A Breath Of Fresh Air After A Heavy Hayes

But in his new office last week, Hayes apparently had experienced a new birth of resentment over his pink slip. He chose a letter from a stack he estimated to be 3,000 or more, supportive and commiserating letters he still had to answer. The correspondent said she was so infuriated by his dismissal that she had taken her daughter, who would have been a senior, out of Ohio State. Hayes read the letter aloud, then shook his head sadly. His voice hardened.

He said he had cleaned out his desk in his old office in two days, and had not been back, and did not intend to go around again or to be a part of Ohio State football. He said that "after 28 years, they're trying to tear it all down," to discredit his accomplishments. "They don't want anything to do with me now, and that's fine with me. The hell with 'em." He brought the side of his hand down hard on the desk, making a thudding noise—a facsimile cleaver separating 28 years past from an indefinite future.

Hayes said that at 66 he is without many close friends. He said he does not do the things that spawn intimacies—"I don't fish or hunt or play golf. I don't play cards. I read. I write." You do not need friends to do those things, of course.

Esco Sarkkinen, who retired as Ohio State's defensive end coach a year ago, after having been with Hayes all the way, says that Hayes "always hated the expression 'Woody's mellowing.' Even after his heart attack in 1974, when I went around to see him, he seemed embarrassed, like it was a weakness.

"When I retired, Coach Hayes asked me if I thought he should quit, too. I said, 'Not as long as you can be creative.' I was trying to say more than that. In the last 10 years he had become more a philosopher and a historian than a coach. The Xs and Os were not as interesting to him.

"We all had differences with him, of course. We used to measure his blowups in megatons. 'That's a five-megaton blowup.' For a new assistant, it could be eye-popping. But he never held a grudge, and everybody knows how he was so unselfish with the things he did—going to hospitals, spending hours there. Refusing fees for appearances, like with the Boy Scouts. He used to pass up raises for himself so his assistants could get them. It is like Tom Pastorius [of the Columbus Citizen-Journal] says, 'If you want to dislike Woody, don't sit down to the table with him.' "

Sarkkinen believes the future is secure at Ohio State with Bruce, because "it's one of the five or six places where as long as you recruit with intensity you can almost be assured of winning seven or eight games a year. Ohio State simply gets better players." The recent expanding frustration for Hayes, he says, was that Woody no longer won the two or three "big games" that went with the others. He had lost to Michigan three times in a row; he had lost seven straight on national television.

The final irony, says Sarkkinen, was that Hayes had allowed himself to go with a passing attack that he never believed in, and with a freshman quarterback (Schlichter) "who is going to win a lot of games here, but at that point could hardly have been expected to know the names of his teammates, much less take command."

Sarkkinen is not surprised by what happened in Jacksonville.

"Woody would have done the same thing his first year as he did the 28th. The potential was always there. It was just a matter of terrible timing. Woody always said there were three things that could happen when you pass, and two of them are bad. Now there are four things that can happen, and three of them are bad."