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"Hardnose" was the Browns' name for him, for the fierce way he slammed into blitzing enemy linemen. He had a bad ankle, but he was still Coach Paul Brown's regular halfback. "He'd hurt it and I'd take him out of the game," remembers Brown, "and next thing you know, he'd be limping up and down the sidelines until he could walk on it again. Then he'd beg me to put him back in."
In 1949, another injury ended Parseghian's playing career permanently. Flicking through an opening in the Baltimore Colts' line, he cut to avoid a linebacker, sprawled headlong with a badly torn cartilage in his right hip. His hip has never been quite right since, and he is bothered by occasional arthritis.
Married, out of work, Parseghian went looking for a job. "There was only one thing Ara didn't want to do," says his brother Gerard, "and that was coach. He thought coaches had to be nuts to put up with the stuff they did." But when Miami Coach Woody Hayes offered him the freshman team, Parseghian leaped at the chance. Then everything happened at once. The frosh team went undefeated. At season's end Hayes packed off to Ohio State. And at 27, Ara Parseghian became the youngest head coach in Miami's history. "I thought you said all coaches were nuts," smirked Gerard. Sighed Ara, "Buddy, I've got the bug."
In five years Parseghian won 39 games, lost only six—and two of those victories came at the direct expense of the powerful Big Ten. In 1954, the day before Miami was scheduled to play Indiana, he deliberately dressed the Redskins in tattered old practice uniforms, sent them through a ragged workout before the eyes of the grinning Hoosiers. Next day, faultlessly attired in new uniforms, Miami upset Indiana 6-0. Frank Leahy would have approved. Next year, against Northwestern, Parseghian even sought out Rival Coach Lou Saban to plead for mercy. Saban, says a Parseghian associate, "really swallowed all that stuff." Miami upset the Wildcats 25-14, and at season's end Saban was out of a job. Who was in? Parseghian, of course.
"They'll See You." When Parseghian arrived in 1956, things were so bad that Northwestern's student newspaper was calling for the school to withdraw from the Big Ten. Northwestern had lost 27 of its last 31 conference games, had not won any game at all in 1955. The only private school in the Big Ten, Northwestern's entrance requirements were the highest in the league, while its men's enrollment (3,936) was the smallest. Why not call it quits? Snarled Parseghian: "If I thought that way, I wouldn't be here. All right, maybe it's an obsession thinking we can do what everyone says is impossible. But we can win." No U.S. Marine recruiting officer ever crooned a smoother pitch. To Chicago high school athletes who thought about going away to school, he said: "Your future business contacts are here in Chicago. They'll see you out there, they'll know all about you."