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Gary Pinkel
T he memories will come back to them today.
The news flashes. The sirens. The chaos and confusion. The dead.
“It’s something that’ll be with you forever,” said Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel. “There’s not a May 4 that hasn’t gone by where I don’t think about it. I vividly go through everything in my mind. It’ll forever have an effect on me.”
It’s been 38 years since National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed Americans at Kent State University. Most of the country has moved on — they’ve put this one in the history books, chalked it up to part of a Vietnam Era that ended when Marines lifted Americans off the roof of the embassy in Saigon. This is our country’s past.
Just not for those who lived it. Today, for two of the most successful football coaches in America, May 4 is the anniversary of when they changed.
Every year, the memories come back to Pinkel, who was a senior in high school 15 minutes away and went on to Kent State a few months later. They return for Nick Saban, now Alabama’s football coach, then a defensive back for the Golden Flashes.
“I always think about it,” Saban said. “Allison Krause” — one of four students who died that day — “who I had English class with, I didn’t know her well but she was in class with me.”
Saban trailed off.
“When things strike home like that,” he said after a pause, “it gives you a different perspective on those things.”
For the young men on that football team in the years that followed, today is a reminder of many things. How quickly life can go wrong. How important their choices are. How precious their lives are. And how a day that began so ordinary ended up shaping their futures.
•••
Trouble was brewing all week.
On April 30, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. On Friday, May 1, protestors at Kent State buried a copy of the Constitution during a noon rally — an act meant to symbolize what they viewed as Nixon’s actual destruction of the U.S. Constitution.
Saban followed the news, most of it taking place far away in places like Saigon and Washington, D.C., as his freshman year in college wound down. Pinkel was even further removed from events, enjoying high school and thinking of summer vacation.
“That night in downtown Kent, there was lots of trouble,” said Tom Hensley, a professor emeritus of political science at Kent State who was a young professor there at the time. “It was viewed as a riot. There were confrontations between local officers and students and non-students.”
None of this was particularly new. Protests, anger, rage — the politics of the 1960s and ’70s played out on campuses across the country.
But that trouble led to the calling out of the National Guard.
“That day, as this happened, the ROTC building was being burned,” Hensley said. “About 1,000 members of the National Guard occupied campus.”
There were more conflicts on Sunday, May 3. Student and non-student protestors had called for another rally, this one on Monday, May 4. The university and the National Guard demanded the rally not occur. The protestors refused to back down.
Young people were angry. The Guard was angry. The campus was torn. Saban, a defensive back for the football team, was instructed to stay away from the gathering. Pinkel was mostly oblivious.
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