CHAPTER 1
This One's for All 111,000 of You
Every season begins like a bright promise, clean as a freshly laundered uniform, free of the grime of failure. It's true in any sport, even in places where teams have been beaten down for decades, deprived of the slightest whiff of success.
Whether it's the Chicago Cubs or the Arizona Cardinals or the Temple Owls, at the beginning, their fans can hope, if only blindly and for a little while. Before the first ball is snapped or the first pitch is thrown, it is still a world of limitless possibilities. Maybe this will be the year when reality gets stood on its head, the losers rise up, and the last shall be first.
When August winds down in Ann Arbor, however, there is a different sort of anticipation. No less keen, but pitched to another key.
Success is regarded as merely the starting point for University of Michigan football. That is the given. The only question is a matter of degree.
What will it be? A share of the Big Ten title? Another trip to Pasadena? A shot at number one?
What will it be? 10–2? 11–1? 12–0?
Because 9–3 is not so good, and 8–4 is abject failure, unacceptable. Something less than that — be serious. It can't happen.
A record that would send fans into gleeful dances and a December bowl game at other places is met here with scowls of contempt. The destination is always January. That certainty not only brings in the prime-time recruits, it fills more stadium seats than any other team in college football. Everybody wants to be a part of the spectacle at The Big House.
They troop in, 111,000 strong, every autumn Saturday when the gates open, because they know this is a place where failure isn't allowed. Nowhere else are expectations constantly pegged so high.
Once upon a time it used to be that way at Notre Dame, and maybe, to some extent, with the Yankees. But even the Yankees can falter. The Wolverines never do.
Michigan has been to a bowl game every season since 1975 — which was the first year the Big Ten lifted its restriction on postseason participation. They haven't missed once, and 13 times in those 30 seasons it was the Rose Bowl.
Their last losing season was 1967. That was two years bb — Before Bo. That's the longest such streak in any sport. Even in the worst year, the injury-plagued, 6–6 1984 season, Brigham Young had to beat Michigan in the Holiday Bowl before it could claim the national title.
Nebraska fell from this list in 2004. It was the first time the Huskers had lost more than they won since 1961 — four national championships ago. In Lincoln, some would say five and tick off the 1997 season, too, when they finished first in the coaches' poll. This is a point that does not even merit discussion in Ann Arbor, which was number one in the AP balloting that year. There was barely disguised glee at Michigan when Nebraska toppled, because some felt it was payback for such hubris, coming seven years overdue.
What rankles, however, is that through all those seasons of success there has been only one national title. That is the other part of the equation. It's always something, some unexpected calamity that shatters hopes and turns championship aspirations into mere excellence once again. It shapes autumn in Ann Arbor — a worm-infested apple that falls to the ground and sours the entire season.
On the other hand, it keeps 'em coming back. Baseball executives like to say the perfect season is one in which your team is in the pennant race all the way but finishes second. That type of finish fills the stadium, and no one gets jaded, which pretty much fits the annual scenario at Michigan.
"You are part of the largest crowd to watch a football game anywhere in the United States today," the public-address announcer always reminds the throng as he announces the official attendance total in the fourth quarter.
The last game played before anything less than a six-figure sellout in Ann Arbor took place on October 25, 1975. A paltry 93,857 showed up to watch the ritual dismemberment of always sad Indiana, 55–7.
Michael Ben has the date committed to memory. He was born exactly two weeks later, on the very day Michigan began its 30-year streak of six-figure sellouts. "When Michael was four years old, his nursery-school teacher asked him to draw a picture of a family activity," says his mother, Barbara. "He turned in a picture of all of us at Michigan Stadium, waving our arms and cheering.
"The thing was, he had never even been to a Michigan game yet. When the teacher showed us the drawing, we figured we'd better take him."
In his freshman year at Michigan, Mike showed up for the home opener with a maize-and-blue block M painted on his chest in zinc oxide. ("All the stores seemed to be out of paint.") It was September 4, a hot late-summer afternoon. As he glumly watched Michigan lose to Notre Dame, the sun beat down on the student section. At day's end he found that it had baked the pigment into his skin.
"For the rest of the year, I was known in the dorm as Michigan Mike, the guy with the M on his chest," he says. "I thought of it as a mark of dedication. I don't know how other people thought of it."
He and his brother, Josh, have a little ritual. When either of them makes his first visit to The Big House each season, he calls the other's cell phone and says: "This is the greatest sight these eyes have ever seen."
It's a line from the movie Rudy. Of course, Rudy was about Notre Dame football. No matter. The sentiment is the same.
A little more than two months before the 2005 opening game, Michael moved back to Michigan after eight years of exile at law school and work on the East Coast. He does not paint his chest anymore. But under the skin his heart is pumping maize and blue.
And the rate speeds up in late August.
Fan Day 2005: August 27
It was a rainy Saturday morning. We debated whether it was even worth making the drive to Ann Arbor to attend. Who would be crazy enough to show up on a crummy day like that?
Usually this is an important day for the big spenders in the Victors Club. These are the fans who support Michigan football to the tune of a $15,000 donation. (For a mere $85,000 more one can join the Champions Club and go directly to heaven.) In return the Victors get the right to buy season tickets between the 30-yard lines, prime parking spots, and first crack at tickets to big road games and the inevitable bowl. There is also a meeting with the coaching staff, which gives them an insider's view of...
