Читать книгу Sid Gillman - Josh Katzowitz - Страница 12
Оглавлениеthree OHIO STATE
Sid Gillman never claimed he was a smart man. Not when it came to academics anyway. With football, Gillman wanted to learn, wanted to ingest as much knowledge as his brain would allow. Academics—like just about everything else that wasn’t a sport—didn’t interest him much. But there was always Esther. She was there to help push him forward, most notably to his high school graduation. Yet, at the same time, to push him away to a city that was a two-day drive away.
“She was smarter than I, honest to goodness,” Gillman said many decades later, with Esther at his side. “We had minimum requirements (at North High School), and to this day, I would never have passed those minimum requirements if she hadn’t helped me. That’s the truth.”
Gillman had earned a football scholarship to Ohio State, but he wanted to continue playing baseball as well. That wasn’t what football coach Sam Willaman wanted to hear. When Willaman learned of Gillman’s plans, Willaman made sure to let his incoming freshman know, “We’re going to have spring practice, and I want you there.” And thus ended Gillman’s illustrious baseball career.
Instead, he prepared himself to play the end position for the Buckeyes, started gaining weight for his transition to the Big Ten conference, studied for what he assumed would become a career in the judicial arts, and found a band that needed a piano player (called the Miserable Five).
Since freshmen weren’t eligible to compete on the varsity squad, Gillman played on the rookie team, and since Ohio State rarely threw the ball in those days—it was not the forte of most collegiate squads of the time—Gillman’s primary responsibility was blocking defenders on power sweeps.
By the time he was a sophomore, Gillman was ready to make an impact on the varsity team, threatening to overthrow the upperclassmen ahead of him on the depth chart by bursting into the starting lineup as one of the Buckeyes’ ends.
The day before the Buckeyes were to open fall practice to begin preparation for the 1931 season, Ohio Stadium was quiet on a Monday afternoon. One could hear workmen banging hammers as they readied Ohio Stadium for the upcoming football season. Student managers, in an effort to obscure the views of those passersby who were desperate to watch a little bit of practice, erected long pieces of canvas around the practice field. They might not have bothered.
It seems hard to believe today, but Ohio State athletic director Lynn St. John had a big problem on his hands with the $1.6 million facility. Simply put, the Buckeyes couldn’t fill Ohio Stadium with fans. This was a problem for St. John and his athletic budget, but it was also Willaman’s problem. Willaman had been an all-Ohio halfback in 1913 for the Buckeyes, and he had been hired before the 1929 season to replace John Wilce as the Ohio State head coach. In his first two seasons, Willaman had recorded a 9-5-2 record and the Buckeyes had been irrelevant in the Big Ten championship race. He needed better success in order to convince fans to show up to games.
St. John also had big decisions to make. Every night, after his workday was complete, he emerged from his office and walked around the Ohio Stadium track, stepped down the stairs to the practice field, and watched Willaman’s team work. While watching, his mind churned, pondering how to convince fans to return. The big question: Should St. John allow a radio station to broadcast the play-by-play from the Buckeyes’ games? If not, the only way people could follow the action live was to show up and pay their money, which obviously benefited Ohio State’s bottom line. But St. John also realized that radio broadcasts could be a good way to expand the fan base. That also would benefit the Buckeyes. He watched and he pondered, day after day.
As the team set to open the 1931 season, though, there simply wasn’t much interest. But the coaches—and the newspapers—were excited about the sophomore class that would begin practice the next day.
While managers inflated 40 footballs on that fall afternoon before the maelstrom of football began, others rolled tackling and blocking dummies onto the practice field. Monday afternoon was calm with the squeaks and the hammer raps. The next day, nearly 90 potential Buckeyes would rip up the grass with their cleats and soak their uniforms with sweat. Tuesday was the storm. Monday was the calm. Tuesday was the beginning of the long, hard journey. Monday was the last day of summer vacation. Tuesday was the beginning of Gillman’s football career. Monday was his last day as a nobody.
The first day of Gillman’s step into manhood was dreary, and rain clouds littered the sky. Occasionally, the sun darted between the clouds and shone on the helmets of the 73 men who actually turned out for practice and the eight-man coaching staff who put them through their paces. If players needed extra motivation, all they had to do was divert their eyes from the practice field in front of them and turn to Ohio Stadium, that most hallowed of places which an incredible football player named Chic Harley had once helped build.
The day’s weather was cheerless, but on the flip side, it was extremely and unpleasantly hot. Soon after the whistles began to blow, scarlet jerseys were thrown to the side of the field so the Buckeyes’ bodies could breathe through the humidity. The rains came early in the morning and again at noon, but Ohio State managed to practice in between and got in a good day’s worth of work before the Buckeyes broke for lunch. The practice had been long but light, and the only time anybody placed headgear atop his skull was to pose for a photo from the newspaper cameramen in attendance.
The cameras were not there to shoot Gillman. No, Gillman was not a star. For one of the few times in his athletic career, he was just another guy on the field. Basically, a no-name who had never accomplished anything. That was proven true when, after a few days of practice in hot, wet weather, Willaman named his initial starting 11. Junius Ferrall and Howard Rabenstein were listed as the starting ends, and not only was Gillman’s name nowhere to be found on the depth chart, the September 17 edition of the Ohio State Journal didn’t think enough of Gillman’s chances to list him among the sophomore end candidates who had even a remote chance of winning a starting spot. Not just the end candidates in general. The sophomore end candidates.
But it was clear that Willaman saw something in Gillman. Before his team scrimmaged for the first time, Willaman gathered his players in the early evening, passed out the team helmets, and asked a simple question: “How about a little football?” Then, he selected Gillman for the starting team, even though it was clear Gillman was still undersized for the end position. Gillman couldn’t take advantage for long. He dislocated his thumb in practice, knocking his chances of starting the season opener against the University of Cincinnati completely off track and forcing him to undergo surgery in order to repair his thumb.
Gillman missed the first game of the season—where Ohio State romped 67–6 against the Bearcats—but he entered his first varsity collegiate game in the first quarter of the October 10 contest against Vanderbilt, which survived a Buckeyes onslaught of 21 unanswered points to hang on for the five-point victory.
Ohio State’s next test was against famed rival Michigan, and the Buckeyes would enter the game without Junius Ferrall, one of the starting ends, who fractured a bone in his hand during a midweek scrimmage. Howard Rabenstein, the other end, was not performing up to expectations. He was so bad, in fact, that Willaman didn’t even use him during the scrimmages anymore, and Willaman thought Gillman would be a better choice to start. Gillman had been the one to replace Rabenstein early in the Vanderbilt game with the Buckeyes losing 12–0, and he had performed well, according to the Columbus Dispatch, which wrote that Gillman “strengthened the end position considerably, in spite of the fact that he was playing his first game of major league football and just over the effects of a bad injury.”
Willaman had made up his mind about Gillman early in the Vanderbilt game when Rabenstein, who already was playing poorly, whiffed during an attempt to tackle a Commodore ballcarrier. That misplay changed Gillman’s job status. It meant the starting job was his alone. Though the Wolverines were heavy favorites on that October day, the Buckeyes won 20–7 in a massive upset, and Gillman made a big impact with his aggression on defense, which helped stop the Michigan running attack.
The next week, in true fashion during the Willaman era, the Buckeyes couldn’t sustain the momentum, losing to Northwestern, and by the end of the season, the Buckeyes were 6–3 and 4–2 in the Big Ten, finishing fourth in the conference standings. It was only a slight improvement on the 1930 season, but for Gillman, the season was an awakening. On a wet, rainy day in a 20–0 win against Navy, Gillman scored his first collegiate touchdown, catching a 23-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Carl Cramer that had been tipped, juggled, and mishandled by “Bullet Lou” Kirn, one of Navy’s star players. On his way to the end zone, Gillman sidestepped a defender after an athletic hesitation move and shook off another tackle attempt before ending his run in the end zone.
For a guy who was not expected to contend for a starting job at the beginning of the season, Gillman had played three 60-minute games his sophomore year, scored an impressive touchdown, and won his varsity letter. The next season, his junior year, was even better, as he played five 60-minute games and at least 45 minutes in each of the other contests. He was called an “iron man.” He was also beginning to look like a star.
Gillman had improved as a student as well. He still planned to enter law school once he completed his undergraduate degree, and he worked harder at studying than ever before. His piano work, though, didn’t seem to suffer. During his freshman season, he played piano during lunch and dinner at The Village, where the team ate its meals. The Buckeyes enjoyed music at mealtime, because it kept up their spirit, and it was not unusual for a teamwide sing-along to break out from time to time. The music also kept Gillman’s wallet full, but eventually, the undersized Gillman stopped playing at the Buckeyes’ training table, because, as he said, “it interrupts my meals too much.”
Gillman loved his music, though. When a sophomore named Kenneth Rasmussen was added to the squad before the 1933 season, he was called a “morale builder.” Rasmussen would tell stories, sing songs, and play the piano. Sometimes, Gillman would sit down with him on the bench, and they’d rattle off a duet to much applause. Gillman’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, and he was also a fan of Sergei Rachmaninoff because the Russian romanticist’s music sounded so big to Gillman’s ears. Once, he was asked by a reporter named Harold Davidson if he was glad he had kept up his study of the piano. Said Gillman: “Sure. I am. You bet. The ability to play football and piano gives one prestige around the campus.”
He was building his own prestige with the way he played football. And with his car. One June before summer classes let out, Gillman purchased a Model T for the princely sum of $12.50. The automobile wasn’t in the best condition, and one newspaper caption writer penned, in a massive understatement, that it was “somewhat outmoded.” Gillman drove home to Minneapolis with halfback Jack Greenburg, and the trip home, including gas, oil, food, and one night at a hotel, cost them only $6. On his return trip, a solo venture, he skipped the hotel and spent the night sleeping on the worn interior upholstery of his car. He could get the car up to 65 mph, but it rattled like a baby’s toy. He nicknamed the car “Dangerous Dan McGrew,” and he was right about one thing. It was dangerous as hell. Just like Gillman on the football field in 1932.
The Buckeyes were on their way to another unimpressive season with Willaman at the helm—in 1932, their final record was 4-1-3 with another fourth-place finish in the Big Ten, and the cries for St. John to fire Willaman were growing louder—but Gillman continued his outstanding play. As one United Press reporter wrote, “Sid Gillman, Buckeyes right end, is one of the best all-around wingmen in the west…. He was good enough for the all-Big Ten team against Northwestern but they say his game against Wisconsin was the greatest ever played by an end in Ohio’s big horseshoe stadium.”
Gillman made important fumble recoveries in the Michigan and Pittsburgh games, he caught the second touchdown pass of his career in the Northwestern contest, and in that game, he blocked a punt that was recovered for another Buckeyes score. His defense was noteworthy—he finished with 34 tackles that season, second-highest total on the team—and his pass-catching ability was beginning to raise eyebrows. It landed Gillman on the All-America squad, one of the biggest honors in college football. As one reporter wrote, “He was not only a tower of strength on the offensive line throughout the entire season, but he was a bulwark on the defense, time after time, breaking through to spill enemy runners before they were able to get underway and often throwing them for losses. His play was outstanding consistently.”
Would Gillman’s play and the Buckeyes’ results be enough to save Willaman’s job the next season? Even though Gillman’s play was constantly improving, the Buckeyes as a team were treading water. Willaman’s job was on the minds of St. John, the media, and the vocal fans who were not shy about calling for his head. Willaman had some convincing to do.
By the time Gillman—who had begun refusing to shave after the Wednesday of every week so he could enter Saturday’s game looking animalistic and menacing—was midway through his senior season in 1933, his role had been defined in Willaman’s head. Even though he had coached Wesley Fesler—a three-time All American, one of only eight Ohio State players ever to accomplish that feat—Willaman declared in October that Sid was “the greatest end I have ever coached.” Along with Joe Gailus, an orphan from Cleveland who gave up grave-digging to become an All–Big Ten tackle, Gillman had been named co-captain of the 1933 season, the first time in school history two men shared the post. But Gillman wasn’t a superhero. Gillman couldn’t be the only one to save the only college coach he had ever known.
Eventually, Gillman would have to defend his coach, but it would be too late by that December. Sam Willaman, nicknamed “Sad Sam” because of his cheerless demeanor and deficit of charisma, was in real trouble before the 1933 season kicked off.
The fans were disappointed in the Buckeyes’ coach, and they could do nothing but reminisce about 1929 and wonder about the state of the program if Lynn St. John’s first choice had agreed to take the job. The primary choice was one of the titans of the coaching industry, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne. At that point in his career, he was 40 years old, and he had compiled an 11-year record of 86-12-5. Rockne either looked to make a move into the Big Ten or, more likely, wanted to gain leverage against the Notre Dame administration. Rockne and St. John first talked at an American Football Coaches Association meeting in New Orleans in early January 1929, and apparently, the two reached a deal on a contract under the condition he could be released from Notre Dame. That never happened, because Notre Dame convinced Rockne, who died in an airplane accident two years later, to stay in South Bend. Instead, the Buckeyes settled for Willaman.
Up to the 1933 season, Willaman’s squads had combined for a 19-9-5 record, the team had never finished better than fourth in the conference, and the din to replace him grew louder after every loss.
Despite beating Virginia 75–0 in the season opener, Willaman felt the pressure. During the Northwestern game, where Gillman scored a touchdown to help win the game before he landed in the hospital with a knee injury, Willaman looked to his bench and saw Ohio State legend Chic Harley. The former Buckeyes star sat on the bench, dressed warmly in his top hat, gray overcoat, and leather gloves. Willaman walked over to Harley, nearly 40 years old by then, and proclaimed, “I wish I could send you in there.” Responded Harley: “I wish they’d let me go in.”
It might have saved Willaman’s job. Instead, the Buckeyes lost to Michigan—the only blemish on an otherwise impressive 7-1 season—and after the 13–0 defeat, the pressure on Willaman and his team grew even more intense. Following the game, Willaman barred reporters from the locker room, and in the emotion of that moment, Grant Ward of the Columbus Journal Dispatch wrote the following: “There was a lack of coordination and team play in the Ohio ranks, probably due to the fact the Buckeye offensive combination was constantly being changed and heretofore was uncertain regarding its assignment.”
The criticism, by today’s standards, seems pretty tame—it wasn’t all that incendiary in those days either—but it riled up the Buckeyes players. What also might have gotten their attention was Ward’s insistence that he would request that the Ohio legislature investigate the activity of the athletic department unless athletic director Lynn St. John fired Willaman. Considering Ward also performed the radio play-by-play duties on WOSU, the players sent a statement to school president Dr. George W. Rightmire demanding that Ward be barred from broadcasting the game over the school’s station.
The players did not believe having Ward discuss the Buckeyes during the next week’s homecoming game to be “fitting and proper.” The statement was issued after Gillman and co-captain Joe Gailus held a secret meeting with the team at noon on the Friday before the game and 18 other teammates—all of them unnamed—decided it was unfair to allow Ward to broadcast the game. Ward had written basically that Willaman was a failure as a coach, and the players wanted him out of the spotlight. Gillman and Gailus intimated the team wouldn’t play if Ward was at the mic, but they also made sure to note that it was more a request than a demand.
Rightmire denied the request, but when told that story 80 years later, knowing what was to come in her dad’s future, Bobbe Korbin—Gillman’s second daughter—wasn’t surprised by her father’s outspokenness. “There you go,” she said. “He was doing it all the way back then.”
Even after the Buckeyes commenced winning again in 1933, the stigma around Sad Sam never ceased. The storm of dissatisfaction that eventually would blow him out of Columbus continued to build. Much of the swirling wind was caused by those who Gillman believed should have been the ones protecting the program and their peers who played in it—the writers for the school’s student newspaper.
Much of the acrimony came in an October 26 editorial that exclaimed that the Michigan game branded “the season a failure, regardless of the outcome of the remaining five contests.” But in December, after the successful 7-1 season, complete with a second-place finish in the Big Ten behind the hated Wolverines, the Ohio State Lantern wrote a fiery front-page editorial entitled “Give Us a New Football Coach.” Wrote the unnamed editorialist: “We believe (Willaman’s) usefulness as a university football coach is at an end despite the statistical outcome of the season. Sam Willaman, we contend, has proved himself lacking the first requisite of a coach: he cannot handle players. The season has been marked by dissension on the team, resignations from the squad, petty jealousies between players and by a general want of respect for the coach…. We maintain he lacks a certain type of leadership and diplomacy that are necessary and peculiar to the position he holds.”
Gillman, named an honorable All-American, fired back as soon as he read the editorial. He immediately issued a statement that read, “Sam is a good football coach. What do student newspapermen know about a football team or the coaching staff? The squad has the highest regard and esteem for Willaman. This has been proven by the fact that regardless of adverse publicity, we have carried on for him. In the Illinois game we fought for him alone. As far as Sam’s ability to coach, we rank him among the best.” Gillman also convinced most of the rest of the team to sign a statement that pledged the Buckeyes’ loyalty and sincerity to Willaman.
Ultimately, none of it mattered. Sixty-six days after Ohio State ended its season, Willaman resigned and took the head coaching job at Western Reserve (less than two years later, Willaman would die after emergency intestinal surgery). And replacing him would be the coach who had the single biggest influence on Gillman’s life. A man who would change the course of Gillman’s career, his wardrobe, and his life.
While Gillman completed his four years at Ohio State, Esther Berg patiently waited at home in Minneapolis. Sometimes, Esther made the trip to Columbus to see her man, and other times, Gillman made his way back to Minneapolis to visit her. Even when the two were hundreds of miles apart and when long-distance phone calls were a luxury, the two were very much in the other’s thoughts.
On a glossy black-and-white photo in the scrapbook that Gillman’s mother kept, Gillman scribbled some comments on a scene from the 1932 Ohio State-Northwestern game. Gillman, who was photographed outside the tackling scrum, wrote, “Probably me, doing nothing as usual.” He also circled a random spot in the stands—it was impossible to make out faces from that far away—and wrote the name of his future wife, Esther Berg. He couldn’t see her, of course, but he could always feel when she was near.
The next week, after Gillman performed well against the University of Pennsylvania, Esther entered a Minneapolis Western Union office at 8:45 p.m. to send a telegram to Gillman’s residence at 174 East Woodruff on the Ohio State campus. “Wonderful Sid,” she wrote, “every one talking about you[;] you played superably [sic] I love you = Esther.”
Even after four years without each other, Esther wasn’t going anywhere. She had found her piano player at that Sweet 16 party, and she wasn’t letting go. Sid couldn’t stop thinking about her either, even when he was all the way across the country in San Francisco to play in the East-West Shrine game—an all-star game for the best collegiate players of the day. While Gillman dined on crème of chicken soup reine, grand filet mignon with mushrooms, and a Neapolitan parfait with petit fours at the pregame banquet, he pondered the best gift he could shower upon Esther when he returned home.
That’s why, during the week he was on the West Coast, he stopped in Chinatown to buy a pajama set for her. One of his coaches for the all-star game had a petite wife that was about Esther’s size, and she tried it on to make sure it would be a good fit for Esther. Back in Minneapolis, when Esther wore it for the first time, Sid thought to himself: “Wow, she looks like a geisha girl.”
Once the game was complete and Gillman’s East team had lost, he only had one thought on his mind. “After the game was over, all these guys went down to Hollywood to get into the movies,” Gillman said. “But I took a train—nobody took the chance of flying in those days—and went home to see my future wife.” In his absence, Esther had been well taken care of by Gillman’s mom. “She would do everything she could to facilitate Esther staying in her house before they got married,” said Tom Gillman, Sid and Esther’s only boy. “She recognized that [Esther] was the one for her son.”
Luckily, she would follow him wherever he went.
When Francis Schmidt was a senior at the University of Nebraska in 1906, the forward pass—and all the controversy that came with it—was finally deemed a legal maneuver. Up until that point, from the first college football game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 through the first half of the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, the game of football resembled rugby (except, perhaps, more violent), and the ball hardly ever sailed through the air. The rules change was hardly impactful, though. New Cornhuskers coach Amos Foster slightly opened up his offense to accommodate the new rule. Pop Warner called it “a bastard offspring of real football,” and though Georgia Tech coach John Heisman helped get the rule passed, he didn’t use it much. Major Robert Neyland at Tennessee said, “[Fans] want their team to win every game, and they don’t want to see it gamble away its chances with a lot of long-shot plays.”
With the passing game still in its infancy, Neyland was probably correct. The ball was still too round to make forward passing a winning strategy, and when teams threw it, there was no route-running. It was mostly jump-balls with ends and backs going against the defense. The attitude of the day was that punting was good, because you were playing not to lose. As such, the forward pass was considered a move of desperation, a less-than-macho way to play the game.
But when Robert Zuppke at the University of Illinois began working on gadget plays that implemented the passing game in the post–World War I era, the forward pass received some much-needed credibility. And there was Francis Schmidt, who believed in the forward pass like he believed in his never-ending abilities to invent new plays for it. Schmidt always believed.
As an interview candidate to replace Willaman at Ohio State after the 1933 season, Schmidt was a wonder. He impressed St. John (who had never seen any of Schmidt’s teams play) and everybody else who wondered if a no-name coach from Texas Christian University in the Southwest Conference could turn around a Big Ten power that had grown stale under Sad Sam’s leadership. After he took the job, Schmidt set off to change the fans’ view of the Buckeyes.
After listening to the advice of Columbus Dispatch sports editor Ed Penisten, who convinced Schmidt to visit the influential alumni who hung out at Ben Ratner’s sporting goods store on High Street, Schmidt charmed the full-throated opinion-sharers (often referred to as the “High Street Quarterbacks”). According to one writer, he “reduced their roars to ejaculations of surprised, vociferous praise.” Afterward, the influential Ratner told Penisten that Schmidt was “100 percent OK.” Later on his initial visit as the new Ohio State coach, Schmidt met with various campus and city celebrities at the Deshler Wallick hotel, and somebody brought up the subject of the Michigan rivalry. Soon, Schmidt, clad in his three-piece suit and bow tie—the same kind of bow tie that Gillman would wear the rest of his life in homage—dropped to his knees and drew out plays on the carpet, using nickels and dimes as players.
Schmidt was a quick wit, and he had a winning personality. He was self-assured and modest at the same time, and he had a work ethic that put others to shame. While Schmidt was not one of the original members of the Southwest Conference that had used the new forward pass to completely revamp their offenses, Schmidt was a quick study. If most of the playbooks used by collegiate coaches were thin like a magazine, Schmidt’s was as thick as War and Peace. Many successful coaches had between 20 and 40 plays ready to run. Schmidt’s offense included more than 300. He ran a single-wing formation, a double-wing formation, and a short-punt formation, but when asked what kind of system he preferred, he said, “I like the touchdown system best.” Simplicity was the philosophy of most of Schmidt’s colleagues. Schmidt wanted to make the opposing defenders dizzy with confusion and nauseous with incompetence.
Schmidt and Gillman first met at a luncheon after Schmidt had been hired and Gillman’s eligibility had been completed, and Schmidt was immediately impressed by Gillman’s smarts and his passion for the game. He offered Gillman a spot on the coaching staff during spring football practices, and Gillman accepted. He saw a mentor in Schmidt—not just with the type of offense Schmidt was going to run but with the way Schmidt never thought much about anything other than football.
Schmidt constantly diagrammed and tweaked plays, and if you visited him in his office, he barely paid you any attention. He worked 18 hours a day, and even when he slept, he hung a pad and a pencil from his bedpost in case he dreamt about a new formation or a new misdirection.
One day, as he got the oil changed in his car, he stayed in the driver’s seat so he could continue to study football. Suddenly, he thought of a new play, and with his mind racing, he stepped out of the car to pace off his newfound thoughts. But he forgot his car had been lifted into the air, and as he stepped out, he fell 5 feet to the cold concrete floor. The price of genius—and of forgetfulness.
The new system at Ohio State was a mind-blowing experience for his players and his assistant coaches. His plays used so much misdirection and confusion that on the third day of practice in 1934, two of his assistant coaches, Dick Larkins and Ernie Godfrey, got trampled by a running back because they were watching another player who they thought had possession of the ball.
“He used to come on the field with charts for hundreds of plays,” Gillman said. “If someone failed to execute properly, he would start thumbing through his charts, and if he was unable to find the particular play, he’d turn to the boy and say, ‘Son, I don’t know for sure what you do on that play, but you’re doing it wrong.’”
Gillman was hooked on Schmidt. After he participated in the East-West Shrine game in December 1933 and the Chicago College All Star game the following summer—where he infamously was knocked out cold while tackling Chicago Bears legend Bronko Nagurski—Gillman received a bus ticket from the NFL’s Boston Redskins. The team had drafted Gillman, and it offered him $125 per game to sign a contact. But Gillman realized early on that Schmidt was one of the greatest minds he’d ever met, and after Schmidt wired him an offer to return to Ohio State and coach the spring practice, Gillman’s thoughts about playing pro football—or becoming a lawyer—disappeared.
Said Gillman: “I wasn’t interested in anything else after that experience.” As he later explained, the coaching bug bit him that spring of 1934, and it bit him hard. He wasn’t exactly done playing football, but after one spring with Schmidt, Gillman knew what his mission in life would be. Schmidt had much to teach Gillman about how to coach football, and Gillman had much to learn from Schmidt about how to reach his potential. Schmidt was ready to show Gillman the path. Gillman was just as ready to walk it.
