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Gary Moeller Deserved Better
It was a different time, but it really wasn’t.
The Excalibur restaurant is gone now, like so many others from days gone by. It was a hangout for well-known Detroit-area locals from broadcasters (Bill Bonds), politicians (L. Brooks Patterson), businessmen (Lee Iacocca) and sports figures.
The ‘Ex’ or ‘Excab’ as it was referred to by the regulars and staff, was where the ‘three-martini-lunch’ or the ‘dinner-and-a-few-highballs,’ was the norm. It was where middle-aged men, young bucks with money and assorted others went looking for an escape, to unwind or to get drunk and ruin your life. Or so one thinks.
Gary Moeller died Monday at 81. The ‘coach between Bo and Lloyd’ at Michigan. Yet for one night, one regretful mistake, he might have been at Michigan another 15 years. Lloyd Carr might not ever coached in The Big House and won the 1997 National Championship. It would have been Moeller.
Had he accepted the free taxi ride back to Ann Arbor, had he let a friend who offered to drive him home, had he done anything differently, not slobbered all over a waitress who was young enough to be his daughter, he would have continued to be the head coach at the University of Michigan.
Instead, he got belligerent and refused to get into the taxi or ride with his friend and the police intervened and anytime…
