John U. Bacon

Tonight, the U.S. Olympic team will enter London’s Olympic Stadium, led by Mariel Zagunis, the American flag bearer. What you probably won’t see, however, is Zagunis dip the American flag, unlike every other nation’s flagbearer.

Last week, I mentioned the origins of this unique custom in passing, but it deserves its own story.

At the fourth Olympiad in London 104 years ago, the American team was the only one that refused to dip its flag to the host nation during the opening ceremonies. A tradition was born.

The question is: Is this a tradition we should keep?

Before you answer, it might help to consider how it started.

The 1908 Olympics featured rugby, polo and tug-of-war, plus something brand new: a parade of nations walking around the track during the opening ceremony, complete with a flag-dipping ritual as each country passed the royal reviewing stand of King Edward VII.

The 1908 U.S. Olympic team picked Ralph Rose to carry the flag into London’s new 68,000-seat stadium. Rose was a native Californian who attended the University of Michigan, a huge guy who easily won the Big Ten titles for shot put and discus.

As a proud Irish-American, Rose didn’t possess an overwhelming affection for the English to begin with. In fact, most Americans at that time didn’t. You have to remember, the British had been America’s enemy in the nation’s first two wars, and the first London Olympics were held six years before World War I turned our nations into allies for the first time.

When the American athletes noticed that their British hosts had forgotten to include the U.S. and Swedish flags among the hundreds flying around the stadium, they grumbled. The Swedes got their revenge by skipping the opening ceremonies. When the Finns, then ruled by Russia, were told they would have to march behind a Russian flag, they elected to march with no flag at all. Ralph Rose had another idea.

When he led the American brigade past the King’s royal reviewing stand, Rose steadfastly held the stars and stripes perfectly vertical. The English spectators gasped, and booed. The British officials would soon take it out on the Americans in every event that involved judges – but Rose was satisfied. The legend goes that he explained his actions by saying, “This flag dips for no earthly king.” If he said it, he had a point. America is, after all, the first modern democracy.

What might have been a one-time thing only became a consistent U.S. custom in 1936. At the Berlin Olympics, the American team courageously refused to dip the flag for Adolf Hitler – and no American flagbearer has dipped it since.

But has this tradition run its course? It seems to me it’s one thing to refuse to dip the flag when you represent an up-and-coming nation, eager to show it does not have to bow to its former colonizer, a nation poised to join the world’s other superpowers.

But it’s quite another to continue this tradition when you’re the only superpower left on earth, one that’s turned its back on everything from the United Nations to the Kyoto Accords to the Geneva Conventions. What once seemed a brave gesture is now starting to look arrogant and obnoxious.

It might be time to break with this custom, and dip the flag – just like every other nation does. The question is: When? If the answer was not 1936 in Berlin, it shouldn’t have been in 2008 in Beijing, either – the least humane host nation since Hitler’s.

Since Queen Elizabeth will take King Edward VII’s place in the royal box tonight, I wouldn’t count on the custom changing this year, either.

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 University of Michigan has sent 226 athletes and coaches to the Olympic Games. Wolverines have competed in every modern Olympics since the first in 1896. The numbers are impressive, but the individuals in those numbers, past and present, are far more interesting.

In the opening ceremonies next week, when the United States flag bearer declines to dip the Stars and Stripes for Queen Elizabeth, he or she will be following the lead of Ralph Rose, a Michigan alum who refused to lower the flag in the 1908 London Olympics, for King Edward VII. Rose explained, “This flag dips for no earthly king.”

Wolverines have also made their mark on the podium, winning 138 medals, including 65 gold. This year, Michigan is sending 26 athletes and coaches to London, who will compete in nine different sports.

The list includes Betsey Armstrong, a graduate of Ann Arbor Huron High – widely considered the greatest high school in the history of Western Civilization (which also happens to be my alma mater). She will play goalie for the water polo team.

Tiffany and Jeff Porter both set hurdling records at Michigan, before getting married – even as Tiffany was becoming a doctor of pharmacy.

There’s Connor Jaeger, an engineering student who wasn’t an exceptional swimmer when he started at Michigan, and finished as a three-time NCAA All-American.

There’s Sam Mikulak, a gymnast, who broke both ankles at a meet last year on the same landing. He finished his remaining events – and learned afterward he’d fractured both ankles. Not all tough guys play football.

And there’s Jerome Singleton. When he was just one year old, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. He went on to become an engineering student, and a world-class Paralympian – Michigan’s first.

The 2012 Wolverine Olympic contingent is one of Michigan’s best, and is sure to make a splash in London. But it will be hard for any of them to surpass the legacies of DeHart Hubbard and Eddie Tolan.

DeHart Hubbard was a first-rate sprinter, who also set the world record for the long jump in 1925. He set Michigan’s record for the event the same year – which stood until 1980. It still ranks as the school’s second best mark – 87 years later. He also set the Big Ten championship long jump record, which was broken by Jesse Owens – and no one else, to this day.

In the 1924 Paris Olympics, Hubbard became the first African-American to win an individual Olympic gold medal. But in that distinction lay his only limitation. Despite graduating from Michigan with honors in 1927, Hubbard could only find work in positions reserved for African-Americans.

Right when DeHart Hubbard was leaving campus, Eddie Tolan was arriving. His track team at Detroit’s Cass Tech High won the national championship – and the “team” consisted of Tolan, and just one other athlete.

Tolan set plenty of marks himself, including a world record in the 100-meter dash – on a track that sloped two-and-a-half feet uphill.

In the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Tolan won the 100-meters over the legendary Ralph Metcalfe in a photo finish, then breezed to another gold medal in the 200, earning him the title of “the world’s fastest human.”

Michigan’s governor declared the date of his return “Eddie Tolan Day,” as “as an expression of Michigan’s pride.” Detroiters packed the train station to give Tolan a hero’s welcome. But even as the crowd gushed over its native son, Tolan noticed his half-brother picking up trash on the park lawn, and realized he “was luckier than I am,” simply because he had a job.

Tolan had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but he could only get a poor-paying job as a county clerk. When that ended, Tolan went from city to city, walking the streets, looking for work. He even appeared in a vaudeville act with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, which cost Tolan his amateur status.

Tolan died in 1967, and Hubbard in 1976. Both were inducted into the University of Michigan’s Athletic Hall of Honor, posthumously.

Few, if any, of Michigan’s current Olympians will outperform these two – but all of them will have more opportunities when their careers are over.

No matter what they do the rest of their lives, however, they will forever be known as Olympians: a title everyone around the world respects, because so few of us are.

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

You can read about Bob Chappuis’s heroics as a World War II tailgunner, or as a Michigan Wolverines tailback, just about anywhere – from his Time magazine cover story back in 1947, right up to his obituary in the New York Times last week. But my favorite stories are the ones he told his granddaughters.

I met Chappuis in 2000, while writing a story about his famous 1947 Michigan football team. But I really got to know him when I coached his grandson Bobby’s high school hockey team a couple months later. When Bobby went to Culver Academies for a post-grad year, I joined the family to see him graduate in 2004.

We were all relaxing in a hotel suite, eating and drinking, when Chappuis’s teenage granddaughters, Amy and Jenny, goaded him to tell some of his stories. He could not refuse them, but he shared the stories you couldn’t find in the magazines, like when his father told him he could go to any school he wanted – except Ohio State.

Chappuis skipped the part about leaving college to volunteer for the Army, where he served as an aerial gunner on a B-25. But his son Rob interjected to explain how their granddad’s plane was shot down over northern Italy, forcing the crew to parachute behind enemy lines.

Chappuis waved it off. “Everybody says we’re heroes. But what kind of idiot wouldn’t jump from a burning plane?”

He told his granddaughters how he and two crewmates hid in a ditch behind some bushes while Italian soldiers marched by. One of his crewmates pulled out his knife, and motioned for them to attack. Chappuis grabbed his shoulder, pushed him down and whispered, “They’ve got us outnumbered ten-to-one, and they’ve got guns. I think you’ve seen too many Hollywood movies. We are staying put.”

Smart move. They were rescued by members of the Italian undergound, who hid them in their attic. They buried the Americans’ identifying clothing – but Chappuis drew the line at his Michigan ring. “This stays with me,” he said.

“If it does,” the Italians said, “you might be going with it.”

Chappuis relented, but it says something that he actually debated the decision.

After a few weeks, one of the young Italian soldiers – who was dating the homeowners’ daughter – told her he knew they were hiding Americans in the attic. “Yes,” she said, “we are. And if you report us, you’ll have a dead girlfriend.”

“In all my life,” Chappuis told his granddaughters, “I have never wanted a relationship to work out so badly.”

Three months later, the little town of Asola, Italy, was liberated. Chappuis and his crewmates joined the celebration in the town square – where many locals learned for the first time about the hidden soldiers. The Chappuis family remains close to their brave protectors to this day.

Chappuis told the girls that when he moved back to Ann Arbor, he met a young co-ed named Ann Gestie – their grandmother.

He also returned to the football team. As soon as the soliders came back, Michigan’s famed coach, Fritz Crisler, changed the game forever by separating his team into offensive and defensive specialists, when everyone else was still using their players on both sides of the ball the entire game.

Chappuis was too slow to start on defense. But under Crisler’s new platoon system, that didn’t matter, and he quickly became the starting tailback. “If [Crisler] hadn’t come up with that, I’d never have seen the field,” he said.

Crisler was smart enough to know he was not likely to intimidate a bunch of 25-year-olds who had already seen the Battle of the Bulge and D-Day, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. When they came to Crisler with some wild ideas to run their new offense, he gave them free reign – and the results were amazing, prompting the press to dub them the “Mad Magicians.” On one play, seven different players could touch the ball, with so many laterals and passes and fakes they looked more like the Harlem Globetrotters than a football team – and often fooled the cameraman into following the wrong player.

Chappuis did not tell his granddaughters that, even as a tailback, he threw the ball well enough, often enough, to set Michigan passing records that stand to this day. Nor did he tell them how Michigan won the 1947 national title, or that he finished a close second for the Heisman Trophy.

But he did tell his granddaughters about the first time Crisler put him in on defense, to follow Army star Doc Blanchard. Chappuis got fooled, he got beat – and he got beckoned back to the bench by his stern coach.

“And that,” Chappuis said, “was your grandfather’s first and last play on defense.”

When he died, at age 89, I went to his son’s home to help the family write the obituary. His son and daughter and in-laws and granddaughters sat around the back deck telling his stories, repeating his one-liners, and laughing more than you’d expect.

They decided to close his obituary with this: “More than his many accomplishments, his family remembers him the way he wanted to be remembered: for his humility, his wit, warmth, generosity, and unfailing kindness.”

We’ve heard a lot in the past few years about the Greatest Generation, and the Michigan Man. Sometimes, I think the more we talk about them, the less real they seem.

But this, I know: I just saw one go by.

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

This week, the University of Michigan celebrated the 40th anniversary of Title IX, with a host of speakers and panels discussing the historic legislation and its impact on girls, women and the United States itself.

It all started pretty quietly. Just a sentence buried in the back of the Education Amendments Act of 1972.

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Just a sentence – one that seems pretty straightforward to us, even self-evident. But that little line stirred up our society in ways that few pieces of legislation ever have. We call it Title IX – and perhaps only the Civil Rights Acts changed our nation the past century more dramatically – or did more good.

But nowhere in that powerful paragraph do the authors say one word about sports. It’s not really about sports, but educational opportunities. It says a lot about Americans’ unequaled belief in the value of school sports, that we consider them essential to a comprehensive education.

Unlike the Civil Rights Acts, Title IX didn’t even register with most Americans when it passed. But the NCAA’s leaders recognized its potential immediately, and did everything they could to stop it. They were joined by congressmen, school presidents, principals, athletic directors and coaches coast to coast, all trying to limit it, or kill it altogether. But the durable Title IX has survived every attempt to cut it down.

Still, it seemed like just an arcane legal issue, until a year later, when a seemingly meaningless tennis match – just an exhibition between an old man and a woman 26 years his junior – made it very real, very fast.

The man happened to be a 55-year old guy named Bobby Riggs, a Hall of Fame player who had won six major championships, and swept Wimbledon’s singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles – in 1939.

He was also an incorrigible hustler. When he first challenged Billie Jean King – who would win 39 major titles in her career – to an exhibition match, she declined. But after Riggs crushed top-ranked Margaret Court, half his age, to earn a Sports Illustrated cover story, King felt she had to accept. They would play the “Battle of the Sexes” for the biggest payday in the history of the sport – and bragging rights that would be shared by half the country’s population.

King had no illusions about the stakes. “I accepted the challenge,” she said, “so that girls and women could feel positive about participating in athletics.”

On Sept. 20, 1973, in front of 50 million Americans watching on TV, about a quarter of our population, and a Houston Astrodome packed with more than 30,000 spectators – both still American tennis records – King stayed strong and focused, and won emphatically. In the process, so did millions of American girls, most of whom had not been born yet.

“There should be nothing,” King said, “to stop them from pursuing and fulfilling their dreams.” Before Title IX and the Battle of the Sexes, one in 30 girls played high school sports. Today, more than half do.

Contrary to urban myth, Riggs wanted to win that match, and badly – but his theatrics were mostly promotional. He had been taught the game by a woman, won many mixed doubles titles, and fervently believed women should play sports. It was an act – but a hell of an act.

Over the years, Riggs and King became close friends, and talked often. The night before Riggs died of cancer, King called him to say, “I love you.”

It all started with a single sentence – and it ended with one, too.

In between, everything changed.

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 weeks ago, I wrote about one of the University of Michigan’s lowest moments, when athletic director Fielding H. Yost scheduled Georgia Tech for a football game in 1934, which required Michigan to sit out its star player, Willis Ward, because Southern teams would not take the field against African-Americans.

The attention Yost’s decision received surprised and embarrassed him. In his limited view of the situation, Yost thought he was simply providing a courtesy for a friend, not making a racial stand. National newspapers, radio programs and even Time magazine featured the controversy prominently. It also sparked bitter debate among students, and created a morale problem on the team. By all accounts the players felt Ward was intelligent, hard-working and well-liked.

That was the bad news – very bad news. The good news, as I wrote, is that the press, the alums, the students, and particularly Willis Ward and his roommate on the road, Gerald Ford, had the courage of their convictions, and derived lasting change from the incident.

But I feel it necessary to fill out this story, to give it more depth, and perspective.

Although former athletic director Don Canham felt it’s generally unfair to judge his predecessors without considering the times they lived in, he was convinced that “Pulling Willis Ward out of the [Georgia Tech] game was bad. [Yost] should have known better by then. I think Yost got caught up with his friends in the South. But the negative PR from that incident opened up opportunities for blacks in the future.”

Despite Yost’s error in judgment in 1934, Ward believed Yost had successfully “flip-flopped from being a segregationist” two years earlier when Ward made the team.

Ward recalled his first trip to Chicago with the team in 1932. At the time, black players usually stayed with local families because the pricier hotels still did not accept black guests. Sure enough, when the team tried to check in, the hotel manager told Yost they did not admit blacks, and they weren’t about to start now. According to Ward, Yost became outraged.

“‘We’ve been staying at this hotel since 1900,’” Ward recalled Yost saying, “‘and we’ll pull every [Michigan] team and I’ll get other Big Ten teams to not stay here!’”

The angry appeal to their financial interest was enough to desegregate the hotel for one night. Ward became only the second African-American to stay in the hotel, the first being the singer Marian Anderson.

There are other examples of Yost’s surprising change of heart from his racist past. He successfully lobbied to get black track star DeHart Hubbard into the university; he volunteered his influence and field house to support an athletic exhibition to raise funds for the Dunbar Center, a local organization that promoted social betterment for African-Americans; and he started Benny Friedman, a practicing Jew, at quarterback in the mid-1920s, then helped him become athletic director at Brandeis University.

This is not to suggest Yost became a pillar of social justice. But, for the son of a confederate soldier born six years after the Civil War, the examples above do indicate Yost at least recognized the changing times, and had begun to change with them.

For better or worse, everything about Yost was larger than life. His ego was as big as the field house that bears his name. When Yost applied for the Michigan job he sent a collection of his clippings and reference letters that weighed 50 pounds – even though Michigan was courting him. But he got away with his excesses because he had the uncanny knack of balancing each vice with an equally strong virtue.

Yost’s immodesty may have run counter to society’s norms, but he didn’t smoke, drink or swear in an era that cherished such restraint. Yost occasionally played up his rural West Virginia background, but this “hay-seed” managed to earn a law degree, run four companies at one time and write a scholarly 300-page book on football – all on the side.

When he arrived at Michigan Yost didn’t worry much about recruiting guidelines, but by the 1920s he had become a stickler for NCAA rule-adherance. In 1907, Yost forced Michigan to leave the Big Ten, but changed his mind 10 years later and became one of the conference’s stalwart proponents.

Yost was driven to create his athletic empire, but he also took pains to construct state-of-the-art buildings for non-revenue sports, women and intramural athletes. For years Yost was an undeniable racist who never had a black player on his team, but he showed clear signs of enlightenment later in his life – representing a rare, if not complete, transformation among older Americans.

Yost’s ego was almost superhuman, but so was his charm; his ambition was grand, but so was his vision; his stubbornness was remarkable, but so was his ability to change.

Yost’s most prominent quality, however, had no counter force: his love for Meeshegan, and all it could be. That love drove everything Yost did.

At one of the various banquets for him near the end of his life, Yost said, “My heart is so full at this moment and I am so overcome by the rush of memories that I fear I could say little more. But do let me reiterate… the Spirit of Michigan. It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan men to spread the gospel of their university to the world’s distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours.”

Yost’s greatest legacy might be the people who are still attracted to his vision of Michigan, people who keep coming here to be a part of it years after his death.

When Don Canham became athletic director in 1968, one of his first tasks was to find a new football coach. He called Bo Schembechler, who was making $20,000 a year at Miami. Canham offered $21,000, and Schembechler took it happily. Canham realized Miami could have thrown more money at Schembechler, “but they couldn’t compete with Yost’s hole in the ground, or with the prestige of Michigan.”

Canham knew he was offering something special, and so did Schembechler.

When Schembechler and his staff first arrived in Ann Arbor, they dressed in the second floor locker room of Yost Field House. They had to sit in rusty, folding chairs and hang their clothes on bolts in the wall.

“My coaches were complaining, ‘We had better stuff at Miami,’” Schembechler recalled. “I said, ‘No, we didn’t. See this chair? Fielding Yost sat in this chair. See this spike? Fielding Yost hung his hat on this spike. And you’re telling me we had better stuff at Miami?! No, men, we didn’t. We have tradition here, Michigan tradition, and that’s something no one else has!”

It all started with Yost.

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

Michigan plays Northwestern in Evanston tomorrow for the first time since 2007. The undefeated, 11th ranked Wolverines are favorites, but beating the Wildcats is no longer the easy game it used to be. Whatever happens this weekend, it can’t match what happened back in 1995.

Before 1995, the idea of Michigan losing to Northwestern was preposterous. In Bo Schembechler’s 21 years leading the Wolverines, he lost to every Big Ten team at least once – except Northwestern, which Bo’s teams beat by scores like 31-0, 35-0 and, yes, 69-0.

But back then, everybody beat up on the lowly Wildcats – often called the Mildcats. From the early ’70s to the mid ’90s, they had 17 really bad years, surrounding a stretch of six really, really bad years – when they won a grand total of three games against 62 defeats. Only the Washington Generals, who play every game against the Harlem Globetrotters, had a worse record.

Northwestern’s stadium seats half as many fans as Michigan’s, but they hadn’t sold it out since 1963. Some years, their attendance for the entire season was less than Michigan attracted for a single game.

Apathy was in their DNA. The few fans who showed up to see loss after loss after loss had a favorite cheer: “That’s all right, that’s okay. You’re going to work for us someday.” Cute, but not exactly “The Victors.”

But when Northwestern introduced coach Gary Barnett in 1991, he told the crowd, “We’re taking the Purple to Pasadena.” Since the Wildcats had not made it to the Rose Bowl since 1949, I naturally assumed Coach Barnett had been huffing glue. But he believed it. And what was even crazier, after a while, his players did, too.

The Wildcats opened the 1995 season against ninth-ranked Notre Dame. They had not won in South Bend in 34 years, but that did not stop Barnett from telling his team that when they won – not if, but when – they were not to carry him off the field, because they had bigger games ahead.

It worked. Northwestern pulled the upset, 17-15.

Their next big game was against seventh-ranked Michigan, in Ann Arbor, where the Wildcats had not won since 1959. But they did it again, then went on to beat Wisconsin and Penn State, too. The locals were going crazy.

This stuffy little college town – which still didn’t have a bona fide bar in 1995 – finally let its hair down. Then the alumni started getting into it. Stores were shipping sweatshirts to Singapore, ball caps to Brazil, and bumper stickers to Morocco.

Even the faculty, which prided itself on ignoring such things, got into the act. The day before Northwestern’s game against arch-rival Illinois, an acclaimed chemistry professor brought out a flask full of a bright orange liquid, then filled another flask with a blue solution – which happened to match Illinois’s colors. After explaining all the chemical properties at play, he poured the orange solution into the blue one – and shazam! – it burst into a perfect Northwestern purple. The lecture hall erupted.

The Wildcats finished the Big Ten season undefeated, but they still needed help to get to the Rose Bowl – lots of it. A 7-3 Michigan team had to knock off undefeated, second-ranked Ohio State, led by Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George.

But the story that day was not George but a Wolverine running back from Zaire by way of Montreal named Tshimanga Biakabutuka. It’s a safe bet Ohio State fans could not pronounce his name before that game – but after he ran for 313 yards, I’m willing to bet every one of those Buckeye backers could spell it. Michigan fans in Evanston that week were greeted like G.I.s liberating Paris.

The impossible had happened: Just as Barnett had promised four years earlier, the Purple was going to Pasadena.

The Wildcats actually won a share of another Big Ten title the next year, in 1996, and again in 2000. They are now led by the 1995 captain, Pat Fitzgerald.

But even if Fitzgerald takes the Purple to Pasadena again, it could never be the same. A great season is a great season – but a miracle stands alone.

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!

John U. Bacon

On Tuesday, the Michigan football family lost another beloved son, Jim Mandich, who died of cancer at age 62.

Regular readers of this space know I’ve had to write a few elegies already this year, and I’m not sure if we can bear another one right now.

I’m not sure Mandich would want any more, either, beyond his funeral. As he told Angelique Chengelis of The Detroit News last fall, after he was diagnosed with cancer, “I said to myself, ‘No whining, no complaining, no bitching. You’ve lived a damned good life. You’ve got a lot to be thankful for.’”

And he did, including a great NFL career and three grown sons – good guys, good friends. But I’m sure he’d like to be remembered – don’t we all? – and I thought you might enjoy a story or two about an unusually talented and charismatic man.

Mandich grew up in Solon, Ohio, outside Cleveland, and should have gone to Ohio State, where Woody Hayes had the program riding high.

Instead, he risked being called a traitor, and went to Michigan.

“Obviously, Michigan is the better place,” he told HBO a few years ago. “That was a very easy decision to make. And if that’s smug, Michigan arrogance – deal with it, Buckeyes.”

As a junior, he played on the 1968 team that went down to Columbus and lost, 50-14.

“We got shellacked. We couldn’t stop ‘em and we couldn’t do anything against them. And Woody Hayes showed no mercy.”

The next year, a man named Bo Schembechler arrived in Ann Arbor, and things were not the same. He told his players, “From now on, I’ll treat you all the same – like dogs!” He kept his promise, which helps explain why 40 or 50 guys left, sometimes in the middle of the night.

That inspired Bo’s famous phrase, “Those who stay will be champions.”

All the best players in that team stayed, but the most important might have been Jim Mandich, their only captain.

He was a confident guy, even a little cocky – but he had the rarer kind of swagger that attracted people, instead of repelling them. The ladies loved him, and he had the perfect nickname, “El Diablo.”

I always got the feeling, whenever Schembechler started talking about Mandich, that Bo, as tight as they come, with tunnel vision and no time for women until he got married at mid-age, secretly envied Mandich, this swashbuckling football star, and wished he could be a bit more like him.

But that never stopped Bo from chewing him out, of course. Someone once asked Mandich who had a shorter fuse, Schembechler, or his legendarily hot-tempered NFL coach, Don Shula?

Mandich thought about it for a moment, then said, “Neither one had a fuse.”

Call it a draw.

But Mandich was also a serious student, who graduated in four years with a degree in economics, while earning Academic All-American honors.

He was also an All-American tight end. He never took himself too seriously, but he took his role seriously. He led.

The Wolverines started Mandich’s senior year, 1969, by losing two of their first five games. But then they caught fire, beating Big Ten teams by scores like 35–7, 57–0, and 51–6.

They had caught El Diablo’s swagger. It was contagious. They believed they could beat the number one-ranked, undefeated, returning national champion Ohio State Buckeyes – even if no one else did.

Las Vegas pegged the Wolverines a 17-point underdog – but they didn’t listen.

The morning of the game, one of the Buckeyes missed the team bus. They weren’t taking it seriously.

But Mandich was. When I asked him about that game, he told me he was crying in the tunnel. I said, Of course. It was the greatest upset in Michigan history. No, he said. “I was crying in the tunnel before the game.”

That’s how charged up they were. All that pain, all that suffering, all that work they’d done in the off-season – it fueled everything they did that day. And it showed, when they completely manhandled Woody Hayes’ greatest Ohio State team, 24-12.

On the HBO documentary about the rivalry, Mandich says, “There’s an expression in German, ‘schadenfreude,’ which means, ‘joy in the misery of others.’ Forty years later, I feel schadenfreude – joy – that it still hurts the Buckeyes, what we did on that fateful November day in 1969.”

But the image of Mandich that day tells a different story, from the famous photo of the outstretched number 88, exalting in the final countdown, and the film footage of his teammates carrying him off the field. He’s exhausted, and overwhelmed, exuding something deeper than mere happiness – something more akin to an abiding satisfaction, one he probably knew even at that moment would last the rest of his life, having spent himself completely for his teammates and his school, and a cause bigger than himself.

And that’s what he did.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

John U. Bacon

The past two Sundays, ESPN has been running a documentary called “The Fab Five,” about Michigan’s famed five freshman basketball players who captured the public’s imagination twenty years ago. It’s not quite journalism – four of the Fab Five produced it themselves – but it is a pretty honest account of what those two years were all about. And it is undeniably compelling. The first showing reached over two million homes, making it the highest rated documentary in ESPN’s history.

A lot of this story, you already know: In 1991, five super-talented freshmen came to Michigan, and by mid-season the Wolverines were the first team in NCAA history to start five freshmen. They got to the final game of March Madness before losing to the defending national champion Duke Blue Devils. The next year, they made it to the finals again, but this time they lost to North Carolina when Michigan’s best player, Chris Webber, called a time-out they didn’t have.

Along the way they made baggy shorts and black socks fashionable, and imported rap music and trash talk from the inner-city playgrounds to the college courts. It’s been that way ever since.

They stirred up a lot of controversy, but at the time the two most sympathetic figures were head coach Steve Fisher, a truly nice guy who seemed to be a hapless victim of his own recruiting success, and Chris Webber, the most polished of the bunch, due partly to his private school background. To many fans, the rest of the Fab Five were just a bunch of clueless, classless clowns who didn’t belong on a college campus.

The Fab Five certainly had its vices, but selfishness wasn’t one of them. In the history of college basketball, few starting fives worked better together than the Fab Five, mainly because they really didn’t care who scored.

I started writing stories about them after they left Michigan, and quickly discovered they’d known all along what they were doing, and did a lot of it merely to gain a competitive advantage. That doesn’t make all of it right, of course, but it dispels the popular notion they were just a bunch of out-of-control kids from the ‘hood simply seeking attention. They weren’t that needy, and they definitely were not stupid.

I found the ones I spoke to – Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard and Jimmy King – to be unfailingly friendly, respectful and helpful. At one point, three of the Fab Five were listed among the NBA’s top five charitable givers.

It also turned out Steve Fisher really could coach – witness the masterpiece over Kentucky in the 1993 NCAA semi-finals – and he wasn’t a victim, either. I learned the latter on a cold Sunday morning in 1996 – a year after the last of the Fab Five had left – when my editor called me to find Maurice Taylor’s Ford Explorer that had rolled over on M-14, near Plymouth.

After I tracked down the truck, a car dealer told me it cost about $35,000. The Secretary of State told me Taylor’s grandmother bought it, and the records showed the car cost twice as much as her home. Within 24 hours, we found several other Michigan players were driving cars they probably couldn’t afford, either. It didn’t take much to smell something fishy.

The investigation that started that day resulted in two coaches fired, two banners brought down, and the entire program put on probation for years.

But I had to wonder: If the press could figure all this out in about 24 hours, why couldn’t Steve Fisher connect the dots right under his nose over several years? They say he wasn’t part of the payola plan, and that’s probably true. But you’d have to be willfully blind not to see its effects by 1996.

When Fisher was fired, he said they’d built an elite program and “done it the right way.” That’s not true – and by the time he was fired, he knew it. To this day, Fisher has never accepted any responsibility for what happened on his watch, and Chris Webber has never apologized for taking over a quarter-million dollars from a booster. Fisher now coaches San Diego State, which played in the Sweet Sixteen last night, while Webber is a very wealthy TV commentator. Those who followed them at Michigan paid the price for their mistakes.

Twenty years ago, I thought the leaders of the Fab Five were Steve Fisher and Chris Webber. But it turns out the real leader was Jalen Rose, who finished his degree by writing term papers in the back of NBA team planes. He and the other three have proven to be thoughtful, successful and even honest men, committed to their communities and their families. I’ve come to have great respect for them – and much less for their so-called leaders.

What a difference 20 years makes.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

John U. Bacon

On Saturday, more than 100,000 frozen fans will watch Michigan play Michigan State at the Big House. Not in football, which happens every other year. But in hockey, thus setting the record for the biggest crowd ever to watch a hockey game – anywhere.

To build a hockey rink on a football field, a six-man crew works for three weeks. First, they install the floor out of big plastic tiles called Terratrak, which were originally designed to create portable runways for fighter jets in the desert. If they can handle F-15s, they can handle Bauer Supremes. Then they put up the boards, the glass, and start flooding the rink with some 40,000 gallons of water.

Don’t worry – these guys have built rinks in San Diego and Mexico City. For them, Michigan’s a skate in the park.

The game will be televised by the Big Ten Network, and will receive worldwide attention. Lawrence Kasdan, the Michigan alum who wrote and directed the classic movie “The Big Chill,” will drop the opening puck. And every time Michigan scores, fireworks will fly.

But that’s not the most impressive part.

No, for that you have to go back to 1984, coach Red Berenson’s first season behind the Michigan bench. The Wolverines were drawing the smallest crowds in the history of Yost Arena, just three thousand a night – not even half the capacity. Berenson was so desperate to increase the crowd, on Friday afternoons he would walk up State Street to the Diag with a wad of tickets for that night’s game, and actually try to give them away. More surprising: it didn’t work.

In Berenson’s first year, the average attendance increased by a total ten people. Ten. Few people wanted those tickets – and even fewer recognized the guy trying to give them away.

But if they knew anything about hockey, they would have.

Berenson was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, but blew off the Montreal Canadiens to attend Michigan – unheard of at the time. He set almost every school scoring record, while earning a business degree – the best years of his life, he says.

The ones that followed weren’t too bad, either. He was the first college player to jump straight to the NHL, where he spent 17 years as a player, and four more as a coach. But he knew it was a business, a point hammered home when he earned NHL’s coach of the year honors in 1980, and a pink slip in 1981.

Michigan had tried twice before to bring the Red Baron home to coach, but the third time proved the charm.

Berenson thought it would be easy to resurrect the once-proud program, but he quickly discovered none of the recruits remembered when the Wolverines were great. They didn’t remember him, either.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Berenson now admits, with a chuckle.

It took Berenson four years to get a winning record, six to return to the NCAA tournament, seven to start selling out the building, and 12 to win his first NCAA title.

“Looking back, I can’t believe it took us so long just to have a winning season,” he says. “I’m glad I didn’t know that when I took over.”

Berenson turned 71 on Wednesday. “I didn’t expect to be doing this so long. But I’m glad I have.”

Tomorrow, he will coach a game outdoors, on the kind of rink he grew up playing on as a kid during World War II.

But this one will be surrounded by over 100,000 fans.

And he didn’t have to give even one of those tickets away.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.