Coach Carries Father’s Legacy to Ohio State – Ohio State Buckeyes
8/23/2001 12:00:00 AM | Football
Aug. 23, 2001
By RUSTY MILLER
AP Sports Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Freshman Lee Tressel scored two touchdowns in Ohio State’s spring game in 1943, but his hopes of a Buckeyes career ended when he enlisted in the Navy soon after.
Fifty-eight years later, his son is reviving a family dream of making the name Tressel synonymous with Ohio State greatness.
Jim Tressel is beginning his first season as head coach with the Buckeyes, returning to the school where he was once an assistant and his father was a promising player.
“Oh, I’m sure he loved Ohio State,” Tressel said. “Ohio State was everything to a farm boy from Ada, Ohio. He never talked about being disappointed that he missed that opportunity because he still went and did what he wanted to do. But we all knew how he felt about Ohio State.”
Lee Tressel went on to a Hall of Fame coaching career at Baldwin-Wallace College.
The family lived in Berea, outside Cleveland, and the dinner table was often shared with players the coach brought home for some of Eloise Tressel’s spaghetti.
The door was always open.
“There were so many big football players coming and going,” said Obie Bender, who played for Lee Tressel and is now a vice president and graduate professor at Baldwin-Wallace. “They gave up a lot individually.”
The youngest of three sons, all of whom would go on to become teachers and football coaches, Jim flourished in the small-college atmosphere. He loved being around his father and his players during Saturday afternoon games at Watts Stadium.
Later, after the crowd had gone home, he and his brothers would scavenge under the bleachers for spare change that had fallen out of fans’ pockets.
Lee Tressel spent 23 years at Baldwin-Wallace. His record was 155-52-6, including a Division III national championship in 1978.
Three years later, he died of cancer at age 56. His wife, Eloise, died Sunday of cancer at 76, just weeks after vowing she would live to see her son’s first game as Ohio State head coach on Sept. 8 against Akron.
A 28-year-old assistant coach at Syracuse at the time of his father’s death, Jim now oversees a football program with a $6 million budget, practice facility as big as a blimp hangar and the same old stadium with a $186 million facelift.
He got the Ohio State job because of his own Ohio State ties – he was an assistant coach under Earle Bruce from 1983-85 – and also because of his extraordinary success in 15 seasons at a big college with a small-campus feel.
Tressel coached Youngstown State University to four Division I-AA titles, the first of which in 1991 made the Tressels the only father and son to coach teams to national championships.
He took the Ohio State job in January after the firing of John Cooper, who spent 13 years fighting the public perception that he was a greedy outsider who never knew very much about the history and tradition of the program.
No one has leveled that charge at Tressel. He has mailed letters to all the program’s alumni, asking them to be part of its resurgence. At public appearances, he obviously enjoys listening to stories about the fiery Woody Hayes, many of which have been embellished by the years and fading memories.
“It was very clear right from the very start he was excited about this,” said Andy Geiger, Ohio State’s athletic director.
The 48-year-old Tressel has embraced the job. He combines an old-fashioned, rah-rah, one-for-all coaching philosophy with an intuitive sense of what players from the hip-hop generation want to hear. Even as he preaches team unity and sacrifice, he whispers to recruits about the many Buckeyes playing for millions of dollars in the pros.
The first few months on the job have been frantic. Along with dozens and dozens of public appearances, speaking engagements and interviews, there has been the move to a new/old town.
“It was certainly a part of my dad’s life to use the game of football to teach student-athletes about the game of life,” said Dick Tressel, now a member of his younger brother’s staff. “Jim’s thought is to take that dream a little more public than it usually is at a small school.”
Bender, who calls Jim “Little Tressel,” said he often wonders what Lee would have thought of how everything turned out.
“If there’s any way Lee has any idea that Little Tressel is the head coach at Ohio State, well, he would just be ecstatic,” Bender said with a laugh.
On the day Tressel got the job, his voice broke as he mentioned his father.
“He didn’t get to live his dream to be here,” he said. “And I guess it works in funny ways because maybe I get to.”
