Rites of Autumn : The Story of College Football

by Richard Whittingham; Roger Staubach

• ISBN13: 9780743222198
• ISBN10: 0743222199
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-25
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

Every Saturday afternoon from early September to the end of November more than a thousand teams from St. Norbert's (Wisconsin) to Western Kentucky to Ohio State meet in front of crowds as small as several hundred and as large as 100,000. They are participants in an epic that began November 6, 1869, when the men of Princeton and Rutgers decided to test themselves on a field not yet called a gridiron. They are actors playing out their drama on a stage on which an unmatched cast of legendary performers has presented thrilling rivalries, glorious triumphs, and spectacular upsets. It is college football, a tapestry woven of memories as indestructible as they are colorful...threads that have encircled and captivated an audience measured in the millions, and have done so for generations. Welcome to Rites of Autumn: The Story of College Football, the definitive history of college football, from Fielding Yost's "point-a-minute" Michigan Wolverines of 1901 to Bobby Bowden's undefeated 1999 Florida State Seminoles and everything in-between, before, and since. Here are Red Grange, Illinois's Galloping Ghost; Army's Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, and Pittsburgh's Tony Dorsett. Here is that day in 1957 when Bud Wilkinson's 47-game winning streak at Oklahoma was ended by Notre Dame and the Game of the Century when Bubba Smith's undefeated 1966 Michigan State team played also-undefeated Notre Dame to a 10-10 tie. With hundreds of vintage photographs, dozens of primary documents, and a vivid text, Rites of Autumn brings back to life Johnny Rodgers running back a punt for a Nebraska touchdown against Oklahoma in their 1971 Game of the Century; Cal's four-lateral kickoff return for a touchdown -- "The Play" -- that defeated John Elway's 1982 Stanford team; and Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass that beat Bernie Kosar's defending national champion Miami team 47-45 on the last play of the 1984 Thanksgiving Day game. In this extraordinary volume -- the companion to an equally extraordinary 10-hour prime-time television series -- are the stories of the first forward pass (1876; Yale vs. Princeton), the first huddle (Illinois, 1921), the invention of the flying wedge (Harvard, 1892), and the wishbone (Texas, 1968). Here, "outlined against a blue-gray October sky," are Notre Dame's Four Horsemen and George Gipp, the subject of Knute Rockne's most famous halftime speech, who once told his coach, "Aw, these pep talks are O.K., Rock, I guess, but I got two hundred bucks bet on this game and if you think I'm lying down out there, you're crazy." Here are USC tackle Marion Morrison before he became John Wayne, and the famous letter to Princeton coach Fritz Crisler written by a former student known, when he attended Old Nassau, as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. In Rites of Autumn prize-winning sportswriter Richard Whittingham brings the most spectacular regular-season games to vivid life, from Jim Thorpe's Carlisle Indian School vs. Army in 1912 to USC's one-point victory over crosstown rival UCLA in 1967. Here are the great coaches, from Pop Warner to Knute Rockne to Eddie Robinson to Joe Paterno; the great African-American tradition, from schools like Southern and Grambling and from players like Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, and Jim Brown. And, of course, here are the great rivalries: Army-Navy, Texas-Oklahoma, Notre Dame-USC, and more. With sidebars on everything from Walter Camp's first All-America team to the history of the great Bowl games, conference and national championships, the Heisman and Outland Trophy winners, decade-by-decade all-star teams, and the greatest teams of all time -- all illustrated by an astonishing selection of more than 250 photographs -- Rites of Autumn is a spectacular achievement: the ultimate book for anyone who has ever spent an autumn Saturday following America's most passionately watched sport.

Author Biography

Richard Whittingham is the author of more than thirty books, including collaborations with Sir Edmund Hillary, Joe DiMaggio, and Life magazine.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Roger Staubach
Introduction

1
GAME DAY HEROES
Great Moments in College Football

2
SEASONS OF CHANGE
College Football Evolves <3
INNOVATORS AND MOTIVATORS
The Game's Greatest Coaches

4
BRAGGING RIGHTS
The Rivalries

5
PASSION AND PAGEANTRY
This Is College Football

6
VICTORY
The Greatest Games

7
CONFLICT AND CHANGE
College Football Comes of Age

8
DYNASTIES
Enduring Excellence

9
THE NATION'S BEST
Heisman Trophy Winners

10
FINAL GLORY
The Bowl Games

Name Index
School Index

Excerpts

Introduction

Saturday afternoons in autumn. For more than a century they have stood as the showcase for what has become a true American ritual, a time reserved for one of the most richly colorful, spirited, and vibrantly exciting sports in all the world -- college football.

Baseball has its summer, pro football its Sundays and Monday nights, basketball its winters indoors, but tradition and college football's passionate following have indisputably claimed that first day of each autumn weekend.

The game's very birth was on a Saturday afternoon, three o'clock to be precise, November 6, 1869, when Rutgers took the challenge laid down by Princeton to meet in a football game that would pit one school's honor and skill against the other. It was really a game much more like soccer that they played that windy November afternoon, but it is considered the first intercollegiate football game to be played in America.

Soon after, games were being played between schools like Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Tufts, Amherst, Trinity, Pennsylvania, Williams, Wesleyan, as well as the two progenitors of the sport. By the 1880s, intercollegiate combat on the football field had become a common diversion in the Midwest, South, and Southwest, and the following decade even in the then remote and sparsely settled Far West.

In those infant days of college football, students decked out in coats, vests, ties, and bowlers crowded the boundary lines of the grassy malls or dirt fields where the games were staged. Clutching and waving handmade pennants, they devised spontaneous cheers to urge their compatriots to victory. From the very beginning, college football was as much -- perhaps more -- of a contest for its fans as for its players.

Schools eventually began erecting rickety wooden grandstands to accommodate the growing crowds, who chanted across the field at each other in derision and down at the field in support of their own. As time passed the sport began to develop its own pageantry with the infusion of cheerleaders, fight songs, mascots, marching bands, bonfires, pep rallies, and tailgate parties. The bleachers gave way to sturdy stadiums and massive bowls, and the fans eventually traded their derbies and greatcoats for flip-brim hats, raccoon coats, and saddle shoes. Alumni returned to their alma maters in droves to watch their school compete against lusty rivals, and townspeople joined the throngs for some of the best entertainment to be had. The intercollegiate sport that had once been witnessed by perhaps several hundred classmates had become a rite and the focus of hundreds of thousands of spirited spectators on any given autumnal Saturday afternoon.

The game itself -- violent, tactical, demanding of skills, strength, and endurance -- evoked the very essentials of classic drama: conflict, suspense, excitement, competition, triumph, and failure. It is hardly surprising then that it became such a fertile ground for the cultivation of legends. The fathers of the game were the early coaches, who developed it with a panoply of innovations and refinements; men like Walter Camp, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Glenn S. "Pop" Warner, George Woodruff, Percy Haughton, John Heisman, Fielding Yost, Harry Williams, Gil Dobie, Bob Zuppke, Knute Rockne, and many others.

And the stars came out early on, sparkling on green fields across the country: a burly Pudge Heffelfinger at Yale, an imposing Hamilton Fish at Harvard, a fleet Willie Heston at Michigan, a corpulent but agile Pete Henry at Washington & Jefferson, a triple-threat Elmer "Ollie" Oliphant at Army, an awesome Jim Thorpe at Carlisle.

By the mid-1920s, more than 50,000 fans would fill Illinois's Memorial Stadium to watch the world's most famous ghost, Red Grange, gallop while professional football teams like the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears were thrilled if they drew more than 5,000 supporters on a Sunday afternoon. George Gipp died and a nation mourned the Notre Dame star's passing, but would never forget the name of the Gipper, thanks to Knute Rockne's now legendary locker room pep talk.

College football became a stage on which dramas of many natures have been played out, from last-second victories to Roy Riegels's wrong-way run, from Woody Hayes's tantrums to Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass. Besides Grange and the Gipper, the game gave us Bronko Nagurski, Don Hutson, Tom Harmon, Sammy Baugh, Blanchard and Davis, Johnny Lujack, Doak Walker, Paul Hornung, Dick Butkus, Roger Staubach, O. J. Simpson, Archie Griffin, Randy White, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, and Barry Sanders, to name just a few of those skilled performers who left indelible marks on the history of the game. And, of course, there remains the wisdom and wizardries of the coaches who followed in the footsteps of the game's founders, such sideline geniuses as Wallace Wade, Fritz Crisler, Bob Neyland, Bernie Bierman, Frank Leahy, Earl Blaik, Bud Wilkinson, Duffy Daugherty, Darrell Royal, Woody Hayes, Ara Parseghian, John McKay, Bear Bryant, Bo Schembechler, Barry Switzer, Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Hayden Fry, Bobby Bowden, and Joe Paterno.

There are few spectacles in the sporting world to match the ceremony of an Army-Navy game, the color of a Rose Bowl pageant, the emotion when a chorus of thousands rings out with the Notre Dame fight song, the splendor of a tailgate party at a Texas-Oklahoma game, the beauty of the USC cheerleaders, or simply the great games that have been played and the extraordinary performances that have been given on college football fields over the years.

In the words of one of the game's finest coaches, Army's Earl "Red" Blaik, written back in the 1950s, college football is "a game that through the years has stirred a president to save it, Theodore Roosevelt; another to coach it, Woodrow Wilson; and a third to both play and coach it, Dwight D. Eisenhower." We might add subsequent president-players Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, the latter having also portrayed the fabled Gipper on the silver screen. Blaik went on to explain that college football is "a game that numbers as legion statesmen, doctors, lawyers, men of finance and business, and thousands of just good citizens who have known the thrill of victory, have experienced the lessons of defeat and have felt, as few but football players can, the lasting satisfaction that comes from playing on a team."

What Coach Blaik neglected to mention were the particular pleasures of walking with a surging crowd across the fallen amber and red leaves of autumn into a cavernous stadium where one can cheer and sigh on a noble Saturday afternoon, and experience what has come to be the rites of autumn.

Excerpted from Rites of Autumn by Richard Whittingham, (Foreword by Roger Staubach). Copyright © 2001 by Pearl Entertainment, Inc.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.