John U. Bacon

An important tenth year anniversary is coming up, but it’s not one I’ve been looking forward to.

I first met Mike Lapprich when I was an assistant hockey coach at Ann Arbor Huron High School, and he was just a ninth grader. He was a big defenseman with a baby face, a shy guy with an easy smile – an oversized puppy.

I came back five years later as the head coach, when Lapper, as we all called him, had just finished his first year as an assistant coach, at the ripe age of 18. The team we inherited had not won a game in over a year.

When I met the returning captain, Mike Henry, over lunch that summer, he brought a list of things he wanted to discuss. The first: “You have no idea what you’re getting into.” The second: “Lapper’s our man. He’s the guy we trust. Keep him, and treat him right.”

It was not a suggestion.

We had a lot of work to do. So, we went to work. I was the drill sergeant, but Lapper was their big brother. When they felt like quitting, he was the one who kept them going.

Day by day, little by little, we learned how to stretch like a team, we learned how to practice like a team, we learned how to how to dress like a team – green shirts and gold ties – and we learned how to play the game, as a team. By our third season, we had become a top-ten squad.

Lapper worked with the defensemen, who cut our goals-against in half over that stretch. Lapper also made the locker room look like the Red Wings’. When the players arrived for game nights, they entered an immaculate locker room, with hockey tape stacked in pyramids and their jerseys hanging up in their stalls, with their name and number facing them.

He loved the players, and they loved him. The best part is, both sides knew it.

The players proved it after our second season, when they voted unanimously for Lapper to receive the Unsung Hero award. I’d never seen a coach win a player’s award before. The picture of Lapper with the trophy in his hands, looking down, too choked up to speak, tells you just about all you need to know about the man – and what the players thought of him.

After our third season, Lapper’s world opened up. He moved into his own place, he enrolled in nursing school, and he even appeared in the pages of Car & Driver magazine, where he worked on the side. But the highlight, for him, was seeing his little brother Kevin play on our spring team. The first night they were on the same bench, Kevin notched two assists.

After the game, Lapper went back to his parents’ house for dinner, and gushed about Kevin’s play. For Lapper, life didn’t get much better than that.

Early the next morning, June 25, 2003, I got a call from Lapper’s mom. She told me Mike had been in a car accident the night before, and he had died.

Of course, I was in disbelief – and when I gathered the players later that day in our locker room, they were in disbelief, too. For most of them, Lapper was the first person they were close to who had died. It was brutal.

So many people showed up for Lapper’s funeral, dozens had to stand in the foyer, listening through speakers. We named the Unsung Hero award, our locker room and a scholarship in Lapper’s honor. But ultimately, nothing we could do could lessen our loss.

At his gravesite, in the shadows of Huron High and the V.A. Hospital, where Lapper volunteered, the pastor said a few words. When he finished, I escorted Lapper’s parents down to their car. Then I walked back up the gentle slope, where I saw our players walking down, without their gold ties. This was not how we do it, I thought, especially on this day of all days. But, for once, I said nothing.

One of our captains, Chris Fragner, came up to me, red-eyed, and put his arm over my shoulders. With his other hand he pinched the knot of my tie, and said, “Coach, we have a place for these.” He walked me back to the gravesite, where I saw five dozen gold ties draped over Lapper’s casket.

And that’s when I knew: Lapper’s legacy was not having his name on a locker room door or on a trophy or on a scholarship.

It was helping dozens of boys become men – something they carry with them to this day.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Sports columnist Rick Reilly once wrote that weekend golfers invariably claim, “I’m a good golfer. I’m just not consistent.”

Well, he said, if you’re not consistent, you’re not a good golfer.

Americans are great at building things, and rotten at maintaining them. We admire winners and celebrities, but we overlook the loyal spouse and the honest accountant and the people who maintain our bridges – and that’s why they’re falling apart.

So, let this be a salute to consistency – that most unheralded virtue.

In 1984, Red Berenson took over Michigan’s moribund hockey program, which had not been to the NCAA tournament in seven years. Berenson thought it would be easy, but it took seven more years to get Michigan hockey back to the big dance in 1991.

Once they got into the tournament, they made it a point to stay there. Year after year, they suffered heart-breaking tournament losses, but year after year, they kept coming back. Finally, in 1996, they won Michigan’s first national title in 32 years – and they did it again in 1998. They’ve come close a few times since, but they have yet to win another.

This bothers Berenson, one of the most competitive men I’ve ever met. When he visited my class, I introduced him by listing his many accomplishments on the board.  When he stood up, the first thing he did was point to the two national titles on the board and say, “That’s not enough. We should have more.”

But they always made the tournament – for 22 straight years. It’s the longest streak in the history of college hockey – by far. The next closest, Minnesota, barely made it past Michigan’s halfway mark.

But this year, the team wasn’t getting the goaltending, the leadership, or the luck it needed to win. Snapping the 22-year tournament streak was the least of their worries. The bigger question: Had Michigan hockey lost its way?

Stuck with an anemic 10-18-3 record, Berenson – now 73 – told his team to go out and have some fun. They did – and in the process, they rediscovered who they were. Their goalie got hot. Their leaders found their voice. The team got its mojo back.

They won four straight games to end the regular season. But they had dug themselves such a deep hole, the only way to get out of it was to win an automatic NCAA tournament bid. And the only way to win that was to win the league playoffs.  And the only way to win that was to win every game, six straight, against the league’s best teams. When you’re seeded 7^th, nobody outside your locker room believes you can win it. But for the first time this season, everybody in that locker room finally believed. And they played like it.

They swept the first series at home. They went to play third-seeded Western Michigan – and swept the Broncos. In the semi-finals, they faced Miami of Ohio, the nation’s third-ranked team, and simply steamrolled them, 6-2 – giving the Wolverines a .500 record for the first time since November. By then just about everybody believed Michigan would pull off a miracle.

But last Sunday, with just Notre Dame left to beat, the Wolverines finally ran out of gas, and lost, 3-1. When the clock ticked down, there was no suspense.  They knew their fate. Their season was over, and so was their streak. They knew what it meant.

When a streak ends, people too often focus on how it ended, not how it started, or why it lasted so long. When Joe DiMaggio’s famous 56-game hitting streak – considered the most unbreakable record in American sports – finally ended, nobody said, “Wow, DiMaggio wasn’t very good today.”

No, all DiMaggio did was perform at the highest level, every day, for two straight months. No one has come close to his mark in the last 71 years.

And that’s what several hundred Michigan hockey players did, for more than two decades: They worked so hard and so well for so long, they created a streak that might not ever be broken. Perhaps the greatest testament to their stunning achievement is this: When the streak started in 1991, 22 of the 26 players on the current team had not yet been born.

Titles are impressive. They represent a performer at his peak.

But consistency – that cannot be achieved without character. And in this case, the character of an entire program, for a full generation.

That’s something that lasts – and deserves our respect.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

A few years ago – okay, a bunch of years ago – I bit on a bet I never should have touched.

I was writing for the Detroit News, and a top minor league hockey team called the Detroit Vipers played at the Palace. So, I got to thinking: just how big is the gap, really, between the pros, and beer league players like me?

Good question. And even better if I didn’t try to answer it. But, being the hard-hitting investigative journalist that I am, I had to go down to the Palace and find out. Bad idea.

I called the Vipers, and they said, sure, come on down to practice. Now, I couldn’t hear them laughing themselves silly when they hung up – but I bet they were. I should’ve known I was biting off more than I could throw up.

But I actually had reason to believe I might survive. Okay, so my hockey career on the Ann Arbor Huron varsity squad consisted of two phases: the first – “This kid’s got a lot of potential” – and the second – “This kid had a lot of potential.” I sort of skipped the middle part, where I was supposed to realize all that potential. My career was like Rudy’s, minus the game-ending sack.

But hockey is a war of attrition, and I was still standing. I even played on the best men’s team in Ann Arbor. I had gotten a little smarter, and a little better, but I was still slow, short and weak.

To get ready for Monday’s practice, I bought a new pair of pants – the kind with padding. I went to the weight room a few times, I played in a couple pick-up games and I even replaced my usual dinner of pepperoni pizza and Stroh’s with mushroom pizza and Pepsi. I know it sounds extreme, but my attitude was, “Hey, whatever it takes, baby.”  I was playing to win. Or at least survive. When I showed up in the Vipers’ locker room, I was a lean, mean 160 pounds of blue, twisted steel.

I’d be replacing John Craighead, because his fists were too banged up from a fight he won the night before. He bet me lunch I wouldn’t survive practice. With more brass than brains, I said, “You got it.”

Coach Rick Dudley, as tough as they come, ran through the drills we’d be doing that day. Then he looked at me and added, with a sinister grin, “And don’t forget, we’ve got laps at the end.” Fifteen laps one way, then 15 the other.

On the first few drills, I actually managed to score three times. And yes, I was counting. The key was my change-of-pace.  While everybody was ripping slap shots, I was baffling the goalies with my off-speed wrist shots – which were, of course, intended to be full-speed.

But it wasn’t long before my lungs were working so hard, I felt like I was trying to breathe peanut butter. I was dying, and I knew it. I think my new teammates did, too. I was so spent, I couldn’t even do simple things correctly, like I was drunk.  And my new pants felt like I was wearing an oak barrel. After 30 minutes, I could no longer even lift the puck. Hey, the goalie wants the damn puck, he can get it on the ice, just like the rest of us.

I lathered sweat like a stallion, and started looking for a place to puke. Right when I thought I was about to lose it, Coach Dudley blew the whistle. Relief! Mercy! I had made it!

No! I hadn’t. Time for laps: 15 one way, then 15 the other. All timed.

But, amazingly, something magical happened. I got my second wind, my legs back, and I finished. A few laps behind everyone else, but so what?

Back in the locker room, I sat, sweating, while the guys played ping-pong. I would have joined them, if I could have raised my hands above my waist.

Okay, I survived, but I’m not gloating. I lost six pounds that day – the hard way. Any weekend athlete who thinks he can do what the pros can do, had better have another think or two.

When Craighead saw me in his stall, frozen like a prizefighter who’d just gone 15 rounds and lost, he laughed, then said the words I longed to hear.

“How ’bout lunch?”

We went dutch.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Editor’s note: A version of this column was originally published in the Feb. 18, 2013 issue of Michigan Today.

In the Michigan hockey program’s 90-year history, some 600 players have scored more than 10,000 total goals. But the man who scored the team’s very first goal, 90 years ago, might still be the most impressive one of the bunch.

He was the son of legendary American architect Albert Kahn, who built the most recognizable buildings in Detroit and Ann Arbor, almost all of which still stand. He pioneered the new discipline of neurosurgery, serving 22 years as chief of the department at the University of Michigan Medical Center. In his free times, he liked to fly planes, speak half a dozen languages, and hang out with folks like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Lindbergh.

But to his teammates, back in 1923, Eddie Kahn, MD ’24, was simply an exceptional college hockey player.

When he was in high school, however, you would have been wise to predict none of this. Certainly, his famous father didn’t.

More than half a century after Eddie Kahn’s father passed away, Albert Kahn remains on the short list of great American architects. He designed over two thousand buildings, including almost every architecturally significant structure in downtown Detroit: the Fisher Building, the Belle Isle Casino, the Detroit Golf Club, the Detroit Athletic Club and the Grosse Pointe Country Club, Detroit Police headquarters and the homes of The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press. 

In Ann Arbor, Kahn designed such iconic buildings as Burton Tower, Angell Hall, West Engineering, the Natural Science Building, the graduate library, the hospital (Old Main), not to mention the Ann Arbor News building, the Delta Gamma sorority and the Psi Upsilon fraternity. Plus his personal favorites, the Clements Library and Hill Auditorium.  So farsighted was his vision that nearly every one of those buildings is still fulfilling its original purpose.

His son, however, was an entirely different matter.

Eddie Kahn admired his father immensely, but his first day interning at his father’s firm was such a disaster, “I put on my hat, left the office, and never returned again,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Journal of a Neurosurgeon.”

After Kahn graduated from high school with “a most undistinguished record, scholastically and otherwise,” he writes, “it was decided that a post-graduate year in a preparatory school before I went to college couldn’t make things worse.”

After eight weeks at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, Kahn was failing fifteen of his 22 credits, when he learned discipline through study, and confidence through sports. In a baseball game against arch-rival Exeter, “I was as tense as could be. An easy fly came to me, and I was shaking as I caught it. It was the same with the next one. But from then on, I had complete confidence and everything seemed easy. That afternoon, I pulled in seven flies, including some rather difficult chances.

“I cannot overstress how much confidence simplifies the task of the conscientious, competent surgeon. On the other hand, overconfidence is very dangerous for any surgeon.” Brain surgery may be woefully complex, but some of the qualities needed to do it well are best learned on a field of grass or a sheet of ice.

Kahn took these lessons with him when he enrolled at Michigan in 1918, living in a beautiful brick home his father designed across Washtenaw Avenue from “The Rock.” Kahn got through both his undergraduate and medical training in six years, working in the very hospital his father had also designed.

Eddie spent his limited free time playing on the informal hockey team, then on the varsity team after Coach Joseph Barss – who was also a medical student – launched the program. The team’s second season, 1924, was undoubtedly the first and only year in college hockey history when a team’s captain and coach were medical school classmates.

“My dad talked about Eddie Kahn quite a bit,” Barss’s son told me. “I know they were good friends who respected each other a great deal.”

On the eve of the program’s opening night in Jan. 12, 1923, The Michigan Daily wrote, “Kahn is probably the fastest man on the team and is a hard fighter.” The student writers later gushed that Kahn, “played a furiously aggressive game from start to finish. He was knocked out twice but stayed in the lineup and performed sensationally.”

And so he did. Kahn scored or assisted on at least half of his team’s goals that season, often by skating the entire length of the ice with the puck. In 1924, Kahn’s last year in medical school, the diminutive forward became the team’s second captain, then went on to become an internationally acclaimed neurosurgeon.

Despite Kahn’s demanding career and intense work ethic, he was able to mix in some adventure, too. After graduating, he spent some time practicing in Vienna and Russia, where he met with Ivan Pavlov, the scientist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for his famous discovery that ringing a bell before each meal eventually caused dogs to salivate at the sound of the bell alone, a phenomenon now known as the “Pavlovian response.”

After he returned to the States and started working at UM’s hospital, he volunteered for the Army medical corps from 1940 to 1945, for one dollar a year. He entered France via Normandy’s Utah Beach just a few weeks after D-Day, mended soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, and was among the first to arrive in Paris when the Allies liberated the City of Light.

“Kahn knew Europe well,” says Rudy Reichert, who played for Michigan in the early 1940s and went on to become chief of staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital in town. “He knew Gertrude Stein and Hemingway personally. When the Americans entered Paris, it was Eddie who brought the U.S. generals into the city, because he knew his way around and knew about a million languages, so he could show them where to go.”

Shortly after he returned to Ann Arbor, Kahn ran into Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s infamous union buster, at a cocktail party. Bennett asked Kahn if he wanted to go flying the next day. With Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh, who tested planes at nearby Willow Run during the war, maneuvered the aircraft with an ease that Kahn, who was a licensed pilot himself, could only admire. “I have never seen a man so relaxed or so much part of an airplane,” Kahn writes.

When Bennett dared Lindbergh to buzz the Huron River, however, the plane didn’t have nearly enough power to clear the riverbank in front of them. “I could only think that at least I as going to go down in good company,” Kahn writes. As they flew closer to the side of the bluff, Lindbergh suddenly veered the plane to the right, gracefully avoiding disaster – with a grin.

Kahn replaced his mentor at the University Hospital, Dr. Max Peet, as the head of the Neurosurgery Section in 1949, a position he held for 22 years until he retired in 1971. Along the way Kahn completed two editions of “Correlative Neurosurgery,” an essential textbook for generations of doctors.  It does not, however, make for light reading. Some of Kahn’s chapters include, “Papillomas of the Choroid Plexus of the Fourth Ventricle,”  “Section of the Ninth Nerve for Glossophyaryngeal Neuralgia,” and the always popular, “Lipomas of the Conus Mdullaris and Cauda Equina.”

You get the idea. This really is brain surgery.

“Great empathy for his patients, honesty, humility and a fine sense of humor were his hallmarks, in addition to his skillful hands,” said his former colleague, Dr. Richard C. Schneider. “No physician was more deeply admired and loved by his patients.”

Eddie Kahn was an original. He hated mundane tasks like lab work; he resisted playing all the holes of Barton Hills Country Club in numerical order; and because he was already independently wealthy from his father’s fortune, he insisted on working for a salary of one dollar a year. “But he never had any money on him!” Reichert recalls. “You’d go down to the cafeteria, where it was 35-cents for a meal, and he’d say, ‘Geez, do you have 35 cents for me?’ The guy was just oblivious to money.

“People would surround him at the cafeteria just to hear his stories of all these famous people, and he knew ‘em all. But he was also an extremely modest guy, didn’t like drawing attention to himself. He wouldn’t even go down to pick up his plaque when he was voted into the Deker Hall of Fame. I picked it up for him.”

But Kahn stayed close to Michigan hockey. Although he was heard to remark that the game just wasn’t the same “since all the boys started playing inside,” he attended at least one game every season, with the exception of the war years.

During his 22 years as chief of neurosurgery, Kahn trained 44 residents, 16 of whom became the heads or assistant heads of their own university neurosurgery departments. If Albert Kahn is still on the short list of great American architects, his son is still on the short list of great American surgeons. Although surgical advances aren’t as obvious a legacy as architectural landmarks, Kahn invented enough surgical tools and innovations to be named president of the Society of Neurological Surgery, the field’s first and foremost organization.

“He wanted to be known as Eddie Kahn,” longtime protégé Dr. Dave Dickenson said, “and not as Albert’s son.”

It’s fair to say, when he died in 1985 at the age of 85, that Dr. Kahn’s lifelong quest to make a name for himself was a success.

Thinking back on his old friend and mentor, Rudy Reichert says, “He was just a remarkable guy.”

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

On Veterans Day, we generally honor our Veterans. It’s a good idea, for lots of reasons: they served our country, often in unpleasant places, and in great danger, to keep the worst of the world away from our homeland.

My grandfather was a New York dentist who volunteered at age 39 to hop on a ship in the Pacific during World War II. My dad graduated from medical school, then enlisted in the U.S. Army, which sent him and his new bride to Fulda, Germany, to guard the border. It was an unconventional decision, but he’s always said it was one of his best.

“I earned more money than I ever had,” he often jokes, though that wasn’t hard to do for a recent medical school graduate. “People had to do what I said. And I never got shot at.” My parents also made lifelong friends, and still travel every year to see them at reunions.

I grew up hearing Dad say things like, “Smart to be seen in Army green!” And “Three meals a day, and –” well, I’m stopping there. (If you know that one, you know why.)

On Veterans Day, I’ve gotten into the habit of calling my old man to thank him for his service. But this year, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League spent Veterans Day telling its 183 member high school teams to stop performing the national anthem before their games.

The league commissioner, Ed Sam, was quick to explain, “It’s not that we’re not patriotic. That’s the furthest from the truth.”

I actually believe him. They’re not unpatriotic. They’re amazingly stupid.

The reason behind the decision was money. Most teams have to pay for their ice time, which Sam said costs up to $300 an hour.

I’ve coached high school hockey,  and that seems high to me. But even at that rate, unless they’re playing Whitney Houston’s version, the national anthem takes about two minutes – or ten bucks of ice time.

What do they get for that ten bucks? They get to join some of their best friends and complete strangers, singing a song that ends with the ringing words, “O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

That’s not a bad deal, it seems to me.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” didn’t become our national anthem until 1931 – when we needed it most. It spread through baseball, then other sports.

We Americans don’t do much together anymore. We watch different news programs, live in different neighborhoods, and go to different schools. But we do this together, every week, without taking sides, or trying to determine whose flag pin is bigger – as if some of us are real Americans, and others aren’t. My dad and I don’t always agree on politics, but we’ve always agreed on this.

When I coached the Ann Arbor Huron High hockey team, we decided to make a quiet statement during the national anthem by standing ram-rod straight on the blue line, and not moving a muscle until one beat after the song ended. This made such an impression on the players’ parents, they took hundreds pictures of their sons in perfect formation. The opponents’ parents would send me letters, praising us for the respect we showed the flag. It became such a central part of our identity that our seniors took it upon themselves to make sure the freshmen did it right.

We rely on the national anthem during our toughest times. I’ll never forget the national anthems that followed 9/11 – from Yankee Stadium, to our rink. That fall, it was our seniors who asked me to add an American flag to our uniforms.

Seeing them standing on our blue line, in a perfect row, I was immensely proud of them. If those 17-year-olds are the future, I thought, we’re going to be fine. Well, those 17-year-olds are 27 now – and I was right. We’re in good hands.

So if the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League can’t afford the ten bucks a game it costs to sing our national anthem together – which is more important than the game that follows – they could shorten their warm-ups or player introductions, or just pass the hat. I’m pretty confident that at any rink in America, you’d have no problem collecting ten bucks for that.

I’d be happy to kick in the first Hamilton.

And my dad will kick in the second.

About the author: John U. Bacon, an Ann Arbor resident, is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game.”

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Teresa Bloodman’s son was thrilled to pass the first two tryouts for his Maumelle, Arkansas, high school freshman basketball team, which allowed him to play on the team for the first two months of the fall. But, when the football season ended, the coach held a third round of tryouts so the football players could come out for the team, and he cut Bloodman’s son.

Teresa Bloodman was so livid she sued the school, the district and the state. She claimed cutting her son was arbitrary, that the lack of a formal appeals process was a violation of due process, and that her son has a constitutional right to participate in school sports.

I can appreciate a mother’s pain seeing her son suffer a setback. And certainly, coaches make plenty of arbitrary decisions, even unfair ones. But if Bloodman wins this case, the rest of us will lose – especially her son.

Her lawyer wants the coach to use a quantitative evaluation system for tryouts – rating each candidate’s skill in dribbling, passing, and shooting, for example – to make the process more objective.

But only an idiot would pick a team on stats alone.

In 1980, U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks decided the key to beat the all-powerful Soviet team was speed, not scoring. And that’s why he cut two-time All-American Ralph Cox, one of the nation’s leading scorers that year, for players with fewer goals but more speed. Brooks’s team won the gold medal. Guess he picked the right guys.

Any coach with a heart will tell you tryouts are the worst day of the season. When I coached the Huron High School hockey team, “cut-day” inevitably ended with a lot of long, private conversations and plenty of Kleenex, but almost all the players and parents handled it extremely well. One mom, however, I will probably never forget.

Before I became head coach, her son had been accused of stealing money from the locker room as a freshman. Unsolicited, he told me he didn’t do it, and I believed him – and even if he had, any ninth-grader surely deserves a second chance.

After my first team finished the season, we let him join our spring team, which was normally reserved for guys who’d already played on the varsity, and our summer team, and our fall team. He asked us to move him from defense, to offense, then back to defense – and we did. But he didn’t play very well at either position, and did no better in our tryouts. With dozens of good players trying out for the team, I felt I had no choice but to cut him – and many others.

It wasn’t fun. I had grown to like him quite a bit, and admired his attitude.

But I thought that was that, until I received a long letter from his mother. She misquoted something I had said to the players in August, when we were running outside. “I can tell even now what kind of team we’re going to have,” I said, praising their dedication and hard work. She wasn’t there, but claimed I’d said, “I can tell right now who’s going to be on the team.”

Not quite the same things – the latter being something only the dumbest coach in the country would ever say.

She added this kicker about her son being cut: “Others have committed suicide for less.”

Wisely, I did not respond then. But I will now. First, some advice:

• Don’t automatically assume your child is telling you the whole truth.
• If your kids have a problem with their teacher or their coach or their choir director, let your kids approach them first. If they don’t learn how, now, who’s going to approach their professor, or their boss?
• If you must write, wait at least 24 hours. And don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to their face. Email gives false courage to cowards.
• Even better, don’t write anything at all, or else you’ll deny your child a vital lesson: Life is tough, and not always fair. But you have to keep going anyway.

In eighth grade, I had had a great spring hockey league, scoring five times more than the other center. But that fall, he made the travel team, and I didn’t. I was crushed. But my parents did something wonderful: Nothing. The next year, I realized a lifelong dream when I made the high school varsity.

A few years later, when some colleges rejected me, I could handle it. When I started out as a writer, and received literally hundreds of rejection letters from magazines, I could handle that, too. And if I couldn’t, you would not be reading this right now.

And I would not have the chance, in print, to thank my parents, for not fighting my battles for me, and giving me the great gift of growing up.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Two years ago, Michigan’s hockey team was in danger of snapping its record 19-straight NCAA tournament bids. They finished seventh in their league – unheard of, for Michigan. So, the only way to keep the streak alive was to win six straight league playoff games to get an automatic NCAA bid.

Oh, and they had to do it with a back-up goalie named Shawn Hunwick, a 5-foot-6 walk-on who had never started a college game until that week.

It didn’t look good.

But the kid caught fire. Michigan won all six games, stretched its streak to 20 straight NCAA tournaments, and Hunwick won the league tournament MVP.

This never happens.

The next season, head coach Red Berenson alternated goalies until he had to pick one to play in the Big Chill game at Michigan’s football stadium – which was going to be the largest crowd ever to watch a hockey game, anywhere. He picked Bryan Hogan, but in warm ups, Hogan pulled a muscle, so Berenson put Hunwick in the net at the last minute. The kid beat Michigan State, 5-0, and a star was re-born.

Hunwick took his team on another wild ride, finishing with eight straight wins to steal the conference crown on the last night. Michigan made it all the way to the NCAA finals – where the Wolverines lost in overtime, once again. Hunwick finished with the best statistics of any goalie in the league – but the league voters inexplicably left him off the first and second All-Star teams. That never happens, either.

His coaches and teammates were smarter. They knew, going into this season, Hunwick was the key. The Wolverines won just one game in November, then won 80% of the rest, to earn the NCAA’s second overall seed.

There was no Cinderella talk anymore. Hunwick set school records for goals-against-average and save percentage, the two most important measures of goaltending. Most jobs in sports are hard to measure, but not this one. Who’s the best free-throw shooter? The guy who makes the most free throws – doesn’t matter how tall he is or what his form looks like. Who’s the best goalie? The guy who keeps the puck out of the net. And that’s how you’d think they’d measure goaltending. But the league once again snubbed Hunwick, keeping him off the first All-Star team.

A year before Bo Schembechler died, he said the best player he ever coached was not one of his dozens of All-Americans, but a 5-9 walk-on named Donnie Warner, who rose to become a starting defensive lineman. Bo said the kid took what God gave him – “which, frankly, wasn’t very much” – and used it to cover everything He didn’t. Warner simply would not let anyone – not even Bo Schembechler – talk him out of his dreams.

Using Bo’s yardstick, you’d have to conclude Shawn Hunwick might just be the greatest hockey player in Michigan history.

Yet, last Friday night, Michigan got knocked out of the NCAA tournament in overtime for the third straight year, ending Hunwick’s college career. When he saw the puck in the back of his net, he told me, “two years ago I would have pulled it out and shot it into the crowd.” Instead, as first reported by the Michigan Daily’s Zach Helfand, Hunwick picked up the puck, and skated it over to the other team’s bench. The head coach called Hunwick’s gesture the “classiest thing I’ve seen in 25 years of coaching.”

On Tuesday night, I interviewed Hunwick about his plans. He hadn’t been drafted by anyone – which also never happens for a player of his caliber – and thought he might play a year or two in the minors or Europe, “then move on.”

But a funny thing happened. The very next morning, the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets’ starting goalie injured himself in practice, so they called to see if little Shawn Hunwick could be their back-up goalie that night – against the Red Wings. Hunwick decided to skip his astronomy class, and drive to Columbus.

This never happens.

Another impossible dream had come true. Still more could follow.

Care to bet against him?

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

The Michigan women’s club hockey team beat the #1 ranked Michigan State women’s team twice down the stretch to finish second in the league, and earn a spot in the national tournament. Hats off to them.

Although I’ve coached high school boy’s hockey teams for almost a decade, a few years ago, I spent two years helping out the very same Michigan women’s hockey team – and I learned a lot more than they did.

It’s worth noting that I’m comparing only high school boys and college women, based solely on my observations of two hockey teams. Your mileage may vary.

My education started on day one. I dumped a bucket of pucks at center ice, grabbed one for myself, then stickhandled the puck around the rink. But something seemed strange, and it took me a while to figure out what it was.

When I coached boys hockey, I never even finished dumping the pucks before I heard the guys rocketing around the rink. They shot as high and hard as they could, trying to break the glass. So what if it costs a few hundred bucks and ruins practice? You do that, and you’re a locker room hero.

But at my first women’s practice, when I looked back, I saw the pucks just sitting there at center ice. The women skated around, waiting for me to say it was okay to take the pucks. “Um, it’s okay!”

When I blew the whistle to give the boys a new drill, they dove right in – and got it all wrong. When I told the women what to do, they would huddle to discuss the whole thing among themselves, up to a minute, but then they did it exactly right the first time.

The boys loved showing up the goalies by whizzing slap shots at their heads and making them look foolish. The women shot the puck right at the goalies’ pads, because that made the goalies happy, and that made the shooters happy – even while it drove us coaches crazy.

The boys loved shooting the puck, being the star, and dominating anybody they could. Getting them to pass the puck was the hard part.

The women loved passing the puck – and passing, and passing, and passing. And really, just passing. They didn’t want to be the star. They just wanted everyone to get along. And that would have been just lovely – except, if we wanted to win, somebody had to score. And that meant someone had to shoot!

How many women does it take to shoot the puck? Five. One to shoot the puck, and four to say it’s okay to shoot the puck.

We had to convince the women they were better than they thought they were. We had to convince the boys they were nowhere near as good as they thought.

When a boy had a birthday, none of his teammates or coaches knew about it, and no one really cared. But the women all knew each other’s birthdays, and told us when they were. The first time, we surrounded the birthday girl in a circle for a drill, then sang Happy Birthday instead. We thought we were pretty sensitive coaches.

Until, that is, I got to the locker room, which was decorated with streamers and posters. They had cake and pop and the birthday girl’s favorite music, and they all danced. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

When the boys had a conflict, one guy might swear at his teammate, and the teammate would swear back – and that was it. It was over. The women never swore at each other – so I gushed to the other assistant coach, a woman who had played at Harvard, about how great they all got along. She looked at me as if I had two heads. “Are you kidding?”

She then proceeded to pull out our white board to diagram the three major cliques on the team, drawing arrows between players who didn’t get along. I was flabbergasted, but then I protested that no one ever argued.

“That’s when they’re really mad,” she said, “and you better watch out!”

I learned to watch out.

But since then I’ve noticed one thing about my male friends who coach women’s sports: not one of them has ever gone back to coaching the boys.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Steve Kampfer grew up in Jackson, and learned to play hockey well enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Michigan. He was a good student and a good player on some very good days, but few expected Kampfer to make it to the NHL. I confess that I was one of them.

What chance he had seemed to vanish on an October night in 2008, when he was leaving a campus bar. He started jawing with another student, who happened to be on the wrestling team. Things got hot, but it was all just talk, until the wrestler picked up Kampfer and turned him upside in a single, sudden move – then dropped him head first on the sidewalk.

Kampfer lay there unconscious, with blood sliding out of his mouth. His stunned friend thought he might be dead.

They rushed Kampfer to the hospital, where they discovered he’d suffered a closed head injury and a severe skull fracture, near his spine. He woke up on a flatboard, his head in a neck brace and tubes running out of his body.

His coach, Red Berenson, talked to him about the possibility – even the likelihood – that he would never play hockey again. The goal was simply to make a full recovery, but they wouldn’t know that for three months.

Kampfer was a student in my class at the time, which met twice a week at 8:30 in the morning – not the most popular hour for college students. Just one week after the incident, at 8:30 Monday morning, Steve Kampfer walked back into my class, wearing a neckbrace. He never discussed the injury. He never made any excuses. He never missed a single class.

But his life was far from normal. I found out just how far only this week, when his mom gave me a paper he had written for another class. In it, he explains how hard it was just to eat, shower, go to the bathroom, or read a book. Nothing was the way it had been – not even sleeping.

Beyond the inconvenience, there was fear. When he looked in the mirror and saw his neck supported by a huge plastic brace, he knew if he turned his neck just an inch, he could be paralyzed forever. Anytime somebody ran toward him, it scared the hell out of him.

After a few weeks, he started going back to the rink – not to skate, but to ride a stationary bike for five minutes a day. Then eight. Then ten. It was the best part of his day, when he would imagine his bones healing, his neck turning, and himself skating again. And on some days, he let himself dream every hockey player’s dream, of raising the Stanley Cup over his head.

After two months, Kampfer started skating again, and got to work building up his legs, and his heart. Instead of becoming gun-shy, he got tougher, and faster. The next year, he had a strong senior season, earned his degree, then reported to the Boston Bruins’ top farm team in Providence, Rhode Island.

I thought that was great, but was as far as he was going to get. But the Bruins called him up in December 2010, and he played very well, before he injured his knee. Boston went on to win the Stanley Cup for the first time in almost four decades, when Number 4, Bobby Orr, was still a young star.

Kampfer had played in 38 games, three short of the 41 required to get your name engraved on the Stanley Cup. But Boston’s general manager petitioned the league, in the hopes of getting Steven Kampfer’s name on the same silver cylinder as Gordie Howe, Wayne Gretzky and Steve Yzerman. Those legends all have bigger names, of course, but not better stories.

Last week, Steve Kampfer got the Stanley Cup for a day, one of the NHL’s most cherished customs. He could have held his party in Boston or Ann Arbor, but chose to take the greatest trophy in team sports to downtown Jackson, surrounded by his friends and former coaches and teachers.

Naturally, they all wanted to get their picture taken with Kampfer, hoisting the Cup over his head – and that sucker weighs 50 pounds. I saw him do it over a hundred times. I had to remind myself this was the same kid who, not so long ago, couldn’t lift his own head.

After Kampfer’s friends took their last picture, I said, “Hey Steve – you must have gotten a hell of a workout tonight. Are you feeling it?”

“No way,” he said, with a deeply satisfied smile. “This thing never gets heavy.”

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the upcoming “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football,” due out Oct. 25. You can pre-order the book from Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor or on Amazon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!