It’s been said that one of the measures of true genius is the ability to relate to others on a variety of psychic planes.
We all know of analytical people who think their way through lives in linear fashion and can direct best practices and design deft plans. And passionate types who follow zig-zag paths of fight and love and talk and splash the world with art. And none of us would survive without those who reflexively see humor at each turn of human behavior.
So, what to make of the life of George Chaump, a man who carried with him a healthy helping of all of those and some other qualities usually spread among a breadth of humanity? In the truest sense, maybe he was a genius.
Chaump was at once a math teacher and social worker, a strategist and psychologist, a planner and a doer. He could diagram a tactic or tell a story. Laugh hard at a joke or tell one. Win a game and lose one with equal grace.
He is the single most accomplished football mind that Harrisburg ever produced. He began his career here as a high school coach and ended it the same way after succeeding as an assistant in both college and the NFL. And it mattered not a whit to him that it concluded back at the level it began. To him, it was all just football.
So many lives did Chaump touch in so many locales and on so many layers – philosophically, tactically, spiritually – that you could play a Six Degrees of Separation football game with him as the hub.
Former PIAA champion head coach Four Chapman cited an example. Chapman’s father Harry worked on Chaump’s staff at John Harris High in the 1960s. And the diversity of his own multiple offense in many ways emulated Chaump’s in the 1990s at Bishop McDevitt High.
Chapman remembers a scene 16 years ago at an off-season clinic run by longtime midstate coach Jim Cantafio.
Chapman was in charge of the speakers. And the one speaker every coach wanted to hear that year was then-Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, just coming off the 2002 national championship. Chaump was by then into his late 60s and back in the high school ranks at Harrisburg High.
“About 150 to 200 coaches are coming in. We have roughly 10 minutes before Tressel gets started. I have to introduce him. But Tressel’s busy. He’s talking to Chaump. They’re talking and talking.
“And I was watching this scene, talking to Rob Deibler, saying: Look at this conversation.”
Former Bishop McDevitt and Harrisburg High coach Harry "Four" Chapman IV in July 2018.
What they noticed was a reversal of the usual high school pupil querying major-college mentor:
“Here’s Tressel, the national college coach of the year, and if you had watched and not known who was who, you’d have thought he was the high school coach and George was the big-time college coach. That’s how much respect Tressel was showing for George Chaump.”
Finally, Chapman introduced the big-time college coach who proceeded to spend the first minute of his presentation detailing how great it was to see the former OSU offensive coordinator and how generous he had been with his time and knowledge when Tressel was a young quarterback coach at Miami (OH), Syracuse and then Ohio State in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
“Rob and I already had the feeling just watching them. Then, when Tressel got up and started talking about George, it just took it to another level. It was the coolest thing.”
There are aces in many realms who never gain requisite fame for how good they were. It’s just the way life goes sometimes.
So, time for a couple of truths out the chute about George Chaump from someone who grew up immersed in Ohio State and Big Ten football:
1. He should have been the head football coach at Ohio State. But a decision based more on fraternity with the athletic director than competence landed Earle Bruce in Woody Hayes’ seat after the latter’s December 1978 firing.
2. Had Hayes punched an opposing player a decade before and Chaump been granted the suddenly vacant job, there really is no telling how many national championships the Buckeyes would have won. They won one in 1968 substantially because Chaump mercifully overhauled Hayes’ inert offense upon his arrival from John Harris High School.
With the strategically elementary Hayes and then Bruce at the helm through the 1970s, OSU blew national title chances in 1970, 1973, 1975 and 1979, all mostly because of backward offensive tactics.
Sometimes it’s the capricious flight or bounce of a ball that can tilt the course of a career. In the case of Chaump’s former player and protégé Dennis Green, it was an ordinary field goal attempt by one of the best place kickers in football history. Had Gary Anderson not hooked a 39-yard field goal attempt 3 feet outside the left upright in the 1998 NFC championship, Green’s 16-1 Minnesota Vikings go to the Super Bowl and are favored to beat the Denver Broncos. And if they win, the late Green has a good shot at landing in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Sometimes, it’s a political decision that can be the difference. George Chaump didn’t get the OSU job because then-AD Hugh Hindman was good friends with Bruce. Chaump never got another chance at glory and national renown after leaving Ohio State for a job as running backs coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1979. John McKay’s Bucs, piloted by quarterback Doug Williams and powered by running back Ricky Bell, came within 9 points of the Super Bowl that first year.
But after 3 more seasons, McKay retired in 1982, the staff was blown up and Chaump landed back in the small-college level as a head coach. He rebuilt programs at Indiana (PA) and Marshall into winners through the 1980s. He then got his first and only chance at the Division I level but with a very tough job, attempting to clean up the mess left by Elliot Uzelac at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was his only coaching failure.
He will be remembered for everything else, not just the successful teams he produced but the humans he mentored along the way. As his John Harris quarterback Jimmy Jones put it:
“My recollection of him then was that he was a good man, a fair man, who had the interests of kids at heart.”
After coming to Harrisburg from Shamokin, Chaump parlayed that wildly successful tenure at John Harris (58-4 over 6 seasons) into a job at OSU when Hayes came into town to recruit Jones. But the dual-threat quarterback, knowing Hayes had the previous year signed a coveted Ohio-bred QB in Rex Kern, had his sights firmly set on Southern California, then coached by McKay.
Instead of recruiting a QB, Hayes came away impressed with receiver Jan White, whom he signed, and his coach, this high school math teacher who’d played his college ball at tiny Bloomsburg College. He hired Chaump the following spring to replace his departed QB coach.
And so, that primo QB recruit Kern would be coached by Chaump. By phone from his home in Colorado, Kern remembered.
“We knew we had this new assistant coming in who had coached Jan White. Anyone who coached Jan White was a good friend of ours.
“Then, just spending the very first time with George, boy, we knew he was completely different. So analytical and exact.
“The great thing about George Chaump was, if the defense played this, George said, ‘That’s great. We’ll attack it this way. They give us this.’
“It went along with one of Woody’s great lectures about [Ralph Waldo] Emerson: For every bad thing, you get a good thing.”
To be exact:
“The man truly conversant with life knows, against all appearances, that there is a remedy for every wrong, and that every wall is a gate.”
Unfortunately, Woody frequently was more philosophical about others than himself. Specifically, his dogmatically stodgy offensive philosophy had for decades been an impenetrable wall through which his own teams found no passage. But George Chaump was the gate.
“Every good defense presented us with an opportunity to make a great offensive play,” Kern said. “George really got us to think that way.”
Former Ohio State quarterback Rex Kern (left) with Connie and George Chaump in January 2018 during the golden anniversary celebration of OSU's 1968 national championship.
And so were sown the seeds of a national championship. Unlikely because Hayes was on the ragged edge of being fired. After a decade and a half of success pocked with outbursts of tempestuous behavior, his teams had become painfully predictable and dreary, towing a 10-8 record from the previous two seasons into 1968.
But Chaump’s arrival just so happened to coincide with a sophomore class that included the greatest influx of offensive talent in school history, not just Kern and White but wideout Bruce Jankowski and running backs Leo Hayden and John Brockington. They’d been a badly kept secret as freshmen (then not allowed to play with the varsity, per NCAA rules) when they routinely blitzed the first-team defense as a scout unit running other team’s offenses in practice.
“We had some stallions,” Kern said. “And we were off to the races. It was a whole new offense – sprint-outs, we’d put pressure on the outside.
“George masterminded that whole doggone thing. To be able to come in as a high school coach and make an impact like that with the existing coaches, it was just a perfect blend.
“It was really refreshing. Even though Woody was in control, he gave us some latitude.”
Part of Chaump’s genius was his diverse personality. Rarely do you find a human at once so analytical and yet personable. Kern said that was particularly valuable to such a young offense:
“He was settling, comforting and supportive for guys who were green behind the ears but who really wanted to do something special.”
That, it was. Ohio State ran the table capped by a 50-14 rout of Michigan. In a twist of irony, Chaump used a lot of McKay’s own Xs and Os from the USC Slot-I as the Buckeyes whipped the Trojans and O.J. Simpson 27-16 in the Rose Bowl.
For the Buckeyes, Chaump had been a strategic mastermind. But he had also employed a building-block approach of teaching the game he had perfected at John Harris High.
His quarterback with the Pioneers was a pioneer in a different sense. Jones would go on to become one of the very first starting black quarterbacks in college football at USC. He was on the Trojans’ freshman team during that Rose Bowl loss to Ohio State. He would start for McKay the next season as a sophomore, leading an unbeaten (10-0-1) #3-ranked Southern Cal squad.
Jones regards Chaump as a teacher first:
“I think people think he was more focused on strategy than he actually was. He was actually more focused on fundamentals. So, we were fundamentally sound in every aspect of the game – blocking, tackling, running precise routes, the timing on a particular play.”
Former John Harris High, Southern California and CFL quarterback Jimmy Jones, in August 2018.
This was all ironed out early every August in preseason camp:
“If you were supposed to take a jab step left before you came back on a certain counter play, and you didn’t, the play was gonna be stopped automatically, no matter what the success of the play happened to be. Because one thing built on another, if you didn’t perform the action properly, that would be fixed.”
According to Jones, Chaump’s teaching at this point every season was like pouring the foundation of a house – the understanding of each skill taught to individuals, the offense growing in complexity as comprehension allowed:
“Most skilled offensive people realize, that’s the whole magic, once you start putting in your tricks. You’re building this appearance where everything looks the same, at first. The defense thinks: When we see this, they’re gonna go this way; when we see that, they’re gonna go that way.
“And once you get that flow going and see them start to overreact to a certain situation, then here comes the counter back.
“We were so fundamentally sound that when he began to throw in the little trinket plays, when he began to say, ‘Y’know what, I think we can do this,’ we were disciplined enough to do it.
“It was just like one building block on another. But it was all able to be done because of the fundamental offense he put in.”
John Harris’ offense was decades ahead of most high schools at the time, nearly all of which relied on the standard Tight T-formation or the Wing T. The objective was always to apply pressure on the defense and force defenders into moments of decision that created doubt. Chaump installed a quick passing series that included sprint-out throws for Jones. Harris ran a bootleg series which stemmed from a sweep the other way. There was a belly-option series that branched off A-gap power runs.
“It was all off about an 8-play base. It was easy to learn. Then, you’d almost chuckle to yourself when he’d come in and say, ‘OK, we’re gonna run Sprint Right 10 Counter.’
“Well, everyone knew what Sprint Right was. All you had to do was add in the 10 Counter and you pop a big play.”
A simple but effective halfback counter off the considerable threat of Jones sprinting out in the opposite direction. That was Chaump’s mantra: Rather than try to pound the defense into submission with repetitive blunt-force trauma, as so many coaches like Hayes did in that era, his aim was to establish a threat that defenders must honor, then sucker them when they became preoccupied with that threat.
And to what might the defense be susceptible? Chaump had that covered, too, through something few high school teams did to such an extent as he – scouting.
Nose guard Jesse Rawls was on Harris teams a few years prior to Jones after his family moved north from the rural hamlet of Guyton, Ga., in August 1964. He has vivid memories of the scouting reports they would devour:
“We used to take a test every Saturday morning on the scouting report: Who’s this guy? What’s his number?
“He had us believing that, if we didn’t pass the test, we couldn’t play on Saturday. He was way ahead of his time when it came to organization. You couldn’t outcoach him.”
Former John Harris High nose guard and Michigan wrestler Jesse Rawls Sr., in March.
Rawls said there was also a smidge of military discipline to which even his Navy Midshipmen would not dream of being subjected 25 years later:
“We had to take our shoes and helmet home on Friday night and clean them up. They had to be clean and then we had to shine our helmet and polish our shoes. When we hit the field, we didn’t have no dirt nowhere.”
Rawls ended up specializing in wrestling, as did his son. Both were champions at Michigan. But, upon him, Chaump always left a mark:
“This is what I’ve always told young football coaches who worked for him: You stay with that guy. Don’t go in there and think you know more than he knows. Just let him teach you. You can learn football and be a great coach.
“Every coach who coached for George in the ‘60s left him and went out and won championships.”
“He very seldom lost a game after halftime. We’d come in and he’d ask me: ‘Jesse, what’s the center doing? What’s the problem? I’d tell him, ‘I went through this gap.’ He’d say, “No, I don’t want you to do that. Just set, wait ‘til the ball moves.’
“We’d make the adjustments. Then, we’d come out and beat you half to death the second half.”
After a decade at Ohio State and 4 seasons in the NFL with McKay in Tampa, Chaump returned to the Northeast and rebuilt the programs at Indiana (PA), then at Marshall. But when he failed to turn around Navy, the disappointment left him out of coaching for two years.
Eventually, in 1997, he decided to return to the high school ranks, first at Central Dauphin, then back to his roots at Harrisburg High and finally to Central Dauphin East before his retirement.
For all Chaump’s skill as a teacher and tactician, those who remember him best recall his humanitarian side.
Graduated from Ohio State two years prior, Kern still had friends on the 1972 team when the Buckeyes took a West Coast road trip to play California. He heard, after Hayes cut them free the day before the game, a group of OSU assistants hit a restaurant in Berkeley.
There at the bar, a young woman approached him, introduced herself and began acting just a little too friendly. As Kern heard it, the married Chaump didn’t merely shoo her away:
“He spent the next hour and a half at the bar, gently trying to talk her out of her profession.”
Kern laughed as he imagined the hooker’s exasperation:
“She came in looking for a quick evening and then ended up trying to get rid of him. I could almost imagine him saying softly to her: ‘Now, why would you wanna do this?’”
When I contacted Chaump’s old assistant Jim Deibler for this story, the longtime Steel-High coach needed a moment to compose himself, so stricken was he by the impending passing of his mentor. The seminal story he chose to tell wasn’t about strategy or one of the many great victories of that ‘60s John Harris team.
It was about one of those kids who musters up the bravery to come out for the team but it is so frail looking that everyone knows right away he’ll be unworthy of a uniform.
Such a kid was Oscar Gunning. He went by “O.T.”
“He was the smallest, scrawniest kid you’d ever wanna see,” said Deibler. “But he came out for football. And there is no way 95 percent of coaches would’ve kept Oscar on the squad.”
He was so uncoordinated that he had difficulty doing the quick calisthenics Chaump was known for. He had trouble running with pads. A couple of the assistants remarked that he needed to be sent home.
Chaump would not relent. Instead, he kept encouraging Gunning and pushing his limits. How?
“Just by hugs. Being upbeat. Many times. At practice, even in the hall of the school.”
According to Deibler, Gunning’s transformation was remarkable:
“Not only did he become a contributor on special teams, he became all-state in track.”
In fact, he’s in the PIAA record books. Oscar Gunning ended up being part of John Harris’ PIAA Class A champion 2-mile relay teams in both 1966 and 1967.
“George said from the start: ‘We’re gonna give the kid a chance. We’re not gonna send him home. He’s a nice young man.’
“George believed that, if at all possible, we should keep every kid that came out for football on the squad, no matter what. That we should never eliminate kids.
“It was because he thought every kid who was out there had something good to offer, and had goodness within him.”
I find myself in a place that I’ve not been while writing an extended epitaph for a local sports figure. I knew George Chaump. I felt like I understood him. Last summer, I visited him and his wife Connie at their home in West Hanover Twp., just to hear some of the old stories again. It was a good day.
His path crossed mine inexplicably throughout our lives from the time he was that young Ohio State assistant and I was reading about him in the newspapers I delivered on my Columbus Citizen-Journal route.
When I was a junior-high quarterback, our head coach had attended several Ohio State summer coaching camps and we ran the same “Rip” and “Liz” formation designations (for right and left) that Chaump had coined at Harris. Until preparing this column, I never knew either that they came from George or that he named “Liz” after Harry Chapman’s wife. Until Deibler told me, I had no idea. Neither did Four; and they were named after his mom.
There I was as a 13-year-old, calling out plays using the name of one coach’s mother, designed by one of his mentors, neither of whom I would meet for more than two decades, both of whom I would later count as good friends.
But that’s the reach of George Chaump. That’s the diameter of a genius.
A memorial service for George Chaump will be held at 1 p.m. on Sat., June 1 at Pine Street Presbyterian Church, 310 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg.