It was an eye-opening experience.

While then-cornerback Rick Telander was chasing scout teams on the practice field next to Dyche Stadium in 1970, students back on the Northwestern campus were burning flags and barricading Sheridan Road in protest.

Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bobby Kennedy. Kent State.

“Students declared Northwestern a free state,” said Telander, now a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Society was all up for grabs.”

Society maybe, but not NU’s football team. Telander admits it was tough at times for him and his teammates to take orders from head coach Alex Agase, a decorated World War II marine.

Personal challenges came at every practice.

“An athlete had to make up his mind,” Telander said. “It was hard to reconcile the staid and established values of organized sports with what they were thinking politically.”

But Agase doesn’t remember a mixed-up kid or even a nationally recognized journalist.

To his former coach, Telander was just a hard-working cornerback who always kept his head up and never shied away from a big receiver.

“He was part of an outstanding group of defenders,” Agase said. “He was a consistent player and made an excellent contribution.”

Big Ten teams like Iowa were seeing players boycott for civil rights reasons. Richard Nixon was a football fan – and Telander said that didn’t sit well with many of his fellow players.

College life awoke this young football player from Peoria, Ill. Reflecting on his playing days, Telander said he has memories of being a conflicted young man who struggled with the discipline of the football field – and the freedoms of the classroom.

The English literature major described the “explosions” in his mind that came with every class.

“We were talking about things that I had never been able to put together,” said Telander, who was bending his mind just an El ride from where the cops and hippies were battling in Grant Park.

After graduation and an unsuccessful tryout with the Kansas City Chiefs, Telander adopted a bohemian lifestyle, selling his wares as a freelance journalist while working odd jobs to stay fed.

His career was kick-started when he wrote the book “Heaven is a Playground” at age 25. Telander spent a summer hanging out at the neighborhood basketball courts in Brooklyn, N.Y. He lived out of a sleeping bag on the floor of his friend’s apartment, which had no furniture beyond a bed.

“If I wanted to read, I had to go to the bathroom, put the seat down and sit on the toilet,” said Telander, who also remembers chowing down on hot dogs and meatball sandwiches every day.

He bounced between a couple of football leagues, but he soon settled on more leisurely games of basketball and softball. Now, Telander said he gets his best exercise from wrestling with his 11-year-old son.

Freedom was the perfect lifestyle for Telander back then, but marriage and family later persuaded him to settle down. In 1980, he got hitched, started a family and found a steady job.

As a staff writer for Sports Illustrated, Telander criss-crossed the country, bobbing from campus to campus – one weekend at Washington, the next at Oklahoma, then on to Michigan – all to watch the game he loved. There was a time in the 1980s, he says, when he knew more about what was happening in college football than anyone else in the country – and maybe that was too much.

The tension and drama on Saturday afternoons couldn’t keep him from witnessing the often corrupt – and sometimes violent – world of collegiate athletics.

“It’s like what they say about hot dogs: If you love them, you probably don’t want to see how they’re made,” he said. “College football in the 1980s was like the Wild West in the 1850s.”

In his current gig as a columnist, Telander hasn’t been afraid to take the hard line with a college athletic department – even when it’s his own alma mater.

And he’s still ticked off by the Dyche Stadium-Ryan Field issue.

“Am I supposed to plant the purple flag and stand by it?” Telander said. “It’s a wonderful university and has greater responsibilities. Maybe I just hold it to a higher standard.”