CHASE BEGINS
Meyer’s OSU run opens with sanctions, special season
For a fleeting moment, Urban Meyer thought about leaving
Ohio State before he ever coached a game. h Before he went on a seven-year run of almost unprecedented success as the Buckeyes’ football coach, Meyer wondered on that December
day in 2011 what he’d gotten himself into. h Here he was, as
Ohioan as one could be. Toledo-born from parents who met in Cincinnati.
Raised in Ashtabula, in the northeastern corner of the state.
A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State. A head football coach for the first time at Bowling Green. h When he began his coaching career, becoming an assistant at Ohio State was his dream. h “That was the ultimate goal,” Meyer said. “I never thought about the head coach piece of it. My focus was if I could ever become an assistant coach back at Ohio State.” h Meyer won two national championships at Florida before his own relentless nature became a weakness instead of a strength. Worn down by pressure, mostly selfimposed, he stepped away from the Gators and spent 2011 as an
ESPN analyst.
It was fortuitous timing. Jim Tressel’s highly successful run at Ohio State ended with the tattoo-and-memorabilia scandal that prompted his forced resignation on Memorial Day in 2011, leaving his defensive assistant Luke Fickell to coach the Buckeyes on an interim basis.
Meyer’s wife, Shelley, knew what that meant. She was skeptical about her husband returning to coaching.
“Shelley cried,” Meyer said. “I remember she teared up and she goes, ‘You know what this means?’ ”
When the 2011 Buckeyes, decimated by the suspensions of several star players, limped down the stretch of the season, athletic director Gene Smith decided not to retain Fickell and to pursue Meyer.
Independently, Meyer and Smith had done research on the NCAA’S upcoming decision about further penalties for OSU. They had talked to experts who assured them it would be unprecedented for Ohio State to be hit with a postseason ban or scholarship reductions.
But three weeks after Meyer was hired, that’s what the NCAA imposed. When Smith told Meyer of the sanctions, both were dumbfounded and angry.
“I recovered quickly, but I had to sit down and be like, ‘What do I do?’ ” Meyer said. “I had thoughts of, ‘Do I have anything in my contract that says I don’t have to do this?’ ”
Meyer said that lasted only a moment. This was his dream job, after all. But he believed the NCAA sanctions were a severe body blow. He thought the effects could last five or six years, perhaps even a decade, because the NCAA would allow OSU seniors to transfer without having to sit out a season.
“If you start losing players, we’re in trouble,” Meyer said.
Meyer arranged a meeting with some of the team leaders — Zach Boren, Etienne Sabino and John Simon. He could tell they were beaten down.
“When I walked out of there, it’s not like we solved the problem,” Meyer said. “I thought, ‘This is not going away.’ ”
Already, he had not gotten great vibes at the start of his tenure. When Smith introduced Meyer at an OSU basketball game, fans booed the athletic director.
“I mean, it was loud boos,” Meyer said, incredulously.
To Meyer, the Woody Hayes Athletic Center looked outdated, badly in need of a facelift.
His first look at his team also was discouraging. Fickell finished out the season as coach with a perfunctory loss to Florida in the Gator Bowl.
Meyer scheduled his first full team meeting for the next morning in Columbus. A handful of players were noshows. Meyer chewed out the team, then scheduled another meeting for 6 a.m. the next day. Several offensive linemen showed up late.
“They were bad-looking linemen, too,” he said. “Fat. Not what I’m used to. They come walking through those doors — terrible-looking linemen who just got their butt beat by Florida walking in late with no urgency like, ‘What’s the problem?’ That’s when it hit the fan.”
Meyer had strength coach Mickey Marotti, his right-hand man, start grueling workouts at dawn outside in the winter cold.
Slowly, the team started to turn around. Shared misery helped the team bond.
When the 2012 season started, Meyer knew he had a budding star in quarterback Braxton Miller, but he had no inkling the team would go undefeated.
But that’s what the Buckeyes did, flawed as they were. After a shaky performance in nonconference games, their resolve and confidence grew after edging Michigan State 17-16 in East Lansing.
A victory over Michigan without the injured Simon, who had emerged as the defensive leader, clinched a 12-0 season.
That the Buckeyes weren’t eligible to play in the postseason only adds to Meyer’s reverence for that team. The 2012 team is as special to him as his national championship ones because it stuck together with nothing to play for but pride and each other.
“I think everybody’s accountable for their own actions,” Meyer said. “But when you’re held accountable for other people’s actions, I have a problem with that. I just think that’s wrong. You’re responsible for yourself.
“I still don’t understand those penalties. Why do that to players that had nothing to do with that? That turned out to be the most selfless group of people
I’ve ever been around.”
If Ohio State had been eligible and won the Big Ten title game, which was likely, the Buckeyes almost certainly would have played the only other undefeated team, Notre Dame, for the Bowl Championship Series title.
Instead, Notre Dame played Alabama, which routed the Fighting Irish 42-14. For Meyer, that was jarring. As much as he loved his team, he saw firsthand the talent gap between the Buckeyes and Crimson Tide.
In certain ways, Ohio State’s 12-0 record was a mirage, Meyer believed. He had come from the Southeastern Conference. The Big Ten of 2012 wasn’t close to that level.
“We would not have competed well against Alabama,” Meyer said.
The chase to reach the Crimson Tide’s level became his rallying cry. Right after the game, he started texting players: “The Chase is on. The Chase is real.” Signs proclaiming The Chase were plastered around the facility.
It would take two years, but that Chase would be completed. brabinowitz@dispatch.com @brdispatch
ROLLING HILLS ESTATES, Calif. — With short, sure strokes of a flathead ax, firefighter Cole Gomoll methodically chopped along the edge of the SUV’S broken windshield as golf icon Tiger Woods — tangled up in his seat belt and covered in a sheet to avoid shards of glass — waited in shock inside the mangled wreck.
When Gomoll had cut a long, continuous line to the end of the glass, he and another Los Angeles County firefighter peeled back the windshield. The 6-lb (2.7-kilogram), 36-inch-long (91-centimeter-long) ax went down, and the backboard was swapped in.
Within minutes, the ambulance had raced away, bound for the trauma center with its famous patient in the back.
It would be hours before the news broke around the world but for Gomoll and the other nine members of Fire Station 106 in Rolling Hills Estates, California, Tuesday’s call — initially reported as a traffic collision with a person trapped — lasted just 12 minutes.
“He’s just another patient,” Gomoll told The Associated Press on Friday at Fire Station 106.
The 106’s firefighters, from Gomoll up to Battalion Chief Dean Douty, stressed that anyone in Woods’ dire situation would have received the same care from them. “I didn’t know who was inside the car,” Capt. Joe Peña said, until a sheriff ’s deputy told him.
And anyone else would get the same privacy, too — the firefighters declined to recount the athlete’s conversations and condition at the scene to preserve patient confidentiality.
“His identity really didn’t matter in what we do,” Capt. Jeane Barrett said.
Even so, those minutes marked a milestone in Gomoll’s career: It was the first time the 23-year-old Marine Corps veteran had performed an extrication like that in the field.
Gomoll joined the fire station, located about a mile (1.6 kilometers) away from the crash site, in August as a probationary firefighter. Just three weeks ago, he’d practiced similar moves with one of his superiors, Barrett. “We’ve trained for stuff like this,” Gomoll said.
Woods was transferred from
Harbor-ucla Medical Center on Thursday to Cedars-sinai Medical Center for “continuing orthopedic care and recovery,” hospital officials said. A Friday night post on Woods’ Twitter account said he “received follow-up procedures on his injuries this morning. The procedures were successful, and he is now recovering and in good spirits.”
Woods had shattered the tibia and fibula bones of his lower right leg in multiple locations. Those injuries were stabilized with a rod in the tibia during a long surgery. Additional injuries to the bones in the foot and ankle required screws and pins. Woods had been driving a 2021 Genesis SUV on a downhill stretch of road known for wrecks when he struck a raised median in a coastal Los Angeles suburb, crossed into oncoming lanes and flipped several times.
The crash was the latest setback for Woods, who has won 15 major
championships and a record-tying 82 victories on the PGA Tour. He is among the world’s most recognizable sports figures, and at 45, even with a reduced schedule from nine previous surgeries, remains golf ’s biggest draw.
He was in Los Angeles last weekend as the tournament host of the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club. Monday and Tuesday had been set aside for him to give golf tips to celebrities on Discovery-owned GOLFTV.
The Los Angeles County sheriff has called the crash “purely an accident” and says drugs and alcohol did not appear to be a factor.
Everyone says Woods is lucky to be alive — and “if nothing else, it’s a good PSA for wearing a seatbelt,” Barrett added.
The first responders did, however, correct previous reports that said they’d used the Jaws of Life and a pry bar called
a halligan tool to free the celebrity.
Barrett, a 25-year fire service veteran, and her fellow firefighters know the dangers of the eponymous rolling hills in the area and have cut many drivers out of their twisted cars.
They initially had three plans for Woods’ SUV: First, try the ax on the windshield. If that didn’t work, see if going through the sunroof was a possibility. A third option would be to cut the entire roof off.
The firefighters and paramedics spoke to Woods — who introduced himself as “Tiger” — throughout, reassuring him through a hole in the windshield that he’d soon be free.
“You can tell he was in pain,” firefighter Sally Ortega said, but he was still responding to their questions and clearly anxious to get out.
“Luckily, our first plan was the one that worked,” Barrett said.