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They sat in a ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel in Novi, Michigan on Thursday and talked about a doctor they trust ruined their lives.
Gilvani Johnson, who was from the University of Michigan from 1982 to 1986, was shivering when he talked about the football team’s doctor, Robert Anderson, sexually assaulting him during exams. Daniel Kwiatkowski, a frontman from 1977 to 1979, went into graphic detail about Anderson’s digitally penetrating the anus. Johnson said, “I have trust issues, relationship issues, and intimacy issues.” Kwiatkowski said, “I have since avoided doctors, putting my health at risk, and found it very difficult to have intimate relationships with women.”
Johnson and Kwitkowski are among hundreds of potential victims of Anderson. Their stories are powerful and heartbreaking – and unlikely to be the headline in any story about this press conference.
Matt Schimbechler, son of legendary coach Beau Schimbechler, said he was molested at the age of 10 by Anderson in 1969, told his parents, and nobody did.
Matt Schimbechler talks with reporters about abuse from Robert E. Anderson, the longtime team doctor for Michigan football.
Kirthmon F. Dozier / USA Today Network
It was hard to watch Matt’s appearance as well. He’s lived an unequal life, and has bounced back and forth from trying to take advantage of his family name to rebelling against it. He set up a company called Schembechler Enterprises that sold Big Ten school-themed boxes. He worked for another company selling sections of grass soccer fields to enthusiastic fans. (“That’s a real piece of history,” Matt said at the time.) He also sued his father, Michigan, and school officials for $500,000 after he claimed they backed out of a deal to allow him to make souvenirs from abandoned stadium stands. That lawsuit was dismissed.
This time, he said that when he told Poe and his mother, Millie, about Anderson’s abuse, Poe replied, “I don’t want to hear this,” and punched him in the chest. Matt says the only other person he has told is his brother Chip.
Bo, Millie, and Chip all died. As far as I can tell, every other victim known to Anderson was of college age. The university began investigating Anderson three years ago, and lawyers have been asking survivors to contact them for nearly that long. I asked the three attorneys present if someone else had come forward to say Anderson sexually assaulted them when they were in their teens. They weren’t aware of one.
Simi, one of Schimbichler’s sons, who reveres Poe and names his only child after him, tweeted Thursday, “I love my brother Matt and pray for him very much.” Matt deserves that level of sympathy. But it is also fair to applaud his story with some skepticism. And his father, one of the most admired American coaches of the twentieth century, must be subjected to serious, honest and fair scrutiny.
In 2005, I sat in Bo Schembechler’s office to talk about a book I wanted to write. I didn’t ask for much from him – I was hoping to ask for a few talks over a couple of years when I reported on the book. I wasn’t interested in holiness biography or licensed autobiography, and I thought that since his 15-year retirement at that point, he had already told most of the stories he wanted to tell, anyway. I wanted to place Schembechler, his rival, and mentor, Ohio State’s Woody Hayes, in the context of the turbulent decade when they faced each other, from 1969 to 1978: two men trying to instill military discipline and respect for authority at a time when universities were increasingly suspicious of both.
SI Vault: Woody Hayes was a Primal Struggle Dialogue
I knew Schembechler but not very well. I just wanted him to know I was working on this, and maybe his friends would tell him I called, and I was hoping he wouldn’t try to block the project. He agreed he wouldn’t.
This book, “War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Beau Schembechler, and America in a Time of Troubles” was published in 2008, nearly two years after Schembechler’s death. Not for me to say if I succeeded, but I stand by trying to portray them as they were, in the context of their era.
Bo Schembechler was a man of his time. It wasn’t just that time in the 1970s or 1980s, when most of these alleged assaults took place. It was formed by the 1930s and 1940s, when it grew up in the small town of Barberton, Ohio.
Schembechler’s entire career must be viewed in this context. He was trying to apply his childhood values and beliefs in a country that was changing. He watched Hayes fail to adapt, and eventually cost Hayes his career. Schembechler adapted without losing his team or his identity. But he was still a man at the time.
He was charismatic, stubborn, sparkling, charming, arrogant, highly organized. A motivational genius, an ingenious but highly conservative tactician, and a painful loser; A man who loved his players and took pride in treating them better after they left than they were playing with him; A coach who preached no excuses, no complaints, no lies, and the few stellar treatment he could get away with; And a conservative conservative whose worst impulses were considered sexist at the time and look much worse now.
Some think he was a miserable tyrant. Still others say playing with him was the best thing that ever happened to them. Schembechler wasn’t a progressive idea—he might have laughed at the phrase—and this was in the ’80s, when fate seemed to be forever illegal, same-sex marriage was barely discussed, “social justice” wasn’t a national topic of conversation, and college football coaches didn’t spend 10 seconds of the year talking about the “mental health” of their players.
If Schembechler players are in severe pain, they are expected to play.
If Schembechler walked into a team meeting and every player there was scared to death of him, he was happy. Friendship with his players can – and often does – come later. He wanted them terrified that if they did anything wrong, he would find out.
“Everyone knows Poe knows everything going on on campus,” Johnson said Thursday. This was part of the legend, and many stories have been told about Schembechler. But of course that wasn’t true in the literal sense of the word. Nobody knows everything that happens on campus.
Former player Gilvany Johnson talks with reporters about being a sexual assault survivor Robert E. Anderson, the longtime team doctor for the Michigan football team.
Kirthmon F. Dozier / USA Today Network
I spoke to a number of Michigan footballers from that era about Dr. Robert Anderson and the pain he caused. I take comfort in saying that many guys were joking at the time about his invasive exams and that others didn’t realize it was a criminal act until later. One ex-player, who told me he was assaulted by Anderson, said he didn’t know any of his contemporaries who had said anything to Schimbichler. They were afraid to complain to the coach about anything, especially anything that might make Schembechler (wrong) question their strength.
However, Johnson and Kwitkowski say they complained at the time, and as the Detroit News and Free Press reported, there is evidence that complaints about Anderson reached university management. It’s also possible that when some players complained, they didn’t all go into great detail about what had happened. This story is still being pieced together. We’ll probably never know how well Schimbichler and his boss, sporting director Don Canham know, know.
Schembechler is not alive to speak for himself. One of his best players, current Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, spoke of his own experience with Schembechler recently: “Nothing is overlooked or overlooked. He addressed everything in time. This is the Bo Schembechler I knew.” There are 1,000 stories to back up this description of Schembechler, which is why not many people can imagine him ignoring a farce of this magnitude.
Well, here’s what they’re missing: Schembechler will take up everything on time if it’s important to him and thinks it needs to be addressed. Should he have dealt with players’ complaints about being assaulted at the medical exam? Definitely! Is it possible that Schembechler didn’t see it that way and asked his players to get tough? Yeah. Yes it is. I would argue that this is not only possible, but would be consistent with his other actions.
This is framed as a simple matter of integrity, and in 2021 it will be. Society has progressed. But these claims occurred at a different time, and Bo Schembechler’s value system was formed nearly a century ago. This is by no means a defense of that system or its lack of action. It’s an attempt to understand how Bo Schembechler so respected by so many of his players may have fundamentally let down so many of them.
During his gritty press conference on Thursday, Kwiatkowski said, “I don’t think we were prepared as a culture in the ’70s to deal with this.” Schembechler was an icon of that culture. Schembechler is part of the Robert Anderson story. But the culture at that time is part of Schembechler’s story.
Former player Daniel Kwiatkowski talks with reporters about being a survivor of the sexual assault of Robert E. Anderson, the longtime Michigan soccer team doctor.
Kirthmon F. Dozier / USA Today Network
Jim Toy, perhaps the most important gay activist in university history, warned President in 1977 that Anderson was “playing boys” in the University Health Services. This is not the language we might use to warn people about Anderson today. It’s also significant that Anderson is accused of assaulting athletes on other teams as well. Through it all, Anderson kept his job.
Historian John Meacham writes in his wonderful book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, what he calls the “moral utility of history.” Essentially: What can we learn from our failures? Too often, we judge past actions by the standards of the present, which allows us to feel better about ourselves but doesn’t really teach us anything. Ultimately, future generations will adopt this attitude and apply it to our behaviour. As Meacham wrote: “What grievances do we hitherto perpetuate that will one day face the harshest judgments from those who come after us?”
Civilized society evolves – not just our sense of right and wrong, but our mechanisms for dealing with them and our willingness to use those mechanisms. The Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal in Pennsylvania claimed many jobs and reputations because people did not behave as anyone reasonably expected them to do. In 2001, PSU assistant coach Mike McQuarrie saw Sandusky sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy and reported it. There was an obvious contemporary way to deal with that, and Pennsylvania failed.
SI VAULT: This is Pennsylvania
Perhaps it would be reasonable to establish that Robert Anderson actually molested 10-year-old Matt Schimbechler in 1969, that Matt told his parents and brother, that his father beat him, and that no one did anything about it. But we are simply not there now. We’re a lot closer to that conclusion, though: At some point in his tenure, Schembechler had to understand that what Anderson was doing to his players was wrong, and that Schembechler should have stopped him and he didn’t.
There is a statue of Chempechler outside the Michigan football offices, which are in a building called Chempechler Hall. The statue is a recruiting tool and a reminder to anyone that Schembechler built the modern version of the software. We can and should discuss whether the statue should stay there. The best question for me is why it’s there in the first place.
The statues are visually attractive, even inspiring, but they try to sum up a person’s presence and value on earth in one pose with a consistent facial expression. They are, in fact, stonewall tweets.
Beau Schimbechler was a man of his time – a proud, flawed, and fiery man of his time. He was not an omniscient God who did what was right every minute of the day. Woody Hayes complained, “We are eliminating all of our heroes in America.” Perhaps in sports, we have a lot.
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