Worldly Michigan fans always talk about how far the fan base extends from Ann Arbor. West Coast, Europe, Asia … you’ll always bump into someone wearing Michigan gear, maybe get a chance to talk to someone about the Wolverines just because.
Head coach Jim Harbaugh, for example, ran into a former Ohio State captain from the 1950s while on the beach at Normandy, France over the summer visiting a World War II memorial. That’s the way it works.
So I sort of expected to talk plenty of Michigan this weekend in Chicago. I’ve been blessed to make great friends on this site over the last 15 years – some of my best friends, in fact. Jeff Schiller and his wife, Sue (better known here as MHoops1 and Mrs. MHoops1) are among them, and their daughter, a beautiful young lady and Maryland grad (known, fittingly, as MHoopsJr. on the Maryland boards) walked down the aisle in ChiTown this weekend.
Imagine how excited the guys on the Maryland board were when they found out MHoopsJr. was a young woman … on the flip side, there was severe group depression when they found out she was getting married.
Jen, who has done some work for us here at TheWolverine.com, married her high school sweetheart, Jon – just a great couple. She’s almost the basketball savant her dad is, which is saying something. In the father of the bride toast, in fact, Jeff noted that while most fathers and brides say their ‘I love yous,’ etc. while arm in arm, he and Jen talked about how Maryland won by 20 that afternoon and Melo [Trimble] scored 18. And yes, he was dead serious.
But there was plenty of Michigan chatter, too, and it started for me Friday at The Men’s Wearhouse in Ann Arbor. I was in great shape for about a week over the summer, but during football season they throw food at you like zoo-goers throw bread to the ducks or (more aptly) peanuts to the elephants – Mr. Spot’s at luncheons, Cottage Inn at games and great stuff in the press boxes around the Big Ten. So when I went to try on my suits Friday morning (nothing like waiting until the last minute), I couldn’t snap my pants.
I wasn’t the only one, apparently. I bumped into Michigan strength coach Kevin Tolbert at the Wearhouse, and he was trying on coats that were a bit too small insisting they’d fit. At one point he turned to me and said, ‘you think this looks good, don't you?’ … as I was trying on a suit vest I couldn’t button. And we got a good laugh out of it (think Tommy Boy, little coat scene).
Fifth-year senior center Graham Glasgow walks in and joins in the fun, looking for some new clothes with his nice looking lady friend. We talked for a bit … he’s decided to work out in San Diego in preparation for the NFL draft. He confirmed that his brother Ryan (fifth-year senior DT to be) was recovering slowly from what’s a pretty traumatic injury (blown pectoral muscle), but he’s in good spirits.
He also noted how much they missed him and senior end Mario Ojemudia down the stretch – nothing against their replacements, but those guys were playing at a very high level and it affected depth, of course.
I left with the assurance that my fat boy pants could be taken in two sizes in a couple months (so, as Jeff would say in one of his favorite and oft-quoted movie lines, ‘I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice’).
The Friday night reception was upstairs at the Luxbar in Chicago – and wow, talk about first class. We had a blast. Jeff’s brother, Greg (The Fort member gesblue) was holding court. I’m going to keep the story about the Sheikh and Greg’s girlfriend between us, but there are other good ones.
It turns out Greg often gets floor seats to Northwestern hoops, and during timeouts recently a basketball official we all know well would come over and ask them about calls, etc. Apparently Wildcats head coach Chris Collins couldn’t help himself from wandering outside the coaching box, no matter how much this official kept warning him he was going to ‘T’ him up. The game was closer than expected so said official didn’t want to affect the outcome, but he told Greg and his buddies, ‘you watch – I’m gonna get him. He won’t listen.’
So with the game in hand and 1.2 seconds left and Collins two feet outside the box and on the floor, the official calls the technical … and Collins doesn’t complain, but running down the steps from his seat comes his dad, former NBA player/coach Doug Collins, pulling his hair where the curls on his 1980s perm once hung screaming at the official and calling him every name in the book.
And our official friend turns to Greg and his buddies and smiles.
I’ve never really liked this referee, but I have a newfound appreciation.
Wedding day – MHoops1 is doing father of the bride stuff, delivering lunch to the hotel, etc., but of course has two hours to watch the big Michigan game vs. 0-8 Delaware State. So several of us head over to his place to watch – Michigan’s up by 40 in the second half with about five minutes to go, and Jeff gets called out of the room to change an airplane reservation for his son (another Schiller success story – a recent Texas grad with a great job at IBM, probably headed to law school. Their younger daughter, by the way, is a student at U-M and an athletic department intern. So they’re three-for-three).
Jeff asks us to pause the game so he ‘won’t miss anything.’ Of course, I understood completely. His wife’s sisters and family – not so much, waiting for their ride to the Magnificent Mile. But they’re great and had gained an ‘understanding’ over the years. And it wasn’t Jeff’s first rodeo here – he brought out the leftovers from the night before and appeased them with the great hummus.
We watched the rest of the game and all left happy.
The wedding itself was at the Chicago History Museum, just incredible, and it couldn't have been better. The nuptials were tear jerking, and they sat me next to another good friend I’ve met through the site, The Fort member ‘mawmer’ (who needs to post more) and his beautiful date, as well as former Michigan assistant Mike Boyd and his lovely wife, Michelle. Boyd was hired under Johnny Orr and stayed through the 1989 National Title year before being hired as the head coach at Cleveland State.
Some of Jeff’s lawyer friends and their wives were also at our table. I was low man on the totem pole, I guess, but when I told everyone I was a sportswriter covering Michigan football and basketball, one of them said, ‘so Jeff washes your underwear?’
These guys all golf together in Florida once a year, and they talked about how Jeff would skip nine holes at times just to watch a Michigan game or talk about a game with his daughter. If those two are watching the same game, they’ll literally be on the phone every fourth play. They are the father and daughter from Father of the Bride with Steve Martin.
I was going to say, ‘no, I wear MHoops1 pajamas’ in response to the underwear comment, but I didn’t think they’d get it.
The recruiting stories from Boyd’s U-M days were priceless. Do you know how close Michigan was to landing Derrick Coleman (Syracuse, former New Jersey Nets No. 1 pick) to go with Terry Mills? A local sportswriter (who shall not be named) sabotaged it – he’d tell Coleman that Mills was the priority because Boyd always “saw Mills first.” Boyd would tell Coleman it was all about the time and they got the same amount of it, but the writer convinced Coleman Mills was their top priority.
Boyd loved recruiting, and he was great at it. He said former All-American guard Gary Grant was one of the best kids he ever recruited in terms of the kind of person he was off the court – along with Detroit big man and former first round NBA pick Roy Tarpley, who ‘never realized how good he was’ and fought drug and alcohol abuse for years. His demons got the better of him, and he passed away last January at 50 years old. Boyd got a bit teary thinking about him.
Bo Schembechler, always in his corner, made the last call to get Boyd the head-coaching job at Cleveland State. U-M head coach Steve Fisher was on board with Michigan forward Sam Mitchell transferring after Fisher recruited the Fab Five … Mitchell helped the 1992-1993 team to a Mid-Continent Conference regular season title with a 22-6 record and a 15-1 conference record.
Sadly, Mitchell passed away at the young age of 24 from carbon monoxide poisoning in his apartment while playing overseas in Italy. Boyd also lost another of his players, leading scorer and playground legend Jamal Jackson, before his last year at CSU in 1995-96. Jackson went home to Boston and was shot and killed while Boyd was out of town.
Boyd also shared how they found big man Loy Vaught, for whom the Michigan rebounding award is named, by accident while recruiting former guard Garde Thompson at East Grand Rapids. The off the record recruiting stories, meanwhile, were priceless.
Boyd finished up a successful career with stints as an assistant at Penn State and East Tennessee State. He lives in Tennessee but joins retired coaches Perry Watson and other Detroit legends in Florida for golf every now and then and is looking at buying a second home down there close to them, enjoying his retirement. He and his wife both look like they’re still in their 50s.
Jeff’s toast, though, was the highlight of the evening. The best quote -- “a friend of mine told me how beautiful my daughter is and I told him, ‘I’m told she looks like me.’ My friend responded, ‘yeah – but on her, it works.’”
Finally, before leaving Sunday, I received a Facebook message from The Fort member wolverines74’s daughter. “Coach Al” as he’s known has been struggling, as many of you know – he posted recently that he was headed to the hospital awaiting a lung transplant and unsure if he’d ever see home again. Al asked his daughter to give me his number and give him Michigan updates while he was in the hospital, so I texted him with the weekend commitment and defensive coordinator news.
Al is struggling, but he asked that we tell The Fort, “my numbers are a lot worse and I may be two or three weeks away from a transplant.” He said, “Besides my devotion to our Lord, U-M is right up there. U-M means so much going back to Bo, Jack Harbaugh, Mac [Bill McCartney].
“Take care – get me a solid D.C.”
Keep him in your prayers, if you’re so inclined – it’s good news that he’s been moved up the transplant list.
All in all, a weekend I won’t forget thanks to some of the relationships I’ve developed because of this place. Thanks again, Jeff … I'm glad I "made the cut" this weekend. And thanks to everyone else who helps makes our little corner of the internet so great.
Head coach Jim Harbaugh, for example, ran into a former Ohio State captain from the 1950s while on the beach at Normandy, France over the summer visiting a World War II memorial. That’s the way it works.
So I sort of expected to talk plenty of Michigan this weekend in Chicago. I’ve been blessed to make great friends on this site over the last 15 years – some of my best friends, in fact. Jeff Schiller and his wife, Sue (better known here as MHoops1 and Mrs. MHoops1) are among them, and their daughter, a beautiful young lady and Maryland grad (known, fittingly, as MHoopsJr. on the Maryland boards) walked down the aisle in ChiTown this weekend.
Imagine how excited the guys on the Maryland board were when they found out MHoopsJr. was a young woman … on the flip side, there was severe group depression when they found out she was getting married.
Jen, who has done some work for us here at TheWolverine.com, married her high school sweetheart, Jon – just a great couple. She’s almost the basketball savant her dad is, which is saying something. In the father of the bride toast, in fact, Jeff noted that while most fathers and brides say their ‘I love yous,’ etc. while arm in arm, he and Jen talked about how Maryland won by 20 that afternoon and Melo [Trimble] scored 18. And yes, he was dead serious.
But there was plenty of Michigan chatter, too, and it started for me Friday at The Men’s Wearhouse in Ann Arbor. I was in great shape for about a week over the summer, but during football season they throw food at you like zoo-goers throw bread to the ducks or (more aptly) peanuts to the elephants – Mr. Spot’s at luncheons, Cottage Inn at games and great stuff in the press boxes around the Big Ten. So when I went to try on my suits Friday morning (nothing like waiting until the last minute), I couldn’t snap my pants.
I wasn’t the only one, apparently. I bumped into Michigan strength coach Kevin Tolbert at the Wearhouse, and he was trying on coats that were a bit too small insisting they’d fit. At one point he turned to me and said, ‘you think this looks good, don't you?’ … as I was trying on a suit vest I couldn’t button. And we got a good laugh out of it (think Tommy Boy, little coat scene).
Fifth-year senior center Graham Glasgow walks in and joins in the fun, looking for some new clothes with his nice looking lady friend. We talked for a bit … he’s decided to work out in San Diego in preparation for the NFL draft. He confirmed that his brother Ryan (fifth-year senior DT to be) was recovering slowly from what’s a pretty traumatic injury (blown pectoral muscle), but he’s in good spirits.
He also noted how much they missed him and senior end Mario Ojemudia down the stretch – nothing against their replacements, but those guys were playing at a very high level and it affected depth, of course.
I left with the assurance that my fat boy pants could be taken in two sizes in a couple months (so, as Jeff would say in one of his favorite and oft-quoted movie lines, ‘I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice’).
The Friday night reception was upstairs at the Luxbar in Chicago – and wow, talk about first class. We had a blast. Jeff’s brother, Greg (The Fort member gesblue) was holding court. I’m going to keep the story about the Sheikh and Greg’s girlfriend between us, but there are other good ones.
It turns out Greg often gets floor seats to Northwestern hoops, and during timeouts recently a basketball official we all know well would come over and ask them about calls, etc. Apparently Wildcats head coach Chris Collins couldn’t help himself from wandering outside the coaching box, no matter how much this official kept warning him he was going to ‘T’ him up. The game was closer than expected so said official didn’t want to affect the outcome, but he told Greg and his buddies, ‘you watch – I’m gonna get him. He won’t listen.’
So with the game in hand and 1.2 seconds left and Collins two feet outside the box and on the floor, the official calls the technical … and Collins doesn’t complain, but running down the steps from his seat comes his dad, former NBA player/coach Doug Collins, pulling his hair where the curls on his 1980s perm once hung screaming at the official and calling him every name in the book.
And our official friend turns to Greg and his buddies and smiles.
I’ve never really liked this referee, but I have a newfound appreciation.
Wedding day – MHoops1 is doing father of the bride stuff, delivering lunch to the hotel, etc., but of course has two hours to watch the big Michigan game vs. 0-8 Delaware State. So several of us head over to his place to watch – Michigan’s up by 40 in the second half with about five minutes to go, and Jeff gets called out of the room to change an airplane reservation for his son (another Schiller success story – a recent Texas grad with a great job at IBM, probably headed to law school. Their younger daughter, by the way, is a student at U-M and an athletic department intern. So they’re three-for-three).
Jeff asks us to pause the game so he ‘won’t miss anything.’ Of course, I understood completely. His wife’s sisters and family – not so much, waiting for their ride to the Magnificent Mile. But they’re great and had gained an ‘understanding’ over the years. And it wasn’t Jeff’s first rodeo here – he brought out the leftovers from the night before and appeased them with the great hummus.
We watched the rest of the game and all left happy.
The wedding itself was at the Chicago History Museum, just incredible, and it couldn't have been better. The nuptials were tear jerking, and they sat me next to another good friend I’ve met through the site, The Fort member ‘mawmer’ (who needs to post more) and his beautiful date, as well as former Michigan assistant Mike Boyd and his lovely wife, Michelle. Boyd was hired under Johnny Orr and stayed through the 1989 National Title year before being hired as the head coach at Cleveland State.
Some of Jeff’s lawyer friends and their wives were also at our table. I was low man on the totem pole, I guess, but when I told everyone I was a sportswriter covering Michigan football and basketball, one of them said, ‘so Jeff washes your underwear?’
These guys all golf together in Florida once a year, and they talked about how Jeff would skip nine holes at times just to watch a Michigan game or talk about a game with his daughter. If those two are watching the same game, they’ll literally be on the phone every fourth play. They are the father and daughter from Father of the Bride with Steve Martin.
I was going to say, ‘no, I wear MHoops1 pajamas’ in response to the underwear comment, but I didn’t think they’d get it.
The recruiting stories from Boyd’s U-M days were priceless. Do you know how close Michigan was to landing Derrick Coleman (Syracuse, former New Jersey Nets No. 1 pick) to go with Terry Mills? A local sportswriter (who shall not be named) sabotaged it – he’d tell Coleman that Mills was the priority because Boyd always “saw Mills first.” Boyd would tell Coleman it was all about the time and they got the same amount of it, but the writer convinced Coleman Mills was their top priority.
Boyd loved recruiting, and he was great at it. He said former All-American guard Gary Grant was one of the best kids he ever recruited in terms of the kind of person he was off the court – along with Detroit big man and former first round NBA pick Roy Tarpley, who ‘never realized how good he was’ and fought drug and alcohol abuse for years. His demons got the better of him, and he passed away last January at 50 years old. Boyd got a bit teary thinking about him.
Bo Schembechler, always in his corner, made the last call to get Boyd the head-coaching job at Cleveland State. U-M head coach Steve Fisher was on board with Michigan forward Sam Mitchell transferring after Fisher recruited the Fab Five … Mitchell helped the 1992-1993 team to a Mid-Continent Conference regular season title with a 22-6 record and a 15-1 conference record.
Sadly, Mitchell passed away at the young age of 24 from carbon monoxide poisoning in his apartment while playing overseas in Italy. Boyd also lost another of his players, leading scorer and playground legend Jamal Jackson, before his last year at CSU in 1995-96. Jackson went home to Boston and was shot and killed while Boyd was out of town.
Boyd also shared how they found big man Loy Vaught, for whom the Michigan rebounding award is named, by accident while recruiting former guard Garde Thompson at East Grand Rapids. The off the record recruiting stories, meanwhile, were priceless.
Boyd finished up a successful career with stints as an assistant at Penn State and East Tennessee State. He lives in Tennessee but joins retired coaches Perry Watson and other Detroit legends in Florida for golf every now and then and is looking at buying a second home down there close to them, enjoying his retirement. He and his wife both look like they’re still in their 50s.
Jeff’s toast, though, was the highlight of the evening. The best quote -- “a friend of mine told me how beautiful my daughter is and I told him, ‘I’m told she looks like me.’ My friend responded, ‘yeah – but on her, it works.’”
Finally, before leaving Sunday, I received a Facebook message from The Fort member wolverines74’s daughter. “Coach Al” as he’s known has been struggling, as many of you know – he posted recently that he was headed to the hospital awaiting a lung transplant and unsure if he’d ever see home again. Al asked his daughter to give me his number and give him Michigan updates while he was in the hospital, so I texted him with the weekend commitment and defensive coordinator news.
Al is struggling, but he asked that we tell The Fort, “my numbers are a lot worse and I may be two or three weeks away from a transplant.” He said, “Besides my devotion to our Lord, U-M is right up there. U-M means so much going back to Bo, Jack Harbaugh, Mac [Bill McCartney].
“Take care – get me a solid D.C.”
Keep him in your prayers, if you’re so inclined – it’s good news that he’s been moved up the transplant list.
All in all, a weekend I won’t forget thanks to some of the relationships I’ve developed because of this place. Thanks again, Jeff … I'm glad I "made the cut" this weekend. And thanks to everyone else who helps makes our little corner of the internet so great.
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