Dr. Robert Murphy Dead At Age 80

Longtime Ohio State department of athletics physician Robert Murphy, who helped the Woody Hayes-era Buckeyes through their bumps and bruises, died Saturday at the age 80.

Last fall, legendary Columbus sportswriter Dick Fenlon wrote a story on Dr. Murphy for Buckeye Sports Bulletin. Here is the article as it appeared in the Oct. 5, 2002, edition of BSB:

Make no mistake, Robert J. Murphy, M.D., bows to no one in his dedication to Ohio State football.

There is one slight difference fanwise, however, between your ordinary garden-variety Brutus and Bertha Buckeyes and Dr. Bob. While a fan’s field of assumed expertise has always inclined toward busted plays, frittered-away games and even — sad to say — an occasional lost season, he, by profession, has always concentrated on misfortunes that are actually even worse.

Really.

You know, seriously bad breaks. Yes, actual fractures. And sprains, rips, twists, tears, bruises, concussions, contusions, welts, scrapes and nicks, etc., etc. — all of the injuries and physical misfortunes, small and large, that attend the sport.

A man for most seasons — 41 all told, until retiring in 1993 — Dr. Bob was the physician on call when bad things physically happened in Buckeye Country. He was also team doctor in basketball all that time. In football, for all those seasons, he attended to the wounded and ailing first for Woody Hayes, then for Earle Bruce, and finally for John Cooper.

Remember the time center/linebacker Danny Fronk came in the week of the 38-28 win at Iowa looking like a man with Mount Vesuviuses breaking out all over his body?

Well, maybe you don’t, because that’s been a while, but Dr. Bob does. Must have been 1958, as he remembers.

“He came in after the game the week before saying, ‘I don’t feel very good.’ Well, we took a look at him and he had boils all over his body. I mean, all over.

“We got him into the hospital, and he was there several days and his temperature was 105, 104, 103. After it went down, we checked him on Thursday and he looked pretty good.”

Still, Dr. Bob was not a man to trifle where matters of team health were concerned.

“I said there was no way he could play,” he said.

But a funny thing happened. On Saturday at Iowa City, Fronk came out dressed for action, and ... uh, oh, ... “I saw him talking to Woody and pointing to me.

“I knew what was coming. He came over and said, ‘Doc, I feel great. I can play football, or anything else.’”

During this era, Murphy had another medical expert on his side, Dr. Dick Patton, his predecessor and father figure as team physician. He and Patton worked pretty much as co-equals until Patton — “the best doctor I’ve ever known” — relinquished his role to become head of surgery at Riverside Hospital in Columbus in 1970.

They decided to let Fronk start, knowing he couldn’t play the whole game.

Murphy: “We got a touchdown up and things were going OK and we had them pinned down deep in the second quarter, so I told Woody it might be time to take Danny out. Woody kept saying, ‘OK, Doc, OK,’ and he finally did. And you can just guess what happened. They beat the new linebacker on the first play and ended up scoring.”

And Mount Hayes?

“He just erupted,” said Murphy. “He kept screaming, ‘You see what you did! You see what you did!’ Fortunately, we won the game, or I don’t know if I’d have gotten on the airplane home or not.”

Memories. Though names momentarily can escape him — he is, after all, about to turn 80 — the reminders of times good — and, yes, sometimes bad — still flow for Dr. Bob. He visits practice, doesn’t miss a home game and is a regular at team reunions.

Worst season? 1971.

“We had 17 surgeries — seventeen,” he said. “Knees, ankles, fractures, you name it.”

And, oh, yes, losses to Michigan State, Northwestern and Michigan the last three games.

Best part-time career? His.

“Remember, this was not a full-time job. I had a full schedule as an internist from 7 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon,” he said. “I could be dead tired from seeing patients, and then I’d go to football or basketball practice, and it was like going home and going out to a show.”

So where do we start?

Try Woody.

“I remember just two times when we took a player out for the right reasons, and he was really angry,” Murphy said. “Never physically, understand, but mad. Now, if that happened between you and me, I’d think about it and the next day I’d apologize to you and say I was wrong. But Woody would never say, ‘I’m sorry.’

“He just couldn’t do that. He couldn’t admit he was wrong. But the same thing happened both those times. For the next two or three weeks, I’d read little things in the newspaper when he went out of his way to praise me. Or he’d do it on his TV show. That was his way.”

Murphy was with Hayes almost from the beginning and until the end. He got to know him well during two weeks on the Coast leading into the 1955 Rose Bowl. In an era of $1 million-and-up coaching contracts, one memory is particularly instructive.

It was a miserably rainy day — a day that would put the polish on a perfect season and an Associated Press national championship for Ohio State — and a coating of sand laid on the field as an absorbent left the players covered with grit when they came in from their warmups.

Hayes and Murphy watched from an anteroom as the squad wiped the sand off the best it could. The fourth-year coach turned reflective.

“Doc, you know what? This is going to make me able to buy my house,” he whispered.

“Over the years, he gave away money like you wouldn’t believe,” said Murphy. “To everybody. But this meant that he was going to be able to make enough from speeches and appearances and things to finally pay for the home he didn’t own.”

From then on, they trod the same path, enjoyed the same ups, suffered the same downs. They were together in 1957, in football’s Death Valley days, when practice-field heat strokes were scything down players right and left.

“That was a scary time,” said Murphy. “There was no water on the fields in America and our staff spent the next five years traveling around the country changing that. Woody was very supportive. As soon as we talked to him about it, it made sense.

“One thing about Woody — He always prided himself that he would get the best athletes in Ohio to come to Ohio State. He always said that’s all he needed.”

(Case in point: His 1957 United Press International national championship team had only one non-Ohioan. Fullback Bob White was a stone’s throw away, from just across the Ohio River in Covington, Ky.)

“But around 1964, he realized he just wasn’t going to have the material,” Murphy said. “That’s when we went out and got that group.”

That group: You know the names — Brockington and Mayes. Stillwagon and Tatum. Kern and Jan White. On and on. A freshman class that Murphy says “could have beaten the varsity” in that more restrictive eligibility era.

Their subsequent 1968 perfect-record, national title team would be the last for Hayes or his successors. Still, until that fateful 1978 Gator Bowl, the good times pretty much rolled on till the end.

About which, Dr. Bob weighs his words.

“I think that last year he was getting to be not as concise as before,” he said. “He was physically failing. What really happened is that he was letting his coaches call the shots.”

As it turned out, when the final shot came — this one thrown by the head coach with the world watching — Dr. Bob would see it like everyone else. But not until after the game, on TV. He was tending an injured player when Hayes struck Clemson’s Charlie Bauman near the end of a 17-15 loss.

“I think Woody knew that was it,” he said. “In the locker room afterward, he just kind of sat there. For 45 minutes, he just sat there.”

An awful way to go out, with a 7-4-1 record, in national notoriety? Not so fast.

“He should have won that game. But he got fired, and when he did he shut his mouth and started working for the university,” Murphy said. “He was always positive. He became a cult hero in this town. What he would have hated was to go 3-7 or 3-8 and then been fired.

“I have to believe that this way was a pretty good way. All those negative things came out about him, and when they were playing or coaching for him not many would say they liked him — but not one would ever say he wasn’t a better man for doing it. He was a true friend to me, and I’m sure glad I knew him. I liked all of them.”

What about Earle Bruce? Old 9-and-3 Earle?

“One of the best coaches we’ve ever had,” Murphy said. “What happened to him was a damn shame. I was very, very disappointed. I don’t think I’m going to say anything else about that.”

The scars, you see, from Bruce’s 1987 firing still linger.

“The Cotton Bowl in Dallas, and the tuxedo, I did not know that was coming,” he said. “I was in the doctor’s room and he had just given his pregame speech, and all of a sudden out he comes all dressed up. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing, Earle? And he says, ‘I’m going to change my image.’”

Before the year was out, new image be damned, Bruce was gone.

And how about John Cooper?

“A pretty good football coach, and do you realize how many great assistants he hired?” Murphy said. “Part of the problem was his not being in the same mold as Woody and Earle. John wanted to go home to his family at the end of the day, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And there was the fact that he was from the South.”

The seasons pass, football begets basketball — wherein the team physician could write yet another book — and the years fly by.

“The most amazing thing to me is to see the growth in size of the athletes,” Murphy said. “Every school has problems with alcohol and drugs, but that’s true of all the students. And I don’t like these supplements. I think we could do without all of them. A lot of it is in the head, rather than in the body.”

This is, after all, first and foremost Doctor Bob.

“Fortunately, I never had a death, and that was a blessing more than anything I did,” Murphy said. “We had two who were paralyzed. The worst, over at Purdue, was paralyzed from the neck down and didn’t get it back for about two hours, in the hospital.

“He was on the field for 17 minutes, and that was really scary. But they both came out of it and we got them both out of athletics.

“The mothers worry a lot, you know. I tell them it’s a great sport, and a lot safer than riding a motorcycle.”