He also sued his father, Michigan, and school officials for $500,000 after he claimed they reneged on a deal to allow him to make souvenirs from discarded stadium bleachers.
This time, he said that when he told Bo and his mom, Millie, about Anderson’s abuse, Bo replied, “I don’t want to hear this,” and punched Matt in the chest.
I asked the three attorneys present whether one other person has come forward to say Anderson sexually assaulted them when they were preteens.
Another of Schembechler’s sons, Shemy, who reveres Bo and named his only child after him, tweeted Thursday, “I love my brother Matt and I pray for him often.” Matt deserves that level of empathy.
I wanted to place Schembechler and his rival and mentor, Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, in the context of the turbulent decade when they faced each other, from 1969 to ’78: Two men trying to instill militaristic discipline and respect for authority at a time when campuses were increasingly skeptical of both.
I just wanted him to know that I was working on this, his friends would probably tell him I called, and I hoped he would not try to block the project.
That book, War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest was published in 2008, almost two years after Schembechler died.
He was shaped by the 1930s and 1940s, when he grew up in the small town of Barberton, Ohio.
He was trying to apply the values and beliefs of his childhood in a country that was changing.
Some thought he was a boorish autocrat.
If Schembechler walked into a team meeting and every player in there was scared to death of him, he was pleased.
Johnson said Thursday, “Everybody knew Bo knows everything that goes on on campus.” This was part of the legend, and it has informed a lot of stories about Schembechler.
I feel comfortable saying that many players joked at the time about his invasive exams and others didn’t realize they were criminal acts until much later.
And yet, Johnson and Kwiatkowski say they did complain at the time, and as the Detroit News and Free Press have reported, there is evidence that complaints about Anderson reached the university administration.
That’s the Bo Schembechler that I knew.” There are 1,000 stories to support that description of Schembechler, and that is why a lot of people can’t imagine him ignoring a travesty of this magnitude.
Should he have addressed player complaints about being assaulted in a medical exam? Of course! Is it possible that Schembechler did not see it that way and told his players to toughen up? Yes.
It’s an attempt to understand how the Bo Schembechler that many of his players revered might have failed many of them so fundamentally.
During his courageous press conference Thursday, Kwiatkowski said, “I don’t think we were ready as a culture back in the ’70s to handle this.” Schembechler was an icon of that culture.
Jim Toy, perhaps the most important gay activist in the university’s history, warned a superior in 1977 that Anderson was “fooling around with boys” at University Health Services.
The historian Jon Meacham, in his wonderful book The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels writes about what he calls “the moral utility of history.” Essentially: What can we learn from our failures? Too often, we judge actions of the past by standards of the present, which allows us to feel better about ourselves but doesn’t really teach us anything.
A civilized society evolves—not just our sense of right and wrong, but our mechanisms for dealing with them and our willingness to use those mechanisms. The Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal at Penn State claimed so many careers and reputations because people did not act as anybody could reasonably expect them to act.
Perhaps it will be reasonably proved that Robert Anderson did indeed molest 10-year-old Matt Schembechler in 1969, and that Matt told his parents and brother, and that his father hit him, and that nobody did anything about it.
The statue is both a recruiting tool and a reminder to anybody that Schembechler built the modern version of the program.
Statues are visually appealing, even inspiring, but they attempt to summarize a person’s existence and value on earth in a single pose with a fixed facial expression.
Woody Hayes complained, “We’re tearing down all our heroes in America.” Maybe in sports, we have too many.