Heisman’s First Trophy

by Sam Hatcher

  George tried his best to exercise control over his emotions as he spoke briefly. He related the challenges in simply getting the team to and back from Atlanta. He named each player and offered a brief profile of every man. He apologized for being the one responsible for causing the game to be played in the first place. And he gave a terse description of what had taken place on the gridiron. Those to whom he was speaking had little knowledge about the sport.

  President Hill broke in at an appropriate moment to steer the discussion back on track as they needed to plan a party to recognize George and his band of football players.

  They decided a Friday afternoon parade along Main Street and around the square would be just the ticket with a barbecue picnic Saturday afternoon on the campus green. Both events were to be publicized in the Cumberland Weekly, the student publication, and in The Lebanon Banner, the local newspaper published each Thursday.

  Hill closed with a declaration that George had helped turn back the pages of time when a former Cumberland alumnus wrote a single word, “Resurgam,” on a fragment of a burned and frail column that once supported the university’s first administrative building, a casualty of the fire in the remaining days of the Civil War.

  Sports coverage had limitations

  Sports writers from coast to coast continued to write reams of copy filling hot-type galleys days after Tech had demolished Cumberland.

  The game may have been yesterday’s news, but John Heisman and his undefeated Georgia Tech team, only two weeks into the season, were the talk of the nation.

  Covering sports in the early decades of the 20th century was largely a chore left to a few columnists mostly in the Northeast. Writers such as Grantland Rice were relegated to let other sports journalists know what they had learned or observed. They were the eyes and ears for much of the nation.

  What they saw and what they determined to be the advantage of one team over another, the superior talent of a single player, the speed of a running back, or the tenacity of a coach would appear in print a couple of days after a game. This same cadre of writers greatly influenced others when it came time to select All-American teams and name national champions.

  There were obvious restraints with respect to travel making it difficult to go from one venue to another several hundred miles apart because there were few commercial flights and rail passage could take days depending on connecting schedules. Communication technology was limited to telephone and telegraph. There were few options available for writers who might be on the West Coast attempting to publish a story about a team or sporting event in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee or on the East Coast.

  It was therefore necessary for many to rely on the descriptive accounts of a few. While scores and only briefs may be reported the day following a game in newspapers a significant distance away from where a game had been played, the complete, more detailed coverage of a game might not appear until days later, when a writer would recreate play-by-play details from a story posted in a major market by Grantland Rice and his peers and received in his newsroom by U.S. Mail.

  Several newspapers published reports about the Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech game. But many did not show up in print until a week or so later after the game, particularly newspapers outside of the Southeast.

  For example the Taylor Daily Press in Taylor, Texas, didn’t publish its story about the game until October 16, nine days after the game. Even at this late date the newspaper’s sports department believed the story merited a two-column, two-line headline, “What a Grid Game, Georgia Wins 222–0,” and 25 column inches of news hole space. Although the newspaper gave a full account of the story accurately, its headline misidentified the name of the winning school.

  Football, although growing in popularity, was not yet enjoyed nationwide. The sport had originated in the Northeast and it was there where it was still the most popular. If there was a headquarters during this era, it would have been in the heart of the Ivy League. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania and others in the Northeast were the dominant forces in the sport.

  All measurements and comparisons to teams in other parts of the country were based on what successes and accomplishments had been recorded by the best playing the game in the Ivy League.

  Because of the newness of the sport in much of the country, sports writers tended to describe games in colorful verbiage including an abundance of adverbs and first-person pronouns.

  An excellent example of this style of journalism can be found in a report of the Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech game published in the Oct. 17, 1916, edition of The Washington Times. The Times scribe wrote, “The performance of Georgia Tech against Cumberland at Atlanta Saturday, October 7, invites our attention to the subject of huge scores. In this game Tech, affectionately known throughout the South as the Yellow Jackets, submerged Cumberland under the unprecedented score of 222 points to 0.”

  Record score unlocks gates for the South

  Tech’s scoring assault on Cumberland accomplished three achievements besides the record score itself.

  First, it served to unlock the well-guarded gates that had kept football programs in the South hidden from the same recognition bestowed by the national press on teams in the Northeast. Perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the game, sports writers across the U.S., seeing the number of points scored by Tech, were realizing that teams in the South can also be credible.

  Secondly, the record point total made it almost a newsroom requirement that a report of the game be published in newspapers stretching from Texas to Philadelphia. If Tech had not scored the 222 points it did, its game against Cumberland may not have been newsworthy, and certainly not of the caliber to merit the nationwide coverage it received.

  For Georgia Tech the third consequence of the final score was possibly the most important.

  While the game caused sports writers to look to the South for outstanding football teams, they looked first at Georgia Tech. No other school in the nation had scored so many points in one game.

  Writers covering a college sports beat in Texas, Boston, Chicago, or Washington had to be impressed with the 222 points posted on the scoreboard. They might not have known anything about Cumberland, but they were ready to believe that any team that could rack up this high a score must surely be one of the strongest teams in the country.

  Although the score drew much attention to the game, the relationship John Heisman shared with Grantland Rice didn’t hurt. Rice, now at or near the pinnacle of his career, was considered the dean of sports writers. For many in the fourth estate he was credited with having the greatest influence leading to a movement in journalism that provided for a respectful place for sports writers in the newsroom.

  Until Rice’s appearance in Nashville, Atlanta, and New York, and the great following of readers he attracted through sports columns published nationwide, sports writing and the “sporting news,” as it was labeled in past years, was largely regarded as a secondary class of journalism.

  Hundreds of thousands read Rice’s columns during the era. His readers were turning into football enthusiasts. His columns, syndicated in the New York Tribune, were reprinted in newspapers, big and small, across the nation.

  America was learning that other schools outside the Northeast were playing a quality brand of the game, and one of those universities was Georgia Tech.

  Tech’s victory over Cumberland was a wake-up call that rang with a loud alarm that football was alive and thriving in the South. The clarion call, heard clearest in the Northeast, signaled that other southern schools soon would be getting their due from national sports writers, and no longer would colleges in one neck of the woods get preferential treatment when it came to picking a national champion.

  It was a new day for football in the South, with the door opened by Heisman and his Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.

  News about Georgia Tech’s football team swept the nation. The Engineers were getting accolades from football fans in 48 states.

  Th
ere have been few college teams with as many nicknames accepted by Georgia Tech.

  The school’s early teams were called Engineers. From 1893 to 1910 the football team was simply called the “Techs.” In 1902 some Southern newspapers began calling the university’s teams the Blacksmiths because of the large amount of metal work that was being completed in the Institute’s Mechanical and Manufacturing departments.

  Beginning in 1905, The Atlanta Constitution referred to the Tech squad as the Yellowjackets (one word) because of the yellow jackets that team supporters often wore to their games.

  The monikers Engineers and Yellow Jackets have been staples ever since, while in some circles they have become known as the Rambling Wreck.

  In 1917 sports writers proclaimed Georgia Tech as the Golden Tornadoes because of the domineering style of play exhibited by Heisman’s team on offense.

  Continuing to display his genius, the coach’s offense attracted much attention early in the 1916 season with the introduction of backfield shifts, the quarterback standing over center and taking a direct snap, a single-wing formation, and the premiere of a series of plays from what would become known as the “T” formation.

  Following a 32–10 win against Davidson in 1917, Hal Reynolds, writing for The Atlanta Constitution, wrote, “While no credit must be taken from Davidson for the game fight they put up in the face of big odds, it was evident the Golden Tornado, as the Tech team has been dubbed, was not the whirlwind it was one week before against Pennsylvania.”

  That was the first time the term Golden Tornado was applied to Tech’s football squad.

  Game three: Tech vs. Davidson

  A week had passed since the blowout against Cumberland. For Coach Heisman’s squad it was a matter of getting back to business.

  The routine was the same as it was a week ago and the week before that. Even so, Heisman, the consummate glass is half-empty personality, was expressing to his players his worries about Davidson.

  He urged his players, untested by the season’s first two outings, to be aware of their surroundings, to be disciplined in their play, and to think and use their heads. Heisman always preached to players to not make stupid, thoughtless mistakes.

  RAMBLIN’ WRECK FROM GEORGIA TECH

  * * *

  Georgia Tech’s rallying theme song had its beginning, according to alumnus Howard Cutter, a member of the university’s first graduating class in 1892, during the first two years when the school opened in 1885. The earliest published version of the song is believed to have appeared in 1908 in the Blueprint, the Georgia Tech yearbook. The song has been sung on various occasions from athletic events to alumni gatherings and even sung during a 1959 meeting in Moscow between Vice President Richard Nixon and Russia Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

  RAMBLIN’ WRECK

  I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer,

  A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer,

  Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear,

  I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.

  Oh, if I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold,

  And put her on the campus, to cheer the brave and bold.

  But if I had a son, sir, I’ll tell you what he’d do.

  He would yell, “To Hell with Georgia,” like his daddy used to do.

  Oh, I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds,

  A college bell to put it in and a clapper to stir it around.

  I’d drink to all good fellows who come from far and near.

  I’m a rambling,’ gamblin,’ hell of an engineer.

  He’d given the same lecture to the same 38 players seven days ago. And the words he spoke then echoed the pre-game message he had delivered two weeks earlier when Tech opened its season by annihilating Mercer 63–0.

  Heisman’s challenge now was sober up his team from the elixir of victory, two games in which they walloped their opponents by a collective score of 285–0.

  He had to get his team focused for Davidson, a team that had the mettle to upend his Engineers, although the Wildcats’ play had not been dominating.

  Davidson lost its first game to a not-so-ferocious Virginia team 14–0. However, they won the second game on their schedule.

  While Tech was trouncing Cumberland, Davidson was handing North Carolina State its first loss for the year, a 16–0 decision.

  Heisman, evaluating Davidson, saw a team that would be passionately energized to beat a school that had walked over its first two opponents.

  Played at home in Atlanta, the game progressed much as Heisman had feared. His offense was playing with what appeared to be as one sports writer noted “little effort.” The team was sluggish.

  At half time Heisman delivered a crystal clear message. He advised his players that if they did not begin playing to their capabilities, they would get socked by a much weaker Davidson team, and they would be out of the running for the national championship.

  Message received

  The Engineers rallied in the second half, won the game scoring nine points and held the opposition scoreless.

  Heisman was disturbed because he realized that the team from whom Tech had narrowly escaped was not that tough, and as it turned out Davidson struggled to eke out a winning season finishing with a 5–3–1 record.

  Georgia Tech’s squeak-by win garnered as much nationwide coverage as its 222–0 rout over Cumberland the week before. The stories being published this time were slanted more towards “what happened?”

  That same Saturday

  A week had passed since George Allen had taken his fraternity boys to Atlanta.

  As he and his brothers gathered with hundreds for a campus and community celebration, they couldn’t help but think about the stage they were on seven days ago. Now they were back in Lebanon in their safe environment and all was well.

  The town in cooperation with the Cumberland administration was hosting a parade along West Main Street in honor of the team of still bruised and battered volunteers, followed by a barbecue picnic of sorts on the campus. There were lots of speeches and lots of praise heaped upon George and his disciples for their efforts in saving their school.

  A canopy of golden and ruby leaves hovered over the front lawn of Memorial Hall. The crowd wrapped themselves in sweaters as they sipped ice tea and lemonade and devoured pork ribs, barbecue, and chicken that had been slow smoked over open pits since the early morning hours.

  It was a very good day for Cumberland University.

  No one at the affair was concerned about the press coverage that would follow. Cumberland, after its one and only official game of an unofficial season, had provided all the material necessary for the sports writers to practice their prose. And now that had passed.

  It was time to soak in the splendor and then get back to the business at hand, more moot court proceedings, research on court decisions, contracts and tort law, and how to defend an innocent man charged with murder.

  Not quite back to the books

  The loss, although anticipated, was still devastating for the Cumberland squad, even days after the battle. Some members of the maroon team had played football in high school and others had starred in sandlot pick-up games.

  The rag-tag athletic experience had created even stronger ties of friendship while their admiration for their student leader had also risen as had their sentiments for their alma mater.

  And they were not quite ready to hang up their cleats.

  What was to be a one and done campaign for Cumberland in 1916 actually resulted in a schedule according to several newspaper reports with four additional games.

  One of these contests, likely a warmup before the trip to Atlanta, was a whopping 107–0 loss to Sewanee on September 30, only days before the Tech game.

  After the Tech game there are unsubstantiated reports of the Bulldogs taking on non-collegiate teams in Bowling Green, Ky., Hartsville,
Tenn., and Nashville.

  Reviews peeve Heisman

  Coach Heisman was not pleased with his team’s performance against a minimal opponent like Davidson and not at all pleased with the copy appearing in the national press.

  His 1916 campaign had stalled.

  Next up for the Engineers was North Carolina.

  The engagement would be an interesting test for the undefeated Tech team, and a strong showing could put them back near the front of the pack.

  North Carolina won its first game, defeating Wake Forrest 20–0. After that they ventured north of the Mason-Dixon Line and tackled two Ivy League schools, Princeton and Harvard.

  Princeton topped the boys from the south 29–0, and Harvard smacked them 20–0.

  Georgia Tech needed badly to whip North Carolina in a fashion akin to its wins over Mercer and Cumberland.

  Heisman sharpened his message to his Engineers and continued to accent his essentials of winning football and prayed for an outcome that would speak to the strength of his team and the caliber of football being played by universities in the South.

  Georgia Tech did beat North Carolina but not in the convincing style that Heisman had hoped. The Yellow Jackets won 10–6, but the team that had been unable to score against its previous Ivy League opponents managed to score six points against Tech and held Heisman’s offense to a mere touchdown and field goal.

  Although still undefeated, Georgia Tech’s reputation as a gridiron powerhouse had slipped another notch.

  The national press continued to heap praise on teams in the North and Northeast, while they discounted those in the boll weevil states of the South.

  Other campaigns

  While Georgia Tech, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and other college powers were campaigning for a national football championship, there was bigger news on the front page about events at home and abroad.