President Ford earns a spot in Spartans’ football history

For official presidential appearances, U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, a “Michigan man,” frequently asked the U.S. Marine Corps Band to play the University of Michigan’s college fight song, “Hail to the Victors,” in place of the traditional “Hail to the Chief” Presidential Anthem.

Ford was a big man on the U-M campus at Ann Arbor, having played varsity football for the Wolverines. He was the center on the offensive line and a linebacker on defense, wearing #48. At 6-foot-1 and 195 pounds, he helped his team go undefeated and win national titles in 1932 and 1933. He was the team’s MVP in 1934 and graduated in 1935.

Forty years later in 1975, imagine President Ford’s surprise when he arrived in Peking, China, on Dec. 2, 1975, and was greeted by a band of Chinese musicians who were belting out the melodic refrains of “Victory for MSU,” the Michigan State University fight song.!

There was no whodunit mystery about it. With great pride, the jovial Peter Secchia, a wealthy businessman from Grand Rapids, Mich., and an MSU alumnus, took full credit for the “mix up.” Secchia fessed up when he was interviewed by Ford biographer Richard Norton Smith in 2008.

Peter Secchia’s unofficial title during the Ford White House years from 1974-77 was “friend of the family.”

“When the president went to China, the White House called me and said, ‘We don’t have the sheet music for the Michigan fight song.’ I said I’d get it to them right away…and I sent them the Michigan State fight song.” (Dagnabbit! That’s one for the “Go Green” record books.)

Secchia got the better of President Ford once again when dignitaries gathered in 1978 to dedicate the Gerald R. Ford Freeway (Interstate 196) – an 80-mile stretch of highway from Grand Rapids to Benton Harbor in western Michigan.

Secchia slyly rigged the unveiling of the large, green highway sign. It was innocently covered with a Michigan-colored (maize and blue) banner. When they pulled the rope, however, it revealed not the highway sign, but a second banner – in the Michigan State colors (Spartan green and white).

Secchia, the clever prankster, said he has a videotape of the moment, showing former President Ford turn to Michigan Gov. William Milliken and muttering, “Where’s Secchia?”

Professional football was an option for Gerald Ford, after he graduated in 1935. The Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers both dangled offers. Earl Louis “Curly” Lambeau of the Packers sent Ford a letter, agreeing to pay him an annual salary of $1,540 ($110 per game for a 14-game season).

Ford once joked that “Detroit and Green Bay were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football, the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.”

“Yale University needed an assistant football coach and, hoping to repay various debts and find a way into Yale’s prestigious law school, Ford took the $2,400-a-year job in 1935,” said Dr. John Robert Greene, a history professor at Cazenovia (N.Y.) College. “Ford also coached boxing – a sport with which he had absolutely no familiarity.”

At first, the Yale Law School administration refused to allow Ford to take classes full time due to his coaching duties, “but Ford persisted and eventually was accepted on a trial basis in 1938,” Dr. Greene said. Ford earned his Yale law degree in 1941.

Gerald Ford returned to his hometown of Grand Rapids to practice law, but “Pearl Harbor put Ford’s legal career on hold,” Dr. Greene commented. “Ford enlisted in the U.S. Navy in April 1942. He served four years in the South Pacific.”

In 1948, Ford was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Ford would serve continuously in that chamber until President Richard Nixon tapped Congressman Ford in 1973 to become vice president. (The office had been vacated by Spiro Agnew, who was under investigation for felony charges.) Ultimately, Watergate misdoings led to Nixon’s demise, and Nixon resigned as president on Aug. 9, 1974.

Ford automatically ascended to the presidency – the “first person ever to occupy that office who had not been sent there by the electorate,” Dr. Greene stated.

Immediately after taking the oath, President Ford appealed to the American public: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers.”

Three other past U.S. presidents also donned varsity football jerseys while collegians. We’ll have to check the box scores.