FREMONT - Mike Wetzel still has the broad shoulders and the thick upper body of an offensive lineman, but a little piece of his soul is gone.
It is up there, on a steep West Virginia hillside where the lives of many of his friends, teammates and coaches were snuffed out on a drizzly, foggy night more than 36 years ago.
Wetzel was part of the Marshall University football program in 1970 when a chartered DC-9 jet carrying 75 players, coaches, boosters and flight crew crashed in poor weather while returning from a game in North Carolina, killing all on board.
Wetzel had broken his right arm about a month earlier, and did not make the trip.
"One day you know all of those guys, you're eating lunch with them, practicing with them, and then they are all gone. You never see them again. They're just gone," Wetzel said. "The shock is something you can't describe, and it never really goes away."
Wetzel, now a 54-year-old grandfather who will retire at the end of the academic year from his post as assistant principal at Ross High School, said the wave of publicity surrounding Friday's release of the We Are Marshall movie has been difficult.
"Something like this is always with you, but in 36 years there's a lot of things you forget," Wetzel said.
"But then you see all of this advertising for the movie, and you start thinking about it more and more. Names pop back in your head, and you start toremember the faces, the personalities. That's what makes this so tough - there's the movie and all the Hollywood stuff going on, but what happened to Marshall was not make-believe. These were real people who died on that plane."
Wetzel had been an All-Ohio lineman at Ross in the 1969 season, and played in the North-South All-Star Game. He had been recruited by Toledo, Bowling Green and Marshall, and decided to play for the Thundering Herd following graduation in 1970.
Because first-year college students were not eligible to compete on the varsity at that time, Wetzel played on Marshall's freshman team that season, but he scrimmaged against the upper classmen all of the time. At a team meeting a few days before the crash, Wetzel was asked by the offensive line coach to accompany the team on the trip to play East Carolina, and keep stats during the game.
"He looked at my broken arm and asked which hand I wrote with," Wetzel said. "Since I was right-handed and it was my right arm that was hurt, I didn't go. Otherwise, I'm probably on that plane."
Instead, Wetzel went back to Fremont to see a doctor about possibly needing a bone graft to repair the complex fracture to his arm. He was at home when he received word that the Marshall team plane had crashed on its return to Huntington following a 17-14 defeat, and there were no survivors.
Southern Airlines Flight 932 had made an uneventful, 40-minute trip from Kinston, N.C., and was on its final approach into Tri-State Airport in rain and fog at about 7:40 in the evening when it apparently clipped the tops of some trees. The plane then slammed into the side of a hill and skidded down a sharp embankment into a heavily wooded hollow a little more than a mile from the runway, and burst into flames.
The Appalachian Mountains reach a height of about 1,000 feet in the area around the crash site, and that night there was a 300-foot ceiling. The airport was not equipped with part of the instrument landing system that assists pilots in adverse weather conditions.
Eyewitnesses near the crash site talked about a "streak of fire," an explosion, and a "huge fireball" that followed. The intensity of the flames and the five-hour long fire reduced much of the fuselage to dust, and the charred remains of a number of the passengers were never identified.
"You're in shock from the moment you hear about what happened, but it doesn't sink in until you see the parents of the kids that died, and you see the FBI standing there," Wetzel said. "That's when it really hits you."
Wetzel returned to Huntington right away, and as he recounted the days that immediately followed the crash, his voice halted several times as those nearly four-decade old images streamed through his mind.
"I remember the two boys who lived across the hall, both defensive backs on the varsity, and those two and my roommate and I had recently had a shaving cream fight. We had shaving cream all over the room that day," Wetzel said. "And then, well, here was the FBI asking me questions about them because they could not identify the bodies of the victims. I told them that those two boys both had sideburns, and one of them had a gold tooth in front. I told them what I could."
Wetzel said facing the parents of the deceased players was the hardest part of the ordeal to endure.
"There was a nice kid from Cleveland named Al Saylor, and he had showed me around the campus when I was recruited. He had broken into the starting lineup just before that, and we went against each other in practice every day.
"When I saw his parents it was really hard to talk to them. All of the parents and siblings were at the memorial service. That was the toughest moment. I think that's where I broke down the most. You just can't go through that kind of stuff."
After the tragedy, Marshall cancelled its final game of the 1970 season, and all classes on campus until the first of the year. Once they returned to school, Wetzel said a lot of the students went home almost every weekend.
"You just wanted to do your work, and then get away from there. It was too painful," he said.
One player had his father pass away at home the day of the East Carolina game, so the coaches told him that evening and put him on a flight to Texas. A couple of the Marshall coaches left after the game to go recruiting in the North Carolina area. They all missed the doomed flight, the worst disaster involving a sports team in U.S. aviation history.
"You don't know whether to feel guilty because you weren't on the plane, and so many of your friends were. You just didn't know how to feel. There's no real way to deal with it," Wetzel said. "We all tried to function the best we could."
A number of the freshmen did not return to Marshall the following season, including Wetzel. He went back to Fremont, got married, and worked a year in a local plant before finishing his education at Bluffton College, where he continued his football career.
Following graduation, Wetzel spent 12 years teaching and coaching football as an assistant at Ross, then went to Antwerp as head coach for four years, where he was honored as the Associated Press Ohio coach of the year in 1989. He moved on to Upper Sandusky and was the 1992 state coach of the year there.
A couple of years later, Wetzel returned to his hometown and Ross as assistant principal, and he served one season as head coach of the Little Giants.
"I feel kind of guilty about leaving Marshall, but when I look back now, I hope what I did was right," Wetzel said. "No matter what you did, there were always those reminders everywhere. It was something you just couldn't get away from."
Wetzel said the Marshall plane crash has haunted everyone associated with the program in some fashion. He didn't go back to Huntington to see a Marshall football game for 30 years.
"I used to have a few nightmares that I would be on that flight, and seeing all the panic on that plane, the lights flickering just before the crash. Then you wake up and say what the heck happened," Wetzel said.
He has some trepidation over the movie, and said he hopes the filmmakers were fair in their treatment of the people, and the real story. Wetzel won't go see the movie, preferring to wait and watch it in a more private setting at a later date.
"Maybe when we come back after the holidays, all of this talk about the movie will fade a little. Then maybe around February, I'll get the DVD and watch the thing," he said. "I just want things to get back to normal. That's not out of disrespect for the people who got killed, but if you've lived this once, you just don't want it brought up every day."
Wetzel would prefer to let his coaches, his teammates, and the Thundering Herd fans who hit the mountain that November night simply rest in peace.
Contact Matt Markey at: mmarkey@theblade.com or 419-724-6510.
First Published December 24, 2006, 11:56 a.m.
