By JOE HOLTZAPFEL
Along came 1972 and Mike Burcham, the athletic director at Ironton, was looking for a new football coach due to a vacancy. He finally found one in Larry Coyer out of Marshall. When Coyer got an invite to coach the Massillon Tigers, he then turned down the Ironton job.
That is when Burcham turned to his friend Bob Lutz and hired him to be the next head coach at Ironton.
When Coach Lutz moved up to Ironton there were several stories that grew out of this move. Some involved me, some that I witnessed and others I just heard about. The ones I heard about may or may not be true. You can just decide that for yourself. I'll just relate them to you and you can judge them and we'll go from there.
As you know, the college and the practice field adjoined each other at that time. On the grounds of the college were these Pine trees. They provided us old guys with shade during the hot days of July and August. Then somehow we became known as the Pine Tree Gang.
Don't know who hung the name on us, but for some reason it stuck. John Winter's made us a bench to sit on and we just made ourselves to home. We were there every night after school to watch practice.
If it rained, of course we didn't show due to the fact that Coach Lutz would move practice inside the gym. Coach would always ride us about being at practice. His statement went something like this. "Why aren't you old guys out at McDonald's with all the rest of the old men". Or it was "Don't you have anything better to do but sit here and watch us". Let me tell you if we missed a practice it was where were you yesterday We would say it was raining and practice was in the gym. He would say that the gym was open to us that is no excuse. Believe me he wanted us there.
The one man, who never missed a practice come hell or high water, was Ralph Huff. We all sported our Ironton hats but for some reason he didn't have one. One evening at practice, Coach Lutz walked over and handed Ralph a coaches hat. Never saw him without it after that. Ralph is one of the Pine Tree Gang who has went on to a better place.
There were many instances where Coach Lutz had things happen at practice that became one of those did you hear what Bob said at practice today. Stay tuned and we will cover that in the next addition.
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