Goalposts exist at Ohio Stadium for one purpose…
We uploaded what footage is available from the end of the 1970 game against michigan1, the game billed as a casus belli for revenge (but sadly, not a crusade… I wanted a celebration where there were no survivors for people from TSUN.). Woody had place mats installed at the foot of the player’s entrance with the score from last year’s game as extra motivation and Ohioans and Columbusites had been nervous about the game for the whole year leading up to it. The Buckeyes, however, stepped up from the beginning, capitalizing on several michigan turnovers to catapult the Buckeyes to a 20-9 victory, an undefeated regular season and a trip to the Rose Bowl against Stanford in the Super Soph’s last season.
From what I understand, the goalposts depicted in this video did not survive the celebration on the field, but I do not know if they were marched triumphantly down High Street and piked on the grounds of the State Capitol like they were in 1968. Is anyone out there reading this that could verify what happened to the goalposts? The video we have cuts out unexpectedly.
Oh, and for future patrons of Ohio Stadium: I’m not sure if we’ll ever get to catch another game in the Shoe, what with the cost of transportation being what it is and more than likely what it will be shortly. For those of you damned fortunate enough to be regulars at the Shoe, I demand a similar celebration, even down to shouting down the final seconds of the game clock. Make us proud, dammit.
Enjoy. I think we only have two more games of note left to upload whenever we get around to it: the 1969 Rose Bowl and a game against Northwestern in Cooper’s second year.
- I’m not capitalizing your precious block m, michigan fans. Y’all ain’t worth it. [↩]
just to clarify: Jim Betts was a Cleveland, Ohio product (Benedictine HS) for the Wolvereenies, and thus that spiffy ‘stache might be classified as a Buckstache.
I don’t know what happened to these goal post but I do know full well what happened to the goal post after a 1985 game against Iowa. After serving it’s purpose gloriously, it was painted scarlet and retired to the legendary Papa John’s on High Street. However, since the fire which destroyed PJs, I know that the owner rescued it at the time but it has since been lost to history.
I told my story of the Iowa game goal post a couple of years ago:
http://www.thebuckeyeblog.com/2006/09/30/buckeyes-face-historic-rematch-in-iowa/
I really miss those types of things. I still have a dream that tossing toilet paper rolls in the stadium will become fashionable again.
I keep hoping that Buckeye football patrons will start paying attention en masse to soccer games over in Europe and pick up some of the motifs there: singing songs — sometimes improved and totally random — at the top of the lungs (the half-assed way Ohio Stadium sings Carmen Ohio never sits well with me), waving flags and scarves, setting flares, never sitting down and never being quiet for an extended period of time. You know: being bigger lunatics than we already are.
Ohio Stadium is unpleasant as it is, but it doesn’t have that mystique, for visitors/away teams that is, that you might not make it out alive. I’m not talking about that namby-pamby-ohh-someone-might-throw-a-beer-bottle-or-something anxiety that Lloyd Carr voiced in 2002. I’m talking that oh-shit-the-game-is-over-run-for-your-lives feeling. Sports fans everywhere in the United States respond too much to the cues of jumbotrons, cheerleaders and bands — almost as if we’re controlled and the widescreen jumbotron is our Panopticon. I’m confident that Buckeye football fans are more than capable of transcending the pedestrian cheers of our times into full-blown havoc.
I think of that a lot as well. We are already considered the hooligans of CFB, so we might as well go all the way, right?
It’s funny. I know guys that were anti-soccer all through our youth. And then they had daughters. That started to play soccer. And finally an appreciation.
There’s a post or two and a rallying cry in here somewhere.
Hear hear. I wish higherups in Block O could go to a place like Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow for an Old Firm match or to Anfield to hear “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and come back ready to duplicate that for an Ohio State home game.
As much as I love our band — the best damn band in the land it is — they need to keep up with the fans, and not having to prod the fans into keeping up with the game. It always bothered me that when a few members of the band would matriculate to different parts of the Shoe to play a little tune to fire a section of Ohio Stadium up, no one interpreted that for what it is: laziness on account of the fans so severe that a few band members had to come play a tune to get them to do something.
I suspect the nature of the problem is more holistic than something reducible to the agency of a group like Block O (a problem like pricing normal Joes out of the game in favor of quiet old people with lots of money), but at least I can take solace in knowing that we’re not as comatose as Michigan football fans.