With apologies to Huey Lewis. And his news organization.

I’ve focused much of my attention lately on UC’s football history, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about all four of my deceased grandparents – I’ve dreamed about my maternal grandfather twice in the past month, which is weird because I don’t recall ever dreaming about him before. I’m using a new shaving cream (an old school brand that just smells ancient and is imported from Italy. Julie, my wife, loves telling people that) and a double-edged razor. My paternal grandfather was a barber, and I can imagine him shaving a customer’s face with his straight edge (which I keep on a bookcase shelf in my basement and which I probably won’t ever use on myself) and using something that smells similar to my Proraso. I went into the Shriners Syrian Hall the other day, and it reminded me of a building in which maybe my parents would have gone to high school (it’s hard to describe, but the lettering of the sign leading into the bathroom and the way the stairs were built made me think of the 1960s – or how I imagine the 1960s).

I’ve been reading old newspaper clippings lately, and I’ve wondered if maybe it would have been better to be a sports writer in the 1930s and ‘40s (typewriters, Western Union telegrams, cigar smoke, train rides, wool suits and porkpie hats, martinis and broads, Extra! Extra! and “Stop the Presses”, the grit) than today (wireless laptops, jeans and flip-flops, the 24-hour news cycle, 6 a.m. airplane flights out of Cleveland, “E-mail me your copy by the 8 p.m. deadline,” the polish).

Anyway, I’m fascinated by history, so this part of The Odyssey research has been much more enjoyable for me. Originally, I was going to start talking about UC’s football history by writing about Sid Gillman – which means, 1949 onward. But then, when I was at the library downtown about ready to delve into a world of microfilm and 15 cent copies, I figured, what the hell, let’s go all the way back. To 1885 when UC played its first football game. And you know what I found? Coverage of polo (not the kind played in the pool, but the one with the horses), brutally un-PC (and mildly offensive) advertisements, and news about how some country named Servia (cq*) declared war against Bulgaria.

*Cq, of course, tells your copy editor that, ‘Yeah, I know this spelling looks screwed up, but it’s actually correct.’ I have no idea where it originated, and Google was no help to me. It’s kind of like -30- at the end of your story.

I didn’t find anything about UC, so I moved on to the late 1940s and the beginning of the Gillman era – the most successful era ever for the Bearcats. It talked about a coach in Ray Nolting who was being forced out by a member of the board (The board of what? I’m not sure. I’ll have to figure that out), and a coach in Gillman who turned down the job before accepting it the next day. Deceptions and no comments and meetings in other cities. See, everything you see today was in place more than 55 years ago. Later, I found my way into the UC archives storage unit inside the decaying Armory on campus, and it was … uh … rather dusty down there. I was looking for more newspaper clippings, but all I found were mustiness, asbestos, some old-timey pictures and lots of expense reports from the last few decades. So, kind of a fruitless search.

But I got some good news. I attended the Bearcats Faithful luncheon for the first time at the Shriners Hall (I’d never even thought of ever showing up at that thing, probably because it sounds vaguely religious to me), and I got to meet Jim Kelly Sr. from the late ‘40s and early 50s squads. A sheer delight. Gave me some really interesting insight into Gillman and what he was like as a coach. He also invited me to attend the weekly Wednesday morning breakfast that consists of Kelly, Glenn Sample and a couple of other Bearcats old-timers. I’ll certainly have to do that, especially if they regale me with stories of “how it used to be.” Actually, I’ll have to insist they do that.

Then, a colleague sent me an e-mail saying he had a copy of the alumni magazine from the 1960s in which a player from the 1900 team gave a first-person account of a riot that, in my colleague’s words, occurred “at Centre College that turned into a riot, a forced train ride out of town for the team at the hands of the local sheriff and the student manager being held hostage until the university president wired money down for his release.” That to me is … well, it’s freaking awesome. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do about sourcing my material and bibliography stuff, but I have to get that in the book. Which, after reading that story, you should mentally be pre-ordering (buy six, and I’ll throw in the seventh for free*).

*This offer is subject to change and/or could be a total lie.

Sigh, if only the 1990s research was as interesting.

To visit my good friends at St. Xavier. Actually, is St. Xavier located even in Finneytown? Or is that considered Springfield Township? Or College Hill? Or Anderson Township? Or Cleveland?

I don’t know, either way I drove over there last Thursday to interview Bombers coach Steve Specht and a couple of his players. Actually, the impetus for me heading over there was a freelance piece I wrote for rivalshigh.com, but I figured since I was there, I might as well double-dip and pick up some material for The Odyssey.

Got some really good stuff from Specht, defensive end Pat Muldoon and Luke Massa.

A quick aside:

With the book, I’m kind of lost right now. After I finished interviewing Mark Dantonio a couple weeks ago in Chicago, I wasn’t sure which direction to go. A week or two before that, I had lunch with some former Posties, and Lonnie Wheeler was telling me not to worry about writing right now. At this point in the book, it’s about the research, interviews and organization. That made me feel a little better. Plus, if it got to be nut-cutting time, I feel I could probably bust out the book in about a month or so (as long as I had all the info I needed to write). Maybe.

But I’m still not sure what I’m doing. I’ve got 11 of who-knows-how-many chapters mapped out so far (all of which is subject to change), but only one of those chapters is dedicated to the Rick Minter years. I’m going to need at least two (I can’t remember what they are, but luckily, I recorded a memo on my cell phone that hopefully has the answer). One other chapter I’m going to write revolves around what a BCS program needs to succeed.

In my mind, three big keys are: state-of-the-art facilities (well, not necessarily state-of-the-art, maybe up-to-date is a better description); an in-city/in-state recruiting base; and stability on staff. If you think of it that way, there was really no way Minter was going to succeed, because the facilities when he first got to UC were pretty bad, he didn’t have much success with in-city recruiting, and, boy, there wasn’t much staff stability.

I’m just not sure where to put all that stuff. I think it deserves its own chapter, but I don’t want to overlap it too much with the Minter era chapters.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to Specht about how the last three UC coaches have recruited his players and about Kerry Coombs (for those who don’t know, Coombs was a big-time high school coach at Colerain and is now the DB coach for UC), and I wanted to ask Muldoon and Massa about their perceptions about UC while growing up in this city as aspiring football players.

Specht surprised me with his Coombs answer – which I guess you’re going to have to read in the book – and Muldoon and Massa didn’t (instead, they pretty much gave me what I was hoping to hear). Muldoon – who’s cut his potential college list to four schools (UC, Virginia, Boston College and Wisconsin while eschewing offers from Ohio State and Notre Dame) – said if he had been in this position five years ago, UC probably wouldn’t have been a blip on his radar screen. Now, he might pick the Bearcats over the Buckeyes.

If that isn’t progress for UC in in-city recruiting, I don’t know what is. As far as progress on the book is concerned, not so much, although I did have a lovely conversation with Pastor Pete, the team chaplain, Wednesday afternoon.

Subjects interviewed (on the record): 11
Hours spent transcribing interviews: 7:07
Words written: 0
Blog posts: 11

CHICAGO - Sort of. I'm here for the second of two days at the Big Ten Football Kickoff at the luxurious Hyatt Regency (I, unfortunately, am not on the company dime, so I stayed out by O'Hare). My purpose was to get Mark Dantonio for one hour (my goal) or 20 minutes (Michigan State's counter-offer).

For some reason, my attempt to get in touch with Dantonio before last week virtually was non-existent. I was too focused on trying to get BK and Minter and Mike Thomas and all those other guys, and I knew I'd probably have to drive to East Lansing, Mich., to get him. So I put it off a little bit. Which brings me to Chicago.

I e-mailed Michigan State's sports information director last week, asking if he thought it'd be better to drive to East Lansing before Michigan State goes into camp, drive to Chicago and get him here, or just do a long phone interview. He said Chicago would be the best bet and that I'd need to contact the Big Ten ASAP to get credentialed. Funny thing, though. The Big Ten wouldn't credential me (as a freelance writer working on a book that has nothing to do with the Big Ten). I ended up finagling a credential (a thousand thanks to Josh Pichler), and then, I figured, 'Well, while I'm out here, I might as well see if I can drum up some freelance work and help pay for my expenses.' The NY Times said yes, it needed some help.

That's why I'm here in a media work room at the Hyatt Regency at 7:30 (CT) on a Friday morning.

And it turns out, 90 percent of my time has been eaten up by NY Times work.

Anyway, I woke up at 5 a.m. Thursday, drove to Chicago (hitting the beginning of rush hour in Indianapolis and the end of rush hour here), and I was told I could maybe get Dantonio for 15 minutes. Yeah, nine hours of driving for a 15-minute interview. At first, Dantonio didn't seem all that thrilled to have to talk to me.

But he was a good sport, and after we went outside the hotel and sat on a bench, he was pretty good. I actually got 30 minutes with him (hooray for minimal transcribing!), and he told me some good stories and gave me some good insight. Then we made fun of C. Trent for a while, so you know we were bonding.

Afterward, I met some friends for dinner in the suburbs, left about midnight, got lost, my phone died, I almost ran over a skunk, I asked for directions, I got stopped by a train, and I saw two people (obviously) riding a tandem bike. At midnight. I think, by that point, I was delirious anyway.

I'm not really sure if this was a trip worth taking. I know it was my only chance to get Dantonio (until after football season anyway), so I guess that was good. And I made more than enough money to cover my expenses, and that's good. My friends, Ling and Mark, picked up my dinner tab and Dantonio offered me a sandwich before we started the interview. All that was good.

Plus, it’s not every day you get to see a tandem bike. That actually might have been the highlight.

... And I left nearly four hours later with a tape recorder almost completely full, my laptop almost completely out of battery power and four cups of coffee that still are making my head whir on an axis (also, my heart is beating inside my eardrum). But it was perhaps the most progress I've made on The Odyssey thus far.

 I sat down with Rick Minter today - and his newly-married son Jesse, a grad assistant at UC - at Frisch’s, and he was the (forgive the oft-used Cincinnati scribe gag) a sheer delight. I think he was a little apprehensive coming into the interview – what my angles are going to be, if I'm going to focus most of it on what the players who didn't like him had to say, and (I'm guessing) if I'm going to drag his name through the mud – but I told him I was looking at his tenure in the most-balanced, most-fair, most-reporterly way possible.

Right now, this is the way I see the Minter angle playing: he was a good thing for UC football. He brought the program to a level of winning it never had experienced (well, not in the 40 years preceding him anyway). The culture began to change, he laid the foundation, the coaches that came afterward benefited from the fruits of his labor, etc. Of course, there are some negatives. He had to hire 50 assistant coaches in 10 years (he gave me some interesting perspective into this angle in which he thinks it wasn't necessarily a bad thing). He didn't have a winning record. He couldn't/didn't get the team to the level it is now. But ultimately, Minter was a positive for UC. I don't know how many people would disagree, but I think, even for those who didn't like Minter and for the players who didn't like competing for him, you'd have a hard time arguing against that.

Anyway, we had breakfast, loaded up on coffee (quick shout-out to Amy, our server) and got down to business. 150 minutes later, my recorder nearly was smoking. Then, the three of us chatted for a while longer before Minter took the drive back to Huntington, W.V. and his defensive coordinator job at Marshall.

Say what you will about Rick, but the man will talk. That, of course, is invaluable to me, because I have an entire book to fill up. Not only that, he was interesting, funny (at times) and gave me a ton of insight into a time in the program's history of which I'm not all that familiar (minus the hours of research I've put into it). From what I saw, there were only two questions he didn't like:

1)    I asked him if he was a hard man to work/play for. He said that wasn't for him to decide. Before that, though, he had talked about how his main man, Lou Holtz, was considered a hard man to work for, but he said, if Holtz called him tomorrow, he'd love to take another job with him. My guess is Minter wouldn't be the only one.

2)    I asked him about JCB’s claim about the knee braces. He said if that’s all JCB could remember during his four years of playing, I should consider the source. But he also said it was for the player's protection, and it wasn't exactly a Minter innovation. I think the coaches at Notre Dame did the same thing.

Other than that, everything seemed to go smoothly. Plus, Minter picked up the bill. Which I really didn't want him to do – after all, he spent almost four hours having to listen to my questions – but he insisted (I also noticed Jesse didn't put up much of a fight). But it was great of Minter to let me into his brain a little bit, let me see how he felt and what he went through as he began building the UC program you see today. It's clear he wants to help UC as much as possible, and really, he had nice things to say about his time there.

Earlier this week, I also sat down with Mike Thomas, and that was fine. He provided some good overview stuff, but for the nitty-gritty on marketing and other affairs, I'll have to go elsewhere. One reason Thomas probably couldn't be as forthright as Minter. Minter has been out of the UC system for five years, so he can talk more in depth – and more frankly – than a guy like Thomas can.

Still, an interesting couple of days. I go back to see BK on Monday.

Subjects interviewed (on the record): 5
Hours spent transcribing: 5:50
Words written: 0
Blog posts: 8