It was a road trip years in the making. Finally last month Dr. Sap and I headed down to Capitol Varsity Sports in Oxford, OH to visit shop owner Bob Fawley and winged helmet artist Russ Hawkins. Uniform gurus probably know that it is Capitol Varsity that has done the bulk of Michigan helmet reconditioning over the past four decades, and it is Hawkins who’s personally created the winged design that you see on many of the helmets each Saturday. Of course, Bo and equipment manager Jon Falk came from Oxford-based Miami, OH and that’s how the bond between the company and U-M was formed & maintained over the years. The Wolverine tie is clearly important to the Ohio company–winged helmets, schedule posters and photos of U-M dignitaries are found around the facility. (And no, despite being an hour from Columbus they don’t do any work for the Buckeyes. Without saying as much, you can tell there’s some bitterness in the air about that.) They even have a shrine to U-M and Jon Falk in their offices: A couple of notes: As implied above Capitol Varsity isn’t the only firm that handles the reconditioning of the helmets for Michigan as the Riddell helmets are handled by Riddell in Elyria, OH. On a disappointing note for me, Capitol Varsity did not…
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Denard Goes Schutt
Nice try, Denard. I’ve got uniform spies everywhere but even I caught this one. This season Denard switched from a Riddell helmet, used the past two seasons, to a Schutt model this year. Here he is in 2009 with the Riddell: And yesterday (from the nice photo gallery put together by Brad at MnB Nation), here’s the Schutt. A quick text to uniform guru Steve Sapardanis confirmed the switch. Sap checked his notes and verified that indeed, Denard wore Riddell in the Gator Bowl but trotted out a Schutt at the Spring game and at the Under the Lights press conference. As I wrote last season, I’m partial to Schutt. These are the helmets that are reconditioned and painted in Oxford, Ohio each year by a man named Russ Hawkins at a company called Capitol Varsity Sports. More from my 2010 post: This May I asked Falk about how Michigan hooked up with Capitol Varsity and Hawkins and he told me relationship goes back to the mid-1960s. Falk was the manager for his high school team in Oxford and naturally they used the local company for their reconditioning services. This relationship followed Falk to college at Miami, OH when he handled the equipment under Redskins head coach Bo Schembechler. When he was reunited with Bo up in Ann Arbor in…
