Backstory: Lion in Autumn

“The pressure I put on myself is always tougher than any put on me.” — Woody Hayes 

This is a story that ran in our October1978 issue. Small updates to align with AP style have been made to this version of the article.

Saturday morning on the long, hot Fourth of July weekend at 9:30 a.m. it was already so humid that a haze hung over the trees and low-lying farmlands that surround Ohio State University’s Biggs Facility. Elsewhere, people were letting it all hang out in hammocks or on beaches, savoring lemonades and cold beers, anticipating fireworks and Sousa marches. Not Woody Hayes, though.

He was winding up the dirt road to Biggs in a cloud of dust in his scarlet and grayish truck with the AstroTurf in back. Stepping out, he offered a firm hand and said by way of greeting, “You’re on time.” Coach Woody Hayes is not lax about time, among other things. 

In that wilting weather, a necktie was firmly in place on his short-sleeved shirt, and his posture was stretched the length of the six-foot frame, which he’s slimmed down since his heart attack in 1974. He is a surprisingly handsome man, 

something that doesn’t come through fully in photographs.

Taking out a huge key ring, he unlocked the building that rings with the clamor of his staff’s football business — strategy planning, player ratings, film studies — for the other 11 months of the year. In July, though, Biggs is empty — except for Woody Hayes, who is so impatient with sloth that relaxation may be the hardest work of all for him. Relaxation has been programmed in as a duty and necessity since the heart attack. He used to be in his office at Biggs virtually every day of every July. 

Now he was thinking about going back to Noble County to hike through the hills for two or three days. First, though, he intended to wrestle some more with the manuscript of a new book he’s been working on for several months, give an interview he was reluctant to do but agreed to in an impetuous moment and meet with an old friend who needed not only his company but his counseling. 

Woody Hayes spends more time and energy doing the latter than anyone could imagine, considering the demands of his job and his own nature. He overcommits himself regularly, often to the impossible, and manages to achieve it often enough that falling short of it throws him into rages or depressions. On this day, it was a quiet, elusive depression. 

“I’m sort of down that I didn’t get this thing done,” he said, stacking files of his uncompleted book on a desk in one of the Biggs film rooms, away from the cluttered cubbyhole that is his official office. “I always take a challenge, then do the damn thing. Every book I’ve written, I’ve said I’d finish it on such and such a date, and I’ve done it. With this one, I haven’t.”

He estimated he was “too far away” to see any immediate end, “not this year, so that means it will be next year, and then it will be the next year [after that] before it’s published, so that’s two years away. A lot of the things I mention now will be kind of worn out two years from now, so it sort of discourages me ... When I try to do something, I try to do it in a hurry.”

Random House wants this book from the Coach. With the three he’s already written, Football at Ohio State, Hot Line to Victory and You Win With People, he “ignored the publishing companies and did them myself and they’ve all turned out pretty well. Of course, they’re in a field I know more about than they did, two of ’em.”

Pausing to calculate his shelves by memory, he said, “I probably don’t even have a copy of it ... I ran clear out of it ... but in Hot Line to Victory, I even put in there how a coach goes about getting a job. [Sometimes] I see a coach with a 10-0 record and he doesn’t get that job. Another fella gets it. So I ask him how he failed on it. By the time you talk to a few coaches, by the time you’ve been interviewed by enough boards ... [as I was] in the Navy, and boards of education and boards at universities, why, you pretty much know what they expect and how to prepare for them ... even for various personalities on those boards. If you want the job, you do.”

He mentioned that “a fella came to me the other day and said, ‘Coach, you know what I did before I went for my job?’ ” Right. He’d read a chapter of Woody Hayes’ book, and he got the job.

Hayes is considered a master at psyching people out on certain scores, but doesn’t care much for that phrase. “I’m not psyching people out. I’m going to study ’em. I’m going to know what a situation is before I get done.”

You Win With People was written from “a different standpoint. I wrote it ... for Ohio State alumni mostly, or the citizens of Ohio, let’s put it that way. I like to feel that anybody who is a taxpayer ... in my book, he’s an alumnus, because he’s helping to keep the school going whether he went to Ohio State or not. He has as big a part in our university as anybody who graduated. I don’t like those alums who graduate and think they deserve a ticket [just for that]. To hell with those people,” he said flatly.

“On the other hand, and we have a lot of these, are alums who, when they graduate, realize their life has been greatly enhanced and enriched by their education here and that other people supported them when they needed it, and they never quit paying back to the university. They work the rest of their lives [for OSU]. Those are the people I like.”

One of Hayes’ characteristics is that he can express sentiments like that with such ferocious belief that they do not sound as obvious or square as they might coming from simpler mortals.

The Coach does have the title for his unfinished book. It’s called Football, History and Woody Hayes. At the suggestion they sound somewhat synonymous, he shrugged modestly, “Well, that’s the only way I could encompass what would be in the book.” He didn’t want to get too specific about what it involves, except to say that there are comparisons between football and “military strategy in war.” “There’s a certain type of football that ... great generals played ... which is rather interesting,” he believes.

Football?

“Uh huh, they do it in their attack.” In the past, Hayes has made comparisons between the direct, grind-it-out approach utilized by his Buckeye teams and the military techniques of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. George Patton. Apparently, he’s elaborating and expanding on that premise in this book, but the task has proved more time-consuming and frustrating than his previous forays into authorship. While he wouldn’t think of having a ghost writer produce work under his byline, he is not fond of writing. “[I] despise it! There are nights when I want to ram my head right through that wall.” It’s rather surprising he hasn’t; he’s been known to put his fist through a blackboard. But he figures “the wall would win. It would still be there but my head wouldn’t be in much of a shape at all. Hell, that’s why so many writers end up ... as winos, dope addicts or just funny, funny people. It’s an exasperating profession,” he stated.

“I’ve almost got to tell it to somebody,” he said, punching the manuscript, “because I’ve sat here night after night trying to do it separately and I can’t do it.” His wife, Anne — a classy lady who is as independent in her way as the football legend is in his — has helped on his previous books by proofreading and running copy to and from the printer. This time, she opted out. But as for his needing help, she laughed later, “He’s apt to be at some hamburger place and just have somebody there read it. And he listens to them if they like it, and says, ‘See, I’m on the right track.’ ” She had a hunch he’d have to concede he couldn’t finish this one on deadline, and Hayes said as much himself that Saturday morning.

“I met my deadline on that last book, and got into my football real hard, too, but I paid for it. I went every day for two years without one day off. I mean Sundays and every day, and those were about 14-hour days, and I ended up at the end of the second year with a heart attack. That was all from just going, going and going. I knew it [the attack] was coming almost to the day, and there wasn’t anything I could do.”

He might have stopped, but, naturally, that was out of the question. Hayes takes a kind of perverse pride in that heart attack, as if it were a medal to his commitment. So, “I could get this done, but if I do I’ll have to pay for it in coaching and I’m not going to do that.” Nothing comes before coaching with Woody Hayes; things only come with it.

One thing that goes with it now, though, is the need to take care of himself in order to keep on doing what does matter. At 65, he looks remarkably fit, and works at staying that way by going back home to Noble County, where he’s building a cabin. “There are no telephones there and I get up very early and walk down to a little restaurant for breakfast. That is 8 miles, and then I walk back and the day’s more than half-way over by then, and that’s 16 miles.”

He was born “down there” February 14, 1913, in a small town named Clifton. But when his father, Wayne Benton Hayes, became school superintendent for the farming community of Newcomerstown, the family moved there. Noble County, Hayes estimated, is “the hilliest and least populated area of Ohio. I think there are less than 10,000 people there. It was the last county set up in Ohio, in the spring of 1851, just 100 years before I came to Ohio State.” (Meticulous as he is about history, Coach Hayes doesn’t exactly date things by the traditional B.C.-A.D. method; it’s before and after he came to OSU.)

He is not sure how long his people have been there, but believes the name Hayes is English. “The ‘es’ [is English]. But it’s also Irish. There are a lot of Hayes’ around ... I’d like to say we’re relatives of the president, but I doubt it.”

He says he doesn’t know more of the Hayes genealogy because his “father’s father, my granddad [Isaac Hayes] had been orphaned at the battle of Antietam in early October of 1862. His mother had died before that, and then his father was killed in that battle, and he was put in several homes and he escaped and came into that area [Noble County] and ran into a beautiful German girl. The reason I know she was beautiful, I’ve seen the tintype of her, and she was just about 16-17 years old and she was beautiful. And he married her and it was the smartest thing he ever did. That’s where the smarts came from in the family. The Huffmans [his grandmother’s maiden name] were just smart as hell. There were some geniuses among them. I didn’t get it,” he demurred quickly.

Isaac Hayes and Maria Huffman had 12 children, one of them being Wayne Benton Hayes, who married Effie Jane (Hupp) Hayes. They had three children: Isaac, Woody’s late brother, who was once an All-American guard at OSU and later became a veterinarian; Mary Hayes North, who became a vaudeville actress and “co-starred with George Jessel, and later she and her husband were a writing team for radio;” and then the baby of the family, Wayne Woodrow Hayes, whom Mary still addresses letters to as “dear brother Woodner.”

For years, people have been trying to figure out what makes Woody Hayes tick (sometimes like a bomb). Only God and Woody Hayes know that for sure, and as a bona fide living legend in sports, Hayes prefers to keep much of it that way. But as a compulsive scholar, he’s also looked at his family background and his environment, along with psychiatric theories, to come to some kind of accounting for his nature.

In an environmental sense, he believes independence is a trait found in all hill and mountain people, “whether it’s the Montagnards in Vietnam or the Tibetans, or the mountaineers in West Virginia and Kentucky or the hill folks of Noble County ... they’re independent, and that’s one thing you better believe. They’ll make their own way.

“Matter of fact, a couple of summers ago, I was driving up the crick, as they call it down there in Noble County ... not creek ... and the lights were on at my cousin Earl’s, so I stopped. And here they were just having supper ... and here’s my 94-year-old aunt, (whom we just laid away a couple of weeks ago) ... Aunt Bertha. We got to talking and I said, ‘Aunt Bertha, how many offspring do you have, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and what not?’ And she said, ‘Well, at last count there were 119.’ And then she showed her hill upbringing, because you know what she said? ‘Not a one of them or any of their parents have ever been on welfare.’ ”

As for his formative years, he said, “A rather interesting thing that happened, and I didn’t recognize it for a long time ... but it was when my brother (Ike) was about 7 or 8 years old, he and my granddad became unbelievably close. My granddad was a man about my age now ... sort of a grumpy old cuss ... but he just loved my brother, who had been named for him: Isaac. My brother I always spent his summers on granddad’s farm, down there where I’m building a cabin now. I’ve never seen two people as close as they were. I believe the reason has to be that it was at this very time that Granddad became an orphan [at 7 or 8], and he was a lonesome little boy, and he sees this little boy in his grandson, and I never saw two people as close as they were. Yet to other people, he was a grumpy old man. To me, he didn’t have the time of day, so Grandma always sort of made over me because she realized I was always getting left out.”

Aside from his grandmother, his mother also “made over” Wayne Woodrow Hayes. “I was the youngest. I was probably the favorite. I don’t like to say it, but I think it’s true, because mothers always hate to let go of that youngest.”

While his father was strict, he had “a very good relationship with my dad.

“This Oedipus complex they talk about ... Freud’s theory ... I never could find it,” he said, shaking his head. “No. No, I had the greatest respect for my dad, and I ended up aping him more than I did my mother ... although I get my combativeness from my mother, the competitive attitude.”

While his mother “worked 24 hours a day” at being a mother, she “could have been a great business lady because she handled all the finances. She had to .. . Dad wasn’t worth a damn at it.

“Her maiden name was Hupp ... they (the Hupps) were that kind of people (combative). Her brothers had been that way. They were prize fighters and oil well drillers. They were really tough as hell.”

By the time he reached pubescence, the babied Wayne Woodrow started showing the Hupp in his nature. He became known as a real “tough.”

Hayes recalled with fondness “a baseball pitcher named Cy Young ... the greatest one that ever lived, matter of fact .. . who came back there to retire” on a farm near where Salt Fork State Lodge is now. Hayes “knew him quite well, because he hung around the ... smokehouse and I always stopped there to get the newspapers. This fellow was the noblest character ... what a sportsman should be.

“My brother and I were out there [at Young’s farm] prize fighting one night and they were having an Elks conclave for that whole part of Ohio, and they brought in this Canadian beer . . . high-powered . . . and it was during Prohibition. They had a ring there on the hillside. I think there were some dancing girls over there, too. But at any rate, my brother and I were fighting. That was back during the Dempsey-Tunney era. I was sort of a standup fighter like Tunney, and Ike fought like Dempsey. We put on three pretty fast rounds. Anyhow, one of the members of Dad’s school board was there, and after we’d fought, he came up to my brother and me, and he said, ‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ My brother was pretty quick. He looked up at him and said, ‘No, Doctor, does your wife know you’re here?’ ”

The memory stirred a quiet laugh in him. “Know where my dad was that night? Over the hill about two miles away, making a commencement address. He found out about it and gave us hell. But he still liked prize fighting somewhat, and I think that came from the Roman gladiators. He was a great Latin student ... loved history, too.”

Some people in the area certainly recall Hayes as more of a gladiator than a scholar during his high school years; very good looking and a magnet for girls. But, apparently, he went through a real change by the time he went to Denison University, where he became known as something of a Puritan, channeling most of his drive into hard work, academically and athletically. He was a tackle on the football team, a guard on the basketball team, an outfielder on the baseball team. While he was not great at any of them, he was good, largely by dint of working like hell. As a scholar, he was considered outstanding. “I had majors in history and English.” He “wanted to be a lawyer,” but because of the Depression, found it financially expedient to go into high school teaching and coaching. Although he later earned a master’s degree in Educational Administration at OSU, he never made it back to his original ambition. The attraction of law for him, he said, was “competition. I would have been a trial lawyer. But they tell me even those fellows, they sort of wear out eventually and then they settle for some other type of law.”

His son Steve, 32, is a lawyer here in town, he added. “So he made it. That’s the way these things happen.”

Not that he regrets being a coach, he said. “I couldn’t regret it.” The thing he likes best about football, he told a crowd at a roast recently, “is that you get a chance to get knocked down. And everyone who’s ever had any success whatsoever has always been knocked down, had that experience. Defeat is where our victory starts.” That statement comes from a man who hates defeat and suffers it as poorly as any public figure of our time. It has been said that anyone who thinks contradicts himself, and Woody Hayes thinks a lot. As his wife points out, too, “One thing Woody isn’t is a phony.”

By now the saga of Woody Hayes’ 27-year reign as a Buckeye coach has been told and re-told by sportswriters and other chroniclers so often that it is more familiar to many Ohioans than the world history Hayes taught and continues to study. And if “everything has already been said” about him but the truth, he figures, “it’s too late to change my image now. And I don’t give a damn what people think of me, anyway.”

One of the most intriguing things about Woody Hayes is just how much of his image to date has been of his own making. One journalist who has covered him for many years believes Hayes “wants to appear to be an ogre.” And while a lot of his publicized outbursts of rage are undoubtedly genuine (and not inconsistent with the need to ventilate drives otherwise kept under rigid constraints), some sportswriters believe Hayes smashing his watches and eyeglasses on the ground is calculated for effect upon his players. One longtime Woody-watcher notes, “Let’s just say there’s always another [watch] handy, and he never throws a good one.”

For instance, that writer recalls “one time when Woody had a bitter argument with (defensive coach) Esco Sarkkinen on the field, in front of Sarkkinen’s players. Sarkkinen came over to him later and said, ‘Don’t ever again do that to me in front of my players.’ And Woody said, ‘Don’t you know I do it in front of your players so they’ll get so mad at me and they’ll work harder for you?’ ”

On that Fourth of July weekend, contemplating the difficulties some players have after years of college glory, Hayes said he not only worries about how his players will cope on the field, but in years to come. “Hell, I hammer on ’em before they get in here as a freshman, goddamit . . . and that’s why I have to be a mean old bastard all the way. We’ve got as fine an athlete coming in here now as we’ve ever had, from as fine a home as a kid ever stepped from, and yet I’ve started to hammer on him already on his grades. I’ve got him studying already this summer ’cause he’s gonna have 18 hours this fall. That kid’s gonna be so nervous and so busy this fall it’s terrible . . . and yet that’s the price of success, and he’ll handle it, and I’ll help him to handle it.”

No matter how “mean” he has to be ...

For years, people have been making comparisons between Hayes and General George Patton, the volatile World War II Army commander whom Hayes respects intensely. “I admire what [Patton] did,” Hayes confirmed, “By God, he outfought all of ’em. Christ, he could have ended up in Moscow if they’d let him. If they’d given him the gasoline. He was that good! We wouldn’t be fighting over Western Europe today the way we are if we’d of let him go. It might have created the third World War on the spot, but at least we’d have fought the damn thing before they had the atom bomb. As a result, we’ve been fighting it ever since under continually worsening conditions.”

Another fact he admired about Patton is that his “casualty rate was about one-quarter of the other generals, yet they called him ‘Blood and Guts.’ It was a damn lie, there wasn’t a word of truth to it.” Hayes prides himself on similar concern for his players’ safety, no matter how strict his measures.

The coach ran into Patton’s son a few years ago in Vietnam. “I had dinner with him and then went over to the mess hall. They were getting ready to show a movie to the troops, and he allowed me to speak to them, so guess what I spoke about?” Patton. “Sure, I spoke to them about his dad. I must have spoke for 20 minutes. When I got done, it was dark and he took me down to the helicopter pad because I had to leave ... and when we got down there, he said, ‘Coach, how do you happen to know so much about my dad?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve been studying him off and on for about 20 years. What was I wrong about?’ And he said, ‘Oh, nothing. Nothing.’ ”

Hayes thought the movie “Patton” was “pretty much” on target, except that he doesn’t believe Patton believed in reincarnation, as the film implied. He thinks Patton may have enjoyed letting the people think such things as part of an aura he deliberately created to be bigger than life. Some people have implied the same things about Woody Hayes, as a matter of fact. However, the coach doesn’t think he’s “like” Patton.

“I don’t know,” he qualified, “I haven’t tried to be. I think my attitudes were pretty well fixed by the time I’d heard of Patton. I never made any effort, conscious or otherwise, to be like Patton, not a bit.”

A longtime close observer, who feels Woody’s image is largely self-created, thinks he is “finding it harder and harder to live up to the image he’s sustained for 27 years,” and that he “feels like something of a failure now, worries that he’s losing his grip. He still wants another perfect football season, which has eluded him since ’68, and he wants to finish on top. That’s the book he really wants to finish.”

Coaching has virtually consumed Hayes’ entire adult existence. “There’s a lot of things I haven’t cared about,” he said, when asked if it were true he was the lowest paid coach in the Big Ten. (He once was, but is now third best paid. However, he’s turned down raises time and again.) “I’ve never cared about hunting and fishing and card playing and golf. Maybe I should one of these days if I retire,” he shrugged, not even bothering to emphasize if. “But I’ve never given a damn about ’em . . . never given a minute to them. There’s always some kid to see, there’s always some film to study, there’s always some letter to write, there’s always some book to read, and I never got around to those (other) things, ever.”

Later he observed, “You put 25 years onto you and not take one of those . . . those breaks . . . and you’re coming close . . .” He paused, then said, “Well, I’ve gotten to the place where I’m just sort of . . . nothing amounts to a helluva lot anymore.”

Reminded that he is hardly ancient, he said levelly, “Well, you name another who has lasted as long as I have.”

It’s not the pressure cooker atmosphere of OSU football that has taken the real toll on him, he responded, negating that theory. “I never worry about that pressure. The pressure I put on myself is always tougher than any put on me. The thing you learn is that for every good thing, you get a bad one. That’s your law of compensation that I learned from Emerson. No question about it.”

Certainly age is on his mind these days. Not in a morbid way, but with a certain awareness that he is 65; and he is realistic enough to realize that even living legends eventually get to be past legends. This summer, he went to the funerals of two of his best friends. And for all the countless hours he spends seeing to the marital, financial and emotional problems of friends and former students, he said there is no one he is close to now in the way his brother was once close to his grandfather. “About all my friends are gone. My sister is still alive and she and I are close,” but they don’t get to see each other often.

Some friends say, though, that Woody Hayes—who’s considered by many to be a “grumpy old man,” just as he described his grandfather — is now very close to his 3-year-old grandson, Phil. That is a family matter, though, and Hayes does not speak easily or openly about matters of affection.

One thing Hayes firmly believes is that “a man’s immortality is what he does now, and the impact he leaves on people who live after him.”

When asked what he will leave, Woody Hayes claimed, “I don’t worry too much about it.”

He stood up abruptly. Concerned that “this fellow coming might have to wait outside,” he walked out to the front of the Biggs Facility and held out his hand to greet him and some people who had come along with him. He was ready to help someone else.

Before the weekend was over, Woody Hayes did make it back to Noble County, and, apparently, he got around to his hiking — or something that restored his soul.

By the following Wednesday morning, the man who had just claimed nothing “matters a helluva lot anymore,” was roaring over a story in the morning paper about some man who had called football a “fraud.” “He’s clear out of line, that guy. Football might be dull ... it might not interest someone ... but it’s sure as hell not a fraud,” Woody Hayes yelled, “and if I ever meet that sonofabitch, he better duck ...”

Another season was coming up. Maybe even a perfect season.

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