Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz
“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