Do you want to share your predictions, analysis or thoughts on Saturday’s Ohio State-Michigan game? Get involved with our coverage at live@theathletic.com.
beatosu, Ohio — There is nothing here. No plaque, no sign, nothing but cornfields and a cluster of buildings near the intersection of two highways.
I arrived at this speck on the map during a recent trip through the borderlands of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry. If you ask most people, they’ll say this is a rivalry with no middle ground. The state line carves out two fiefdoms ruled by the Big Ten’s two most powerful programs, leaving little room for ambiguity.
That’s certainly true if you live in Ann Arbor or Columbus. Venture toward the state line, however, and you’ll find a strip of land where the boundaries blur. To get a different perspective on the rivalry, I decided to leave the bubble of Ann Arbor and spend a fall Saturday exploring where fans of Michigan and Ohio State live side by side.
I had three destinations in mind: The Buckeye Wolverine Shop in Maumee, Ohio; the Appleumpkin Festival in Tecumseh, Mich.; and the phantom town of beatosu, located just off the Ohio Turnpike about 50 miles west of Toledo.
The legend of beatosu originated with a prank carried out by Peter Fletcher, a Michigan alumnus who served as chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission in the 1970s. Fletcher was in charge of the state highway maps, which include a tiny strip of northern Ohio. At Fletcher’s direction, the highway commission’s 1978 maps included a fictional town called “goblu” near Toledo and another called “beatosu” in a rural part of Fulton County, Ohio.
Fletcher, an ardent Michigan fan who later served on the Michigan State board of trustees, received some criticism for the prank, but he insisted it was all in good fun. According to newspaper reports at the time, the highway commission even sent one of the maps to Ohio State coach Woody Hayes.
“There’s nothing inaccurate in putting a message of great national import on the map,” Fletcher, who died in 2012, told The Associated Press in 1977. “Now we have three million messages cheering on the world’s greatest football team.”
A story about Fletcher’s prank ran in the Toledo Blade, accompanied by a cartoon of two gas station attendants, one saying to the other, “Another person asking about goblu!” as a car drives away. But when I arrived at the coordinates for beatosu, all I found was a wind-blown patch of ground with semis and pickup trucks zooming by in the background. It seemed the prank had been long forgotten.
I drove a few miles south to the small village of Archbold, looking for someone who knew the story. Inside the local diner, the waitress and the cashier looked at me in confusion when I showed them the Wikipedia page. A man on the street in an Ohio State sweatshirt was similarly stumped.
I checked with the local newspaper, the Archbold Buckeye, and was told to look for a man with a name straight out of a Thomas Pynchon novel: Bummer Dominique, owner of Ickey’s Bar and Grill.
I discovered that Dominique also has a pregame radio show called “Buckeye Breakfast” on the local radio station, WMTR, and has been covering Ohio State football games since 1969. By his own calculations, that makes him the longest-standing member of the OSU media contingent. He opened Ickey’s at its current location, 108 Ditto Street, in 1979, but the original establishment opened decades earlier, way back in the early days of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry.
I figured if anyone in Archbold knew about beatosu, it would be Dominique. When I asked him about the story, he said it didn’t ring any bells. But he wasn’t surprised to hear that it happened near Archbold, incorporated in 1866, population 5,000, where rivalry pranks are part of daily life.
“I would say, without any data to back it up, that this town has got to be just about as evenly split as you can get,” Dominique said. “Your next-door neighbor is a Michigan person. Their kids go to school together, they go to church together — one wearing maize and blue and the other wearing scarlet and gray.”
Dominique hadn’t heard of beatosu, but he had plenty of other stories. The 1975 game, played in the heart of the famous 10-Year War between Hayes and Bo Schembechler, was a matchup of 10-0 Ohio State and 8-0-2 Michigan. The winner would go to the Rose Bowl, the loser to the Orange Bowl. The night before the game, a group of Michigan fans snuck into Ickey’s with a casket they’d swiped from a local theater company. They took a picture of Ohio State Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin off the wall and placed it in the casket next to a bowl of oranges, then draped a Michigan flag over the top.
Ohio State rallied in the fourth quarter to beat Michigan 21-14, ending the Wolverines’ 41-game unbeaten streak at home. After the game, a group of Ohio State fans took the casket with the Michigan flag inside and paraded it down Main Street.
“I think the boys had had several before they did that,” Dominique said.
Ohio State and Michigan play Saturday while both ranked for a record 50th time. (Joseph Maiorana / Imagn Images)
In those days, Ickey’s used to host a big bash leading up to The Game with cheerleaders, a marching band and lines stretching out the door. Attendance started to dwindle in the 1980s after Earle Bruce replaced Hayes and the 10-Year War ended. In what may or may not be a commentary on Our Divided Times, Dominique said fans of Michigan and Ohio State don’t like to congregate as much as they used to.
“I’ve found they want to be with their own if they’re watching the game,” Dominique said. “Michigan fans don’t want to sit with a bunch of Ohio State a–holes. There are plenty of those, by the way. The Ohio State fans don’t want to sit with Michigan people because they don’t want to be nice. That’s how that rolls.”
Lest anyone fear that civility is dead, there are still places where fans of Michigan and Ohio State can peacefully coexist. I found one of those places in Tecumseh, Mich., a small town about 25 miles from the state line.
The Tecumseh Tavern is run by Bill Leisenring, a Michigan native who went to school at Ohio State. He keeps the decor fairly neutral, but locals know the tavern is a Buckeyes-friendly bar where OSU fans gather for watch parties.
“As a Buckeye watch bar in this neck of the woods, you can’t bite your nose to spite your face,” Leisenring said. “We’re not very forward with it. It’s sort of like, ‘Don’t talk politics.’ You don’t walk in and (see) Buckeye stuff everywhere.”
I called Leisenring a few days before my trip to see if I could stop by during the Ohio State game that weekend. He said I was more than welcome but offered a word of caution.
“This weekend is the Appleumpkin Festival,” he said. “There will be about 40,000 people in Tecumseh.”
Leisenring was not exaggerating. When I arrived, the streets were jammed with cars and fall festival-goers were milling around in droves. I didn’t have to walk more than a few blocks before I encountered a mixed group of fans, one wearing a Michigan jersey and two others in Ohio State attire.
While roaming the festival, I met Valerie Long and Debbie Murray-Ellison, two friends who work for the Sylvania School District in northwest Ohio. Long was wearing a T-shirt commemorating Ohio State’s 2024 national championship, and Murray-Ellison wore a shirt commemorating Michigan’s national title from the year before.
As Murray-Ellison put it, the friendship started before they “found out the devastating truth” that they were on opposite sides of the rivalry. Michigan’s four-game winning streak against the Buckeyes has ramped up the nastiness between the two fan bases, but it hasn’t driven a wedge in this particular friendship.
“I remember you said, ‘I still love you no matter what,’” Murray-Ellison said. “As mad as we want to be, we’re not going to take it too seriously.”
Fans in the borderlands have to buy their Michigan and Ohio State gear somewhere. A store catering to both sides of the rivalry wouldn’t last a minute in Ann Arbor or Columbus, but the Toledo area is one of the few places in the world where the idea can work.
To see for myself, I drove from Tecumseh to Maumee, Ohio, home of the Buckeye Wolverine Shop. The store is run by brothers Chris and Mark Mason, who took over the business from its previous owners, a couple who operated several stores in the Toledo area. The brothers had a home recreation business selling pool tables and barstools, and they decided to bring the Buckeye Wolverine Shop under the same roof.
An invisible line splits the store in half, with racks of Ohio State paraphernalia on one side and Michigan gear on the other. The store was mostly empty the day I visited. If I came back on Black Friday, Chris said, I’d see two lines stretching out on either side of the store, never crossing in the middle.
“We’ve had it where one line was shorter than the other, and we’d say, ‘OK, this line is shorter,’” he said. “They won’t go to that side. They will stand longer in line.”
The area around Toledo tilts slightly toward Ohio State, and the sales numbers reflect that, Chris said. While Chris’ sons are proud Buckeyes fans, he and Mark keep their loyalties close to the vest. They’re rooting for commerce, which means they need to maintain the neutral ground.
“I was actually sitting in somebody’s car, fighting like hell to get a steering wheel cover on,” Chris recalled. “All of a sudden the guy stops me and says, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, you are an Ohio State fan, right?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I am right now.’”
If it’s possible to put a Michigan or Ohio State logo on something, the Buckeye Wolverine Shop probably sells it. They have toilet paper, cooking utensils, dog collars, Christmas decorations, a large inflatable Brutus Buckeye and anything else you can imagine.
I noticed a “House Divided” flag adorned with Michigan and Ohio State logos and thought it might look good on that little patch of dirt near Archbold, just to keep the story of beatosu alive. Then I remembered what happened when Michigan players tried to plant a flag at midfield after beating Ohio State last season, sparking a brawl that was broken up by law enforcement officers wielding pepper spray.
Perhaps it’s better to leave the rivalry lore undisturbed. If you’re looking for beatosu, you’ll have to find it yourself.