Woody not only Hayes beloved on a campus
Acertain Mr. Hayes was an Ohio native, a fierce football competitor and a beloved figure on a Midwestern campus.
But his first name wasn’t Woody.
Isaac “Ike” Hayes — Woody’s older brother — was posthumously inducted Friday into the Iowa State University Hall of Fame. In Ames, Iowa, he is remembered as a football player and a renowned veterinarian who died suddenly in 1955.
Ike Hayes rivaled — or maybe even exceeded — Woody’s competitiveness, if the stories told by Ike's daughters, Mary Hoyt Hemmer and Marty Armstrong, both of Upper Arlington, are any indication.
When her father was in high school, said Hemmer, 76, Woody found his brother weeping in his bedroom and asked what was wrong.
“My dad looks up and says, ‘I just realized the football season is over, and I don’t get to play for another whole year.’”
Ike Hayes was born in 1911 in Clifton, Ohio. His sister, Mary (who became a Broadway performer), was eight years older, and his brother, Woody, was two years younger. The family moved to Newcomerstown, in Tuscarawas County, before Woody was 2.
Their mother and father found their rambunctious sons a handful.
The father, the superintendent of schools in Newcomerstown, once went to a nearby community to give a speech, only to learn that most residents were at a boxing match. When he checked it out, he was surprised to see that the competitors were his teenage sons, who had been secretly staging boxing matches for money under the names Battling Nelson and the Cuban Kid.
Ike hitchhiked to Iowa State to go to veterinary school. He played guard on the football team, earning all-conference and AllAmerica honors in the 1930s.
Ike served in World War II and established a veterinary practice in Waterloo, Iowa, where he was known for treating horses.
The meanest horses were brought to him because he could calm them, said Armstrong, 78. "He was the expert."
Her family went to Pasadena, California, to attend the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1955, and saw Ohio State, coached by Woody, beat the University of Southern California. Ike died three weeks later of a heart attack at age 43. The Iowa State campus has a marble bench dedicated to him.
When Woody died in 1987, Hemmer said, Ike figured in the remarks made by Michigan's Bo Schembechler.
Woody had invited Ike to sit on the Buckeyes' bench during an Ohio State game against the University of Iowa. At halftime, Ike followed the team into the locker room and proceeded to shout advice that proved useful in a second-half comeback.
When the mystified Schembechler, then an OSU assistant, asked the identity of the visitor who had roused the team with Woody-like verve, a player replied: “That was Woody’s brother.”