Hankwitz collection traces evolution of football equipment

By Rob Alway, Editor-in-Chief

HAMLIN TOWNSHIP – For Mike Hankwitz, a lifetime in football did not end when the final whistle blew on his more than 50-year college coaching career.

The Mason County Central High School graduate and former University of Michigan football player has assembled a collection of antique football helmets and other artifacts that traces more than a century of change in the game he has loved since childhood.

Hankwitz estimates he owns 35 to 40 helmets, ranging from rudimentary leather and canvas headgear from the late 19th century to helmets from the modern era. His collection also includes vintage footballs, shoes and cleats, protective equipment, early football rule books, equipment catalogs and other historic artifacts.

“I just enjoyed seeing the evolution of them,” Hankwitz said.

The oldest helmet in the collection dates to about 1895. It consists primarily of leather with a thick felt lining. Another, dating to about 1900, is made of heavy canvas with felt inside. An aviator-style helmet from about the same era illustrates just how little protection some early football players had.

Among the helmets is Hankwitz’s practice helmet from when he played for Michigan.

Hankwitz also once owned an early rubber nose protector. The device was held in place by a strap and included a piece the player bit down on. He donated that artifact to the Mason County Historical Society.

Another piece of early protective equipment in his collection is a pair of heavy canvas football pants. Bamboo rods were sewn into the pants to serve as thigh protection, accompanied by thick felt knee pads.

Those early pieces are a long way from the equipment worn by today’s players.

“You can see how they changed,” Hankwitz said.

Some of the oldest helmets are now so fragile that Hankwitz avoids allowing people to handle them. The century-old leather has dried and cracked, sometimes requiring reinforcement simply to keep the helmet together.

His collection moves through the development of harder molded fiber helmets covered in leather and into the early plastic helmet era. Some later helmets featured suspension systems and increased padding, though Hankwitz said the protection still bears little resemblance to that found in today’s equipment.

Among the helmets is one particularly personal example: Hankwitz’s own University of Michigan practice helmet from 1969.

The helmet, marked with his number, 81, came home with him following Michigan’s trip to the Rose Bowl.

“We figured when we got back from the Rose Bowl they weren’t going to be using all this stuff anymore, and so I just took it home,” he said.

There also is a helmet similar to the one Hankwitz wore while playing at Mason County Central in 1965.

Football had been part of Hankwitz’s life long before he reached Michigan Stadium.

Growing up in Scottville, he played sandlot football before organized football became available through a Scottville Optimist Club-sponsored program for seventh- and eighth-grade students. As an eighth-grader, he became something of a student manager for MCC football coach Loren Dietrich, riding the team bus to away games and observing the program from the sidelines.

The following year, Hankwitz was moved up to the varsity team.

His senior football season was in the fall of 1965 and he graduated from Mason County Central in 1966. Recruited by several colleges, Hankwitz ultimately chose the University of Michigan. He began there as a split end before moving to linebacker and later tight end.

When Bo Schembechler became Michigan’s head coach in 1969, a conversation between Schembechler and Hankwitz helped put the Scottville native on a path toward coaching.

Hankwitz became a graduate assistant at Michigan in 1970. What he initially expected might lead to a high school coaching position instead began a college coaching career that lasted more than half a century.

He coached at numerous major college programs and served as defensive coordinator at schools including Western Michigan University, the University of Colorado, University of Kansas, Texas A&M University, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University. He retired following the 2020 season after more than 400 career victories as a college coach.

Hankwitz’s collection began while his coaching career was still relatively young.

In the late 1970s he regularly visited antique stores. During summers in Mason County, Hankwitz and his brother, Terry, would search antique shops, often looking for railroad memorabilia such as lanterns, locks and keys.

But the old football helmets kept catching his attention.

“I’d see these neat old helmets, and I thought, wow,” he said. “So I just started buying them.”

One became another, and eventually the helmets accumulated in boxes over the years.

Some examples connect directly to the places Hankwitz coached. One helmet in the collection came from the University of Wisconsin. During remodeling work beneath the stadium, old helmets were discovered in storage. An equipment manager who had previously worked with Hankwitz at Purdue University gave him one.

The collection extends beyond helmets.

Hankwitz owns vintage footballs, including one dating to about 1929 that will still hold air. The older football is wider than today’s ball and has nine laces rather than the eight commonly used today.

Hankwitz poses in some of the gear during last week’s Mason County Historical Society Gala

He also owns a ball from the All-America Football Conference, a professional league that competed with the National Football League in the late 1940s before folding following the 1949 season.

Then there are the shoes.

One pair features early cleats consisting essentially of chunks of leather nailed directly into the soles. Other shoes and cleats in the collection document the progression toward replaceable cleats and eventually the much lighter footwear worn today.

Hankwitz has also collected old football publications, including equipment catalogs, rule books and instructional guides. Among them is a rules reference dating to 1894 and early football guides associated with figures such as Walter Camp.

Together, the artifacts show a game that changed dramatically in equipment, player size, speed and approaches to safety.

Hankwitz remembers firsthand how limited some protective equipment could be. While playing at Michigan, he was struck in the hip by an opposing player’s helmet while covering a kickoff against Duke. Although he wore hip protection, the padding was relatively thin foam.

“It was the most painful thing,” he said.

After the injury, he was given a more substantial pad with a plastic shell.

“I thought, well, why wouldn’t they do that in the first place?” he said.

Hankwitz has occasionally brought portions of the collection into the community. At the recent Western Michigan Old Engine Club Education Day in Scottville he displayed many of the helmets in chronological order so students could see how they had changed.

The children naturally wanted to pick up the oldest helmets.

Hankwitz had to tell them those were off limits.

“They’re falling apart,” he said.

The newer helmets, however, could be handled and tried on. He has also compared a suspension-style helmet from the 1960s with a Northwestern University helmet from around 2018, allowing students to see the dramatic difference in size, padding and protection.

Hankwitz’s interest in preserving the past goes well beyond football.

He is a member of the Mason County Historical Society Board of Directors and has spent years researching Mason County history, particularly the railroads. Earlier this year, Hankwitz helped research and lead the historical society’s sold-out Mason & Oceana Railroad tour, which followed portions of the former narrow-gauge railroad through Mason and Oceana counties.

His interest in railroad history began years ago and, much like the football helmet collection, grew from curiosity into something deeper.

Whether the subject is an abandoned railroad grade or a fragile leather helmet from the 1890s, Hankwitz’s collections and research preserve physical connections to the past.

The helmets, in particular, tell the story of a sport that has occupied nearly his entire life – from sandlot games in Scottville, to Mason County Central, to Michigan Stadium and ultimately a college coaching career spanning more than 50 years.

For Hankwitz, each helmet is another chapter in that story.

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