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PrintThe education of Jim Tressel
How Tressel's remarkable tenure at Youngstown State University shaped him and set the template for returning OSU to glory.
Courtesy Youngstown State University
In September 1989, Jim Tressel did something out of character: He raised his voice. The 36-year-old coach of the Youngstown State University Penguins unloaded on his quarterback, Ray Isaac, after he threw an interception in a game against Eastern Michigan University. “Darn, you, Ray Isaac!” the coach screamed. The outburst hardly registers on the Woody Hayes scale of sideline temper tantrums, but Isaac was surprised. He’d never heard his coach yell before.
The next morning, Tressel sat Isaac down for a marathon film session. Together, they reviewed every play from the 14-3 loss. They studied fronts and formations and talked about the botched play—“75 shoot”—that resulted in the interception. What went wrong? Isaac veered from the system. Instead of throwing to a receiver running a particular route as his coach instructed earlier in the week, Isaac made an ill-advised pass to the tailback running down the middle of the field. Stick with the program, Tressel insisted, and good things will happen.
Isaac had reason to doubt. A gifted athlete, the Youngstown native rejected scholarships from bigger schools to play for Tressel at unheralded Youngstown State. He liked the idea of building something special in his hometown with the young coach. So far, however, Isaac had little to show for his commitment. The team finished 4-7 his first year and was faring no better in his second. With the losses mounting, Isaac even flirted with the possibility of transferring.
But Tressel didn’t panic. Yes, he faced a make-or-break season in his nascent coaching career. His team needed to start winning if he hoped to deliver on his pledge to turn the Penguins into a football powerhouse (not to mention keep his job). But he stuck with his plan. He won Isaac over two years earlier with his calm and confident resolve and, regaining his composure after his surprising outburst, did so again as he autopsied the Eastern Michigan loss. Instead of throwing his young field general under the bus, Tressel turned the setback into a teachable moment.
Isaac emerged from the meeting a changed player. “He taught me the game,” he says. The next week, he led the Penguins to a 20-17 victory over archrival Akron and never looked back. Despite losing its first two games of the 1989 season, the Penguins finished 9-4 and made the Division I-AA playoffs, beating perennial power Eastern Kentucky in the first round. Two years later, Isaac led the Penguins to their first national championship, winning a string of nail-biters along the way. The key, Isaac says, was his faith in his coach. “I would say to myself, ‘If me and this man get two minutes and 10 seconds to win a game, it’s a wrap. He’s going to put me in the right place, and I’m going to execute,’ ”Isaac says.
Jim Tressel has accomplished so much—and is such a towering figure in Columbus these days—that it’s easy to forget the questions that surrounded him when he began at Ohio State nearly a decade ago. Typically, a promising coach jumps from job to job until he lands at one of the premier programs in the country. He might go from Division II to the Mid-American Conference to the Big East to an elite school. (Think Brian Kelly of Notre Dame.) Tressel, however, skipped a step (or three). He went right from steering a pontoon boat in Youngstown to helming an aircraft carrier in Columbus.
As it turned out, Tressel was more than ready to captain the Buckeye battleship, leading Ohio State to its first national championship in more than three decades in his second year. He owned the job from the moment he arrived. There was no learning curve, no trial and error. A reporter for the Other Paper, a sister publication of Columbus Monthly, asked him in 2001 what most surprised him during his first few months at Ohio State. “Nothing,” he responded.
By the time he got to Columbus, Tressel already had forged his identity, philosophy and coaching methods. That all occurred in Youngstown, where he laid the groundwork for everything he later achieved at Ohio State.
During his remarkable 15-year tenure in the Mahoning Valley, Tressel turned a small school in a dying city into an unlikely football dynasty. Under his leadership, the Penguins won four national titles, made the Division I-AA playoffs nine times and offered inspiration to an economically devastated region. “He gave us pride,” says Youngstown shopping mall developer Anthony Cafaro Sr., the uncle of Capri Cafaro, the leader of the Ohio Senate Democrats. “He gave us life. He gave us the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In Youngstown, Tressel built an unstoppable football machine practically from scratch. And he did it without the advantages (money, prestige, tradition) he now enjoys at Ohio State. While Tressel’s sudden success at Ohio State stunned a lot of people—including some of his supporters in Columbus—his friends in Youngstown were not among them. They knew his Youngstown accomplishments were just as impressive as what he did in Columbus, perhaps even more so. “I don’t think there was one person in Youngstown who didn’t think hecould win,” says David Lee Morgan Jr., a sportswritern and author who met Tressel while a student at Youngstown State in the 1980s.
So many of the hallmarks of his OSU years originated in Youngstown, including his trademark sweater vest. His teams took care of the ball, played rugged defense and emphasized special teams (Jeff Wilkins, his former YSU placekicker, spent 14 years in the NFL). His players excelled in close games as they mimicked Tressel’s unflappable sideline demeanor, while Tressel wooed fans, recruits and community leaders off the field with his grace, intelligence and family values. The entire Ohio State package was there—consistency, meticulous preparation, attention to detail, even a scandal that threatened to undermine his goody-two-shoes image.
But the most remarkable thing was that he stayed in Youngstown as long as he did. The city might have felt like football purgatory for other ambitious coaches, but Tressel stayed loyal to northeast Ohio. He found professional fulfillment and private strength, raising his three kids in suburban Boardman and rebuilding his personal life there after the breakup of his first marriage. Until Ohio State came knocking, Tressel rejected a series of advances from bigger schools. “In my mind, I could have stayed there forever,” Tressel told Columbus Monthly in September.
While Columbus gave Tressel fame and fortune—his earnings have increased nearly 80 fold to more than $3.5 million—Youngstown taught him how to be a coach. “Everybody says, ‘We were lucky to have Jim,’ ” says Joe Malmisur, the former Youngstown State athletic director who hired Tressel. “But Jim was lucky to have Youngstown, too. It’s a pretty good town to coach in.”
Sports can be a refuge during tough times, and the Mahoning Valley Restaurant, a rare thriving enterprise in an otherwise desolate Youngstown neighborhood, reflects that. The MVR, as everyone calls it, is packed with memorabilia from the vibrant local sports scene: helmets, pennants, jerseys, sports schedules, photographs, a shrine dedicated to boxer Kelly “the Ghost” Pavlik.
During his Youngstown years, Tressel ate at the restaurant after every YSU home game. A man of routine, he’d order the same things, either the tortellini or a Cajun chicken sandwich (both items are now named after him). “People didn’t bother him because he was kind of a regular,” says Carmine Cassese, the third-generation owner of the MVR. Cassese, also the head equipment manager for Youngstown State athletics, is one of Tressel’s closest friends in the city. “I was fortunate,” Cassese says. “The coach has an inner circle. He’s a very social guy in his own way, but he’s very private.”
After nearly a quarter century of friendship, Cassese is a keen observer of Tressel. For instance, Cassese knows Tressel’s face won’t reveal his emotional state as he leads his team onto the field. His feet do. Cassese jumps from a chair in an empty back room at the MVR. “Watch at Ohio State,” Cassese says, imitating Tressel’s pre-game fancy footwork. “If he’s doing this—the back step—it’s like, ‘Uh oh, he’s nervous.’ ”
When Tressel arrived in Youngstown in December 1985, he inherited a program in the doldrums. Under his predecessor, Bill Narduzzi, a hard-nosed defense-minded coach, YSU went to the Division II playoffs in 1978 and the national title game the following year. But the success didn’t continue once the school jumped to Division I-AA (now called the Football Championship Subdivision), and he was fired after a 5-6 season in 1985.
A 33-year-old assistant coach on Earle Bruce’s staff at Ohio State, Tressel had no head coaching experience, but an impressive pedigree. His father, Lee, was the legendary coach of Baldwin-Wallace in Berea. Malmisur, the former YSU athletic director, coached against Lee Tressel, who died of cancer in 1981. He says father and son share a common family-focused philosophy, but their temperaments differ. “I never saw Jim blow up,” says Malmisur, who coached at Hiram College for 14 years. “His dad could get riled.” Malmisur says the younger Tressel’s remarkable self-control is his greatest attribute. “I’ve never known anybody quite like him,” Malmisur says. “He’s exceptional.”
At YSU, Tressel threw himself into his job. “I’m an early riser, and I never beat that guy to work,” Cassese says. He ran tight practices, led by example, assembled a talented and diverse group of assistants (including Mark Dantonio, now the head coach at Michigan State) and rallied his team around the common goal of building YSU into an elite program. “Jim Tressel has CEO management skills,” says Tom Shipka, a Youngstown State professor and friend of Tressel’s. “Every hour of the day, every day of the week, every week of the year is planned. He is a brilliant organizer.” (In fact, Shipka nominated Tressel for the presidency of Youngtown State a year ago.)
Cool and confident, Tressel was an effective salesman. During Tressel’s job interview, Malmisur stressed the importance of community outreach, an idea Tressel enthusiastically embraced. He worked the media, hit the charity-dinner circuit hard and met with all the high school coaches in the area to repair relationships that had deteriorated under Narduzzi. “We’re pleased to pass along word that in some quarters he’s being hailed as the best thing to hit Youngstown since Schwebel’s Bread,” the Vindicator wrote in a May 1986 editorial.
Still, he didn’t hit every ball out of the park. In proudly ethnic Youngstown, everyone kept asking Tressel about his family’s immigrant roots. One day, Tressel asked Malmisur why no one was satisfied with his answer. “I said, ‘What are you?’ ” Malmisur recalls. “He went, ‘I’m Scotch-Irish.’ I said, ‘No, Jim. In this town, you’re either one or the other.’ ”
Tressel succeeded in raising the school’s profile, but failed to produce results on the field right away. In his first year, YSU struggled. The team seemed snakebitten, losing six games by a touchdown or less. Before the last game of the year—a showdown with heavily favored Akron—Tressel’s friend Dick Lucarell took the coach to visit someone. “I knew this Italian lady,” Lucarell says. “She said, ‘Bring him over to my house and I’ll take the curse off him.’ She had all the lights on, candles burning. She anointed him with oil and said these prayers.” Against Akron, Tressel’s team pulled off a 40-39 upset, and his players carried him off the field on their shoulders. “The guy never looked back after that,” Lucarell says.
The Akron victory gave the Penguins momentum, as well as ammunition to use on the recruiting trail. Tressel knew he needed to upgrade his talent, something he acknowledged to Cassese as they watched traditional power Eastern Kentucky walk on the field in 1987. “I remember looking at the players going by and him saying, ‘Geez, Carm. We don’t have a lot of guys built that way,’ ” Cassese recalls. “ ‘We need to get some players.’ ”
And he did. He formed what he called “the state of Youngstown.” The goal was to attract talented players from the football-rich region that stretched from Cleveland to western Pennsylvania. Isaac, the former YSU quarterback, says his recruiting class included six kids from Youngstown that could have gone to Division I programs. Tressel also did well in Florida, bringing in five or six players a year from the pigskin hotbed. It was an impressive achievement. He had to overcome the school’s recent troubles and the city’s blight. “I remember Coach not being able to bring recruits down Fifth Avenue, which is the street that our stadium is on, because it was so deplorable,” Cassese says.
By 1994, Youngstown State was the one awing opponents with its talent. “There were games we couldn’t have lost if we lined up backwards,” Cassese says. After tying Stephen F. Austin University in the season opener, the team won 14 straight on its way to Tressel’s third national championship. YSU beat Boise State 28-14 in the title game, a contest that was more lopsided than the score indicated. “We could have beat them by 70,” Cassese says. “They couldn’t play with us. I didn’t even like the game.” Strategy is important, Malmisur says, but it can’t compare with talent. “I’ve been around a lot of coaches,” he says. “They all coach alike. It helps if you have Eddie George. It helps if you have Archie Griffin or Les Horvath. It’s remarkable how successful coaches have successful athletes.”
Following the 1994 championship, Tressel was one of the hottest coaches in the country. After Dennis Erickson left the University of Miami for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, the Florida football powerhouse zeroed in on Tressel. His friends say the job was his if he wanted it. “He turned it down when he was sitting right there,” says Malmisur, pointing to a chair in his living room.
When he announced his decision to drop out of consideration for the job, Tressel cited family concerns. While his career was soaring, his private life was at a low point. His friends say his marriage to his first wife, Carol, his high school sweetheart, was dissolving at the time. (They divorced in May 1996.) Not much is known about the divorce. Cassese says he’s never talked with Tressel about it. “That was so private,” he says. In an interview with the Vindicator in 1990, Carol talked about the difficulties of being a football wife. “Jim being away so much used to bother me, especially when we were newlyweds,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly used to that type of schedule. My father had an eight-to-five job, and we all sat down and ate at the same time. Adjusting to the new routine was really tough, especially when I became a mother.”
Plus, the Miami job had other drawbacks. Under scrutiny by the NCAA, the school appeared to want a white knight to clean up its image. That’s a hard role to play, especially in the cesspool of South Florida. After all, no one’s perfect, not even Tressel.
Mickey Monus was one of the first people Tressel met in Youngstown. The drugstore tycoon, a member of the YSU board of trustees, interviewed the coach in 1985 as a member of the panel’s sports committee. Monus, the founder of the Phar-Mor chain, was a big deal in Youngstown. His company was a rare economic bright spot after the collapse of the local steel industry, growing from one store in 1982 to 300 in 37 states a decade later.
Like a lot of people in Youngstown, Monus was crazy about sports. He brought a women’s professional golf tournament to the city and founded the World Basketball League, a professional association for players 6-foot-5 and under with teams in Youngstown and other smaller cities. An original general partner of the Colorado Rockies, he loved to hang around with jocks and often gave YSU players off-season jobs.
In the summer of 1988, Tressel called Monus and asked him to meet Isaac, then an incoming freshman quarterback. The coach hoped Monus could find work for Isaac down the road, according to court testimony. Immediately, the relationship between Monus and Isaac crossed ethical lines. At that first meeting, Monus gave Isaac $150 to attend a local fair, according to an NCAA infractions report. Money continued to exchange hands throughout Isaac’s YSU career; the NCAA later estimated the quarterback received at least $10,000 from Monus. The booster also arranged for Isaac to use two or three cars while at YSU.
No one might have found out about the dealings if Phar-Mor kept on ticking. It turned out the company was a giant lie. Monus had cooked the books, hiding massive losses, while attracting some $1.1 billion in investments. The saga turned into a huge legal drama, with Monus’s first fraud and embezzlement trial in 1994 ending in a hung jury. (Monus was convicted of 109 felony counts of fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement about a year later.)
Accusations floated that one of the jurors was bribed. Prosecutors accused Isaac, who remained close with Monus, of promising $50,000 to a juror, a friend of his then girlfriend, if she sided with Monus. Both Monus and Isaac were charged with jury tampering. When Monus went on trial in 1998, the full extent of his relationship with Isaac—including the YSU shenanigans—was revealed. “Mickey was a person who was gullible; he loved athletes and we did something wrong,” says Isaac, referring to the YSU payments. (Monus was acquitted, but Isaac, who cooperated with authorities and admitted to trying to sway the juror, was sentenced to three years probation for tampering.)
Isaac says he kept the YSU money hidden, using it to help care for his young child, as well as help out his mother, who was battling personal problems at the time. Tressel knew nothing about the wrongdoing, Isaac says, and had no reason to cover up for him. At the time, Nick Cochran, a talented transfer from Ohio State, backed him up at quarterback. “If [Tressel] caught me, he would have suspended me, because he had the opportunity to play Nick Cochran,” Isaac says.
Still, there were suspicions. Several teammates at the time wondered how Isaac got access to a car, according to the NCAA infractions report. Four years before the jury-tampering trial, an anonymous tipster alerted the NCAA about possible violations at Youngstown State, including allegations that Monus set Isaac up with a vehicle. YSU president Leslie Cochran asked athletic officials to review the claims. There were questions raised, however, about the thoroughness of the investigation. Malmisur, the athletic director, and Tressel didn’t interview Isaac, Monus, former players or coaches, according to the NCAA infractions report. They told Cochran the charges were baseless and the inquiry died.
When the Monus dealings were revealed eventually, Cochran was shocked. “I felt like I got crapped on,” he later told ESPN.com. YSU launched an internal investigation and reported its findings to the NCAA. Both Malmisur and Tressel told investigators they disregarded the original tip because they believed it came from a disgruntled employee.
In February 2000, the university agreed to self-imposed sanctions. It reduced annual football scholarships by two and annual paid recruiting visits by five from 2000 to 2003. Tressel wasn’t reprimanded. Investigators found no evidence he was aware of the infractions, though the university was cited for “lack of institutional control” for the athletic department’s weak initial investigation. Malmisur defended Tressel in an interview with Columbus Monthly. “That wasn’t a blotch,” he says. “The fact is he wouldn’t be at Ohio State had that been the case.”
Indeed, less than a year later, Ohio State hired Tressel. Former OSU athletic director Andy Geiger says he looked into the NCAA findings carefully and found no serious problems. “There probably were some mistakes along the way, but they were not systemic with him,” Geiger says.
‘I got about five or eight minutes before I got to race to the next meeting,” Tressel says. It’s a Wednesday in mid September, and the coach is on the phone. Four days earlier, the Buckeyes manhandled his former suitor, Miami, at Ohio Stadium, but Tressel isn’t basking in the victory. In three days, the team has another game, and he’s got to prepare (even if it’s just Ohio University).
Tressel is asked if he transferred most of what he did at Youngstown to Ohio State. “All of it, in fact,” he says. He praises Youngstown for its deep football culture and looks back fondly on the way the city embraced him and his players. He uses the word “we” a lot. “We had been through some tough times there,” he says. “We had lost steel, and we had some unemployment problems. I enjoyed the fact that we gave them something to rally about and to feel good about and to be prideful in.” He cuts the interview off after letting it run a little long (four extra minutes!) and thanks the reporter for checking in with his friends in Youngstown. “They’re wonderful,” he says.
Tressel is a hard guy to pin down. He’s been called a player’s coach and a disciplinarian. He’s not touchy-feely, but he talks about building a team around “love.” He’s conservative both on the field and off, but he told a gay publication he’d support a player who chose to come out of the closet.
Even his most well-documented blemishes are difficult to pigeonhole. Tressel surprised some folks in Columbus this summer with the way he embraced Maurice Clarett after he emerged from prison. The former running back accused Tressel and his staff of a slew of NCAA violations a few years back (none were proven), but that didn’t stop Tressel from helping Clarett re-enroll at Ohio State this fall and then secure a tryout with the Omaha Nighthawks of the United Football League. “He will give you 50 chances,” says his friend Lucarell. “If you’re his friend, you’re his friend.” Tressel’s compassion didn’t surprise people from the coach’s Youngstown days. “Maurice ain’t the first,” says Isaac, the former quarterback.
Isaac, the Clarett of his day, remains close with Tressel despite the damage the quarterback did at Youngstown State. Over the years, Tressel urged him to go back to school and get a master’s degree—which Isaac did—and they continue to keep in touch. They don’t talk as much as they used to, but Isaac says they still exchange e-mails almost once a week. Now living in Cary, North Carolina, Isaac is recently remarried and working on a book about leadership. He says Tressel has told him he’s willing to write a forward for it. “I love Coach Tressel like he was my dad,” Isaac says.
Dave Ghose is an associate editor for Columbus Monthly.
