He beat Ohio State

By Joel Thurtell

A hospice nurse called a bit after two on Sunday morning, May 3, 2009, to tell my wife that her dad and my good friend, Hank Fonde, had died.

Hank was 85, and had suffered with Alzheimer’s disease for many years. It was a hard, awful, bitter process of mental degeneration, but right now I want to think about the man who befriended me, a guy with a big, scruffy beard who would marry his daughter. His remark, made with a big grin in 1972, when I shaved and got a haircut before flying to West Africa to join Karen in the Peace Corps was, “You clean up real good.”

When Karen introduced us in the den of their house in Ann Arbor back in about 1972, she told Hank I was a student of history. “I like history,” Hank said, and showed me the book he was reading. It was a biography of Fielding Yost, the legendary University of Michigan football coach. Unlike most of us, Hank actually knew Fielding Yost.

For his family, and for the kids lucky enough to have him as coach, Hank was pretty legendary, too. It was not all about football, though his record on the gridiron was pretty impressive. It was about teaching, about character. When he took me fishing around their cottage in Canada, he always explained why he trolled here rather than there: There’s a shoal down there, he’d say. You can’t see it, but point the stern towards that dead tree and the bow toward that point and we’ll go over it and catch a pike. Maybe. 

Up in Canada, we did catch a lot of pike and bass, and back on shore, Hank was busy instructing me how to filet a pike without losing too much meat. Oh, did we like to eat pike! From the cleaning board, the eat went to his wife, my mother-in-law, Edith Jensen Fonde, who died two years ago.

Old-time University of Michigan football fans will remember Hank as a key player on the UM squad in the mid and late 1940s. He came from Knoxville to UM through the Navy’s V-12 program during World War II. The government wanted more aeronautical engineers, so Hank studied engineering. He was a Seaman Second Class in the Navy, but at the same time he was a UM student. But the classes that really mattered to Hank were all about football. He showed me his notebook from a class he took from legendary UM football coach Fritz Crisler. He memorized those notes.

It was only partly about plays. Hank’s younger son, Mark Fonde, has a dilapidated sack of pigskin with yellow letters painted on it: “Michigan – 7, Ohio, 3. Ohio State scored their field goal early in the 1945 game, but the winning — and only — touchdown was scored in the fourth quarter. By Hank. I heard Hank, by then deep into the involuntary amnesia of Alzheimer’s, tell an Ohio woman who was heckling him for wearing a maize and blue t-shirt, “I beat Ohio State!” 

He was right.

Mostly, it was about building character. This was a coach who led his team in sprints. This was a coach whose backfield moved so fast and so deftly that spectators had trouble figuring out the plays. Only one thing you needed to know. They made touchdowns.

For many years, Hank had two season tickets to UM games. They were on the 50-yard line in a section populated by retired coaches and their spouses. Once in a while, Hank would take me to a game. I’m not good at following football action, but going to a game with Hank was educational. He was always analyzing. After he retired from UM coaching, he was the color man for UM games covered by an Ann Arbor radio station. He knew how to boil the plays down so even the most ignorant of us could understand.

It was on our way to one of these UM games that Hank told me he regretted leaving high school football for coaching at UM. College football is all about business. High school ball was about character, he said.

Somebody made a movie called “Seven Touchdowns in January” about the 1948 Rose Bowl game UM played against Southern Cal. The score was Michigan 49, USC zip. Hank was a member of that team. On the film, you can see Hank, a halfback, scooting around Southern Cal players and lofting the football for a touchdown.

For 10 years in the 1950s, from 1949-58, Hank coached football at Ann Arbor High School. In his first eight years, his team lost one game. His total win-loss-tied record was 69 wins, six losses and four ties. Four of the losses occurred his last year, when he and his players knew he was leaving to coach at UM.

From 1959-68, he coached at UM under Bump Elliott where the win-loss record was nothing to brag about, though the team won a Jan. 1, 1965 Rose Bowl game against Oregon State, 34-7. Better than the 2008 Wolverines!

Until the last couple of years when Alzheimer’s really took over, Hank could watch a football game and call a play better than the refs. And until very recently, he was still capable of cracking a joke.

Hank was a poet. He loved and in his better days could recite Bobbie Burns and Robert Service. He was so full of old sayings, either from his family or the country around Knoxville, that his kids put together a list of his sayings, called “Daddyisms.”

Hank is survived by five children: Karen Fonde of Plymouth, Charles Fonde of Carmel, Ind., Mark Fonde of Ann Arbor, Julia Davis of Farmington Hills and Anne Potter of Dayton, Ohio, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, one of whom is named for him.

Funeral arrangements are still being made.