by Dave Revsine
By the time the game was over, Dorais had completed a remarkable thirteen of seventeen passes for 243 yards. Notre Dame won 35–13, with the forward pass playing a role in all five touchdowns. “The Army players were hopelessly confused and chagrined before Notre Dame’s great playing,” the New York Times reported, “and their style of old-fashioned close line-smashing play was no match for the spectacular and highly perfected attack of the Indiana collegians.” Eastern observers were flabbergasted. Former Princeton head coach Bill Roper, who served as one of the game officials, said afterward he “had always believed that such playing was possible under the new rules, but that he had never seen the forward pass developed to such a state of perfection.”
The new game wasn’t just aesthetically pleasing; it was also demonstrably safer. After peaking at ten in 1909, the number of deaths in college football declined to just one by 1912. Fatalities at all levels of the sport dropped from twenty-six to eleven in the same three-year span. By 1915 the threat of death on the college gridiron had been minimized to the point where the NCAA decided to abolish its committee on casualties. The sport had successfully navigated a massive crisis.
Which isn’t to say the game didn’t still have problems. The concerns in 1905, remember, had been about much more than injuries. Understandably, the reforms of 1910 to 1912 focused on player safety. It was an issue that, had it not been satisfactorily solved, might very well have killed the sport. The new rules didn’t just help football escape that fate, though. They birthed a game that would grow virtually unencumbered for the next century, despite the fact that many of its other warts remained. The road had been paved for college football to become an American institution.
Over a span of twenty-five years, the sport had evolved in ways its early advocates could have never imagined. It grew from a sparsely attended, mostly regional game into a spectacle that filled stadiums from coast to coast. It unified student bodies. It alienated some academicians. It left some universities questioning their academic mission and led others to ignore theirs in pursuit of gate receipts and glory. It captivated some influential members of the media. It appalled others. In 1890 college football was a curiosity. By 1915 it was an institution. But as the ensuing century has taught us, institutions are not beyond reproach. College football survived the problems that dominated its early existence, but it didn’t solve them. Sadly, it still hasn’t.
Epilogue
The bespectacled man stared out at the adoring throng—5,000 fans braving the chilly Midwestern November night—all there to see him. An enormous bonfire raged in front of him, its flames leaping four stories into the air. All around him, people craned their necks just to catch a glimpse of his crease-lined face, of his graying hair, of his fedora hat. He was, after all, a legend. For decades young boys growing up in Wisconsin had known his name before they knew the president’s. Yet, they had never expected to get this chance—the chance to lay eyes on the greatest hero their state had ever known. There was a simple reason for that. They had thought he was dead.
But Pat O’Dea was very much alive. He was sixty-two years old, carrying the same 170 pounds on his 6' 11⁄2'' frame that he had thirty-five years earlier, when crowds like this one had last cheered him—a football player described as “the closest thing to a Paul Bunyan that the game has produced.”
That had all been so long ago, though, before he’d made a mess of his life. Before the disintegrated marriage. Before his failure first as a coach and then as a businessman. Before the indictment. Before he ran away from it all, changing his name and slinking off in shame. Somewhere he had a daughter that he had never met. Did she know of his fame? Perhaps she was out there now, among the adoring masses.
The last time O’Dea had set foot in this town, in his beloved Madison, he had taken the cheers for granted—seen them as a birthright. But it had been ages since he’d been in the spotlight. And now, the player who Walter Camp, the father of the modern game, once said, “put the foot in football as no man ever has or as no man probably ever will again” was back in front of the reverent masses.
O’Dea’s eyes began to moisten as the memories flooded back to him.
And then he spoke. His words were not profound. He had told himself he wouldn’t reveal much. The fans knew his legend. But they did not know his secrets. Besides, when it came to Pat O’Dea’s life, it was hard to separate the myth from the reality. His silence on the most important matters simply added more mystique to an already fantastic story.
“They told me the Wisconsin spirit had changed,” he said into the microphone from his perch on the balcony outside the old library building. “But I want to tell you that you have the same Wisconsin spirit we knew and loved years ago.”
And then, as he had so many times before, Pat O’Dea heard the cheers.
After leaving his job as the head coach of the American School of Osteopathy in 1905, Pat O’Dea faded from public view. In fact, in December of 1905, a Kansas City Star reporter naming O’Dea “the greatest long distance goal kicker ever seen in football” inquired with his now-estranged brother Andy about his whereabouts and got this sarcastic response: “He is in the employ of the Japanese government and assigned to Honolulu, where he is giving the emperor of the island kingdom the benefit of the years of study at Madison.” The former Wisconsin crew coach added that his brother “expects to remain in the Japanese government service as a commercial expert—he will try to make long goals from the mercantile field for the Japanese.”
Pat had indeed headed west, though not quite that far. He had landed in the San Francisco area, where he survived the 1906 earthquake and occasionally surfaced on the periphery of the athletic scene. He umpired some high school football matches, got involved with a local rugby team, and even took a job coaching Lowell High School, where, upon announcing his hiring, the local paper was quick to point out that heretofore he had been “a failure as a coach.” O’Dea was mugged again in November of 1908 (as he had been seven years before) and showed up to court drunk.
By 1913 he had turned things around sufficiently to be formally admitted to practice law in California. That same year he was named the crew coach at Stanford, a position he held for one season. He also helped coach a young society girl named Celia Zwillinger, who shattered the national walking record for a woman. Cheered on by crowds lining the roads along the way, she hiked the 66 miles between the Northern California towns of Burlingame and Gilroy in a little less than eighteen hours. O’Dea said afterward that, in all his athletic experience, he had “never encountered a more gritty athlete than Miss Zwillinger.”
Not much more was heard of O’Dea in the next few years. He worked in the fruit business—employed in the San Jose office of the California Prune and Apricot growers, the antecedent to Sunsweet. Then in 1919 he was charged with embezzlement by a Sonoma County woman named Elsie Waters, the daughter of a prominent area family. Waters claimed she had given O’Dea some money to invest and some stock to hold, and when she asked for it back, the former football star fled to Seattle.
A San Francisco grand jury brought charges against him. The case was heard in May 1919. Among the witnesses was J. F. Brennan, a friend of O’Dea, who testified that the former football star had originally told him he planned on returning the money. Later, though, Brennan received a letter from O’Dea “in which he said he would make no further explanation and that ‘by the time you receive this I will have passed into the great beyond where I will find rest.’ ” O’Dea was indicted. Not that it mattered. With his life now in a shambles, Pat O’Dea had disappeared. His second wife, Emma, filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. The divorce was granted, but it turned out she knew where her husband was all along.
Around the same time, the town of Westwood, California, gained two new residents—a husband and his wife. Their names were Charles and Emma Mitchell. Or, at least, that was what they claimed. Not that anyone was particularly inclined
to press them on the issue. As a fellow Westwood resident named Dick Pershing recalled in a letter many years later, “At that time (before Social Security) people used any name they chose—and nobody asked any questions. I’d guess 10% of the people in Westwood travelled under another name than their own.” The town’s residents were all there for one reason: The Red River Lumber Company.
The company had been founded in Minnesota in the 1870s by Thomas Barlow Walker. By the 1890s it expanded its operations to the West, where the supply of timber was seemingly unlimited. Red River went on a buying spree and eventually owned more timberlands than any other private concern in Northern California—more than 900,000 acres. With the 1916 publication of its pamphlet, “Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, California,” the company launched a modern legend, creating an advertising campaign around the long-circulated tale of a lumber-camp folk hero.
Bunyan’s “home” hadn’t even existed a handful of years earlier. But after negotiating an agreement for the Southern Pacific Railroad to construct a rail line into the area in exchange for exclusive shipping rights, Walker built a company town in Westwood, adjacent to what would become one of the most active sawmills in the nation. Westwood was Red River and vice versa. Everyone who lived there worked for the company, which provided housing, health care, and all the other necessities, including a massive company store. It was a highly restrictive operation that sought to control every aspect of its employees’ lives. For instance, if a Red River worker made purchases via mail order or in the closest town, located about 20 miles away, they were immediately fired.
T. B. Walker’s son Willis was in charge of the Westwood operation. He had played football for Minnesota in the 1890s, which presumably was when he first met O’Dea. Walker moved west in 1915, originally working out of San Francisco, where he again could have come in contact with his former football foe.
As O’Dea’s life began to deteriorate, culminating in his impending indictment, Walker made him an offer: He could disappear to Westwood. Red River needed some help. As one would expect in an environment as confining as the one the Walker family had established, maintaining control of the workers was paramount. The threat of union organization, in particular, was a constant concern. Walker apparently intended to use his old acquaintance as an informant.
Many years later, O’Dea described his mission to Milt Bruhn, Wisconsin’s football coach for a portion of the 1950s and 1960s. “He said his boss, an industrialist, needed someone to do an undercover job at his lumber mill,” Bruhn recalled. “The company was having lots of trouble and it was necessary that Pat’s identity not be known or he couldn’t have gotten the information needed.” It was not an assignment for the faint of heart. “I could have been done away with if certain people knew who I was and what I was doing,” O’Dea told Bruhn.
With the offer of the covert assignment, Patrick J. O’Dea became Charles J. Mitchell. Though the “Charles” could have been a tribute to any number of friends from O’Dea’s past, the origins of “Mitchell” are far easier to discern. Though it was not his mother’s maiden name, as O’Dea would claim many years later, it was, in fact, the birth surname of his good friend Dame Nellie Melba.
Mitchell held a variety of positions at Red River during the next fifteen years. Dressed in his signature cap and leather puttees and with his distinctive accent, he was a well-liked member of the community. He had a number of different titles in the Westwood Auto Club, the town’s version of a chamber of commerce, whose primary goal was to bring improved roads to their little pocket of the world. Mitchell also wrote feature and sports stories for the Sugar Pine, the local newspaper, and served as a special correspondent for several other publications.
While his identity remained a secret within Westwood, there were a select few from his former life who knew of his whereabouts. Among them was famed Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette Sr., who, according to an article in the Wisconsin News, “several times during O’Dea’s voluntary masquerade saw and talked to O’Dea in California.” In fact, O’Dea later revealed that he spent a great deal of time with La Follette during his failed presidential campaign in 1924.
While in Westwood, Mitchell passed his time listening to operas on his phonograph and reading the half-dozen newspapers to which he subscribed. In his reading, he would have almost certainly come across any number of the many tributes to his talents that appeared in print throughout his exile. Perhaps he would have seen the 1924 Boston Globe article that mentioned those “who would give O’Dea the palm for all time” as the greatest kicker in football history. Maybe he stumbled across the Atlanta Constitution in 1925, when it cited him as “perhaps the greatest kicker of all time,” marveling at “how he could boot the ball, shooting goals from all angles.” And perhaps he bristled when, in the same article, the author derided him for his fragility, claiming that “his teammates had to treat him like an egg in an egg and spoon race.”
But what might have pained him most was his occasional inclusion in articles about the fleeting nature of fame, like one written by former major league pitcher Al Demaree in the Washington Post in 1925 under the headline Hero One Day—Bum the Next—Isn’t Life Tough? The same paper mentioned him again in a similar vein the next year, including him among a group of athletes who “just flickered and died.”
And while the reference to death in that article was purely metaphorical, the truth was that almost everyone believed Pat O’Dea was actually dead. On March 17, 1934, the day O’Dea would claim as his sixty-second birthday, Literary Digest, one of the most popular and widely read general-interest publications in the country, included a tribute to O’Dea, “the greatest American college kicker.” The publication told the story that, at this point, had become accepted as the truth regarding his demise: “In 1917 when the Australian army passed through San Francisco, where he was practicing law, O’Dea joined . . . without informing even his brother, thus leaving the country as unostentatiously as he came. He has not been heard from since. Andy, who is now employed in a New York sporting goods firm, is certain he is an unknown soldier.”
That Literary Digest story bothered O’Dea tremendously, so much so that he mentioned it upon his return. At around the same time, the former star learned that Wisconsin was debating erecting a plaque at Camp Randall Stadium and naming the field in his honor. The plaque would mention that he had died in the war. As Dick Pershing related in a letter, O’Dea “simply couldn’t take that, he’d never been in the army!”
This man who had once known such fame, for whom the possibilities in life had seemed endless, now toiled in absolute anonymity, presumed dead. While fifteen years earlier, it had seemed to be his only option, it now felt confining—an unsatisfactory way to conclude what had once been a great story. So Pat O’Dea decided to change the ending.
The word went out, setting into motion the chain of events that brought Pat O’Dea back from the dead and sent Charles J. Mitchell to the grave in his place. Certainly, he knew it would be a big story, though he admitted later that he was “unprepared for the furor that did ensue.”
On September 19, 1934, San Franciscans awoke to a headline that screamed: O’Dea, Lost Grid Immortal, Comes to Life. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Bill Leiser had the scoop of his career.
“Out of the past he came smiling to sit across the dinner table last night. I could hardly believe it,” Leiser wrote. “This man who crashed through with football records never surpassed or equaled in the whole gridiron history of America and then vanished as completely and mysteriously as Aladdin’s Genie.”
Despite his assertion that the “whole world remembers” Pat O’Dea’s greatness, Leiser went on to regale his readers with the story of the football star’s remarkable life. He spoke of O’Dea’s arrival in America in 1896—just years after he was almost “cut to pieces by sharks” while saving a young girl from drowning in his native Australia—and of his incredible feats as a kicker at the U
niversity of Wisconsin at a time when the kicker could impact the game like no other player on the field.
He wrote of O’Dea’s “world record” 63-yard dropkick field goal against Northwestern in 1898, a kick, Leiser reported, that flew 20 yards beyond the uprights. He told of a 55-yard placekick through a “twenty mile gale” against Illinois in 1899, a boot he dubbed “the most impossible kick in football history.” He recounted a man who once rifled a 110-yard punt; a man who “could curve a football as a pitcher curves his throws”; a man who “displayed a ravishing, kicking, smothering type of football that America never knew before and may never know again”; a man who, in short, was “the most spectacular and greatest athlete of his time.” In fact, Lesier contended it wasn’t just his own time that the Aussie dominated, asserting that “the names of Jim Thorpe and Red Grange, even, mean little alongside Wisconsin’s Pat O’Dea.”
But according to Leiser’s account, the fame that came with these accomplishments became too much for O’Dea to bear. “I wanted to get away from what seemed to me to be all in the past,” O’Dea told Leiser. “I seemed very much just an ex-Wisconsin football player.”
And so he did get away; away to Westwood. He became Charles J.Mitchell. “Mitchell was my mother’s name,” O’Dea explained, “and Charley that of a cousin I like.” And now, at the urging of his boss, who, readers were told, had just learned Mitchell’s true identity, Pat O’Dea was back among the living.
The reaction to the news was fast and furious; the wire service version of the story ran on the front page of newspapers from coast to coast. As would be expected, O’Dea’s resurrection got the most coverage in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin State Journal ran a picture of him on the front page of that afternoon’s paper above a caption reading simply, “Found?” and talked of his punts, which the paper said “drew gasps from followers of opposing teams.”