On Tuesday, the Michigan football
family lost another beloved son, Jim Mandich, who died of cancer at
age 62.  

Regular readers of this space
know I’ve had to write a few elegies already this year, and I’m
not sure if we can bear another one right now.     

I’m not sure Mandich would
want any more, either, beyond his funeral.  As he told Angelique
Chengalis of The Detroit News last fall, after he was diagnosed
with cancer, “I said to myself, ‘No whining, no complaining, no
bitching. You’ve lived a damned good life. You’ve got lot to be thankful
for.’” 

And he did, including a great
NFL career and three grown sons – good guys, good friends.  But
I’m sure he’d like to be remembered – don’t we all? — and I
thought you might enjoy a story or two about an unusually talented and
charismatic man.  

Mandich grew up in Solon, Ohio,
outside Cleveland, and should have gone to Ohio State, where Woody Hayes
had the program riding high. 

Instead, he risked being called
a traitor, and went to Michigan.   

“Obviously, Michigan is the
better place,” he told HBO a few years ago.  “That was a very
easy decision to make. And if that’s smug, Michigan arrogance –
deal with it, Buckeyes.” 

As a junior, he played on the
1968 team that went down to Columbus and lost, 50-14.   

We got shellacked.  We
couldn’t stop ‘em and we couldn’t do anything against them. 
And Woody Hayes showed no mercy.”   

The next year, a man named
Bo Schembechler arrived in Ann Arbor, and things were not the same. 
He told his players, “From now on, I’ll treat you all the same –
Like dogs!”  He kept his promise, which helps explain why 40
or 50 guys left, some times in the middle of the night.  

That inspired Bo’s famous
phrase, “Those who stayed will be champions.” 

All the best players in that
team stayed, but the most important might have been Jim Mandich, their
only captain.  

He was a confident guy, even
a little cocky — but he had the rarer kind of swagger that attracted
people, instead of repelling them. The ladies loved him, and he had
the perfect nickname, “El Diablo.” 

I always got the feeling, whenever
Schembechler started talking about Mandich, that Bo, as tight as they
come, with tunnel vision and no time for women until he got married
at mid-age, secretly envied Mandich, this swashbuckling football star,
and wished he could be a bit more like him.   

But that never stopped Bo from
chewing him out, of course.  Someone once asked Mandich who had
a shorter fuse, Schembechler, or his legendarily hot-tempered NFL coach,
Don Shula? 

Mandich thought about it for
a moment, then said, “Neither one had a fuse.” 

Call it a draw.  

But Mandich was also a serious
student, who graduated in four years with a degree in economics, while
earning Academic All-American honors. 

He was also an All-American
tight end.  He never took himself too seriously, but he took his
role seriously.  He led.   

The Wolverines started Mandich’s
senior year, 1969, by losing two of their first five games.  But
then they caught fire, beating Big Ten teams by scores like 35–7,
57–0, and 51–6.   

They had caught El Diablo’s
swagger.  It was contagious.  They believed they could beat
the number one-ranked, undefeated, returning national champion Ohio
State Buckeyes – even if no one else did.   

Las Vegas pegged the Wolverines
a 17-point underdog – but they didn’t listen.  

The morning of the game, one
of the Buckeyes missed the team bus.  They weren’t taking it
seriously.   

But Mandich was.  When
I asked him about that game, he told me he was crying in the tunnel. 
I said, Of course.  It was the greatest upset in Michigan history. 
No, he said.  “I was crying in the tunnel before the game.” 

That’s how charged up they
were.  All that pain, all that suffering, all that work they’d
done in the off-season—it fueled everything they did that day. 
And it showed, when they completely manhandled Woody Hayes’s greatest
Ohio State team, 24-12.   

On the HBO documentary about
the rivalry, Mandich says, “There’s an expression in German, “schadenfreude,”
which means, “Joy in the misery of others. 

“40 years later, I feel Schadenfreude
– Joy, that it still hurts the Buckeyes, what we did on that fateful
November day in 1969.”  

But the image of Mandich that
day tells a different story, from the famous photo of the outstretched
number 88, exalting in the final countdown, and the film footage of
his teammates carrying him off the field.  He’s exhausted, and
overwhelmed, exuding something deeper than mere happiness – something
more akin to an abiding satisfaction, one he probably knew even at that
moment would last the rest of his life, having spent himself completely
for his teammates and his school, and a cause bigger than himself.  

And that’s what he did.