War As They Knew It

June 23, 2008
The yearly battle between Ohio State and the University of Michigan is one of the most intensely fought rivalries in college football, and one of its greatest eras began in 1969, when Bo Schembechler arrived in Michigan as the team’s new head coach. Schembechler had been a former protégé of Woody Hayes, the legendary coach of Ohio State—who was so intimidating that one player used to be terrified that Hayes would kick him in the testicles during practice, despite never having seen him do it to another player. Rosenberg, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press
, tracks how the two coaches pushed their players to greatness over the next nine years (until Hayes was fired after punching an opposing player in the middle of a game) while trying to adjust to the social upheavals of the 1970s. His attempts to bring the radical student underground into the story are an intermittent distraction—the most powerful drama is out on the football field and in the locker room when every year Schembechler and Hayes went head-to-head. The story has its strong moments, including one of history’s most notorious missed field goals, but it’s the dual portrait of the old-school coaching legends that’s the real attraction.

September 1, 2008
In college football from the late Sixties through the Seventies, the intense rivalry between Michigan coach Bo Schembechler and his mentor, Woody Hayes, the militaristic coach of Ohio State, made for great theater during a time of vast change on American campuses. This exploration of the beginning of Schembechler's legend and the close of Hayes's contentious reign treats both men fairly and seeks to place sensationalized actions and statements in their proper context. Rosenberg ("Detroit Free Press") delivers a probing, sensitive, and insightful assessment of the two legendary coaches and of college football in general during a volatile era. Of interest to both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/15/08.]

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2008
America was embroiled in a real war, and college campuses were in turmoil. But in the country's heartland, no-mans land was the border between Ohio and Michigan, and the battleground rotated between the football stadiums at Ohio State and the University of Michigan. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the heyday of the rivalry between legendary football coaches Woody Hayes and his former assistant Bo Schembechler. Hayes Ohio State Buckeyes had established themselves as one of the nations best, while Schembechler had taken a moribund Michigan program and turned it into a consistent challenger to Ohio States dominance. Though Rosenberg weaves a bit of the eras antiwar protests, drug use, and social unrest into his narrative, this is fundamentally the tale of an intense football rivalry and the two men at its center. Schembechler was a hard-nosed, old-school football coach but ultimately a reasonable, thoughtful man. Hayes, on the other hand, comes across as a manipulative, foul-tempered eccentric. This will appeal especially to Ohio and Michigan sports fans, naturally, but it will be of interest, too, to anyone who follows college football closely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)