MacPherson was the 32-year-old quarterback of the Central State Marauders.
You read that right.
At 32, he was the oldest quarterback in all of college football.
That fact – and a few of the other details in his life that had gotten him to that point – appeared in Sports Illustrated a couple of weeks before the game.
MacPherson had been a standout quarterback at Roosevelt High School in Dayton when, in 1957 at age 17, he quit school and joined the U.S. Marines.
After four years of service, he returned to Dayton and worked 10 years at Central Ohio Paper and NCR. During that time, he completed his GED.
Finally, he decided to try his hand at college football and became the CSU starter for two seasons, one of which included a tete te tete with Too Tall.
McPherson recounted the story to me 26 years ago when he was coaching at Northridge High. He said the week before facing Tennessee State, he’d had a three touchdown game and that, like the SI nod, had caught Too Tall’s attention.
“Sure enough, on one of the very first plays, he jumps straight over my guard and buries me for a sack,” MacPherson said. “And all he said was ‘Not today, Old Man. Not today…Stay down!’”
The story always draws a laugh, but it should also come with a qualifier because in his life Steve “Butch” MacPherson never stayed down for long.
Too Tall may have had the more famous moniker, but MacPherson was just as towering in his own right, right up to 13 days ago when he died at age 82 in Chicago while he and his wife Deborah were visiting their son Matt, his wife Pam and their three children.
Matt is the associate head coach in charge of defensive backs at Northwestern University, and he’s joined on the staff by another former Northridge High player, Jay Hooten, now the Wildcats’ Director of Football Performance.
Butch had coached both of them, so during football seasons he and Deborah made many trips to Chicago to catch a pair of back to back Northwestern home games and also to see their two grandsons, Tommy and Drew, play football at their respective high schools and sometimes even watch granddaughter Emily play junior high volleyball.
MacPherson, though, was a football man, through and through.
After CSU, he coached a season at Stivers and then took over the job at Jefferson High, which was riding a 49-game winning streak when coach Bob Gregg left and most of the talent did, too.
The first season MacPherson didn’t win a game and had several fans on his back. He didn’t waver and within four years he’d turned the program back into a winner.
That got him to Northridge where he coached 27 seasons before retiring in 2005. By then his coaching tree was branching out and that included Bob Smith, his former player and longtime assistant, who took over the Polar Bears program, and this season has them 7-2.
The family limbs reach to Cincinnati, too, where son Mike – who played for his dad, as well – coaches the third- and fourth-grade team at Our Lady of Victory School and grandson Ben is an eighth-grade linebacker and offensive tackle.
With a laugh, Matt said the grandkids “have no idea what it was like playing for Butch. He let my younger brother Mike get away with stuff we never could have and now, with the grandkids, he wasn’t even close to the person I grew up with.”
Mike agreed: “I had it easier than Matt, but it was still rough, I wouldn’t call our dad a players’ coach. He practiced tough love.”
Hooten explained it further: “He was very demanding and could be extremely hard on us. When I was young, I didn’t understand it, but as I got older, I understood that without him, without his guidance, his hard-nosed coaching, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
“He was demanding because he cared. He saw the potential in us and he was going to get it out of us.”
Since MacPherson’s death, a number of his former players have posted remembrances on social media and many of them have reflected on the prime lessons he instilled.
One of the big ones, Mike said, was: “Just show up. Do your job whatever it may be. No excuses. When things are good, when they’re bad, if you’re tired or sick, be tough enough to show up every day and do what you’re supposed to do.”
Those lessons carried over from the football field to a player’s marriage, raising his family and his job.
“If you didn’t feel like going to work; if your boss was on your butt; if you felt like quitting, remember you made it through gym class with Butch MacPherson! You played football for Butch MacPherson! So you can handle that other stuff,” Matt said.
MacPherson was just as demanding when it came to the classroom, Hooten said:
“I wasn’t the greatest student in school so he was like ‘That’s it. You’re coming to my office to do your homework every day.’”
Other former Northridge players, including Derek Asher, chimed in on Hooten’s Facebook page:
“Without him, I don’t graduate. He came and pulled me out of study hall to be his teacher’s aide my junior and senior years. (Took) me to each of my classes to get missed assignments, then made me do them in front of him.
“I started coaching because of him. He’s one of the biggest and positive role models in my life.”
‘He’s the reason I got into coaching’
MacPherson grew up on Lexington Avenue in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. He told me he never knew his father and his mother was a hard-working woman from Puerto Rico.
“I remember hearing stories from my dad how she worked two jobs and how he walked her from the bus stop at all hours of the night to make sure she got home safely,” Mike said.
She moved her four kids to Dayton in the early 1950s. Butch was 12.
By his teenage years, he showed real athletic promise. He starred at Roosevelt High and then on service teams in the Marines. When he worked in local factories here, he became a standout softball player and today is enshrined in the Dayton Amateur Softball Hall of Fame.
He said his Central State teams had several gifted players, including defensive end Mel Lunsford, who then played eight seasons with the New England Patriots; Charlie Hester, who was drafted by the Oakland Raiders and Donnie Walker, who played with the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets.
Yet the people he remembered most from his CSU days were his coach, Jim Walker, who took a chance on him, and especially Dr. Vivian Lewis, the tiny, well-respected professor and wife of former football coach Country Lewis.
She was known as “Little Doc” and was part Mother Teresa, part Terminator.
He took her lessons along with him when he started working with kids.
Bob Smith was just a teenager when he first met MacPherson, who then was coaching at Jefferson.
“Me and my buddies were getting ready for football and we’d run down at DeWeese Parkway,” he said. “We’d see this old Ford pick-up truck pull up and this guy would jump out and start running every day.
“One day he sees our Northridge Football shirts and starts taking to us. After a while, I started running with him and I’m telling you, I was a teenager and he had to be almost 40 and it took everything I had to keep up with him.
“Then, my senior year, he ends up taking over at Northridge. I knew him 46 years and he meant as much to me as did my mother and my father. My dad passed away 22 years ago, but Butch was still a father figure to me and then a grandfather figure to my kids.
“We were best friends. Our families would vacation together. We’d talk almost every day.
“He’s the reason I do what I do. He’s the reason I got into teaching. The reason I got into coaching.”
After Smith – who played college football at the University of Dayton – took over the Northridge program, he said MacPherson often visited:
“He’d be at about all our home games and he’d come to practice. Sometimes he’d visit the locker room, but other times he’d just sit on the Gator at the edge of the practice field and talk about the game and the kids.”
Mike said his dad even came down to watch him coach the third and fourth graders:
“He used to get a kick out of sitting behind our bench during the games and listening how some people talked about how I was a terrible coach. He said it brought him back to the days when was coaching.”
Matt said this last trip his dad made to Chicago, he did see Northwestern play Southern Illinois (Sept. 17), but he missed the game with the Miami RedHawks the following Saturday:
“He had mounting health issues: Type 2 diabetes, Stage 4 kidney failure, he’d had a minor heart attack and a small stroke.
“I think it was just an accumulation of things.”
After nine days in the hospital, he was moved to hospice for two more.
Loving ‘send-off’
Family and friends gathered with him the day before he died and, as Mike put it, “It was a great day. He was in a good mood.
“My sister, Lisa, was up from Florida with her daughter and family and Dad was his old self. He was arguing with us to get him up so he could sit in “a normal chair”… which he soon did.
“We watched football and he made the jokes he usually did and told stories and there was a lot of laughter.
“Matt’s son Tommy had just returned from a college visit to Cornell and he talked about the trip.”
Bob Smith and his wife and daughter had driven over Saturday morning – following the Polar Bears victory over Bethel the night before – and Jay Hooten and his wife were there, too.
“Butch was drinking Soco Limes and we brought up some Marion’s Pizza and he was asking how so and so was doing and remembering different stories. He was on fire!” Hooten said.
In a private moment, Bob Smith spoke to him from the heart: “Not to be sappy, but I had the opportunity to tell him I love him and what he’d meant to my life.”
Mike did the same: “I got to tell him I love him and what a great dad he was.
“Not everybody gets a chance to have a send-off like that.”
Sometime in the wee hours of the next morning Butch MacPherson passed away, leaving his wife, two brothers (Doug and Loyd), a sister (Gail), four children – Lisa (spouse Shane Cotter); Stephen (Teresa); Matt (Pam), Mike (Susan) – 11 grandchildren and one great grandchild.
“Matt and I talked about it,” Mike said. “Sunday was so great and it wasn’t going to get any better from then on. I think he just said, “It’s time to go!'’’ Matt said the family plans to have a Celebration of Life gathering, but it might not be until spring or summer:
“Mom wants a chance to sort everything out. Being a true coach’s wife and a player’s mom, she also knows me and my kids and my younger brother and his son are all busy with football right now.
“Butch’s attitude would have been: ‘Missing a game or missing a practice isn’t going to bring me back, so why would you do it?’
“A lot of it goes back to the idea that whether things are good or things are bad, it doesn’t matter.
“You show up. You do your job. You do what you’re supposed to do.”
You don’t: “Stay down!”
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