by Gary Pinkel
• • •
The country was still at war in Vietnam when I was in high school. I turned 18 in the spring of my senior year, so I wasn’t eligible for the first draft lottery that took place. There were more lotteries in later years, and I was eligible in 1971. You were assigned a random lottery number 1 through 365 based on your birthday. My number was 124. Fortunately, the highest number called that year was 95. Had I been born on April 26 instead of April 27, my number would have been 45—and I would have been drafted into the military and likely sent to Vietnam. Who knows what direction my life would have taken.
On May 4, 1970, the nation’s perspective on the war changed for a lot of people. It was a Monday. I was two weeks away from my graduation from Kenmore. Then, after the summer, I would be off to Kent State. For lunch that day I went to Dairy Queen with my girlfriend. We were in my car eating our sandwiches when a news report started crackling on the radio. There was a shooting at Kent State. Anti-war protesters had been gunned down. The Ohio National Guard had shot into a crowd of protestors on the school’s campus. Yes, the shooting had occurred at the college I had just agreed to attend in the fall.
I went back to Kenmore for an afternoon college composition course. News reports had started to come out from Kent. During class, our teacher picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board: “National Guard 4, Students 0.”
Four protesters had been shot and killed during the rally. That day, my teacher said Kent State would struggle to recover from this for at least 10 years. I looked at the guy like, “Come on. This is a tragedy, but we’ll overcome this.” Every class we had the rest of the day, that’s all we talked about, just trying to sort out why it all happened.
Naturally, people asked me if I would change my plans to attend Kent. I had just signed my national letter of intent, and now, Kent’s campus was the stage for the biggest story in the country. Maybe it was time to reconsider my future.
Toledo vs. Purdue
September 6, 1997 Toledo, Ohio
In the season opener of my seventh season at Toledo, the Big Ten team visited the Glass Bowl and I made sure my team understood nobody gave us a chance to win. In the speech, I read excerpts from recent interviews with Purdue coach Joe Tiller and several players. None of them mentioned their upcoming game at Toledo.
Team Meeting Thursday, September 4, 3:30 pm
“Does this sound like a team or coach that respects you? There is none. If that doesn’t piss you off, you shouldn’t be on this team. I’m tired of it! There comes a time in your life where you stand up and say, ‘That’s it!’ We must decide that we will change Purdue’s attitude. If we want respect, we kick their ass!”
Final: Toledo 36, Purdue 22
The Boilermakers knew who we were by game’s end. The only way to gain respect in games like this is to win—and wins like this are a tradition in the Mid-American Conference. Behind first-year starters at quarterback and tailback, we scored on our first three drives and compiled 280 yards by halftime.
2. Kent State: My Alma Mater
I had given Kent State my word, and even after the May 4 shootings, I wasn’t worried about attending school there in the fall. Campus had shut down for the rest of the spring and then reopened in the summer. The shootings opened a lot of people’s minds about the direction of the country and the support for the Vietnam War, but in my world, I still wanted to play football at my nearby school.
There were always reminders on campus about what took place that spring day. You’d occasionally see a burning flag on campus. On the one-year anniversary of the shootings, I vividly remember sitting in a friend’s dorm room watching the National Guard marching around campus. Tensions were high and some people worried there’d be more violence. It was a difficult time on campus. I remember one day walking past the main administration building to get on a bus and there were two guys standing next to the flagpole. I suspected they were going to take it down and possibly burn it. “You guys aren’t really going to do that, are you?” I said to them. They just kind of looked at me. I just said, “That’s not the right thing to do.” They walked away. There were so many different opinions on campus about politics and the war and current events, but I was always just a rule-of-law person. I probably got that from my dad and the influence of his military background. I disagreed with a lot of things, but what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong. My dad fought for that flag and our country.
My freshman year, the students designed T-shirts to show our unity on campus. We all wore those shirts on the one-year anniversary.
The university faced a lot of criticism. Enrollment plunged drastically. As a student body and community we really needed something positive to happen on campus, something the students could rally around, bring people together and help the healing process from the May 4 tragedy.
Nobody figured football would be the solution, at least temporarily.
But first, a coaching change. The NCAA didn’t allow freshmen to be eligible to play in games until 1972, so my first year in the football program was essentially a redshirt year. I moved from receiver to tight end and spent most of my time on the scout team.
During my freshman year, Coach Puddington announced he was stepping down after eight games. We were 2–6 with two games to play. He was later quoted as saying part of the reason he left the job was “the prevailing contagious negativity on campus and the community.”
“The fatalism around us,” he also said, “and the current tendency to politicize every facet in life—even sports—has certainly affected the young men in our program.” He finished out the season as we split our final two games, including a 10–8 loss to Miami. The May shootings had rocked our campus, and our coach didn’t believe we could recover. We had a new athletic director named Mike Lude who would be responsible for hiring our next coach. Lude would become one of the most successful and respected ADs in the country in his time.
When I first got to Kent, I was so disappointed in the work ethic of the players. Back at Kenmore, we always had a relentless approach to the sport. Coach Fortner created that environment. But that wasn’t the case at Kent, which I realized quickly. Maybe I was naïve my first year on campus. I never drank in high school or partied too much, so I was a pretty straight arrow. But all around me I saw a lack of commitment and focus from other players.
That all changed when the school hired Puddington’s successor: Donald Earl James, a 38-year-old who had never been a college head coach.
Coach James was another football coach who hailed from the state of Ohio. He played at Massillon High School, a legendary program in a town by the same name just south of Akron. James played quarterback at the University of Miami, Florida, but when he came to Kent State, his coaching background was squarely on the defensive side of the ball. He had been a defensive assistant at Florida State, Michigan, and most recently Colorado, where he worked under head coach Eddie Crowder.
Considering the situation at Kent State, a campus still reeling from the 1970 shootings, Coach James had to be confident in how he was going to manage his program, especially when the outgoing coach made such strong statements about the negativity on campus. Years later in his autobiography, Coach James wrote that people told him he was crazy for taking the Kent State job. They called the place “the graveyard of coaches,” he wrote. Coincidentally, Coach Fortner heard the same things about the Kenmore High job. We must have had similar friends because I heard the same things 30 years later.
Coach James wasn’t a yeller, but he was serious and always intense, especially in those first few months. We knew at his first team meeting that Coach James meant business. It was like a combat situation. We were instantly going to set the bar much higher than it had been. I was so impressed with everything he stood for. Coach James changed the culture from the day he arrived. His program was all about discipline, structure, and attention to detail. This would be the founda
tion for the football program that would define my career.
Our winter conditioning workouts were brutal. Players quit left and right. In our first spring under Coach James we had a teammate who quit in the middle of a particularly grueling practice. He just had enough. He had to walk about 125 yards from the field to the locker room. He started making that walk and peeled off his gear one piece at a time. First his helmet. Then his jersey. We watched him make that long, torturous walk off the field, and by the time he got to the locker room there was a trail of clothes behind him. As much as we laughed about that scene later, we understood not everyone was cut out for Coach James’ style.
A couple times I wondered if I wanted to stick around and make all these sacrifices with no guarantees about playing time or the role I’d have on offense. Was I willing to invest everything it was going to take to play for this man? Like everyone else I would have to prove myself. Once Coach James settled in and his plans took root in the program, a remarkable story took place.
• • •
My sophomore year, I earned the starting job at tight end—but it didn’t last. I was demoted to the second unit for the last few games of the season. I was still immature as a competitor. At that level you need to have your mind right. After a brief spell of success, I had started to struggle. I wasn’t mature enough to battle through some of these problems, and I wasn’t sure how to earn back the starting job.
After the season, our offensive coordinator Dick Scesniak gave me a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. It was a best-selling self-help book written in 1960 by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. It was all about the mental side of competition and changing your attitude to help achieve your goals. The book changed me and opened my eyes to the importance of mental toughness. It was all about self-control and learning how to think the right way. My attitude and my production climbed to new levels after I read that book.
We finished the 1971 season with a 41–6 loss at Toledo. We had lost the week before to Miami 30–0. It goes without saying we weren’t happy with our season.
Coach James gathered us in the locker room after the Toledo game and pointed out to the field where their players were celebrating a perfect regular season. “If you guys want to ever win a championship here, that’s what you have to become,” he told us. “We can be the team celebrating next year, but we have to work our asses off to get there. If you want to win a championship, that’s the team we have to look like.”
I could hardly believe he was already thinking ahead to the next season, all but commanding us to watch Toledo players celebrating their special year. That visual aid was supposed to motivate us for the offseason. A lot of the guys embraced this mentality.
For those of us who stuck around and bought into Coach James’ program, a special team took shape in 1972. At running back, we had three playmakers from Garfield High: my high school rival, Larry Poole, and Renard and Bernard Harmon. At quarterback, Larry Hayes broke his arm the first game of the season against Akron, so we turned things over to Daryl Hall, a converted tight end, and Greg Kokal, a freshman. It was the first season the NCAA allowed freshmen to play in games. At slot back, we had Gerald Tinker, who earlier that summer won a gold medal at the Munich Olympics on the 400-meter relay team. I came into my own that season and led the team with 34 catches for 477 yards and three touchdowns.
But our biggest star played on defense. John Harold Lambert came to Kent State in 1970, the same year as me, as an unheralded quarterback from Crestwood High School in Matua, Ohio, a town in northeast Ohio that’s so small it’s considered a village. Now it’s known as the home of one of the great linebackers to ever play the game. He went by Jack.
Jack Lambert wasn’t exactly destined for stardom. He came to Kent State on a partial football scholarship as a defensive end. He was 6’4” and lanky, not much more than 200 pounds. He’d wanted to play for Miami of Ohio, but they didn’t think he was the right size. It would be their loss.
Going into the season, our middle linebacker was Bob Bender, a transfer from Buffalo. He was enormous, a hulking dude who had NFL stamped all over him. But in the middle of preseason camp, Bender quit. Just walked away. We thought maybe Coach James was going to lighten up for his second season so we wouldn’t lose any more players. Not at all. He and his staff, “the James Gang” as they became known, only made practices more intense, more grueling. But they had to make a move on defense and needed a middle linebacker. Lambert was too gangly for the position, but they plugged him into the spot.
As for Bender, he vanished from Ohio and became a bodyguard for some English rock band. He’d spend years protecting Mick and Keith and the rest of the Rolling Stones.
As for Lambert, he was unique in so many ways. Taller and skinnier than the prototype middle linebacker, he quickly adapted to the position and became a tackling machine. He played the game with a rare intensity, unlike anyone I’d ever seen on the football field. He was easily the most competitive guy I’d ever call a teammate.
Jack would go on to become a nine-time Pro Bowler and six-time first-team All-Pro with the Pittsburgh Steelers as the centerpiece of the Steel Curtain defense. I had the fortune of playing with him again for a few weeks with the Steelers during the 1973 preseason. (He was a second-round draft pick; I was an undrafted free agent.)
During training camp in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Jack and I usually walked together to meetings and practices, but one day I couldn’t find him anywhere. Finally, I found him in the shower with three different nozzles beating water on his leg. He had bruised his thigh in practice doing the Oklahoma drill against rookie center Mike Webster.
“Jack, what are you doing? We’ve got to get to practice,” I told him.
I didn’t know if he was too hurt to practice. His leg looked pretty nasty. He looked me in the eye, water splashing everywhere, and made one thing clear.
“Jack Lambert never gets fucking hurt,” he snarled.
I said, “Okay, buddy, I’ll see you later.” I was out of there. I told a couple trainers they might need to check on Jack, but I doubt he missed a practice.
Jack was famous for missing his front two teeth. When I got into coaching in the late 1970s, just as Jack was at the height of his playing career with the Steelers, I would joke with recruits that I was the guy who first knocked out his teeth. Over time, that line got lost on recruits and it was their dads who appreciated the humor.
One year older than me was a defensive back from West Virginia named Nick Saban. He suffered a serious ankle injury in the eighth game of the season against Northern Illinois and eventually got into coaching. Our paths would cross again.
• • •
As for our team, we opened the 1972 season 1–3–1. So much for all that offseason motivation. After a narrow win at Bowling Green, we stood 2–3–1. That’s when Coach James gathered us for a meeting and said the damnedest thing.
“Okay, we’ve got five games left,” he told us. “We can win a championship if we win these games.” We’re all looking at each other like, “Seriously? We can win a championship?” This guy was crazy, right? Kent State had never won a conference championship. For the previous 20 years, Bowling Green, Miami (Ohio), and Toledo had taken turns winning the MAC championship—but never Kent State.
Going into the ’72 season, we decided we’d stop watching movies on Friday nights before games and instead watch offensive and defensive film to prepare for what we’d face the next day. It was a young team, but we were hungry. We had a huge game at Miami. I played one of the best games of my career, but Lambert made the game-saving plays for us on defense with four straight tackles on the goal line to preserve a 21–10 win. Our team confidence soared with that win. For years Miami had been one of the elite teams in the MAC, but not that day. The next week we hosted Toledo for our regular-season finale. The MAC championship was at stake along with the league’s only bowl berth, to the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, F
lorida. Toledo had come into the season on a 35-game winning streak. They had dominated our six-team league and beaten Kent five times in a row, including that 41–6 bloodbath the year before.
But on this day, our stadium was full, and the energy was in the air. It was the largest home crowd in the history of Kent State football, with 20,715 at Dix Stadium.
The support from our student body had grown tremendously in the wake of the 1970 shootings. On our campus we had a lot of students who were part of the anti-establishment culture. Some people called them hippies. The guys wore their hair long. They had no interest in sports. But they rallied around our team, especially that year, especially that day when they showed up armed with tangerines, ready to pummel the field to celebrate if we won.
At that point we had won four of our last five games. And then we trounced Toledo 27–9. The fans swarmed the field as the clock ran out and toppled the goalposts. The whole campus and community celebrated the victory, even the hippies. I’ll always be convinced that Coach James and our team had a significant impact on the healing process at Kent State. A little pride came back to the university. I was so honored to be part of that experience.
We were the unlikeliest of champions. We were only 6–4–1, the fourth-best overall record in the MAC, but we had the best conference record at 4–1. We were actually outscored by two points during the regular season, but it didn’t matter. We were going to a bowl game, the school’s first Division I bowl.
In 1968, the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando became affiliated with the Mid-American Conference and matched the MAC champion against the winner of the Southern Conference. Ohio and Toledo represented the MAC the first four years of the agreement. Then, in 1972, it was our turn. We played the University of Tampa, an independent team coached by Earle Bruce. Tampa would only field a team for two more seasons.