Another Chapter from my Football Book

This chapter will end up somewhere in the middle of the book. After coaching small college football for over 20 years, I felt some background on my own college football experience was necessary.        

   I think this is a good time to talk about my career, or lack there of, as a small college football player at Ohio Wesleyan University, a DIII school in Central Ohio, back in the fabulous Seventies. Over the years I have described my two years as a Battling Bishop mostly two ways, I was an awful player on a bad team, or a bad player on an awful team.

         We first have to talk about the time and place I went to college. The most unique time to ever go to college, if you liked to have a good time, was the time between the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the 1980s Reagen conservative period, not to mention the AIDS epidemic. The Viet Nam War had just ended it and there was a big sigh of relief, not only from students, but parents, teachers, and administrators. The chance that you could end up playing real war in a rice paddy in southeast Asia, like thousands of young men had recently before us, disappeared. All the social changes that started in the Sixties were now back and center stage. The drinking age for beer was 18 in Ohio, for everything else 21. States like New York and Florida the drinking age was 18 for everything. For the first time marijuana laws were being relaxed.  Most college students had easy access to birth control, and most parents were happy their kids were in school and didn’t want to know what they were up to when they were there.

         The creative arts exploded. In music we had a periods of progressive rock (the Grateful Dead), country rock (the Marshall Tucker Band), jazz rock (Steely Dan), to go along with the folk and Beatles influenced music of the late 60s and early 70s. It was the beginning of the careers of Seger, Springsteen, Mellencamp and Billy Joel. Women artists like Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and Emmylou Harris were finally getting their due. Movies that either won or were nominated for best picture during my high school and college days included The Sting, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, The Godfather part II, Chinatown, Lenny, One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Rocky, All the Presidents Men, Network, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, the first Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Midnight Express, Apocalypse Now, Norma Rae, Ordinary People, and Raging Bull.

 

         Albums released from 1973 until 1980 included Good Bye Yellow Brick Road, Houses of the Holy, Brothers and Sisters, 461 Ocean Blvd., Bad Company, Court and Spark, Diamond Dogs, the first Kiss live album, Pretzel Logic, Rush, Rock n Roll Animal, Grievous Angels, What were Once Vices are Now Habits, Living and Dying in ¾ Times, Todd, Get Your Wings, Buddha and the Chocolate Factory, On the Border, The Hoople, Endless Summer, Elvis Live in Memphis, Close up the Honky Tonks, Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends, Starting Over, I Can Stand a Little Rain, Sneakin’ Sally through the Alley, The Heart of Saturday Night, Sheer Heart Attack, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Fire on the Mountain, Heart Like a Wheel,  Blood on the Tracks, Rock-n-Roll, Physical Graffiti, That’s the Way of the World, Blow-by-Blow, Katy Lied, Journey, Willo Wisp, Toys in the Atic, Red Headed Stranger, Cut the Cake, Dream Weaver, Fleetwood Mac, Outlaws, Abandon Luncheonette, Wish You were Here, Face the Music, Still Crazy After All these Years, Northern Lights, Schoolboys in Disguise, A Night at the Opera, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, We Sold our Souls for Rock and Roll, French Kiss, the list goes on and on. I could name a thousand albums. No better time for popular music, and there was no autotune, no drum machines, no manufactured beats. Just real music.

Several years ago, my niece Penny and her boyfriend did a cross country trip before her senior year in college. They checked all the travel websites on the internet and made a plan to see all the sights. Each night they stayed in a nice hotel, ate in all the best restaurants. 

They didn’t sleep one night in their car, didn’t pull the sleeping bags out and slept under the stars in a rest area off a freeway somewhere. They had a game plan and stuck to it. And that was the problem. Nothing was spontaneous, nothing out of the ordinary was explored.  They followed all the travel advice they found on the interent.

Forty years ago we didn’t have the internet to guide us, our travel adventures, as well as our lives in general, were guided by the albums we listened to, the movies we watched, the books we read, the stories we heard from both strangers and friends in bars and parties. They didn’t give us set instructions to guide us in our adventures but gave us a sense of adventure that caused us to search out our own thrills, not the same old stuff everyone else did. Those places to go and things to do my niece and her friend read about on the internet were someone else’s adventures and experiences done over and over by thousands of travelers.

Books I and thousands of other college kids read for the first time back in the Seventies included On the Road by Jack Kouriac, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (He was going through a renaissance at the time), The Drifters by James Michener, I’ve been down so long it seemed like up by Richard Farina, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The World Accoding to Garp by John Irving, Fear and Lothing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson, Roots by Alex Haley. Again, the list could go on and on.

Throw all of that together along with what was the state of athletics at most small colleges at the time, and you could see why a lot of guys, including myself and many of my teammates, walked away from football. There were so many other things to do than play for coaches who the game had passed by, in stadiums that didn’t even compare to many high school stadiums, wearing equipment that was new sometime in the Fifties. It just wasn’t worth it.

Sure we drank too much, smoked too much dope, stayed up too late and always looked for a reason not to go to a class. It was the best of time and walking away from the game we all loved become easy to do. And we did things on campus that students would never get away with today. My fraternity had the Thursday night special, a buck for girls, two for guy, for all the draft beer you could drink. The frat next door had a illegal bar set up on Tuesday called Scroungers Lounge, with fifty cent cocktails and beers for a  quarter.

After I quit the football team I was never far away from the game I loved. It was during those years away from football that I started my coaching career. For two summers I quit my job early and spent a week or two volunteering at Padua, mostly helping with the freshmen team.

And at school I coached my fraternity team. We played in a Friday afternoon touch league. After games we would have a cookout at our frat house with our little sisters, we would have a bonfire going in the Midwest autumn air, a keg or two would be tapped, and we would be enjoying life. Those experiences were a whole lot better than getting on a bus for a two hour drive up to Berea or down to Springfield to get our asses cleaned by either Baldwin Wallace or Wittenburg.

No better place for an impressionable suburban boy from Cleveland than central Ohio. Ohio State was Columbus when Columbus was still the best college town in America and not a metropolitan area. Delaware, Granville and Westerville were still college towns instead of suburbs. Central Ohio was filled with picturesque campuses, pretty girls, and lead to all sorts of adventures.

         I did make it through my freshmen season, then sometime in the beginning of my sophomore year it hit me. Something happened to me that had never happened before, I knew going into a game that there was no way we were ever going to win, or even be competitive. All through CYO and high school, in all the different sports I had played officially and unofficially, in organized leagues or sandlot pickup games, I always thought my team had a chance to win. But that fall, with games coming up against Wittenburg and Baldwin Wallace, two teams that out talented us not only on the field but on the sidelines, I questioned why I was doing it. 

         After playing for the coaching staff we had at Padua, the coaches at OWU didn’t seem to have it. I think most of them were decent people, but at least the coaches on offense were really out of touch. The plays and schemes they designed weren’t very sound, they didn’t get along with the players very well, and they didn’t do much to instill confidence in the team.

Like I had said, some of our lack of success was the fault of a team that had to many players drinking and partying way too much. But the 50 year old stadium in shambles, the equipment that was too old and too unsafe, not enough talent to compete with the better teams in our league, not enough coaches who were respected by the men they were suppose to lead.

From the two years I played I did acquire some great friends, some of them became life-long friends. But over the years, whether it was a life-long friend or someone from those teams who I would run into at a reunion or someplace else, I have always been surprised at the amount of anger many of them had, even after many years, towards one or several of the coaches. From guys who played, and from guys who sat on the bench.

It wasn’t until years later I realized maybe because I got to coach all these years since then, my football dreams did not end during college. Most of my college teammates had their football dreams finished ugly and disappointingly. And many of them never forgot it.

         Those guys I played with at OWU football dreams were filled with nothing but disappointment. Most of them never coached, some saw a son or two play, but their football dreams ended in losing seasons and ass kicking by better teams. The guys in my class that played all four years had their careers end in a pair of 1-9 seasons.

         One topic always seems to come up when I see someone from my football days at OWU, Coach Les Michaels. By the time I had gotten to the college Coach Michaels' better days were behind him. He was a long-time receiver coach as well as the Head Baseball Coach. He definitely was marching to his own beat by the time I got to Wesleyan.

         Coach Michaels will always be remembered for the scouting report he gave before the Wittenburg game one year. The ‘Berg were defending national champs and they were loaded. They had a stud it seemed at every position, why these guys were playing DIII I, or Coach Michaels for that matter, had no idea.

         Coach Michaels gave the report in front of team in one of those tiered classrooms in the new science building. He was standing in front, the team squeezed into the desks, and our Head Coach was sitting in the last row on the top tier.

         As Coach Michaels went on describing Wittenburg’s personnel the more excited he got. “They got this tailback Davey Merritt, he runs right, he runs left, no one can tackle him!” “They have a flanker named Masoon Moon, runs like a dear, you can’t cover him.” ”They have this linebacker named Foster, runs side line to side line making tackles, he can’t be blocked…” it was at that moment at the peak of his excitement that Coach Michael paused for a moment, then looked up at our head coach in the top row, threw the scouting report in the air and said, “Jack, I don’t know why we are playing them, there is no way we can beat them.”

         But I really think that guys remembered Coach Michaels because he was just a good guy, with no ego about him. He taught health classes (public health, community health, personal heath) which were all the same class filled with Coach Michael’s stories about World War II and growing up in a small Ohio town. I also remembered that he didn’t dress for practice with the other coaches in the office in the stadium. He’d dress in his teaching office which was up in the old gym and drive over to the practice field. He’d always get there early, sit in his car and smoke his pipe and listen to 40’s music on some station out of Columbus. He coached the receivers, and they were taught that when a plane flew over the practice field they were told to hit the dirt, because “the hymies are coming.”

         The last time I saw Coach Michaels was at the Brown Jug Harness race a few years out of college. I snuck down to Delaware for the festivities even though it was during football season and had a great time hopping from party to party in and around the grandstand and track. After I had placed a bet I went up into the grandstand looking for an old friend, and when I looked up I saw Coach Michaels sitting there. He had his arm around his wife, a big corsage pinned to her chest, his ever present pipe in his mouth. .

         “Coach Michaels, how are you?’ I asked.

         With a big smile on his face he replied, “Never better, son. Never better.”

I should’ve quit at the beginning. The first weeks of summer practice stunk. I had a helmet that was probably made during the Johnson administration that gave me constant headaches. I had a line coach who couldn’t coach the freshmen at Padua. I just wasn’t into it. Tom Fedele, who’s locker was near mine kept telling me, “Don’t worry, the good life starts a week from Thursday.” He counted down each day until the Thursday came, the day before the first day of school. I was unsure what he meant.

         I did know there was an all-school picnic that night, and we were the last to arrive because of practice. I remember walking up Spring Street towards the residential campus with some of my fellow freshmen players, hearing noise and music way off in the distance. You couldn’t see what was going on, Smith Hall was blocking our view.

         When we did get around Smith Hall it all hit me like a hurricane…A big barbque cooking everyone dinner, a country rock band playing songs by the Marshall Tucker Band and the Grateful Dead, hundreds of kids sitting in clusters on both sides of Sty Glenn, the slight smell of pot in the air, beer coolers everywhere filled with Little Kings, and girls in all directions wearing their summer halter tops. 

         Out of nowhere a beautiful blond came up to me and asked, “Are you Greg Cielec?”

         “Yes,” I responded and she gave me a great big kiss on my lips. She told me her name and then she said, “We have some mutual friends back in Parma and they wanted me to make sure I welcomed you to college life.”

         Football aside, I was hooked.

I loved my OWU years, all my college dreams, except football, came true. Great friends, wonderful girls, big adventures, everyday was a holiday, every meal was a banquet. It was just too much fun, at the most perfect time to go to college. And if football was the only thing that didn’t work out the way I had envisioned it, I could live with that.

And I am happy to report that football program at OWU is up to speed with most of the other DIII programs in Ohio. They finally finished rehabbing the stadium and I think it is the best one in DIII in the country. They have a solid coaching staff, and everything from the weight room to the uniforms are first class. And the school’s campus, as well as the town of Delaware, Ohio, have never looked better. And it safe to say that their current students take academics way more seriously than those of us who were in college back in the day.