Hey! You! Get Off of My Lawn

By Bob Greene May 28, 2015 9:30 p.m. ET For the second concert in their lucrative-beyond-the-dreams-of-potentates new tour, the Rolling Stones on Saturday night will step onto the football field of Ohio Stadium in Columbus. There is never a day when I don’t wish that Woody Hayes were still alive, but I particularly would relish hearing his thoughts on this development. Hayes, who was head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes for 28 years, had the final say on virtually every aspect of the university’s football program. Rock musicians performing on the gridiron were not a part of his vision for what should properly transpire inside the horseshoe-shaped stadium. It is probably no coincidence that the first rock band given permission to play in Ohio Stadium—Pink Floyd—was not afforded that opportunity until 1988, a year after Woody’s death. That stadium was his domain, and he had rather firm thoughts about who should be allowed access to the field. I asked Kaye Kessler—a sportswriter in central Ohio for 45 years and a man who covered Hayes’s teams from Woody’s first day as head coach until his last—what Hayes would have done if he’d been told the Rolling Stones were coming through the tunnel and onto the field. “He’d have run ’em out,” said Mr. Kessler, now retired and living in Colorado. Mr. Kessler wasn’t offering idle speculation; he had seen Hayes in action when someone had the temerity to wander uninvited onto an Ohio State football facility. He recalled the day when, at a Buckeye practice, Hayes summarily ejected a man named Bill Reed, who was accompanying a group of out-of-town sportswriters. Bill Reed, at the time, was merely the commissioner of the Big 10. Woody, Mr. Kessler said, “didn’t give a rat’s [posterior].” Hayes was a complicated, fascinating, endlessly contradictory man of pronounced likes and dislikes. Students of the fierce Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry are aware of the deep mutual affection that existed between Hayes and his chief adversary, the renowned Michigan coach Bo Schembechler (who died in 2006). After Hayes was fired for slugging a Clemson player during the 1978 Gator Bowl, it was Schembechler who tried to comfort his despairing, embarrassed friend…

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