The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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THE BUSINESS OF MICHIGAN ATHLETICS their way to it? It would have to be more than just a million or two more for me to give up that advantage. I'm not interested in doing more of those. "We've got one coming up that we will honor [versus Florida in Arling- ton, Texas, in 2017], but I've turned down a race track. A guy told me they could put 160,000 in there. It can't be a great experience for the fans, to give up this place, so I said no. But somebody is going to do it." The Wolverine: What sort of fence- mending has taken place with former Michigan football players? Hackett: "Bo's death … I was at Steelcase, and I just told everybody I was going home. It had a monu- mental ripple effect for all of us that played for him. "What we didn't anticipate, which you can now look back on, is that he was the mortar in the network. He was a gatekeeper of human needs and interests. He kept order to that system. When he died, there was a vacuum. "There was not a person who could take that spot. We struggled as a community of former players on how to relate to each other without his pull. "Jim and I worked really hard on that. We got them all together this spring, and I was really pleased with the people who came in. There were people who came back who haven't been here for 40 years, who were All- Americans here. "I'm just so excited about it. Some of them are going to sit with me at the games this year. "We just said the state of that disar- ray, and all of the reasons for it, needs to be put behind us. We're going to take a step forward together. "The department has funded a new start-up idea. It's an alumni network for the football players. Jim Betts is going to be the liaison from here to them. His job is to get them to be self-sustaining. We've held space for them to gather at each game. "If I were in charge back when the stadium was being built — which is a phenomenal job — I would have made sure that we built a room for them in the stadium. Not to watch the game, but to gather. "The Detroit Lions have a place like this. And the players deserve that, because they helped it be there. They're a community that gets that special space. "We've put that in Crisler. We're going to see whether it works better inside or outside, but that's where we're starting. "They're building a website and a network together. It's just getting started, but I've got nothing but great news about it. "Then we've found that one of the teams, for some reason, didn't get their championship rings from a few years ago. It was a sore point. So we just bought them all championship rings. One of the players was Tom Brady. "I don't know what got in the way of all these things getting done, but we're picking them off. The equi-