by Dave Revsine
The Badgers and their supporters made their way to the field, past stately houses adorned with Yale flags and banners. It was a gorgeous day for football, and the scene in New Haven was a festive one. A crowd of Yale students estimated at 2,500 marched to the stadium. They were celebrating not just the game but also the end of a huge week on campus that had included the inauguration of a new university president, Arthur Hadley. They had pulled out all the stops, with no fewer than four bands leading the procession.
The Badgers’ fans were fronted, more modestly, by a single group of musicians. The band had not been easy to come by, as Yale supporters had hired most of the musical groups in town. All that was left was an Italian ensemble that, according to the Daily Cardinal, “furnished no end of amusement,” particularly its bass drummer, which the paper, without compunction, described as “a fat little dago.”
Pageantry and cultural insensitivity aside, the real story was, of course, the game. As the band blared martial music and well-coordinated cheers echoed throughout the stands, the Elis took the field. Though this was a very good Yale team—one that included three of the season’s eleven first-team All-Americans—it was nowhere near the level of those the university had fielded earlier in the decade. Still, they made for an impressive sight as they trotted out, due, more than anything, to their sheer numbers. Yale had fully sixty men suited up for the game—nearly three times as many as the Badgers brought.
Ten minutes later Wisconsin’s team made its entrance, and Eastern football fans got a glimpse of the player they had heard so much about. “ ‘O’Dea, O’Dea!’ everywhere was heard. ‘Which is he? That tall, lank, youngish looking chap!’ was the sum of the babel of talk,” though O’Dea “seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused,” the Daily Cardinal reported. His every movement was followed by a massive cadre of reporters, including the top writers from papers throughout the country. “Indeed,” the New Haven Register observed, “it is not possible to remember when a Harvard or Princeton game here has called together such prominent newspaper men.”
Yale won the toss, electing to take the ball and to play with what was described as a “stiff wind” at its back for the first half. The Elis didn’t have the ball for long—fumbling the opening kick at their own 35-yard line. O’Dea tried for a dropkick goal from the field on Wisconsin’s first play from scrimmage. But the kick was blocked, a theme that ran throughout the day, as, depending on which newspaper account you believe, O’Dea had anywhere from one to three of his boots knocked down. The Badger star recalled many years later that Comstock’s injury had played a major role in his dropkicking struggles, as it “prevented him passing the ball back the usual distance, consequently drawing me closer to the line and thereby making the blocking of drop kicks an easy matter.”
Yale’s issue was holding onto the football. While the Elis moved it far more effectively than the Badgers did in the first half, three different drives were snuffed out inside the Wisconsin 25-yard line due to fumbles by Yale halfback George Chadwick. Whenever the Elis coughed it up, Wisconsin was quick to kick it back to them—the goal being to get out of the first half without giving up any points and then to score in the second half, when they would have the wind in their favor. The first part of that mission was accomplished. The game went to halftime scoreless, a partial result that was seen as a triumph for the Badgers. As the team trotted off the field, Hereward Peele threw his nose guard into the air and exclaimed, “Now we’ve got ’em beaten boys. They couldn’t score with the wind to help them. We’ve got the wind and the game.”
The halftime tie certainly raised some eyebrows. In Chicago a Yale alum, eager to learn of the progress of the game, made his way to the Times-Herald building, where updates of the battle in New Haven were being posted in the window. “The first half is a surprise—a big surprise to me,” he said. “Wisconsin is holding our boys down in the hardest portion of the struggle. The Badgers are showing unexpected mettle and speed.” In Madison this news was greeted with enthusiasm. Sitting in his box at the opera house, from which he enjoyed a wonderful view of the Veriscope Board, President Adams dispatched a halftime telegram to O’Dea. “P. O’Dea:” it read—“Every one glories in your success in the first half. With the wind we hope you will score.”
The Badgers tried to do just that at the outset of the second half. Yale sent the kickoff to Wisconsin’s 20-yard line and O’Dea weaved 35 yards on the return before being brought down around midfield. The Badgers were able to move the ball a bit before O’Dea tried a dropkick from 45 yards. It was blocked.
Yale lined up on offense for the first time in the half with one notable change—the fumbling Chadwick was out of the game, replaced by Howard Richards. Although Chadwick had obviously not played well, it was still a curious move. Richards had spent the previous two seasons as a substitute tackle. Just a week before, he had been playing with the third string. On the Thursday before the game, he was tried at halfback for the first time and impressed the coaches with his “terrific plunges into the scrub line.” Now, he was in with the game hanging in the balance.
Richards and his teammates had some moderate success running the ball in the second half but found themselves unable to capitalize on their numerous opportunities. Fumbles continued to be an issue, but the Elis also had several drives simply stall out or end on failed kick attempts. Wisconsin, meanwhile, had no luck at all offensively, unable to gain a single first down on its attempts to send the ball through the line. It all set the stage for O’Dea, who “displayed a kicking prowess which has never been equaled on the Yale field.”
The first truly amazing kick came after Yale’s Malcolm McBride punted to the Wisconsin 25-yard line. O’Dea returned a kick of his own on Wisconsin’s first play from scrimmage, and the ball “looked as though it intended taking an aerial journey, but finally descended on Yale’s ten yard line,” eventually coming to rest on the five—a boot of 80 yards on the 110-yard field. When the remarkable distance of the kick was announced back at the opera house in Madison, “the house fairly went crazy.” But O’Dea wasn’t done. Later in the half, the Elis saw yet another drive stall out in Wisconsin territory and punted the ball to the Wisconsin 18-yard line. O’Dea kicked it right back to the Yale 15-yard line—a drive of 77 yards.
As the half went on, it seemed that the combination of O’Dea’s leg and the Badgers’ “bend but don’t break” defense would be enough to keep Yale out of scoring position and earn Wisconsin a tie. But in the final five minutes, disaster struck.
With the ball at its own 45-yard line, Yale handed off to Richards, the halftime substitute at halfback. Thanks to some “splendid interferences,” or blocking, he made his way around the right end. Yale had its fair share of eight- to ten-yard runs in the game, and it seemed this would be another one, but Richards wasn’t done. He broke into the open field “with four Wisconsin backs after him. The first man he dodged, a second he eluded with a clever foot movement, the third he proceeded to bowl over with his free arm.” That left only O’Dea between Richards and the goal line. “Here, the inexplicable happened. Pat, the surest of tacklers, handicapped by a broken finger, for the first time in his football career at Wisconsin, failed to bring down his man.” Richards took it all the way to the goal line, planting the ball right between the posts. The 65-yard run and the goal after touchdown gave Yale a 6–0 lead that it would not relinquish. Yale had won the game “that in many respects was the best ever witnessed on the Yale gridiron.”
Richards, the unlikely hero, was carried off the field on the shoulders of his fellow students, though many who witnessed the contest were reticent to give him too much credit. It “will not go down in football history as one of the few truly great runs,” the Boston Globe asserted. “This is due to the fact that Richards could have never covered this distance . . . had the Badgers known enough to ‘tackle low.’ ”
O’Dea shared that opinion. “I am willing to take the blame,” he told t
he New York Sun afterward. “I should have got Richards as he came down the field, and it is the first time that I have missed a man under similar circumstances.” Coach Phil King, though, quickly leaped to his star’s defense. “To show the pluck of Wisconsin’s captain,” he said of O’Dea, “I should like it known that he played through the entire game with a broken finger and played the game of his life notwithstanding.”
The Eastern scribes seemed to agree with King, lavishing praise on the Wisconsin star. The Sun called him “the prince of all kickers,” while the Boston Eagle described him as a “marvelous man.” The New York Press confirmed, “Capt. O’Dea proved himself to be the great punter he was reported to be.” The Boston Globe proclaimed “in punting . . . O’Dea is a wonder.” And the Philadelphia Inquirer stated “O’Dea’s punting for Wisconsin was marvelous.”
The problem, according to the Easterners, was that O’Dea was essentially all Wisconsin had. “O’Dea . . . was the whole Badger team,” the Globe stated. The New York Times criticized the Badgers for “their sole dependence . . . upon Capt. O’Dea’s kicking ability,” complaining that they only tried to rush the ball about a dozen times in the entire game. “Wisconsin was made up principally of O’Dea,” the New York Journal observed. “O’Dea’s kicks gained the only ground she made, and O’Dea’s kicks took her out of whatever danger she was in.” The Sun contended, “if O’Dea were replaced by an ordinary kicker [Wisconsin] would fall an easy prey to at least two of the smaller New England colleges.”
O’Dea saw it differently. “We should have won without a doubt,” the Wisconsin star said. “We traveled 1,200 miles and got out of condition . . . let the Yale team come to Madison and the result will be reversed.”
All the journalists seemed to agree that the strategy of having O’Dea punt at every opportunity, while keeping the Badgers in the game, ultimately led to their downfall. “Something more than kicking prowess is needed to vanquish a team like Yale,” the New York Press observed, “and the Badgers found it out today.”
Of course, Wisconsin’s strategy involved more than O’Dea’s punting—it also included his phenomenal drop-kicking. But, on this day, that part of his game was anything but phenomenal. Whether the issue was Comstock’s wrist, O’Dea’s finger, Yale’s focus during practice on blocking kicks, the wind, or a combination of all of the factors, the record-setting Aussie simply couldn’t get it going. The Philadelphia Inquirer called that part of his game “a disappointment.” The New York Journal said that, if O’Dea is a great drop-kicker, “he certainly did not show it in to-day’s game,” and the same Boston Globe writer who described him as “a wonder” in punting referred to him as “fatally slow” and “terribly overrated” as a drop-kicker. The Globe described one of O’Dea’s dropkicks as “a failure,” another as “worse than a failure,” and it dropped in a highly technical term when it offered that he had made a “poo fizzle” of a third.
Despite the unsuccessful drop-kicking in New Haven, the Yale game actually helped cement O’Dea’s status as a superstar. Along with the Northwestern contest of the year before, which saw him execute his record-setting dropkick, it was one of the two defining moments of his career. And though that career was certainly significant at the time, it took on further significance in the years to come. While O’Dea is a forgotten figure in the twenty-first century, he was a legend in the first half of the 1900s—a larger-than-life hero whose exploits helped put an entire region on the athletic map. The 1898 Northwestern game and the 1899 Yale game combined to create that legend. Those two contests are connected by an obvious thread—the difficulty of separating myth from reality.
What is fascinating about the games is how sharply memories of them years later diverged from the contemporaneous accounts. In 1917 the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Malcolm McLean wrote an item on O’Dea in his column. “Isn’t it strange,” McLean began, “how the thrills in sporting events are remembered with vividness for such a long period?” The columnist said he recalled the Wisconsin–Yale battle “as it had happened only yesterday.”
Early in the game, McLean remembered, Wisconsin had the ball in a position that was “something like sixty or sixty-five yards to Yale’s goal—maybe it was closer to seventy.” O’Dea dropped back for what the crowd assumed would be a punt. Instead, though, in his “peculiar fashion” the “tall giant” attempted a dropkick. “As the ball soared straight as a die for the goal every heart quickened. To begin with, the distance attempted was something unheard of in the east. Yet there the ball went—on and on. It swerved a trifle and missed going between the posts by a yard, perhaps. The carry was sufficient, but Pat had missed by a hair’s breadth. Even yet we can hear the muffled roar as all exhaled their breath. This may sound like an overdrawn statement, but it was actually a roar. And every man and woman—all had arisen—sank back breathless. That thrill exceeded anything we can remember at a ballgame.” It’s a great story—other than the fact that there is not a single contemporaneous account that even comes close to supporting it. Still, it was picked up in a syndicated column, running verbatim a dozen years later in newspapers across the country.
Grantland Rice, considered by many to be the greatest sportswriter of all time, told a similar story in 1944, as he pondered the question, “who is the greatest all-around kicker football has produced so far?” Of O’Dea, Rice wrote, “As I recall the fog-hidden details, O’Dea hit the crossbar against Yale from 64 yards.” That’s a long way from a “poo fizzle.”
While that “near miss” obviously doesn’t show up in the record books, Wisconsin does list a 100-yard punt by O’Dea from the Yale game—20 yards longer than what was described in the game reports. And if you go by what was in the papers years after the fact, it seems O’Dea’s alma mater might be shortchanging him. In 1934 famed New York Times writer Allison Danzig wrote, “against Yale in 1899, when the field measured 110 yards in length, O’Dea got off a punt that measured 117 yards, with the aid of the wind, and he was credited with another kick of 110 yards.”
Just seven years after the game, in 1906, O’Dea’s former teammate Edward Cochems recounted for the Fort Worth Star Telegram that Pat “booted the ball from behind the goal line to Yale’s 5 yard line.” In 1934 the Associated Press spoke of a punt “in the Yale game at New Haven in 1899 that went 117 yards.”
Another 1934 account details a 110-yard punt in New Haven, though it claimed that it came in warm-ups. “Pat, at a run, dropped the ball and booted it just as he passed under the goal posts. It zoomed high into the autumn air, plunked to the earth on the 10 yard line at the other end of the field, and rolled over the goal line . . . [while] the Yale stands groaned a unanimous groan and sat down!”
The record “champagne” boot against Northwestern took on a life of its own as well. Right after it happened, the press raved about the kick, calling it “a performance never equaled on any gridiron in the world.” O’Dea downplayed his remarkable achievement, saying he would try a dropkick from anywhere within 70 yards “on decent ground.”
The mention of “decent ground” is critical, as it got less and less “decent” as the years went on. A fable of sorts grew up around the weather. Though it was quite cold, newspapers of the day noted that “a more perfect day could not have been chosen for a football game” and that the gridiron was in “fine condition.” The weather report for the Chicago area shows a grand total of one one-hundredth of an inch of precipitation in the three days before the contest. The setting, however, deteriorated significantly upon retelling.
A feature in Wisconsin’s homecoming game program in 1934 mentioned that the Northwestern kick had come “on a muddy field with a heavy ball,” and the Montana Standard of the same year reported that the kick “was made from the sidelines with a slippery ball.” O’Dea’s National Football Foundation Hall of Fame write-up reports that the boot was converted “in a driving blizzard,” and his UPI obituary took it one step further, not only mentioni
ng the blizzard but also reporting that the Aussie was “on the run from scrimmage” when he kicked it.
Legendary sportswriter John Lardner wrote a New York Times column in 1955 debunking some of the great myths in sports. He included stories such as Abner Doubleday’s “invention” of baseball and Babe Ruth’s famous called shot against the Cubs’ Charlie Root in the 1932 World Series. Of O’Dea’s kick against Northwestern, Lardner wrote: “The day that Pat O’Dea of the University of Wisconsin kicked the most celebrated of his long field goals lives in a curious way in the minds of old-time football fans: the snow gets deeper with every year. With one conservative faction it became stabilized . . . at six inches.” Unlike Doubleday and Ruth, O’Dea was still around at the time and, upon questioning, told Lardner that the kick “was made from relatively bare ground.”
Though the length of the kick wasn’t subject to quite the same embellishment as the weather reports, there were also some differing opinions on that front. Cochems, who was the younger brother of Henry Cochems, one of the two Wisconsin players ruled ineligible before the 1898 season, always insisted that the kick against Northwestern came from 65 yards, rather than the 60 yards that most of the papers reported or the 62 yards that Wisconsin credited him with in its record books. And while the general consensus at the time was that the ball traveled 70 yards in the air, Cochems insisted that it was “easily an 80 yard drop.”
What to make of the disparities in the accounts of the Northwestern and Yale performances? One thing to keep in mind when it comes to the Yale game is that virtually none of the newspaper stories of the day gave any length approximations at all for any of the O’Dea punts. In fact, of the myriad of newspaper accounts cited here, only two discussed actual distances. The Daily Cardinal had a play-by-play account of the game where, under the heading O’Dea’s Great Punt, it described “a kick of 80 yards.” Later in the same paragraph, it reported, “McBride punts to the 18 yard line and O’Dea punts back to Yale’s 15 yard line,” which is the 77-yard boot described earlier. Embedded in its game story, the Boston Globe wrote, “once he punted from his 25-yard line over the heads of Yale’s backs to Yale’s 8 yard line.” Though the writer didn’t feel it was worthwhile to do the math, that too would have been a 77-yard punt.