Jayne: Insouciance of youth can inspire wisdom in adulthood

Sometimes, inexplicably, you find yourself at the intersection of dumb and clever, of foolish and inspired, of gutsy but harmless. Sometimes you arrive at a moment that will create a memorable story for years to come.

The fact that these moments typically occur during college or young adulthood surely is no coincidence. For some reason, that age lends itself to odd behavior — even when beer is not involved. All of which is a preamble for explaining how I came to find myself standing in the living room of legendary football coach Woody Hayes.

It’s a story worth telling, yet over the years the meaning of it has been altered. You see, while the tale once served as an ode to outsized fandom, it since morphed into a paean to youth and adventure and the transition from carefree adolescence to adulthood. At the risk of spoiling the ending, carefree adolescence is more fun.

We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, the story.

You see, although I grew up in Portland, I have been a lifelong Ohio State football fan. Something about coming of age at a time when few college football games were available on TV and even fewer involved teams from the Northwest. There was little reason to be a Ducks fan or a Huskies fan when the local teams were mediocre and Ohio State was one of the giants of the sport.

Woody Hayes was the reason the Buckeyes were giants. He coached at Ohio State for 28 years, capturing 13 Big Ten Conference championships and three national titles, and while he was famous for winning football games, he was equally famous for being a crotchety curmudgeon. (He infamously was fired after punching an opposing player.)

A quirky story

Anyway, during my junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., some eight years after Hayes had retired, two friends and I got tickets to the game in Columbus between Ohio State and hated rival Michigan. We drove through the night, arrived in Columbus early Friday morning, and had no place to go until our room became available later in the day.

So, what do college students do when they have nowhere to go? Something silly, of course. We looked up W.W. Hayes in the phone book, got his address, and drove off to find the former coach’s house. After a couple stops to ask for directions, we found it — a simple, white A-frame on Cardiff Road.

“You’re the Ohio State fan, go up there,” my friends said. So, making the best possible use of my 20-year-old logic, that’s what I did. The legendary coach opened the door, and I stammered something like, “Mr. Hayes, I’m very sorry to bother you, but I’m a lifelong Ohio State fan and I’m in town for the game …” We talked for a few moments, and when I asked for an autograph, he invited me inside and sat at a desk in his living room. “To Greg, Yea Ohio, Woody Hayes,” he wrote. Nearly three decades later, I still have that autograph.

The story has been told and has been written about many times over the years, and I have been reminded of it recently with Ohio State preparing to play on New Year’s Day in the college football semifinals. The Buckeyes probably have little chance of beating mighty Alabama, but at least they are in a position that is the envy of all but three other teams across the country.

Regardless of whether the Buckeyes can outlast the Crimson Tide — and then defeat either Oregon or Florida State to win a national championship — I shall revel in my story of meeting Woody Hayes.

It’s a quirky story, really, one born of a simpler time and the innocence of youth. It’s difficult to imagine somebody knocking on the door of a famous coach — or any other celebrity — these days and having a conversation; it’s impossible to imagine doing it myself at the age of 49.

But you find yourself at some odd intersections when you are 20 years old. And usually you live to tell about them.