Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz

      four ASSISTANT COACH

      Sid Gillman didn’t have to travel very far to take the first step on the path of his newly realized coaching career. Same city, same university, same expectation of winning. But with a new exciting coach who promised to lead Ohio State out of the pit of mediocrity that Sam Willaman had dropped it off before resigning. It was a new offense and a new sense of purpose—for the Buckeyes and for Gillman.

      Gillman had planned to be a lawyer, the same as Schmidt when he was on his way to graduating from the University of Nebraska. Neither expected to be a coach. Both men’s plans changed.

      After their first meeting, Schmidt blew Gillman’s mind with his plans and with his strategy. Gillman impressed Schmidt as well, and though Gillman still planned to attend law school, he agreed to take a student-assistant job under Schmidt for Ohio State’s spring practice of 1934. Though he was supposed to use the money made in the spring to help pay for law school in the fall, he realized soon after that he could not escape football’s grasp. He would leave the law books to somebody else. He would be a coach, just like his mentor Schmidt. Maybe slightly less crazy and paranoid, but just as hungry for winning and with a penchant for never thinking about anything other than football.

      “I haven’t seen a law school yet,” Gillman said later in life. “I wasn’t interested in anything else after that.”

      He had been drafted by the NFL’s Boston Redskins after graduation, and they sent him a contract to sign so he could begin his professional playing career. “Maybe I will,” Gillman thought to himself. “Maybe I’ll play.” He went so far as to sign the contract, but in the end, Schmidt convinced him of his true path. It wasn’t the law. It wasn’t taking over the family business of movie theaters (“I needed him in the business,” Sid’s father, David, said. “He wasn’t interested.”). And it wasn’t playing football. Instead, it was coaching college kids for little money in exchange for the many responsibilities, problems, and headaches. That’s where Gillman’s journey would take him, where he’d really shine.

      He performed odds jobs for Schmidt while participating in practices and coaching clinics that first spring at Ohio State, but Schmidt didn’t have the money to hire Gillman full time. Instead, he turned Gillman loose into the wild.

      Into the arms of Esther, as it turned out. Gillman had graduated in the spring of 1934, and at that point, he didn’t have enough money to marry Esther. That would have to wait until Gillman procured a full-time job. “I got paid [as an Ohio State student assistant coach], but very little,” Gillman said many years later, turning to his left to address his wife with a smile. “It wasn’t enough to take care of you, baby.”

      That changed, however, when an official from Denison University, a small liberal arts school 30 miles northeast of Columbus, called Ohio State athletic director Lynn St. John and asked for a recommendation. The school needed a third coach for its three-man staff, and St. John spoke highly of Gillman, the All-American who had been one of the top Buckeye ends of all time. Denison called and offered Gillman the job, and he gratefully accepted. The second step had been taken, and it was going to lead Sid and Esther to Granville, Ohio, for $1,800 a year. It was, in Esther’s eyes, a princely sum of money. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Esther exclaimed to her mother as if they had hit the jackpot.

      Even better? It allowed Sid and Esther enough money to get married in 1935, nearly a decade after that Sweet 16 party had brought the two together. They wed in a formal affair at the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis, and afterward, they set sail on their honeymoon. To Chicago. For the College All-Star Game. So Gillman could work and bask in his loves (football and Esther). You want romantic? Well, Esther received the most romantic honeymoon Sid could have imagined.

      “I planned every inch of it,” Gillman said. The blissfully wedded couple stayed at the Morrison Hotel, and after attending football practice every day, they went to jazz clubs every night. On the day of the Chicago College All-Star game, the two attended the contest at Soldier Field, and with Esther clad in her powder blue wedding dress, the skies opened at halftime and drenched the field. Esther took refuge under a newspaper and waited out the storm. Not surprisingly, the newspaper wasn’t much of an umbrella, and the rain soaked her dress. To make matters worse, she lost her purse that day. But still, the two were together, watching football, and in love (if you visited them at their home more than 65 years later, all three facts would still be true).

      After a brief return to Minneapolis following the honeymoon, the two set sail for Granville in a used DeSoto convertible that featured a rumble seat in back (unfortunately, the whereabouts of the Dangerous Dan McGrew, Gillman’s college jalopy, have been lost to history). Among their belongings stuffed into the car: a used 35-millimeter film projector that Gillman had bought at a hock shop in Chicago.

      At the time, the couple had only $25 to their names. The projector cost $15. The couple couldn’t afford it. Even though he had seen himself on film at Ohio State only a half-dozen times during his playing career, Gillman had an inkling about the importance of watching film. He had to have it. He bought it. Esther could have killed him, but she was also intrigued by the new teaching tool. If she was going to be married to a football coach, she wanted to learn everything she could about the game that would keep him up at night. The two arrived at their new home in Granville, and after they took out a loan from Denison head coach Tom Rogers so they could buy groceries, Sid and Esther tacked up a white bed sheet to the wall and turned on the film projector.

      Gillman—and Esther, to some degree—never relinquished the habit.