Editor's note: This previously published story is being highlighted as part of ESPN's 2019 coverage of the 150th anniversary of college football.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The coach lined up the Michigan freshmen at the front of the team meeting room. To a man, they look as if they wished they were somewhere more comforting, like a chemistry midterm.
The coach plucked tailback Kevin Grady from the middle of the line. Grady, a high school All-American, enrolled in school last winter. Surely he would know the assignment. The coach asked him to demonstrate.
In a quavering voice, Grady sang, "Hail to the victors valiant..."
If he hit the hole as tentatively as he began the chorus to the Michigan fight song, Grady's football career never would have started.
"Say it again," commanded the coach, professor emeritus of music Willis Patterson.
It is one of the untold traditions of college football. For nearly 40 years, the Michigan football team has gotten an annual lesson in how to sing "The Victors," the school's famous, and famously contagious, fight song. This year, for the first time, coach Lloyd Carr allowed a writer and an ESPN GameDay crew into the session.
If you are wondering why it is important that a football team learn how to sing its fight song, you should know three things.
First, a tradition of even longer standing is that the Wolverines sing the fight song in the locker room after every victory.
"You feel like you are a part of the tradition at Michigan and the players who've played before you," senior tight end Tim Massaquoi said about the locker room sing. "It is funny because the first time I sang it, I didn't even know the first couple of words. Now I have been here five years and I know all the words. You feel real good, you feel like you are a part of something greater than yourself."
Second, "The Victors" is essential to the makeup of, as they like to say here, a Michigan man.
"For those of us who love Michigan," Carr said, "every time you hear that song, it speaks to your heart and your love for Michigan."
Third, you have to walk upstairs in Schembechler Hall, the football building, and ask the man for whom the building is named. Legendary coach Bo Schembechler, who began the tutorial in 1969, leaned back and stared, thunderstruck that such an obvious question would be asked.
"You've heard 'The Victors,'" Schembechler said in his customary tone, which is somewhere between a roar and a command. "If you sing it badly, it really sucks!"
Schembechler's first singing tutor was Bill Revelli, who was to the Michigan band what Schembechler is to Michigan football.
"When I came to Michigan in 1969, the first guy in my office was Bill Revelli. I swear to you. The first guy," Schembechler said. "He said, 'They tell me you're a tough coach.' "I said, 'Well, I got that rep.'
"He said, 'I'll coach that band as tough as you'll coach the football team. They're going to be disciplined, tough and do it the way it's supposed to be done.'
"I liked him. He lived right over here," Schembechler said, waving out his office window across State Street. "I decided I would have him come in."
Early in Carr's tenure as head coach, he asked Patterson to take over as singing coach. He couldn't have found someone better-suited to the task.
Patterson looks a decade younger than his 74 years. He is not only a professor emeritus but also a former associate dean of the school of music. He serves as choir director at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, where Carr attended, on the edge of campus. He grew up in Ann Arbor.
"The marching band used to be at Harris Hall," Patterson said. He gestured out a church window. "That's State Street out there. It was about two blocks down. On game day, at 11 o'clock, they would parade from Harris Hall to Michigan Stadium. The kids in Ann Arbor ... we were there. We would ragtag along with them. Some of us would sneak into the game with the band."
As a Cub Scout, Patterson served as an usher at Michigan Stadium. Patterson saw Tom Harmon, the Heisman Trophy winner in 1940, play. He shook hands with legendary coaches Fritz Crisler and Bennie Oosterbaan. His is a lifelong love affair with the maize and blue and, especially, their song.
"In my opinion," Patterson said, "it is a really well-written song in terms of the melody not being very complicated, good major scale, doesn't go too high, doesn't go too low, and rhythmically it has that kind of drive that incites and excites the audience."
That anyone would think to teach "The Victors" to the football team indicates the reverence that the university has had for the song almost since the day it was written. In 1898, after watching an underdog Michigan team win 12-11 at the powerful University of Chicago, a Michigan undergrad named Louis Elbel wrote "The Victors" on the train ride back to campus.
The university named its intramural field for Elbel and even may have forgiven him for being a native of South Bend, Ind.
Patterson labels Carr as a C-plus singer, with a qualification. "If he wins and doesn't sing a note on pitch," Patterson said. "I think I could still squeeze out an A-plus for him."
When Carr belted out "Hail to the victors valiant, champions of the West" in a sit-down interview for the GameDay camera, he brought to mind Bear Bryant's favorite type of football player.
"The one that makes you proud," Bryant said, "is the one who isn't good enough to play, but it means so much to him, he puts so much into it, that he plays anyway."
Hail to the Victors Valiant!
The seating chart inside the team meeting room at Schembechler Hall is simple: seniors up front, juniors behind them and so on up the stairs until you get to the freshmen in the back.
"Where you sit the first meeting, that's where you sit the rest of the year," assistant head coach Erik Campbell said. Looking at the freshmen, who line the back rows, Campbell said, "You got to work your way down."
At 7:23 p.m., seven minutes before the meeting began, the players were seated and as quiet as a jet engine. Minutes later, when Carr walked into the room, the team erupted. Carr has an image as a taciturn man. If he allowed more people inside the Michigan wall -- and according to him, this was the first team meeting ever attended by a journalist -- they would see the wonderful relationship that he has with his players.
First came the rhythmic clapping, followed by many of the players' bowing as they remained in their seats, in the finest We-Are-Not-Worthy style. The players began to chant, to the beat of "Eye Of The Tiger," "Lloyd! Lloyd! Lloyd! Lloyd!"
Finally, the coach said, "I'm Lloyd Carr. I'm glad to be here." The tone of the meeting had been set.
Patterson quickly brought the freshmen down to the front of the room. When Grady faltered, Patterson asked the seniors to show how it is done. They pounced. Out rang, "Hail to the victors valiant!" in an impeccable falsetto.
When the laughter died, Patterson grabbed Grady's hand and guided it to his teacher's stomach.
"You have to bounce that song right from your diaphragm!" Patterson said. Then he belted it out in a bass that has sung opera and concertos for many years and still sounded as if it could rattle the china out of the cabinet.
The seniors called for freshman Mario Manningham to demonstrate. Manningham may be a two-time all-state wide receiver from Warren, Ohio, but he is clearly uncomfortable speaking aloud, much less singing in front of all his teammates.
"This perfect performance he is about to give you," Patterson said, "is going to be just before the seniors stand and show us really how it is supposed to be done."
Manningham, too shy to gaze at his teammates or at Patterson, looked as if he sang to his right shoulder. His own nervous laughter interrupted him twice in one line, and Patterson responded by putting his hand on Manningham's gut -- diaphragm! -- and singing.
"The most important thing outside of the support and having the right rhythm and the words," Patterson said, "is to make sure you don't pitch it so high that when you get to the 'Hail! Hail!' you are all the way up on the top of your head with no pitch."
The seniors came through in style, as did the juniors and sophomores together. Before a half hour elapsed, the Wolverines sounded much, much better. As Patterson got the entire team to sing as one, he reminded them about the importance of the locker-room sing.
"It seems to me," Patterson said, "that since you are a team and you've functioned as a team all the way through the season, that when you come to one of those victorious moments you ought to get your concentration the same way as it was when you were playing the game. Get on the same pitch, support it and really convince the people on the other side of the camera that are watching that you really believe that you are victors and you are the champions of the West."
The team belted out an entirely respectable version. Patterson thanked the team and said good-bye. He received an ovation and a Michigan Football polo shirt as a gift. Carr declared the night a success.
"I don't think we have ever sung it very well, at least from a musical standpoint," Carr said, "but I think it is part of bringing the team together and being able to laugh. From a coaching standpoint it is always great to see the difference between the freshmen and the seniors."
The freshmen understood one more facet of becoming a Michigan man. Offensive lineman David Moosman, another rookie singled out to sing by Patterson, said, "Some people have mascots, big elaborate places. We have a great fight song, along with a great stadium."
Grady grew up in Grand Rapids. He began attending Michigan games in middle school. He has stood in the stands and belted out "The Victors" who knows how many times. But he came out of the meeting room as if he heard the song for the first time.
Ivan Maisel is a senior writer at ESPN.com. He can be reached at ivan.maisel@espn3.com.