America in WWII - (Page 56) gridironWAR by 1942, roaring throngs were also following football, the hardthumping gridiron game that once was so dangerous it was nearly outlawed. For every well-executed sacrifice bunt, smartly turned double play, or stolen base that baseball offered, football countered with a dazzling touchdown gallop, a bone-jarring collision, or a powerful sweep around end. The aggressive spirit of the game suited the American mood. Football remained rough—and more exciting than ever. The fierce action and inherent violence of football had thrilled American spectators since the late 1870s, when Yale’s Walter Camp transformed a rugby-soccer hybrid into something truly American. By the time Japanese carriers brought war to the American shore in December 1941, the pageantry and rivalries of the intercollegiate game had survived decades of controversy, fatalities, and countless rule changes. Massive concrete football stadiums dominated campuses across the country. Nationwide polls traced the success of the nation’s elite college football programs. Images of muscular, golden-haired ball-carriers graced the covers of Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and Life. The onset of war turned the college football world upside down—beginning with the January 1, 1942, Rose Bowl, which nervous organizers had to relocate from sunny Pasadena, California, to Durham, North Carolina, due to government restrictions on the size of crowds permitted to gather on the seemingly vulnerable West Coast. As waves of capable gridders left for military service, talented squads such as the University of Wisconsin Badgers (ranked third in the country in 1942) disintegrated. “I’m not going to sit here snug as a bug, playing football, when others are giving their lives for their country,” wrote end Dave Schreiner, speaking for many. At Columbia, Coach Little lost Heisman Trophy candidate quarterback Paul Governali to the marines, and his depleted squad went 8-25 between 1941 and 1944. by Eric Ethier As scores of traditional football powers filled their thinning rosters with 17-year-old freshmen and 4-Fs (men deemed unfit for military service), the navy used football to help prepare officers and aviators for combat. In the game’s teamwork and toughness, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox saw a clear connection between “the spirit which makes great football players and the spirit that makes great soldiers and sailors.” The nation’s youth seemed to back him: a poll published in the December 22, 1942, edition of the New York Times revealed that virtually all college-student fans of the game believed that “football bolsters national morale and helps boys to be better soldiers.” Under the parameters of its V-12 College Training Program for prospective officers, the navy dispersed thousands of navy and marine reservists and enlistees to deserted college campuses to begin concentrated programs of study and physical fitness training. Previously sagging football programs, such as the one at California’s College of the Pacific, suddenly leaped into the spotlight; fortified by navybound transfers from the St. Mary’s College team (then a California football power), the Pacific Tigers of ageless gridiron general Amos Alonzo Stagg reeled off a series of upsets and bounded back into the nation’s top 20. (In December 1942, in another, more coincidental, convergence of football and the war effort, scientists of Enrico Fermi’s Manhattan Project witnessed the world’s first controlled nuclear reaction in a secret laboratory beneath Stagg Field, the then-dormant University of Chicago gridiron where the legendary coach had made his name.) Stagg’s victims included a powerful squad from the previously unheard-of Del Monte Pre-Flight School of Monterey, California, one of a handful of new varsity programs spawned by the navy’s V-5 Preflight Training Program for aviators. Installed at the Universities of Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia, and at St. Mary’s College and California’s Del Monte Naval Air Station, the ABOVE: COURTESY OF COREY LEIBY,WWW.SPORTSMEMORABILIAMUSEUM.COM. CENTER: COURTESY OF THE FRED L.WARREN COLLECTION No team or player was unaffected by the war. Top: Old-time leather helmets remained standard through the ’40s until football recovered. Above: University of Michigan captain Paul White graced the program cover for his school’s October 9, 1943, home game against Notre Dame. Officer candidates in training at his school helped keep the team going. Opposite, bottom: Reservists on Colgate University’s squad trade jerseys for marine uniforms after a 6-win, 1-tie, 2-loss 1942 season. Opposite, top, clockwise from top center: Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, whose passing won 1940’s NFL championship, kept his gridiron job even as a wartime merchant marine; Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch (on a mid-’50s bubblegum card as a Los Angeles Ram) played for Michigan starting in ’43 as a marine in the navy’s V-12 training program; Visco Grgich, a San Francisco 49ers guard on this 1951 card, played on army air force teams; Byron “Whizzer” White, shown as a Chicago Bears halfback in the mid-’50s, reported on the loss of PT-109 as a naval intelligence officer—the boat’s commander, John F. Kennedy, appointed him to the US Supreme Court in 1962, where he remained until 1993. 56 AMERICA IN WWII OCTOBER 2007
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