Nick Saban, Kent State, and What Happens Next (1970)

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I.

On a Monday afternoon in May of 1970, Nick Saban had lunch with a football teammate, then wandered up a hill on the Kent State campus and happened upon the end of the 1960s. Helicopters hovered and ambulances streaked past and Saban learned that four students had been killed, including a young woman named Allison Krause, who was in his English class. “I always think about it,” Saban later told Bill Reiter of The Kansas City Star. “When things strike home like that, it gives you a different perspective on things.”

I have thought many times about how odd a juxtaposition this is—that the man who would become the most sternly disciplined football coach of his generation was present at the moment when America seemed to unravel before his eyes. I do not know for certain what Saban’s politics are (though I am part of a college football group text thread that spends at least 18 percent of the time speculating about this topic), but I do know that there is something jarring about imagining a man who always appeared to be in complete control—who, for many years, became the most respected authority figure in the South—bearing witness to the breakdown of the American experiment.

But now I wonder if it isn’t so odd at all.

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II.

Years ago, when I was a young newspaper reporter in Akron, Ohio, myself and my two best friends on staff were assigned to report and write an entire section over the course of three months about the anniversary of Kent State shootings. (These are the kinds of things newspapers used to do when newspapers had too much money to spend.) The moment had already begun to fade into history, and the Sixties had largely become a hippie caricature; the whole lead-up to Kent State felt so far removed from my own Gen X slackerdom that digging into the archives was like reading a novel.

In my naivete, I found it surprising just how contentious things were—the way the social fabric had broken down to the point that the FBI was now openly spying on young Americans, and the way some of those young Americans had increasingly resorted to violence to get their point across. Everything became political; in the days leading up to Kent State, Nixon had ordered troops into Cambodia, students had protested and a handful of them had set fire to the campus ROTC building, and that led to the presence of the National Guard on campus, and that led to the killing of four unarmed students. (There remains no good explanation as to why or how shots were even fired in the first place.)

The contentiousness, even after such a tragic moment, was jarring: A Gallup poll taken after the shooting showed that nearly 60 percent of Americans believed the students were responsible for the shootings. As Gary Pinkel—who would play football at Kent State the next season, and later become the head coach at the University of Missouri—walked into his journalism class at a nearby high school, a teacher triumphantly declared, “National Guard 4, Students 0.”

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III.

The thing you pick up from talking to people who lived through the 1960s is that they felt as if they had lost all sense of control. They had no idea what was coming next. And you could argue that maybe this is part of why Nick Saban became who he is—that witnessing one day when nothing seemed to make sense led him to become a man obsessed with controlling the things he could control. For a long time, that reality felt as if it was part of some distant and unrepeatable past, but now here we are again, at a moment where anything can happen next, and where the American experiment is once again being threatened by a corrupt authoritarian leader, where Senators are being handcuffed for asking questions at a news conference, and where the argument over tactics for regaining control of the moment feel increasingly tenuous. There is a choice here: Do you embrace the system and attempt to improve it, as Saban did, or do you attempt to burn the system down?

Yesterday I stumbled across a Reddit thread that led with a quote from the actor Peter Coyote about the tenets of peaceful protest, and a surprising number of the comments excoriated the very idea of being able to make change without violence—in their minds, they believed we were long past the moment where Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis were even relevant anymore.And reading it reinforced the fact that we had entered a new and frightening paradigm, which was also an old and frightening paradigm. It reminded me of the opening scene of Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage, about the underground revolutionary groups who proliferated in the course of the 1970s, in the aftermath of Kent State, and who believed in the violent overthrow of the American government.

In his introduction, Burrough describes his meeting with a woman named Cathy Wilkerson, who was once a prominent member of a revolutionary group called the Weather Underground, but was now—in the mid-2010s, back when the current president was still a reality-television punchline—a sixty-something grandmother in Brooklyn. All of this feels so far away at that moment; it is hard to imagine it ever coming back. As they get up to leave, Wilkerson says, “It’s all so fantastic to me now. It’s just so absurd we participated in this.”

“The challenge for me,” Burrough tells her, “is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.”

“Yes,” she replies. “That’s it exactly.”

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