlier in the aftermath of Watergate?

"It's sad that Woody finished the way he did, because he was a great man," recalled former Ohio State nose guard Jim Stillwagon. "A lot of people only remember him for that one thing. They never saw all the great things he did for people. ... He always had a lot of great advice like that for us, but I wish he would have taken some of it himself."

Hayes never publicly apologized for the punch, but his fiery temper was well known. On other occasions, he had tossed right hands at an ABC cameraman and a Los Angeles Times photographer for real or imagined offenses. This kind of behavior typified a man who said things like "I will pound and pound and pound you until you quit."