Early Football Career of Yost

Our Guest, Author Dr. John Behee joins us in the Pigpen to discuss the legendary football coach Fielding Yost and what early instances shaped the path to his success.

Our guest in the podcast above is Dr. John Behee and he is the author not one but two biographies on Coach Fielding Yost. His latest, after over 50 years of research is titled Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker. Dr. Behee achieved a degree in History and then furthered his education at the University of Michigan and even got to spend some time as a graduate assistant coach for the Wolverines during his stay there. This kindled his passion for the football program's history and traditions and when he looked into them, the name Fielding H. Yost jumped off the pages, and the campus. Behee wrote his dissertation for his PhD on Coach Yost. Some 50 years later after that original published work, he recollected his notes dug a bit deeper and found even more revelations about this amazing coach from the early 20th century.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of Photograph of the West Virginia football team, c 1895 or 1896

Fielding Yost's introduction to football

Yost grew up in West Virginia and his family had a store to sell equipment for the mining industry there. Yost participated in hard work as a youngster at the urging of his mother he attended Ohio Wesleyan to become a teacher. He taught school for about a year and then decided he needed a bit more out of a career to satisfy him so he returned to school at West Virginia University. It was there that he was introduced to playing football as his rugged build and strong stature made him a perfect candidate to play tackle in single platoon football of the era. He soaked it up lie a sponge and enjoyed the game.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of Photograph of Fielding Yost with teammate, probably at West Virginia, c 1895 or 1896

In one weekend his WVU team played Lafayette College three times in consecutive days. Lafayette won all three contests but their wiley coach, parke H Davis noticed Yost and ended up having communication with the opposing player. Davis suggested Yost take up his studies at Lafayette, and so he did. It just so happens that very soon afterwards, Lafayette, with Yost on the roster went up against the top team in the nation  of the Penn Quakers. Lafayette's Leopards with Yost playing tackle broke Penn's winning streak, and Yost soon after left to return to West Virginia.

Fielding had so much fun and success playing ball that he was soon invited to play for the nearby Allegheny Athletic Club near Pittsburgh. At the urging of his Fraternity brothers he was asked to return to Ohio Wesleyan and help coach their upstart team. Yost took his blossoming knowledge of the game and taught the players the game, and they won games. He even participated as a player for Weleyan when they failed to be able to have eleven on the field, with the permission of the opposition.

This success set Yost on adventure to coach more the next fall and he moved on through his network of friends and fraternity brothers to coach the University of Nebraska Bugeaters. They won all of their games in Yost's system including defeating rivals Kansas and Missouri. Kansas was so impressed that they hired him to coach their team the very next season and Yost had another successful football campaign there. Soon his longing to head West and prospect minerals guided him to a job coaching the Stanford University Cardinal football team in 1899. Again success followed Yost.

There are many more details in Dr Behee's book and I invite you to get a copy and take the pleasure in learning about coach Yost and this important era of football. Look back soon for part 2 of this series on Fielding Yost with Dr. Behee coming soon.

Transcript

Darin Hayes 
A special treat today: our guest, Dr. John Behee, author of two books on Fielding H . Yost, the great coach, most famously of Michigan. He's gonna tell Coach Yost's story from beginning to end in part one of this three-part series on Fielding H. Yost with Dr., And we're gonna look down that portal today and go back some 130, 135 years to talk about one of the greatest coaching legends of all time, and that's Fielding H. Yost. Most famously of Michigan, and to help us with this, we have a gentleman who has written two books over the last 50 -years, Dr. John Behe of his great book, Coach Yost, Michigan's Tradition Maker. Right now, we'll welcome him in. Dr. John Behee, welcome to the Pigpen. 

Dr. Behee 
Thank you. Thank you very much, Darin. Good to be with you. 

Darin Hayes 
Doctor, you have an interesting outlook on Fielding H. Yost and his entire career. I mean, you talk a lot about Michigan in the book, but you talk about him prior to Michigan as a player and as a coach at some other places as well, and we're going to talk about that. But what gave you the passion to write about Coach Yost in the first place? 

Dr. Behee 
That's a good question. I was a high school football coach for four years, and then I got a chance to work at a small college in Kansas, my home state. I met Bob Holloway, the defense coach at the University of Michigan, and he helped me considerably in those early coaching years. So when I finished my bachelor's degree and then my master's degree, I thought, I want to do the doctorate, and I really want to do it somewhere around a good football program. And in six years, there was in my lab in Michigan. So I talked to Bob, and he said, yeah, well, you've got to apply and get accepted, and if you get accepted, I'll push you to work. And that's what he did. I got accepted into the graduate program at the University of Michigan and showed up there in September 1964 to begin the coursework. And Bump Elliott was the head coach, and he immediately just embraced me because of his confidence in Bob Holloway, his defense coordinator. And I sat in on every coach's meeting where I wasn't in class for two years, 1964 1965. As you may know, January 1, 1965 was a Rose Bowl championship year. So I was in 7th Heaven learning about Michigan football from the people who were really experts. Also, I started hunting them for a dissertation topic because I did not want to just do the coursework. There were a lot of ABDs, all but dissertations out there, and I didn't want to be one of them. So I ended up picking Yoast as my topic, and finally, after a long track in 1970, I finished the coursework, not all of the coursework, but I finished the dissertation and felt Yoast's legacy to the University of Michigan came out of that. That was my dissertation. 

Darin Hayes 
Wow, that is pretty interesting. I failed to mention earlier that your latest book, which came out just a year or two ago during COVID, is called Coach Yost, Michigan's Tradition Maker by John Behe. You can find ways to purchase that book at Behe, B -E -H- E -E -E .com, Behee.com. You can link to a few different stores to get your purchase on that book. Now, Doctor, going back to Coach Yost, he wasn't always a coach. According to your book, he was quite the player, too, wasn't he? 

Dr. Behee 
Well, first of all, West Virginia. It comes out of a pretty good gene pool, some pretty bright people, but in a very modest living area in the western part of West Virginia, forgotten by most people, you know, really not very arable soil. And they're going to make their living by what's the free forest, and they can lumber, but everything else is below the surface. And so anyway, those were mining, coal mining, salt mining, and those were tough jobs. He was when I looked at the guy's character as I studied his football teams and his coaching techniques, he was fearless. And I look at his youth and think, that's where it came from. As a 10-year-old, this was his first experience at the school. He was in Fremont, a small town in West Virginia, and Fairview, 10 miles away, had a school. After a while, he walked that 10 miles with his brother, but he walked to school and back. And the only school was offered in the dead of winter. So he's in Nowheresville, walking 10 miles in each direction to school in the middle of winter, and he's excited about it because he gets to learn. 

Darin Hayes 
And West Virginia is not the flattest place in the world either, is it? 

Dr. Behee 
No, hills and dales and rivers were running off. But yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's interesting terrain. You're right. So, you know, he's in an environment where the working people are pretty rugged. And, you know, they're miners. His dad has an outfitting shop. And all the things that miners need to do the job they come to his shop to purchase. You'll notice that. But his mom thinks that he ought to; he'd be a good teacher. And he gets big for a high school boy. At 17, he was six foot, 195 pounds. And they made him a marshal. Because you only get some routiness and drinking and this sort of thing. So he's learning how to manage conflict as a 17-year-old. You know, by 17, he is tough as nails. Now, his mom thinks he'd be a good teacher. So she says there's a nice Methodist school. She was a Methodist gal in Ohio called the Ohio Whistians. And you need to go there and do the teacher. I think the teacher's education is two years, yeah. So you need to go there and get a teaching degree. You make a good one. So he goes there. They don't have a football program. He does play baseball. But anyway, in two years, he's got his teaching credentials. He comes back to West Virginia and teaches for one year. And he says, well, it's just not interesting enough. Not enough action for me. So he works for his dad in that supply shop for another year or two. And he says, this just is not interesting enough for me. And they're thinking, well, you know, there are always other things. And if you want to go to law and do some work here with the miners, right-of-ways, and all the good things, he takes the debate on that. That was his introduction to law, a career, and college football. He played, and they have a very, they're all just beginning, a lot of schools. And all the schools they played were just beginning to learn how to play football. And let's see, he was born in 1870. So this was about, let's see, 1895 and six. And the first year, they have a nice record, but they, you know, again, everybody just plays beginners, bumping against beginners. The next year, they go three, seven, and one. A pretty dismal record. He loved everything about it. The coach was well-paid. They took them on to a preseason camp in Maryland. They got to play some really good schools, and he loved the whole experience. And they got to play, I'm trying to think now, a school in Lafayette. They played Lafayette three consecutive days in three different cities in West Virginia. And he got, and Lafayette was an outstanding small college football team. They were going to take on Pennsylvania, which had been a perennial national champion for three years. In the first game he played against Lafayette, he got smacked well above the eye and split it open, the skin open, and somebody came out. 

He's like a kid. He's made admired, he thinks. The next day, he comes out again for the next game, a second game, with a piece of beef steak over the eye, and Park Davis, a wonderful, wonderful coach, a great man in the history of early football, is genuinely impressed. And so then the Doctor will not let the yolks play the third game. His dad had some, and his grandpa was a doctor, so he got some good advice. In any case, he doesn't play a third game, but he has won the heart of Park Davis, who says, you know what? You need to come and transfer to our school to major in engineering. And we have a wonderful engineering school, and he would be a wonderful addition to our football team, and he does. He goes up there and plays. 

It happens to be, just happens to be, the week of their game against Penn. Penn's coming in, I think, with a 32-game win streak. They've rolled over everybody. And Mark Davis' team, Lafayette, with Yost in the lineup, a tackle, left tackle, beats them 6 -4. In a crowd of about 18,000, it's big-time stuff. Well, that was a mountaintop experience for Yost. And that kindled a love for football that never died. So that's how you got interested in football. 

Darin Hayes 
That's an extremely, still a very volatile game to talk about because the people down on the other side of the state, for me down in Philadelphia, are still calling it the "Yost Affair," with him playing that one game for Lafayette. They claim to bring in as a ringer and I know it's a long story and Yost years later said he intended to return to Lafayette. It wasn't just a one-game thing that he and Park Davis thought up, Park Davis thought he would be attending there for a while and Yost did too, but some other things got in the way of that. 

Dr. Behee 
It sounded scandalous, but how Yoast handled it added to the whole thing. This made matters worse. Honesty was not one of the strategies he used to explain his whereabouts. I mean, it was clear that this was the era of Tramp athletes. In 1890, I think the University of Michigan baseball team had, I don't know the exact number, so I'll just make it up as the point will be made. T

Hey played about nine away games in baseball in the spring of the year, and I don't think most of the players were Michigan University of Michigan students in any of those games. Oh, my goodness. Well, first, you know, but athletics was not controlled. The Big Ten in 1896 said there had to be some rules. First of all, we've left these guys run themselves. As long as they had run up debts or getting into any other trouble that would get the university in trouble, we'd find somebody on the faculty who liked the young men. They would like him, and he'd keep them out of trouble and help pay their debts, and they had to play some games in cities where they could pass the hat and make some money from donations. But basically, they were just young men at play, primarily men at play, and just stay out of trouble. This is an academic environment, and that's where we start, say, the faculty and the presidents, but then what they did not realize was that there was a love of sport that was being trembled in the 1880s in the New England area and then in the 1890s in the Midwest, and people would gather, and if you could put a good team together, you would begin to generate some strong income, and then the faculty and the presidents really became involved. And then, as Coach Yost, my story of Coach Yost points out, that's the chapter I entitled All Hell Breaks Loose. They went from playing 11 games a year to five, only one of which could be a strong opponent, so there would be no champion. The faculty finally put a foot down and came back to haunt them. 

Darin Hayes 
Dr, before we get into that, I just want to make sure we touch a little bit more of the background before we get into his coaching because he did, I mean, something I found really interesting that I learned about coach shows from your book is that he, in the center of professional football right at its birth, within at least the first five years of his birth in the Pittsburgh area as well, before he went into coaching. 

Dr. Behee 
Yes. Yeah, there's a group in the La Trobe area, in the Pittsburgh area, of really good professional players. And, you know, they made no distinctions. As a matter of fact, sometimes, when in the coaching that Yost did, he would get an agreement from the opposition to let him play. Sometimes, they hired coaches to both coach and play. 

So, you know, there were very few rules that would make for equity in competition, you know, or anything resembling the rules we have governing sports today. Anyway, he got the chance to play with some of those all-star teams in the Pittsburgh area. So, when he played, he really learned a lot about the game. First of all, if you had to play both offense and defense, there would not be just one-way players. And against the best players, and he was a strong and tough guy and a smart guy, he learned quickly and became a very outstanding athlete. And it wasn't so much that he learned that so that he could play professional ball. He could teach it. And he did. And it was one of the key features of his successful coaching career. His ability to, he would dress for practices and get down there and, oh, I've got some good stories about when he was in Michigan. He has them gathered at the start of the year, and he's giving him the little pep talk and the little organizational meeting, and he gets a guy and grabs one. And demonstrate that the guy is really caught, caught by surprise. 

And so, Yost starts demonstrating, and he's getting this guy, he's a big guy. He's got him upended, and if he comes forward, Yost knows that's going to happen, and he's got him on his nose. If he goes in his back, he's got him on his heels. I mean, he was outstanding at, first of all, all the skills demonstrated and loved to do that. And this fellow became an All-American at the University of Michigan Center, a great, great athlete that Yost was toying with, and he said, I learned a lot. The biggest thing I think I learned was that the next year, at that preliminary practice, I was going to be way, way back in the pack. I am not going to volunteer, so just face Jo's. Anyway, yeah, he did have professional experience, but now, you know, there's not professional in the sense that we have today, professional football today. 

Darin Hayes 
But he's playing with the Allegheny Athletic Association, who played against Latrobe in the Pittsburgh, you know, some of the other Pittsburgh clubs, you know, the John Braillier, Pudge Heffelfinger, you know, Bob Shiring, Blondy Wallace, those type of guys were playing in that same era. And that's some tough, hard-nosed football, and as you said, it teaches some lessons about how to play single-platoon football and stay on your feet and stay in the game without getting killed, you know, that's important, I think in his lesson of some of his fundamentals that he taught, as you said. So okay, so he gets, his playing days are somewhat over, and he starts to move into coaching. What happens next? 

Dr. Behee 
Well, he comes back from this great experience, having played with the Lafayette team and winning, basically. They were named the top team of the year, and Lafayette was the national champion. And Park Davis, the coach, made sure that Yost, even though he was on there for one game, got his L, the major letter, and he wore that L on a sweater very, very often. So anyway, now he has been to the summit and has succeeded. Just two years of graduate school training is over, he's got his law practice certification, and so now what he wants to do is to be a lawyer and help to learn some things about mining and how to get the minerals from the ground and into plants and into the work world. He also, when he goes to get that training for teaching at Ohio Wesleyan, joins the Sigma Chi fraternity and becomes a lifetime member and a tremendous; the fraternities were big. And those were opportunities to get influence centers.

They came from all corners, and they knew people who knew people. Yost was so abundantly confident that it was very easy for people to say he was a braggart. He is a pain in the rear with his braggart. When he did something really well, he couldn't shut up about it. So he has to tell the boys at Ohio Wesleyan what he's done and what this Lafayette thing was all about, how great it was, and, of course, how great he was. And so they're saying at the fraternity house, you know, why don't you come here and coach us? Coach our team. Well, he says, you know, you've got to set it up for me, and I'll see what I can do. So they set things up for him, and he saw what he could do. Out he goes. He has no intention of staying. He's just going to go out and coach football if they fall, and he's going to come back to West Virginia and do his lawyering. He gets out there, and, my gosh, they learn very quickly. And he's showing them things that they would never have learned anywhere else. He is really prepared to be a good coach, a technique. The third game on their schedule is one with the University of Michigan.

Now, they're totally out of their league. And even though Michigan football in the 1890s was not all that great, it was certainly a long way ahead of Ohio Wesleyan. Anyway, they get the agreement because he's the only guy, the loving guy. He's got 10 in himself. He gets the agreement from the coach, and the captain is very often the person responsible for making decisions at that point in time in the 1890s. And so he says to the, to the captain, I'd like to play, if you don't mind, so we can have 11. Yeah, okay, good, no problem. It's all very informal, almost like intramurals. And of course, they're playing this podunk of Ohio Wesleyan, so there's not a lot of sweat here anyway. Well, he plays, and he has his team so striped up that Michigan can't score on them. And the game ends in a 0 -0 tie. This does not sit well with the sports reporter for the Michigan Daily, who decries the whole event as a tie. 

He says that basically, you know, they, they said they were going to be, do everything they could to win and put, bit, pull hair, and everything else, and they did exactly that. He accused them of being, you know, very dirty football players. Then, the RCC concludes its own article on the game. And they mentioned it daily by saying that the referees stood around doing nothing. So, you know, any referee at that point in time was, you know, they almost had to get somebody. Well, in some cases, the coach of one team would do the offensive side, and the coach of the other team would do the defensive side, and then they'd switch back. I mean, it's very informal. Anyway, Yost brings them to a wonderful season conclusion, and Ohio State is just learning football at this point in time. They beat Ohio State, too. And so they crowned themselves as the champions of Ohio. So that's his first year of coaching, 1896. He happily goes back to West Virginia, but he cannot get football out of his head. He's got the bug, right? He's got the bug. And now he doesn't. I don't recall that he got much money for that. But, salaries for persons in the United States in the 1890s were somewhere around $350 to $400 a year. He gets a call from, and he finds it; he gets his Sigma Chi guys going. They find that Nebraska needs a coach. He gets everybody who saw his team play to write for him. He knew how to bash the support. 

Darin Hayes 
He had the network in place, and they were looking for him. 

Dr. Behee 
Yeah, absolutely. And they wanted to. I mean, you couldn't, you couldn't pay no to this guy. So now he goes to Nebraska. They say they're going to pay him $340, but I think he only got about half of that. But anyway, he wasn't that interested in the money anyway. He said it's okay. And that was brilliant. That's almost a third of the wages of a person who's doing full-time 12-month work. Anyway, my gosh, their big rival was Kansas. They go through a wonderful season, and they beat Kansas. So, they call themselves then the champions of the league. And they are. So now he's been at Nebraska. That's his second year of coaching. And I think they lose one game. He says, you know, this is fun. And, you know, the money is all that bad. Kansas says, you know, we would love to have you. 

Darin Hayes 
Before I let you leave Nebraska, you have a very interesting tidbit. Something else that I learned is that Nebraska was not called the Cornhuskers at that point in time before the 20th century. They had a different nickname, and I thought it was interesting. 

Dr. Behee 
They were the "Bug eaters." You talk about students being involved in their own game here. Hey, what do you think we should call ourselves? Hi, guys. How about the bug eaters? Hey, let's do that. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, that's one ballgame where I wouldn't want to visit the concession stand. Let's just say that. Oh, good. 

Dr. Behee 
So, and of course, there's always a manager of football, someone who could put the schedule together and do the kind of things that took, you know, to have a, you could only have about 25 guys on the team, so anyway. So now Yost decides that he will take it; they don't have enough money at Nebraska to hire him back; they hardly could pay him what they promised in the first place, but Kansas did. And so he gets everybody who saw him play, including the manager of Nebraska, to write for him, and he gets the Kansas job. 

Darin Hayes 
Can you imagine that? Okay, so Kansas is their biggest rival at Nebraska. He talks to his players, who probably don't want him to leave, and his managers and everybody else to write letters to get him a job at their rival, who they're going to have to play again. That's exactly right. 

Dr. Behee 
and he goes to Kansas, and he goes 10 and 0. Of course, he beats Nebraska and Missouri, two big rivals. Anyway, it's one of those things where they sometimes joke about the great coaches of today. You know, they say he's good enough to take his players and beat you. And then he can take your players and beat you with them. Oh, and beat the team that he left. The point is that it doesn't matter which side the players are on or if they're really good. If he's on that side, they're going to win. Smart guy just knew how to coach, he knew how to motivate, and he knew how to get the students and fans on the side of the players to really help them. And practices, well-attended practices, you know, cheering the guys on, and he knew how to put on a show for that field. Really, signal calls, running up and down the field, and you know, there was no huddle at this point in time. I think Stagg came up with a huddle, but not yet. Not in the 1890s, not nearly to the 1900s either. In any case, he's put on a show. 

Darin Hayes 
we're gonna break off our interview right here and end this episode of it, but we're gonna continue our talk with Dr. John Behe on Fielding Yost; it's really starting to get into the good stuff when we get into Michigan, and some of the traditions that he did start with you know the great book by Dr. Behe fielding Coach Yost Michigan's tradition maker you can find that book at behe .com which is behee.com find it in the show notes it gives you links here to buy this very excellent work by the good Doctor his second time around writing about Fielding H. Yost. Old hurry up Yost, the great coach of Michigan for so many years and you know, and he tells why he believes he may be one of the greatest coaches ever to coach in college football in the United States, so make sure you tune back in just a few days where we'll come up with part two of Dr. John Behee author and biographer of Coach Yost Michigan's tradition maker, and it's a great book great story. 

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikipedia Commons photo collection of the Public Domain of Photograph of University of Michigan football coach Fielding H. Yost circa 1905

Special thanks to Dr. John Behee, and his wonderful book  Coach Yost: Michigan's Tradition Maker.