Kent State shootings left impact on future coaches Pinkel, Saban

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The stage was set.

•••

Pinkel walked out of the Dairy Queen, climbed into his 1967 powder blue Volkswagen and headed back toward Kenmore High School in Akron. His girlfriend sat next to him. They ate lunch as he drove.

Then, the radio: There’d been a shooting in Kent. Students had died. Others had been injured.

“You’re absolutely shocked,” Pinkel said. “It was just ugly.”

This was where Pinkel planned to attend school in the fall, where he’d play tight end for the football team. He was just a small-town kid who followed the news from a distance, if at all. He wasn’t used to events like this one barreling into his life.

Pinkel and his girlfriend pulled into the high school and headed into journalism class.

“We went in there and the teacher said, ‘National Guard 4, Students 0,’ ” Pinkel said.

“The teacher in town, I’ll never forget him because he said, ‘The aftermath of this will last 20 years.’ I’m 17 years old and I’m looking at him like, are you kidding me, 20 years? He was right.”

Not far away, Nick Saban had just finished eating lunch at a dorm on campus.

“There was this noon meeting, which we weren’t allowed to go to,” he said. “I had to make a big choice.”

Well, he’d made it. First lunch with a teammate, then a walk up the hill to see what was going on. He might have been there himself had he not decided to eat first.

“We walked toward the meeting and found out people had gotten shot and we scurried our way up there,” Saban said.

The place looked like a military zone. Helicopters fluttered in the air. People screamed. Ambulances streaked by. Saban was dumbfounded.

This is what had happened, what the world would learn later, the event that would stay with Pinkel and Saban from then on: The students, maybe 3,000 of them — about 500 of whom were active protestors — had gathered and the guardsmen ordered them to disperse. They refused.

“So the Guard — 100 of them — fired tear gas into the crowd and marched on them,” Hensley said.

The guardsmen went across the commons area, and up a huge hill, following the students as they retreated. They reached the top of the hill and followed the students back down. Then, on a football field the team had used the year before for practice, the guardsmen found themselves trapped.

They retreated back up the hill. Some guardsmen stopped, turned and fired.

Thirteen seconds of firing. Sixty-seven bullets. Four dead students. Nine injured.

The school closed. Saban returned home. Pinkel’s mother advised him, “Let’s wait and see how things go.”

“Obligation wise,” Pinkel said, “I had to go.”

The following fall, Pinkel and Saban arrived on campus.

“What happened was, everything in the years after May 4, really to ’75, was about May 4,” said Jerry Lewis, a witness to the shooting and professor emeritus of sports sociology at the school.

“This happened to the sports team. I heard a football coach say in ’72 or ’73, I wish we could forget that May 4 business. Kent State became a symbol of the war and the controversy. You just couldn’t escape the May 4 culture.

“It just was pervasive. Everything was around May 4.”

•••

A cloud hung over the school.

Bad news in Vietnam? Reference Kent State. Trouble stirring on campuses across America? Reference Kent State.

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To reach Bill Reiter, e-mail him at breiter@kcstar.com