Alan Ameche: The Story of "The Horse"

12. Ivy and the Boys

 Midway through the  football season, Ivy Williamson was asked to tender a request to the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents for a pay raise. The Regents must have been braced for the worst because Williamson had leverage like no other coach in Wisconsin football history. In six seasons Williamson had taken the program from moribund under Harry Stuhldreher to vital, relevant, and beyond profitable for the first time in the program’s history. In his first five seasons, Williamson had crafted a phenomenal –– record, including the school’s first conference championship () in forty years. He had a future Heisman Trophy winner in his backfield, the mood was upbeat, and the turnstiles at Camp Randall were spinning. He had turned down major offers to be the head coach at several colleges, most notably USC. At , per year, Williamson might have been the most underpaid football coach in America, even by  standards. According to Sports Illustrated , the University of Wisconsin’s total athletic revenue in  was ,, of which ,. was taken in by the football program. Of the thirteen other sports Wisconsin sponsored at the time, only basketball paid for itself. So with the leverage of negotiations tilting heavily in his favor, what did Williamson ask the Regents to award him? Nothing. In his mind, , was quite ample. An article, written at the time by Newspaper Enterprise Association sports editor Harry Grayson attempted to explain Williamson’s thought process. As important as Williamson was in reviving Wisconsin’s football fortunes—and  Ivy and the Boys   ivy and the boys Grayson called him “the best defensive coach in the Big ”—Williamson didn’t feel his work was more important than what was happening in the classrooms at the university. Williamson is one football coach who knows when he is well off—at , a year. Besides being the best defensive coach in the Big , the Michigan alumnus is avoiding a pitfall that often starts a character builder on the downgrade. It’s extremely hard for a botanical researcher, who for  years has been bent on finding a wilt-resistant strain of tomato, to understand just how important it is for a fellow professor to teach young monsters how to run around knocking guys down. This becomes even more difficult for the plant pundit to comprehend when the master mind is being paid so dearly for his unique services. As head football coach, Williamson has had the same tenure as a professor and definitely wants to get along with his colleagues. According to Grayson, at their December meeting the Board of Regents “accepted Williamson’s request and passed a resolution commending the head man for being so considerate.” Williamson was not a complicated man; in fact, he was quite the opposite. He was an advocate of hard work and modesty off the field and maximum effort on the field. It was a formula that worked for him growing up in Prairie Depot, Ohio, near Toledo, and later while earning three letters in football and two in basketball at the University of Michigan. Michigan won three Western Conference championships and was ––  when Williamson played as an end there in , , and , and he was all-conference and the team’s captain in his senior season. Williamson was a college teammate and fellow Yale assistant with future president Gerald Ford. After graduation from Michigan, Williamson coached Roseville (Michigan ) High School to an undefeated season in  before accepting the assistant coach position at Yale in . He stayed there until , when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served through the end of World War II. After the war, Williamson had an epiphany of sorts. He returned to Yale to reclaim his old job, and he realized that being a football coach was what he was meant to do with his life. Here’s what he told Sports Illustrated in . “I guess that’s when I took a look at myself,’ he says today, ducking and bobbing shyly behind his desk. ‘I figured as long as I was going to be a football coach, I ought to try to be a good one.” This time around, Williamson stayed for only a year at Yale. He left for the head job at Lafayette College, where he was – overall for  and . He applied for the open job at his alma mater, but Bernie Osterbaan got the Michigan job. Then he got the call from Wisconsin...