Remembering Evy

I am fortunate to have become friends with Tom Kirkendall, a very successful attorney in Houston. Tom grew up in Iowa City. He and his family were very close to Forest Evashevski and his family. He was kind enough to share his thoughts on Evy and the impact he had on Iowa Football. Our sincre thanks to Tom for this wonderful piece on the life of one of the all time great coaches.

When Forest Evashevski died this past Friday evening, the man who proved that the University of Iowa could succeed at the highest level of modern college football became one for the ages.

My earliest memories of Iowa football are inextricably intertwined with Evy's larger-than-life personality. Not only was I born the year (1953) after Evy came to Iowa, my parents - the late Walter and Margaret Kirkendall - became close friends with Evy and his beloved wife, Ruth.

It was not surprising that Evy and my father hit it off and became friends. They were born within a year of each other and came from similar working class backgrounds. Both men endured the hardships of the Great Depression as teenagers and served America with distinction during World War II after playing college football in the late 1930's (Evy was the key blocking back for the star Michigan halfback, Tom Harmon). Both men were highly-motivated in their respective professions (my father was a distinguished UI professor of medicine from the late 1940's until 1971 when he moved our family to Houston), and both enjoyed large and rambunctious families - Evy and Ruth raised seven children and my folks had ten!

One of Evy's attributes that appealed to my father was his willingness to confront difficult challenges. And make no mistake about it, the challenge that Evy confronted in reviving Iowa's football fortunes was formidable.

With rare exceptions such as Eddie Anderson and Nile Kinnick's famous 1939 Ironman squad, for almost 30 years after Howard Jones' dominant Hawkeye teams of the early 1920's, Iowa's football program had fallen into the deep abyss of college football failure when Iowa hired Evy away from Washington State in 1952. With powerhouses such as Michigan, Ohio State, Minnesota and Notre Dame dominating the Midwestern football landscape, most football experts thought that the Iowa job was simply a way station for the ambitious Evashevski before he took over one of the more prominent head coaching jobs, such as his alma mater Michigan.

But those pundits did not understand Forest Evashevski. Although ambitious, Evy had no

intention of moving his large family around in pursuing more desirable jobs. Thus, Evy and Ruth established their roots in Iowa City and became active members of the community. Evy - who was a world-class bridge player - was a particularly popular participant in Iowa City's bridge clubs of those days.

Meanwhile, Evy assembled a top-flight group of assistants and began expanding Iowa's traditionally narrow recruiting base to such fertile football fields as Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In so doing, Evy forever changed the paradigm for recruiting football players to the University of Iowa.

Coming off a 2-7 record in his first season, it was becoming clear in 1953 that Evy was turning the program around.. The 1953 team started slowly, losing to Michigan State in the opener and losing a heartbreaker to Michigan in the third game, 14-13. But by the final game of the season at Notre Dame, Iowa was 5-3, including two straight decisive shutout wins against Purdue and Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame's 1953 team was one of that storied program's best. By the time of the Iowa game, it had won seven straight, and had not even been seriously challenged. Prior to the Iowa game, the Irish had been voted number one in the wire service polls by the most lopsided vote in the history of the polls at that time.

Nevertheless, the Hawks went into South Bend and played the Irish off their feet. Behind 7-0 in the final two minutes of the first half, Notre Dame was driving, but without any timeouts.

Inasmuch as college rules at that time did not provide for the clock to be stopped on first downs or through "spiking" the ball, Notre Dame did not have enough time to get its last play off before the half.

So, on the last two plays of the first half, Notre Dame players faked injuries, and the officials called "official" timeouts to allow the injured players to get off the field. The additional timeouts allowed Notre Dame enough time to throw a touchdown pass at end of the first half to tie the score.

But in the second half, the Hawks continued to dominate the top-ranked team in the nation on their home turf. With two minutes to go, the Hawks were up 14-7. Notre Dame had the ball, but again had no time outs and no way to stop the clock.

In the final two minutes, Notre Dame moved 60 yards in eight plays, and after each play, one or more Notre Dame players faked an injury to stop the clock. Given the extra time from the fake injuries, Notre Dame was able to buy enough time to score the tying touchdown on the final play of the game. The game ended in a 14-14 tie in that era before overtime.

Notre Dame's desperation "fainting" tactics generated a firestorm of controversy throughout college football at the time, giving the Iowa football program more publicity than at any time since Kinnick's 1939 Heisman Trophy season. Grantland Rice, the legendary sportswriter, speaking at the New York Football Writers luncheon the Monday after the game, observed as follows:

"I consider it a complete violation of the spirit and ethics of football and was sorry to see Notre Dame, of all teams, using this method. Why, in heaven's name, was it allowed?"

Evy never one to miss an opportunity to generate publicity for the up-and-coming Iowa program - issued his own statement in verse:

When the One Great Scorer comes

To write against our name,

He won't ask that we won or lost,

But how we got gypped at Notre Dame!

This incredible game was a watershed for Iowa's football program. The 1953 team ended up 5-3-1, and was ranked ninth in the final wire service polls. Except for the 1939 Ironmen team, this was the best finish for a Hawkeye football team since Iowa's first Big 10 champion teams of the early 1920's.

The 1953 Notre Dame game also convinced Iowans of what they had in Evy. At the end of that season, the University of Iowa tore up his contract and gave him a 10-year contract, something that was almost unheard of in college football those days.

By the 1956 season, Evy finally believed that he had all the pieces together to make a run at the top echelon of college football. But it took a stroke of Evy's genius as a motivator of men to put the Hawkeye over the top.

With star QB Kenny Ploen at the helm, Evy installed during 1956 spring practice the Wing-T offense, his revolutionary scheme that was the precursor to many of the balanced run-pass offenses of the modern era of college football. The Hawks burst out of the gate that season, winning their first five games. That streak set up a Week Six homecoming game in Iowa City against Michigan, Evy's alma mater. Coming into the game, Michigan had beaten Iowa 13 straight times.

A capacity Iowa Stadium crowd of over 58,000 watched Iowa take a 14-3 first-half lead over the Wolverines and the Hawkeye fans were beginning to smell roses for the first time. However, Michigan battered the Hawks relentlessly in the second half and finally won 17-14 on a last minute touchdown.

Evy, the team, and Hawkeye fans were devastated. Evy later acknowledged that the loss was one of the most bitterly disappointing of his career. Moreover, the team was battered badly - a third of the Hawks' top 22 players were injured in the game and questionable for the following road game against an undefeated Minnesota team that had beaten Michigan by two touchdowns.

A win over Iowa would wrap up a trip to the Rose Bowl for the Gophers. Network television decided to televise the 1956 Iowa-Minnesota game nationally, which was still a rarity at that time. The battered Hawkeyes were seven-point underdogs coming into the game, and Evy was worried about how he could raise the morale of his team to meet the challenge.

That's when fate brought a stubborn gatekeeper into Hawkeye football lore. The day of the game was bitterly cold, and Evy and his players were shivering as they got off the Iowa team buses at the old Minnesota horseshoe stadium. As they approached the players entrance gate, the gatekeeper would not anyone from the Iowa team into the stadium without a pass ticket, which none of the players had.

Seizing the moment, Evy got into a heated argument with the gatekeeper and threatened to put his team back on the bus and drive back to the hotel if he was not going to let them into the stadium.

In the meantime, the Iowa players milled around outside in the bitter cold getting as angry as their coach over the intransigent gatekeeper. Finally, after about 20 minutes and a near riot, Minnesota athletic department officials intervened and let the team into the locker room. Evy and the players remained livid.

In a matter of minutes, a somewhat demoralized Iowa team had been transformed into an angry group of warriors. Evy commented years later that the locker room was as electric as any he had ever experienced.

A few minutes before the Hawks took the field for pre-game warm-ups, Evy walked into the training room where longtime team physician Shorty Paul was cleaning up quietly while the jacked up players were dressing out in the adjoining locker room.

"Hey, Shorty," said Evy. "Look here." Evy opened his coat and pulled out dozens of pass tickets. "I guess these are what that stubborn gatekeeper was looking for," chortled Evy with a wink.

The aroused Hawkeyes went out and outplayed Minnesota before that nationwide television

audience. After recovering a Minnesota fumble on the first offensive series, the Hawks took it in for a touchdown before the game was five minutes old.

A ferocious Hawkeye defense forced six turnovers and that TD held up for a truly memorable 7-0 Hawkeye victory. The following week, the Hawkeyes returned to Iowa City for their third big game in a row. Now it was Ohio State, the defending Big Ten champion and winner of seventeen straight Big Ten games. The game was literally for the Rose Bowl bid.

In an unforgettable pre-game speech, Evy implored his players: "You have sixty minutes to play, and the rest of your life to remember it!"

In another bruising battle, Jim Gibbons caught a third quarter Ploen pass for a touchdown that again held up for a 6-0 Iowa victory. The Hawkeyes had won their first Rose Bowl bid.

The following week, the Hawks pasted a pretty good Notre Dame team 48-8 in Iowa City.

When Michigan beat Ohio State that same day, Iowa had its first undisputed Big Ten championship in 35 years. A month and a half later, the Hawkeyes battered Oregon State 35-19 for Iowa's first Rose Bowl victory.

During Evy's final five seasons beginning with that historic 1956 season, Iowa won 37 games, lost only 8, tied 2, won two Rose Bowl games, and three Big Ten titles. During that span, the Hawks beat and tied Michigan, beat Ohio State three times, and hammered Notre Dame in four out of five games. Along with Bud Wilkinson's great Oklahoma teams, Iowa was one of the most dominant teams in college football during the latter half of the 1950's.

Before the 1960 season, the Iowa Board in Control of Athletics yielded to Evy in a feud with then Athletic Director Paul Brechler, but - in one of those decisions that looks unfathomable in hindsight - required Evy to make a choice: either continue on as head football coach or athletic director, but not both.

Accordingly, Evy announced that the 1960 season would be his last as football coach and that he would assume the Iowa athletic director position full-time. He was 42 years old. His last Iowa team - the 1960 Big Ten co-champions - beat Ohio State 35-14 and Notre Dame 28-0 in Evy's final two games as Iowa's coach.

Evy was Iowa's athletic director for the next decade, but he never seemed as fulfilled in that role as he was as Iowa's head coach. He made a masterful choice in hiring Ralph Miller to revive Iowa's flagging basketball program, but he agonized as the Hawkeye football program slid back into the abyss under his choices of Jerry Burns and then Ray Nagel as his replacements. After a disruptive black player boycott and a bitter public feud with Nagel, Evy resigned as AD in 1970.

Inasmuch as Evy's son Tom was a good friend of mine and we were in our teenage years, this was the period during which I got to know Evy personally.

One fond memory of mine is working on one of Evy's "work details" one summer disassembling an old dock at the Evashevski family's summer lakefront home near St. Ignace, Michigan. Evy was a stern taskmaster during the day, but he and Ruth would always provide a bountiful dinner for us each evening. Evy would hold court during the meal and engage us in lively discussions about many different topics. Interestingly, those conversations rarely involved football.

After Evy resigned as AD , he and Ruth spent most of their time in Petosky, Michigan, although they eventually bought a place in Vero Beach, Florida to spend the winter months. He invested wisely and sat on a number of corporate boards, so he never needed to work a regular job again after leaving Iowa.

Many folks have speculated that Evy retired from coaching too early, and even Evy suggested late in his life that perhaps he should have coached longer. But I'm not sure that's the case.

Evy loathed the recruiting aspect of college coaching, particularly the traveling that required him to be away from his family. Moreover, Evy believed in the educational mission of college athletics, so I doubt that he would have been comfortable in the obsessive environment of professional football coaching. Finally, Evy truly believed that football coaching was a young man's profession, so it's doubtful that he would have coached into old age as several of his contemporaries did.

Forest Evashevski left an indelible mark on University of Iowa football. After his era, the Iowa football program declined to the point where Iowa was characterized widely as a coaching graveyard. With Iowa's inherent recruiting limitations, many people believed that Iowa's football program could never be revived.

It finally took a creative Texan -- who had never really found his niche before coming to Iowa - to bring the Hawkeye program back from the abyss of the 1960's and 70's. But Forest Evashevski showed Hayden Fry that the University of Iowa could be a college football power.

For that, all Iowans should pay tribute and give thanks.