By Don Doxsie
Remember back in high school when you had to write an essay about the most unforgettable person you’d ever met?
Some of us probably had trouble deciding who to write about back then, but now, after the better part of a half century kicking around sports journalism, it’s an easy choice.
Hayden Fry was by far the most unforgettable person I’ve come across through all those decades.
It’s not just because of what Fry did for the Iowa football program and the university’s athletic programs in general. Hawkeye football was a wasteland when he arrived in 1979. Many thought the program was beyond repair.
Fry, who died Tuesday evening (Dec. 17, 2019) at the age of 90, had them in the Rose Bowl within three years and laid the foundation for what the program is today. His former assistant, Kirk Ferentz, perpetuates what Fry began.
But the most unforgettable thing about Fry was a breezy, countrified personality that masked a fiery competitive spirit and a soft heart.
He had all these catchphrases and homilies that had their roots in his rural West Texas upbringing.
He described his offensive philosophy as “scratch where it itches.” If someone was sad, they looked as though someone had shot their dog. If someone was sharper than they looked, he’d say they didn’t just ride into town on a wagonload of wood. Having fun was a “high porch picnic.” Fullback Richard Bass was “a rolling ball of butcher knives.”
The man was full of stories, some of which might have even included elements of fact.
Every year when the Hawkeyes went to a bowl game, Hayden got a whole new audience that hadn’t been exposed to him before, and he always came up with fresh material.
He would tell uninitiated reporters how he worked the Texas oilfields with George and Barbara Bush in the early 1940s. (George Bush was a World War II pilot at that time and came from enough affluence that he likely never soiled his hands in an oilfield.) At the Alamo Bowl one year, Fry revealed that a distant ancestor, Benjamin Franklin Fry, had been the chaplain for General Sam Houston’s troops at the Battle of San Jacinto.
My personal favorite was at the 1988 Peach Bowl, where Fry explained how he had taught Roy Orbison how to sing in study hall one day back at Odessa High School. It seems Roy was acting up so Hayden had him go stand in a corner with a trashcan over his head and sing. Orbison supposedly liked the way it sounded so much that he adopted the familiar twang that made him an international recording star.
Orbison had died three weeks earlier and was unavailable to confirm or deny the story, but it doesn’t appear he ever attended Odessa High.
Fry obviously didn’t like it when relentless fact-checkers such as myself exposed the holes in his tall tales, and there were other things we reporter types did that didn’t sit well with him either. One story I wrote in the middle of the 1984 season really angered him (with good cause, by the way).
Fry reacted by lambasting the Quad-City Times at one of those Friday morning Johnson County I-Club breakfasts.
We quickly recognized we had been overzealous in our reporting and sent him a letter the following week, attempting to explain our point of view. It wasn’t an all-out apology, but it was a contrite proposal of truce.
Fry wrote back. The main body of his note contained four words: “I received your explanation.”
The tension lingered for the remainder of the season, right up until the Hawkeyes’ appearance in the inaugural Freedom Bowl.
The game was scheduled for Dec. 26, which meant that many of us had to be away from home for Christmas for the first time in our lives. For someone whose wife was eight months pregnant, it was especially tough.
The Iowa team was having a huge party on Christmas Eve, and members of the media were invited. This was a rare enough occurrence, but the message was conveyed to me by sports information personnel that Fry especially wanted me to be there.
At dinner, he went from table to table, glad-handing as only he could, extending his holiday wishes. He paused at our table, shook my hand, looked me in the eye and it was as though nothing had ever happened.
In the ensuing years, I continued to poke at him and fact-check his tales. And he occasionally would sneer at me. But I never saw the guy in quite the same light after that.
I came to genuinely like and appreciate him for what he was: An American original who was shrewdly doing things with his football program that no one thought were possible.
I continued to cross paths with him occasionally even after he was forced to resign as Iowa’s head coach in 1998 in the midst of a battle with prostate cancer. He became a huge fundraiser for prostate cancer research and developed into something of an expert on the affliction.
In August 2004, I was assigned to go to South Bend, Ind., to chronicle Fry’s induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. In the week before the event, I received some crushing news: I also had prostate cancer.
In the afternoon at the South Bend event, as Fry and the other inductees were touring the Hall of Fame museum, there was a quiet moment where just Hayden and I were standing there alone. I told him about the diagnosis I had gotten just days earlier.
That’s right, I told Hayden Fry that I had cancer before I told my mother.
His concern was genuine. No jokes, no frivolous West Texas homilies. He asked what course of treatment I had chosen and what the prognosis was. It was obvious that he cared. He tried to offer some words of encouragement and advice.
I instantly understood what hundreds of young men who had played for him at SMU and North Texas State and Iowa already knew, that beneath this occasionally cartoonish, hard-nosed exterior was a man of marrow-deep compassion and caring.
Iowa will never forget him. Neither will I.
(Don Doxsie is a sports columnist for the Quad-City Times. This column previously appeared in the Dec. 19, 2019, edition of the Quad-City Times.)
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