The Skip Report: Randy Walker Remembered
6/29/2016 11:42:00 AM | Football
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
He was raised in the Ohio town of Troy and weaned on the legendary Woody Hayes, that quintessential example of the ornery, old-fashioned coach. But also, as a senior at that city's high school, he landed the lead role of Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," the musical that features the song "If I Were A Rich Man."
He established, on his arrival in Evanston in 1999, a work ethic and sense of discipline that were foreign to many of those players he inherited. "We thought we were working hard, then he came. To tell you the truth, when he came and said a couple of things, I thought some of the things he said were impossible," one of them, the wide receiver Teddy Johnson, once remembered.
He, when necessary, could most-certainly trot out a cliche with the alacrity of your typical coach. But also, and more often, he would offer up observations as original as they were homespun. "You have to view a game as you view a practice. It's taking the straight drive on the driving range to the golf course," he once intoned. "How many of us have just hit balls and balls and said, 'I've got it. I'm feeling good'? Then you see the first dogleg with a little pond on the left, and we crap ourselves. It's the same deal. Trust your swing. Trust what you do."
That is how the Scribbler remembers Randy Walker, a good man whom death stole away a decade ago. He resisted labels, rejected boundaries, refused categorization, and reflected instead that cry of the poet Walt Whitman, who wrote in "Song of Myself," "I am large. I contain multitudes." For there was, quite simply, a breadth to him, a range that belied the conventional image of the blinkered-and-bombastic football coach.
Surely he was driven to succeed at his profession, which he approached with a mindset as tough as annealed steel. Yet, concurrently, he found time to argue politics and to listen to talk radio; to read biographies of great leaders and to hear former Secretary of State Colin Powell speak; to attend a performance of "Aida" and to spend an evening viewing that most-untraditional show, "Blue Man Group."
"He would go to symphonies and ballets and operas if he had the time," his widow Tammy once remembered. "That wouldn't be his first choice. But it would be something he'd go to more if he had time because of his love of music."
"I think music's neat," Walker himself agreed at the same time. "I think I could sing you every song from 'Hello Dolly.' Yeah. I know I could. I can sing you the Beatles, the Beach Boys. But I don't know anything after 1975."
He didn't know anything after that for a very simple reason. That was the year he set off on his coaching career. Now, for him, there was limited time for frivolity, his approach here governed always by the lessons he had learned while growing up back in Southwestern Ohio. Some of those lessons came from his father, Jim, who often put in overtime and instilled a relentless work ethic. And others came from his mom, Ruth Ann, who kept an immaculate house and instilled an attention to detail. But one that was most-abiding came on the field itself, came at the end of his season as an undersized sophomore running back for Troy High.
It had been a rebuilding year for his team, but now, with one play remaining in its final game, it was tied with powerful Dayton Wayne and savoring the chance for an upset. A Hail Mary pass was called, the ball landed in Walker's hands, and he turned and sprinted toward all the glory awaiting him in the end zone. He would never reach it. He would instead be tackled 18-inches short of the goal line.
"In our town, I heard about that a lot. In the barbershop, in the schoolhouse," he once remembered, and he heard about it too from Jim Conard. He was the coach of that Troy team and, shortly after this game, he gave each of his players a strip of cloth that was exactly 18-inches long. "We had to carry it around with us for a whole year," Walker then related. "That's how far away we were. Not very much, not very long. That taught me a lot. That's when I made the choice. I was never going to be 18 inches short again."
That is the thought that drove all his future efforts and drove him also to push his players, whom he could treat as gruffly as his old hero Hayes. But then, after so many practices, here came Tammy with their dog Magic, and now he was transformed into a kid again romping through the fields with his pet. That last visual, it is an abiding image for the Scribbler, and testifies again to the multitudes within Walker, to Walker's refusal to wear any sort of label.
Extant too a decade later is a folder testifying to the singularity of some of his observations, a folder labeled "The Sayings of Chairman Randy" and filled with pages that are yellowing yet still readable. So here he is when asked his mood after a particularly-enervating loss: "I wasn't Chuckles the Clown."
And here he is when asked about his team's failures in a big loss: "It's that old adage. Some days those dogs don't want to hunt. You can't kick 'em off the porch. They just sit up on the porch, become porch puppies, and that's the end of it. Hopefully, they'll go out and hunt next week. We got to go out and hunt."
And, most memorably, here he is when asked about his game: "I think football's primal. It goes back to the Stone Age. There were cavemen back in the Stone Age who hid in the back of the cave and hoped no one would find 'em, and they went out and foraged and found bits and pieces. Then there were other cavemen who took a club in their hand and went out and kicked somebody's butt with it and took what they wanted to take. We're still doing that. That's what our game is. You've got to learn to come out of the cave with your club in your hand and get after it. That's what people do who prevail in our game."
There were, of course, many more such utterances, just as there are countless other memories. But we will stop here and, thinking of him as Tevye, simply finish with this. Randy Walker was a rich man in ways that had nothing to do with money.
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