The Posse recently discovered John U. Bacon’s Three and Out, and we’ve made it required reading for our staff.
This may seem strange, given our general antipathy towards the University of Michigan and the scorn we heaped on the hapless RichRod.
However, Bacon’s book offers a great deal of insight about the School We Love to Hate, not the least because Bacon himself is a card-carrying, Blue-Ade-drinking Skunk Bear Slappy. He’s just a little more self-aware than most of his fellow fans.
There is so much in his book that it will take several posts to examine these insights – a mere book review is not enough. Thus we will begin a multi-part series to examine:
1. Bacon’s book itself
2. The culture of delusion and what it means to be a “Michigan Man.”
3. The truth about what happened to RichRod and how he was set up to fail
I am not well-read in the sports genre, largely because I find the writing style tedious. Most sportswriters deep down want to be the next Grantland Rice and load up their work with clichés and overwrought imagery and Bacon is no exception. On the plus side, this type of writing tends to read quickly.
Bacon begins with some background about U of M, presumably aimed at college football fans not from the Midwest or otherwise ignorant of the exalted and storied past of the Winningest! Program! Ever!
It’s clear that Bacon loves his alma mater and he lays the praise on a bit thick, though he is clearly trying to be objective. For example, early on he remarks on how classy, mature and magnanimous Michigan fans are, and goes to prove the opposite by noting that even after crushing Notre Dame 38-0, fans called into talk radio to complain about the team. It’s hard to be both a Blue Ade drinker and an honest reporter.
He also botches some of this historical background, getting quite a few details wrong – which is hard to excuse in an age where fact-checks are mouse click away. For example, he remarks that while U of M has always been U of M, Michigan State has gone through three name changes. This is incorrect – it has gone through six.
He also includes a strange reference to George Armstrong Custer inspiring his brigade of Michigan volunteers at Gettysburg by referring to them as wolverines. Maybe he is trying to document the nickname itself, which is in fact rather mysterious. Wolverines are not native to the state and the last one known to be here (in the 1990s) is believed to have gotten lost and ended up here by mistake. Such is the mascot of the University of Michigan.
The author also has a curious omission in his sketch of Skunk Bear football greatness – he jumps directly from the Wolverines’ 1947 national title to the hiring of Bo Schembechler in 1969.
The intervening 22 years? One would think that the post-war expansion of the Big Ten – particularly the admission of Michigan State – might be worth mentioning, but apparently not.
Bacon also ignores a lot of the context of the events he describes, and this greatly undermines what he is trying to do because it sets events in Ann Arbor almost in a vacuum. Football is a contact sport and the other team has a say in who wins it, but to Bacon, every game is considered a Skunk Bear victory until it is lost. Opposing teams are given little if any credit.
This is a disservice not only to the reader, but also the subject of the book. Part of the reason Lloyd Carr was forced out was that U of M football was no longer dominating the conference. Upstarts like Northwestern were challenging the status quo and of course Michigan State was beginning its own slow rebuilding process. This approach also denies Appalachian State the proper credit its infamous victory in the Big House.
Then there are the contortions he follows to reconcile is clear sympathy for the subject of his book with the historical record.
For example, conditioning coach Mike Barwis is hailed as a fitness guru, bringing much-needed reform into the team’s training regimen. Yet for all of his conditioning, Michigan’s teams tended to fall apart in the second half – hardly what one would expect from players who supposedly had vastly improved stamina. Bacon really builds up this guy, spending quite a bit of ink talking about how the trainers help rehabilitate an accident victim, but this is hardly unique. Just about every Division I school has feel-good stories like this, and they are utterly immaterial to the subject at hand. Bacon’s reason for dwelling on it is clearly to burnish the halo surrounding the Skunk Bears. It’s a waste of space.
Speaking of Barwis, Bacon placed himself in the U of M fitness program to describe first-hand how brutal it was. While I am not a fitness expert, I have passed through Army basic training and I have to say that what Bacon described is nothing short of sadistic. The object of a workout is to improve one's condition, not simply see how badly one’s body can be broken. Barwis pushed the players through intense workouts, but the results never lived up to the hype (which is probably why Barwis was sacked along with RichRod).
Perhaps the author’s greatest fault was the halo he tried to paint over RichRod’s head. It was not enough that the West Virginian simply be a good coach who got a raw deal – Bacon builds him up to be some sort of rare genius, whose hard-scrabble upbringing and ability to build programs from nothing was almost without parallel. The superlatives get awfully boring in his pre-Ann Arbor biography, particularly the nugget that he invented the spread offense while still in high school. To put it another way, he lays it on a bit thick.
Still, for those who can get past these flaws, the book is quite rewarding – even (or especially) for Spartans who want to know what goes on inside the world’s largest open-air insane asylum.
Tomorrow we will look at some of what he reveals.
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