MIAMI OF OHIO : A Coaching Factory : This University Is Renowned, Not Because of Its Testaverdes and Kosars, but Because of Its Parseghians and Schembechlers, etc.

An Eastern reporter seeking an interview with quarterback Vinny Testaverde last year telephoned the Miami University publicist here to make the arrangements.

Dave Young, the publicist, patiently explained that Testaverde played not for Ohio’s Miami University but for Florida’s University of Miami.

Then Young hung up and, talking it over with a visitor, said: “One problem is that there’s no Miami in Miami. People think we’re in Miami, Ohio, but we’re in Oxford. And they’re in Coral Gables.”

But that isn’t much comfort to those who reside in this little college town.

In Oxford they don’t like the confusion that arises when two universities bear the same name--and they aren’t too fond of Florida, anyway.

A typical bumper sticker here reads: “Miami is in Ohio, Damn It!”

That, of course, is only half true. And because there’s another side to the story, a football game scheduled for the Orange Bowl next Nov. 7 is being called the Confusion Bowl.

It will bring Miami (Fla.) against Miami (Ohio) in what could also be called the Parenthesis Bowl.

Don’t forget to get a bet down. Miami can’t lose.

When they meet for the first time in 41 years, Florida’s Miami Hurricanes will be more familiar to the national audience than Ohio’s Miami Redskins.

The Hurricanes, unlike the Redskins, have been competing for, and winning, the national championship lately with such quarterbacks as Testaverde and Bernie Kosar.

As molders of championship coaches, however, neither the Hurricanes nor any other rival can match the Redskins.

Ten of the most famous football coaches of this century began at Ohio’s Miami as either college players or young coaches or both.

They are Paul Brown, Ara Parseghian, Woody Hayes, Red Blaik, Sid Gillman, Weeb Ewbank, Paul Dietzel, John Pont, Bill Arnsparger and Bo Schembechler.

Thus, when Miami of Florida plays Miami of Ohio, it will be talent vs. tradition--the Florida school’s personnel vs. the kind of heritage that can only come from a long association with many noted leaders.

What distinguishes Miami of Ohio from other football-playing schools is its coaching factory.

Over the years, they have trained hundreds of sports personalities--former Dodger manager Walt Alston among them--along with thousands of high school, college and pro coaches.

No fewer than six of the head coaches who made it into last winter’s 18-game college bowl season were once at Miami.

Ohio’s Miami, that is. Miami is in Ohio, damn it.

The unique success of the Miami Redskins has earned their university a unique label. Throughout football it is known as the cradle of coaches.

This is a school that has other distinctions and values as well, of course, but what sets it apart is the curious fact that so many prominent coaches have for one reason or another chosen to live and work here.

Three, Brown, Ewbank and Gillman, went on to coach pro football champions in three different leagues.

Four went on to another common destiny. After serving as head coaches at Miami, they moved consecutively, in one long, extraordinary parade, from this campus directly to Big Ten campuses--Hayes to Ohio State, Parseghian to Northwestern (and then to Notre Dame), Pont to Indiana, and Schembechler to Michigan.

There was a time not long ago, in fact, when 5 of the 10 active football coaches at Big Ten schools were Miami products: Gary Moeller at Illinois, Dave McLain at Wisconsin, Pont, Hayes and Schembechler. And three of them coached Rose Bowl teams.

Cradle of coaches indeed.

What’s more, it is a cradle that is still rocking.

More than 500 Miami graduates, among them Pont, are in high school sports today.

Of the 130 Miami graduates now active in one sport or another on the college or pro level, 43 are head coaches, and 7 of them are college football coaches: Carmen Cozza at Yale, Bill Mallory at Indiana, Nick Mourouzis at DePauw, Chris Pagliaro at Santa Barbara City College, Peter Peterson at Kenyon, Paul Schudel at Ball State, and Schembechler.

Plus four in other categories:

Dick Crum of North Carolina is a former Miami coach, Larry Smith of USC and Jim Young of Army are former Miami assistants, and Tim Rose is Miami’s present leader.

Rose, inheritor of one of the richest legacies in sports, has coached the Redskins to 8-2-1 and 8-3 records in the last two years, advancing to a bowl game last winter after his team upset LSU, 21-12, in a Miami civil war of sorts. LSU was coached by Miami alumnus Arnsparger.

Parseghian predicts that Rose will be the next to leap out of the cradle.

“All that Tim needs is one more (good) year and, sure enough, he’ll be in demand by (larger universities),” said the former Notre Dame coach. “The Miami image is very beneficial.”

And very real. And as deep-seated as it is self-perpetuating. The Miami image has been ingrained for generations. But what accounts for it? Who carved this image? Why Miami?

The Oxford visitor this summer hears that there is a cradle here for three predominant reasons:

--The special Miami setting has a strong appeal to most people. This is a university with a neat, very collegiate campus set in the midst of a country village in the only wooded, rolling countryside of a predominantly flat state.

--Would-be coaches have been recruited for more than 60 years. In the beginning, Miami was one of only two American universities deliberately seeking students with coaching ambitions. It has then trained them with more thoroughness than they thought they could find elsewhere.

--One particularly magisterial leader was in charge here at just the right time. This was the 1944-47 coach, Sid Gillman, who gave the cradle the swing that made it what it is.

A tireless recruiter, Gillman brought in the student-athletes who got Miami’s streak definably under way--just as World War II was ending, and just as college football’s biggest era was starting. The pros weren’t much at the time.

It is true that Blaik, Brown and Ewbank had all hit Oxford earlier, but Blaik, who coached Army’s champions in the Glenn Davis-Doc Blanchard days, left in 1920. Ewbank graduated in 1927. And Brown graduated in 1930.

No one thought there was a cradle here in those days. In fact, the cradle, if any, lay motionless for about 15 years after Brown departed.

Then, in the mid-1940s, in rapid-fire order, Gillman recruited Parseghian, Dietzel, Arnsparger, Pont and Schembechler--among hundreds of others--and the cradle was rocking.

It has been swinging ever since.

TOWN AND GOWN AND A COACHING FACTORY

Kent State is in Miami’s conference, the Mid-American, and at a Kent State game not long ago, the Miami Redskins weren’t surprised to run into a picket line. The students there were protesting Miami’s nickname, reasoning that it was offensive to American Indians.

In California for similar reasons, Stanford has lately been persuaded to give up its historic nickname, Indians, in favor of the more prosaic Cardinal.

But Miami, a deeply conservative university, isn’t one to be pushed around by pickets. The Redskins stonily held their ground, then went home and sent Kent State a copy of a document that has since kept all such critics quiet.

The document is a proclamation that begins with a whereas:

“Whereas, at Oxford, Ohio, where there once stood a village of the Miamis . . . “

Then it continues:

“We, the Miami Redskins of Indian blood, and our namesake, the Miami University Redskins, have a mutual and cherished heritage. May it be blessed by Moneto (God) as long as the winds shall blow.”

It was signed by two Indian chiefs, Forrest D. Olds and Floyd E. Leonard.

Olds and the other full-blooded Miamis have long since moved south, leaving behind two landmarks, a university, and a river for which the university was named.

Miami could instead have been named Oxford University, in honor of the village that surrounds it, a village that features a Civil War cannon, a water tower, and 3.2 beer--nothing stronger--on its only main street. But an Oxford University in America would have been confusing to British immigrants.

Miami could also have been called University of Ohio, for it is indeed a state university, though often thought of as private. But that would have been confusing in Columbus, the home of Ohio State, and even more confusing in Athens, home of Ohio University.

But it was given an old Indian name and established in downtown Oxford, where, sprawling over hundreds of acres, the university is an attractive compound of big, impressive trees, green turf, and red brick buildings that might all have had the same architect, one partial to modified Georgian.

Since 1809, Ohioans have been erecting Georgian buildings on this campus. It is the nation’s seventh-oldest state university and among the most enchanting.

Jim Steeg, the National Football League’s director of special events, was the son of a Purdue engineering professor when he first saw Miami.

“The trees, the campus, the tradition--you love the place instantly and, I guess, forever,” said Steeg, one of the many non-athletes in the Miami family.

“Hollywood couldn’t build a better college set,” Parseghian said.

Said Pont: “I never had a scholarship, and I still loved it.”

Paul Brown, who as a teen-ager withdrew from Ohio State and enrolled at Miami, said: “If you have a picture of a college campus in mind, Miami looks the way you think a campus should look.”

Thus over many years, Miami has been a magnet to sensitive athletes, among others. It has also lured the kind of athletes and other students who enjoy the pointedly collegiate aspects of a college.

For example, one-third of the student body is active in fraternities and sororities.

This campus, in truth, was the founding site of no fewer than four national social fraternities and a sorority.

On a somewhat different level, a Miami graduate, Rita Dove, now an Arizona State professor, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year.

In the field of education, Prof. William H. McGuffey, author of the widely circulated McGuffey Reader of a bygone period, spent most of his life on the Miami campus.

And in politics, two 1892 Miami pals, Republicans Benjamin Harrison and New York editor Whitelaw Reid, became the first and so far the only alumni of the same school to run for U.S. President and vice president on the same ticket.

Harrison was the White House incumbent at the time but lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland.

The Miami Student is the nation’s oldest college paper. The school library is proud of its collection of compositions in Beethoven’s hand and of its file of Jefferson Davis’ letters. Oceanography and maritime geology are taught here. Miami’s international relations department ranks among the nation’s best.

Possibly because of these attractions, Miami’s enrollment has been restricted to 15,000 in recent years for, ostensibly, two main reasons.

Oxford, population 8,500 on its own, might blow away if Miami weren’t there and can only afford a volunteer fire department, which wouldn’t be able to cope if the university were much bigger.

Second, the school’s administrators, who won’t let students have cars here, want most of them to live on campus, where only 8,000 men and women can be housed.

Some critics suspect the university of other motives in limiting the student body to a manageable number. They charge that Miami is chiefly protecting its elitist image in the face of an Ohio law that requires state schools to admit all commuters.

The Miami response has been to restrict enrollment and to establish branch campuses in two nearby towns. The branches are full of commuters.

One sure result of any limited enrollment plan for any desirable university is a rise in interest--as expressed in freshman applications--leading to a general scholastic upgrading.

This has happened at Miami, which last year made the inside pages of a unique book, “The Public Ivies.”

The author, Richard Moll, a former dean at UC Santa Cruz, picked out the nation’s eight public institutions that in his view most closely resemble the eight private Ivy League schools in both ambiance and academic values.

He said they are Cal, Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, Texas, North Carolina, William & Mary, and Ohio’s Miami.

A certain kind of football coach--another Blaik, Brown, Parseghian or Schembechler, not to mention the hundreds of other coaches who have swept in and out of Miami--seems to want the kind of university this is.

Moreover, Miami wants him.

The Redskins have been industriously coaching coaches for seven decades, according to Weeb Ewbank, a Miami man who led both the Baltimore Colts and New York Jets to NFL championships.

“In (1924), Illinois had the (nation’s) only strong physical education program,” said Ewbank, who taught here for 13 years and still lives in Oxford. “Our people went to Urbana, looked them over, and came back to put in the basics of the program we still have.”

In effect this is a college, or training ground, for coaches.

“(Illinois and Miami) were the first to offer coaching classes in the school of education,” said Miami Athletic Director Richard Shrider, who has been here for 31 years. “(Such a) program was nonexistent elsewhere for some time.”

So it gave many Miami graduates a leg up on the cradle.

“The pleasing thing is that our early leaders set such high standards for excellence,” said Miami President Paul G. Pearson.

How many students have chosen Miami strictly for its coaching program?

General Manager John McVay of the San Francisco 49ers thinks he can identify a few.

“On the 1949 team, 10 players went into coaching,” McVay said.

“Three were quarterbacks, Nobby Wirkowski, Jim Root and Pete Ankney. Two were running backs, Pont and Cozza. Two were tight ends, Doc Urich and Clive Rush. Two were tackles, Schembechler and Arnsparger.

“And I was the starting center.”

FATHER OF THE KIDS IN THE CRADLE OF COACHES

As Ram executive Jack Faulkner tells it, there was one memorable course of study for the scholars at Miami 40 years ago: Industrial arts.

The class was closely monitored by the football coach, Sid Gillman.

“We got two things done in industrial arts that semester,” Faulkner said. “Mostly we practiced football. Then, once in a while, we went out and put Sid’s car back together. We all got a B.”

For the last three quarters of a century, more or less, Gillman has focused rigidly on football, often going to surprising lengths.

Now retired in California, he can look back on many peaks as a coach, including his 1940s Miami tenure. There, in addition to supervising industrial arts, Gillman began a football dynasty with four teams that finished 8-1, 7-2, 7-3 and 9-0-1.

The players he enticed to Oxford did the work on the playing field. And then as coaches themselves, they kept the dynasty alive and the cradle in motion.

“Miami wouldn’t be the cradle of coaches without Gillman,” Faulkner said.

The facts and the record seem to bear this out, although, many years earlier, Blaik, Brown and Ewbank had played Redskin football.

It was Gillman who primed the pump. He did it with, in particular, five young early recruits who were to become household names in college football:

--Parseghian, who became a Notre Dame legend.

--Pont, who took Indiana, of all teams, to the Rose Bowl.

--Dietzel, who coached Miami, Indiana, Army and LSU.

--Arnsparger, the defensive genius of the Miami Dolphins’ 17-0 Super Bowl era who later coached the New York Giants and LSU before taking over as athletic director at Florida.

--Schembechler, who in 24 years at Miami and Michigan, has become the football coach with the nation’s best winning record, except for Eddie Robinson’s, and best record ever at Michigan.

Thus, 5 of the 10 most famous Miami football people were Gillman’s people.

“I’m proud of them all,” he said.

Many others from his teams--and subsequent Miami teams--also went on to positions as college or high school coaches or assistants. And as vacancies developed here and there, Miami men tended to hire other Miami men. They still do.

But how did Gillman get so much quality for Miami in the first place?

“Sid made you feel important,” Parseghian said. “And he made football important. His face lit up when he was talking football with you, and telling you how he’d make you a part of his program. His enthusiasm for football was contagious.”

Parseghian and Schembechler agree that in a time of fewer NCAA restrictions, their coach realized that, in Parseghian’s phrase, “the numbers game was the essential.”

Schembechler, who chose Miami after Gillman drove to his high school in Barberton, Ohio, to offer him a scholarship, said: “There were more than 200 guys on (Gillman’s) freshman team.”

None was self-financed.

“Sid found something (financial help) for everybody,” Parseghian said. “The school had a few scholarships. Then he utilized the GI bill fully. And he went uptown to get room-and-board jobs for the others.

“He knew that if he had enough good young players around, some would develop into excellent players.”

And coaches.

At Miami today, visitors are often shown the university’s athletic Hall of Fame room. No fewer than 91 Miami men are honored there, including Joe Galat, Tom Pagna and Mel Olix--but not Gillman.

Although he is in seven other halls of fame--the NFL’s among them--he continues to be ignored by the school whose longstanding athletic prominence is in part due to him.

The explanation, they say here, is that when Gillman moved in 1949 to a rival institution 35 miles up the road--the University of Cincinnati--he was accompanied by some of those he had recruited for Miami.

The small-town school apparently can’t forgive him that, regardless of what he might have done here earlier.

Besides, they seem to be thinking of other things at Miami now. The printed message on one of the most popular T-shirts at the student union proclaims: “Harvard: the Miami of the East.”