This Michigan fan will blow a horn to honor her husband’s love of college football

Jen Nette can’t remember who won fall 2015’s game, even though it was a memorable finish.

The Michigan Wolverines — her team — held a 23-21 lead over rival Michigan State with mere seconds left in the contest and needed only to punt the ball away to hand the Spartans their first loss of the season.

There was a snap.

A fumble.

A scoop-and-score.

And the Spartans, on the road, walked out of Michigan Stadium — “The Big House” — with the win as the clock ran out.

Nette watched the game with husband Bob — from whom she inherited her love of Wolverines football — in an assisted-living facility in Fredericksburg, Va. The couple had relocated there in 2013 after leaving their home on Hilton Head Island. Bob was a Michigan alum, having attended the school for three years before graduating from Western Michigan University. They were active members of the island’s University of Michigan alumni club and stayed involved even after the move.

To the club they left the horn.

The horn — black, plastic, plastered with a sticker sporting a yellow block “M” — has been in the Nette family since the 1950s. It is long and loud, the precursor of a vuvuzela, perhaps.

Jen Nette saw it briefly confiscated by a security guard in the mid-1950s as she and Bob entered Michigan Stadium for a game. Fans of opposing teams had started bringing their own horns, the guard told Nette, and skirmishes — people sword fighting with the noisemakers — had been reported.

Later, in the 1970s, after the family relocated to Virginia, the horn was kept in the kitchen closet with the yardsticks and flyswatters, to be blown on occasion by youngest son Mike whenever he felt the urge. And it was blown more frequently when Michigan games were on TV, when the Wolverines scored.

Often, Jen Nette was the horn blower.

“If there was a game on, and there was a Michigan touchdown, there was a fair chance of that horn being blown in the house,” Mike Nette said in the fall of 2016. “And let’s face it: That was Mom’s way of supporting Dad.”

The Nettes bought their first piece of property on Hilton Head in 1973, a villa in Harbour Town. They would later trade that villa for a home on Deer Run Lane and, in 2007, move to the island to live year-round.

On fall Saturdays on the island, they’d take the horn to whatever bar or restaurant the alumni club chose to watch the Wolverines play. And when Michigan scored, they’d blow the horn, passing it around among club members, drawing looks and laughs from other patrons.

In fall 2016, when No. 2, undefeated Michigan took on the the unranked, 2-5 Spartans, Jen Nette was with her old alumni club friends at the Mellow Mushroom, where she was the designated honorary horn blower.

Her return to the island was a reluctant one.

“I’d already seen (my friends recently),” she said, recalling her thoughts as her children and alumni club members Bill and Jan Raisch conspired to plan her trip.

“They saw me when I brought Bob’s urn (to Hilton Head), and that’s enough,” she said. “But they insisted.”

Bob Nette died July 9, 2016, after battling several health issues.

By the fall of 2015, the man who worked for the Department of the Army for almost 40 years and who could fix anything with his hands needed both of them to hold a cup, according to his youngest son. The arthritis spread to his knees and feet and affected his balance.

At first, he needed a cane, then a walker and later, a wheelchair. He was stubborn, and he fell trying to walk. But he was always lucid, his wife remembers.

Shortly after his death, his family drove his ashes to the island. He was interred at Six Oaks Cemetery in Sea Pines. His oldest son sounded taps on a trumpet.

“She’s a little lost, and that’s why I think this reconnecting with friends is important,” Mike Nette said of his mother. “I want to get her down (to Hilton Head) for a few days each month. What she knows down there is life, and getting her to reconnect with that is important.”

Jen Nette stayed with the Raischs during her return to Sea Pines, a little more than a mile from where her husband rests. She wore his wedding band, having sandwiched it on her finger between her own and her engagement ring.

She planned to visit him before heading back to Virginia.

She recalled watching a Michigan game in the fall of 2016 in the assisted-living facility there.

She had a picture of Bob on her laptop, and she called it up on the screen, which she turned to face the TV.

After a few minutes sitting idle, the laptop’s screen would darken, and Bob’s picture would disappear.

So she’d shake the mouse, and there he’d be, watching the game with her.

She won’t be the only widow Saturday at the Mellow Mushroom, she said.

“There’s a lot of people in the club who are widows and widowers, so that won’t be a problem,” she said. “We’re just rooting for the home team. ... It’s like coming home again.”

And the horn's home will always be the island.

This story was originally published September 1, 2017 at 5:02 PM with the headline "This Michigan fan will blow a horn to honor her husband’s love of college football."