He once played against Jim Thorpe in the early days of the NFL.
He allegedly threw a football 60 yards in a college game.
He barnstormed with semipro baseball teams to make a little extra money in the summer.
These are the legendary tales of Don Batchelor, the colorful highlights of a life devoted to sports.
What Grand Blanc folks remember is the gentle giant devoted to students and student-athletes in a 32-year career as teacher, coach and athletic director at Grand Blanc High.
Put together, it’s a portrait of the long, rich life of one of the newest members in the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame. Batchelor, who died in 1971, will be formally inducted at a banquet Dec. 5th at Genesys Health Club, not far from where he worked and lived.
“Batch,” as everyone called him, was a 6-foot-3, 240-pound mountain of a man who earned the respect of students and players not because of his size but because of his kindly nature and professional demeanor.
“He was like a big bear, a real gentle fellow, ” said Grant Alward, who played tackle for Batchelor in 1947 and 1948, but he was very intense, and you had to do what you were supposed to do.” Most Bobcats would have run through a wall for him.
“You kind of idolized him,” said Howdy Cline, a 1951 graduate who played football, basketball and baseball for Batch. “Everything he said I took as gospel. I think we all did in those days. When Batch talked, you listened, and you believed.”
Donald G. Batchelor grew up as a big farm boy who didn’t care much for the farm life. A multi-sport athlete at Hicksville High in western Ohio, he escaped to play football at Ohio Northern University, but returned to run the farm when his brother went off to fight in World War I.
After the war, he resumed his college career at Grove City (Pa.) College, where he once fired the ball 60 yards out of bounds as a legal form of punting then, according to one news article.
The distance is believable because Batchelor also was a hard-throwing pitcher who played for the companies he worked for in the summer – from Grove City to Akron to Hudson and Owosso, Mich.
“I remember his big hands,” said Cline. “He would pitch batting practice to us, and when he put his hand around the baseball, I couldn’t see it.”
Batchelor’s playing fame peaked with two years in the NFL, with the Canton Bulldogs in 1922 and the Toledo Maroons in 1923. It was with Toledo that he played against Thorpe’s Oorang Indians and reportedly tackled the legendary athlete in a hard-fought 7-0 victory.
“There’s a lot of others besides Thorpe, but he was the guy I would rather watch from the stands than play against,” Batchelor told The Flint Journal in a 1961 article.
Batch settled in Grand Blanc in 1929, coaching varsity football and baseball and JV basketball for two decades before becoming athletic director in the early 1950s. Even as AD, he continued coaching middle school and JV teams.
But his players knew him long before they played for him. With grades K-12 all in one building, no Grand Blanc student could miss the towering figure in the hallways. And any student who took his eighth-grade science class remembers his pet phrase. “Observe your surroundings,” said Bob Burek, who played for Batch in the 50s. “He’d say that 15-20 times in a class period. Ask any Grand Blanc kid in that era and they all remember it.”
His care for students went beyond the classroom and playing field. He’d open the gym on Saturdays for grade school kids and have his varsity players work with them.
He took Bob Stallcup to a father-son banquet when the youngster’s dad wasn’t available. When Stallcup later coached the Grand Blanc track team, the retired Batch would come to his practices.
Burek was a special protege who worked as the basketball team’s manager in grade school and also did odd jobs at Batchelor’s house. Burek went on to become a teacher, coach and principal at Grand Blanc.
“I drew on his lessons and things he shared with me,” Burek said. “He was truly a mentor, although I didn’t know it at the time.”
In retirement, Batch became active in local government and served as Grand Blanc’s delegate to the Michigan Constitutional Convention in 1962. But he was never far from the sports scene, and his legacy survives long after his retirement from the sports scene, and his legacy survives long after his death at age 76. He was among the earliest inductees in the Michigan High School Coaches Hall of Fame and the football field (now soccer field) was named in his honor.
His photo still hangs among a multitude of sports stars inside Little Joe’s Restaurant.
“After high school ” said Cline, “it was one of my very pleasant experiences to sit down in Little Joe’s and have a beer with Batch. We talked about old things and funny things over the years.
There’s not many people from his era in the group of sports pictures. Batch is there, and he ought to be there.”
READ FULL BIO