Fairborn commencement
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Division I regional track finals
Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2009 > October > 11
Sunday, October 11, 2009
OSU’s Coleman: “I Got the Party Rockin’”
COLUMBUS — Kurt Coleman summed it up perfectly:
“I got the party rockin’.”
While you may think the Ohio State senior safety and team captain was talking about his spectacular, first-quarter, 89-yard interception return for a touchdown against Wisconsin, Saturday, Oct. 10 — the play that lit the fuse on the Buckeyes’ 31-13 romp over the Badgers at Ohio Stadium — he actually was talking about the Saturday before that.
Instead of suiting up with the Bucks for their game at Indiana, the Northmont High grad was back in Dayton, enduring a one-game suspension by the Big 10 for his helmet-to-helmet hit on Illinois’ back up quarterback in the final minute of OSU’s blowout victory over the Illini in late September.
Not allowed to accompany the team, he came home to watch his alma mater defeat Wayne High on Friday night, then stayed over so he and his brother Kyle could surprise their little sister, Cassie, at her 13th birthday party.
“A bunch of 12 and 13 year old girls and us — yeah, I got the party rockin’,” he laughed. “Actually the party was supposed to have been in Bloomington if I’d travelled with the team.”
The hit on the Illini’s Eddie McGee grounded him, though he said it was “just a split-second thing” and “not intentional.
“I didn’t really know I’d hit him in the head, but people kept talking to me about it afterward and I started to get more aware of what happened. When Coach Tress (head coach Jim Tressel) finally called and told me I was being suspended, my stomach kind of dropped.
“I didn’t get mad, I just planned to learn from it — learn you can’t hit the quarterback helmet to helmet Then I decided to turn it into a positive.”
He did in three steps:
— He did his best to prep his back-up, freshman Orhian Johnson, for IU: “I wanted him to see what I saw, know what I knew.”
— He got his sister a special present: “She’s into retro, so my brother and I got her two pairs of Chuck Taylors — one high top, one low.”
— He made his return to the Bucks line-up quite emphatic. He had 14 tackles Saturday and his interception return was the fifth longest in OSU history.
Under pressure from the Bucks defensive front, Badger quarterback Scott Tolzien threw the ball high as he avoided a sack.
“The ball came right to me and as soon I got it, I saw a sea of red and just got behind my teammates and they led me all the way down the field. I did the easy part, they did all the work.”
His score put OSU up 7-0 and — like last week — got the party rockin’ on a day filled with big plays by the Bucks.
Asked if scoring his first college TD — as a crowd of 105,301 gave him roaring support — was a lot better than that birthday party the week before, he surprised you and shook his head:
“Both memories are something I’ll cherish. To see my sister’s face on her birthday — that will always be a special moment for her. You’ve got to remember, football only goes so far…but family is forever.”
TweetBob Logan: “Stivers saved my little rear end”
MEDWAY — Before Stivers High decided to enshrine him as one of its most storied athletes ever — more than just an All City football player, he’s become a hard-nosed legend of Tiger reclamation — the school helped save him.
That’s why, as Bob Logan has looked forward to his induction into the Stivers Athletic Hall of Fame today, October 11, he’s also found himself looking back to a time when teenage trouble — and the incredulous penalty it drew — was giving any hope of glorious accomplishment by him a solid stiff-arm to the snoot.
Growing up poor in the 1940s and early ’50s, he lived in the hard-scrabble Fifth St. neighborhood near Stivers on the East End.
He can tell you about pulling a little red wagon up and down the railroad tracks picking up coal that fell from the passing trains and bringing it home.
He put cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes in his soles and he remembers toting a kettle into the Rendezvous, an old Italian place at La Belle and Fifth, and getting 50 cents worth of spaghetti so his family could eat.
He said his dad was rough man — “his discipline was bad news,” — and died when Bob was 12. To support her son and daughter, Logan’s mom worked long hours as a waitress in the bars and eateries along E. Fifth.
For a while, Logan spent all his free time at the Bomberger Center and the Boys and Girls Club. But when he turned 15, he began hanging out with a bunch of guys, most of whom cared little for sports, school or anything else constructive
“We were standing around one day wondering what we were gonna do and one kid says, ‘I got a brother in Newark, New Jersey, let’s go see him,” Logan said.
Without a cent in his pocket and just the clothes on his back — “I’d never been nowhere in my life.” — Logan joined three other guys and hitch-hiked to New Jersey.
“We spent a couple of days there, went over to Coney Island then thumbed back,” he said. “It was an adventure and it went pretty well — so then one of the guys said, ‘Let’s go to California.’
“I said, ‘Let’s go. We hitching?’”
The kid told him no, he’d get a car.
The four piled into a ‘42 Chevy — Logan anchored in the back because he didn’t know how to drive — and they headed west. But near Martinsville, Indiana, they ran out of gas.
“We went over to an abandoned farmhouse, smoked some cigarettes and then we left the car along the road and walked into town,” he said.
Soon the local cops had them corralled.
That car the kid had produced — it was stolen.
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“I ALMOST FLIPPED A GASKET”
“Times were different then,” the 73-year-old Logan said as he sat at the kitchen table of his home outside Medway the other day. “There was no phone call, no lawyers, no trial, no nothing. Nobody back home even knew where we were. The judge just sentenced us to six months in the county jail.”
After four weeks of confinement, a jailer let one of the kids go to a nearby store to buy a soda pop. Instead, he boy called his mom back in Dayton.
“Next thing you know here comes the lawyers and after six weeks of us being locked up, all charges were suspended,” Logan said. “We were feeling pretty good until the G-people showed up and said, ‘You boys took a car across state lines.’ They handcuffed us and took us to the federal prison in Danville, Illinois.”
After another six weeks, they finally appeared before a judge who told the kids he was sending them to a correctional institution in Washington, D.C. until they were 21 years old.
“I almost flipped my gasket and passed out,” Logan said. “Then the judge said he was suspending the sentence and giving me two years probation.”
Once back at Bomberger, Logan wondered what he was going to do. The three other kids never did go back to school and a couple would get into serious trouble later.
“I looked across the street at Stivers and decided to walk over,” he said. “Mr. (Floyd) Carpenter — he was the principal — happened to be there that day and I told him I wanted to go to school. He made me a freshman and, well, that moment changed me forever.
“Stivers High — and the sports I played there — pretty much saved my little rear end. It gave me new direction.”
That direction often led him straight to the end zone. Though just 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds, he became a tough-as-nails, two-way star for the Tigers, winning All City honors a junior defensive back and senior running back.
His games fueled newspaper headlines. He had touchdown runs of 75 and 70 yards — an 85-yard score was called back — against Wilbur Wright.
He led the Tigers to a stunning upset of Chaminade, which had won 49 straight games and, as Logan remembers it, “hadn’t lost to a City team in like 12 years.”
And then there was the game against Roosevelt. He was a little sophomore defender and ended up running face first — there were no face masks back then — into the helmet of a Teddy lineman.
“When I saw him after the game, he goes, ‘My mouth got messed up,’” laughed Betty Jean — she goes by Jean — who back then was his new girlfriend and now is his wife of 53 years. “He was all bloody and his two front teeth were gone so all you saw were the nerves dangling. He’d played the whole game like that.”
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“THAT’S A HOOD IF I EVER SAW ONE”
Jean met him when he was a freshman and she was a Wilbur Wright eighth grader. The first time she brought him to her McReynolds Street home, she said her mom had a less-than-flattering assessment, saying:
“That’s a hood if I ever saw one.”
Her mom, like so many others, soon learned what Bobby Logan really was about and, as Jean put it, “he ended up her favorite.
“That first Christmas he got more presents from her than I did. She bought him a winter coat and a scarf because he didn’t have one and he wore them everywhere.”
When he graduated from high school in 1956, Logan paid no attention to the small college football interest he had drawn and that August borrowed $20 from a friend and ran off with Jean to get married in Liberty, Indiana.
Jean and Bob — he’d work 19 years at NCR and then at other factory jobs — had three daughters, who in turn have brought them seven grandchildren and one great grandson — several of whom play prep sports in the area.
Bob was an avid softball player until 1973 when histoplasmosis cost him all but a little peripheral vision in one eye. In 1994, the fungal disease got into the other eye and left him legally blind and unable to drive, work and, for a brief while, even fathom a future.
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“I’M GOLFIN’ AGAIN”
Once again, sports saved him.
“I remember one morning he was kind of sitting here feeling sorry for himself, but when I got home from work something had changed,” Jean said.
“A neighbor told me from early that morning, he had been out in the field next to us here, determined to learn how to hit a golf ball again. He finally came in the house at dark, just covered with mud — he was a mess — and said, ‘I’m golfin’ again.’”
Though he has to cock his head a bit sideways to see the ball — and then it’s only a white blur — he has figured out a swing and plays at least three times a week at Kittyhawk, where he once had won two club championships and has a lake named after him.
Now walking each round, he plays to a 12 or 13 handicap and four years ago had hole in one.
He and Jean regularly walk their neighborhood with their beloved dog, Patty, and they spent a lot of time at their grandkids sporting events at Fairmont and Milton Union High, where one grandson is the Bulldogs starting safety.
“The only way I can see anything is if I train my binoculars right on him,” Logan said.
Today, the entire family will be at the Presidential Banquet Center as Logan and 15 other Stivers sports stalwarts are inducted with a social hour, dinner and ceremony that begins at noon.
“He’s really honored, but he was a little taken aback too.” Jean said.” He says, ‘I didn’t go off to college like some of the guys. I didn’t do this or that. I didn’t really do anything that great.’”
Maybe it’s the vision thing — maybe he’s still wary of an unexpected ride to a fabled place — but everybody else who knows him can see this one clearly.
There is no one more deserving of the Stivers’ embrace than Bob Logan.
The two are forever intertwined.
He brought the the school plenty of football field glory and it — as he put it so perfectly — saved his little rear end.
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