boutons_
12-08-2006, 04:05 PM
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/08/sports/08heisman.1.190.jpg
December 8, 2006
John Heisman, the Coach Behind the Trophy
By BILL PENNINGTON (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/bill_pennington/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
The old football coach had a cold, and as it worsened that September, his wife summoned a doctor to the couple’s Midtown Manhattan apartment. A week earlier, the coach had played 18 holes of golf and worked out at his local gym. But now he had pneumonia, and his condition was deteriorating by the day.
Then, on Oct. 3, 1936, a crisp Saturday and a good day for a college football game, the man with what would become the sport’s most famous name died at home.
Seventy years ago, the passing of John William Heisman a few days before his 67th birthday caused little stir in New York, not as the Yankees were defeating the Giants (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/profootball/nationalfootballleague/newyorkgiants/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in their first World Series with Joe DiMaggio (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/joe_dimaggio/index.html?inline=nyt-per). Several days later, Heisman was buried in Rhinelander, Wis., the hometown of his widow, Edith.
Tomorrow, the 72nd Heisman Trophy will be awarded to the nation’s most outstanding college football player. In the seven decades since Heisman’s death, the small, flush-with-the-ground gravestone at his resting place has rarely been visited. It has never, for example, been visited by a Heisman Trophy winner, cemetery officials said.
Mike Garrett, the 1965 winner, might have best summarized the attitude of the college football community. Handed the trophy 41 years ago, Garrett asked: “The award is wonderful, but who’s Heisman?”
Heisman, born two weeks before the first American football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, is often referred to as a pioneering coach — when he is remembered at all. It would be more accurate to call Heisman someone who acted as the game’s conscience. He was a forceful defender of its soul and a tireless advocate of its potential.
Without John Heisman, there might not be a forward pass in football, and without a forward pass, the game would probably have died from disinterest or been abolished because of its fatal brutality.
Aside from leading the fight for the legalization of the pass in the early 1900s, Heisman pushed to divide the game into quarters and created the center snap. The ball had previously been rolled on the ground. Heisman introduced the “hike” vocal signal and the first audible at the line. He invented the hidden ball trick and what would now be called the fumblerooski. Because he wanted fans to understand play-calling, he made it easier for them to follow the downs and yardage needed by erecting something else new at games: a scoreboard.
He was a man of many faces and skills, and in a lifetime, he used them to help create what is now an accepted cultural American character, the autocratic football coach. Despite an Ivy League (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/ivy_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org) education in law, Heisman never became a lawyer, but he instinctively honed a talent for commanding, melodramatic locker-room oratory.
Heisman, standing before his players when he first met them, would hold aloft a football and ask, “What is this?”
Answering his own question, Heisman said: “It is a prolate spheroid in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.”
Heisman would pause and add: “Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”
He moved around the country helping spread the growth of the game like a coaching Johnny Appleseed, taking jobs in Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia. With the game’s popularity surging in the South in the 1910s, Heisman’s 1917 Georgia Tech (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/georgia_tech/index.html?inline=nyt-org) squad became the first Southern team to win the unanimous college football national championship. Heisman, who was known to bench players for poor grades, also became among the first football coaches to anger an institution’s faculty when his annual salary of $9,000 was higher than any professor’s.
He was also a prolific writer, authoring a book, “Principles of Football,” and a series of football columns for Collier’s magazine. Ever curious, Heisman had many side jobs, including roles in Shakespearean summer stock plays. But football was his life’s work. He had played the game since 1883 as a high schooler in the western Pennsylvania oil town of Titusville and later as a 150-pound lineman for Brown and Pennsylvania universities.
He seemed a paradox to most who knew him. As a middle-aged coach, he would bang shoulders with his 20-year-old linemen in practice, then excuse himself to leave early to attend the opera. He used a silken cord around his neck to hold a small, effete set of eyeglasses that he would prop on a flattened nose he broke while blocking a punt against Penn State (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pennsylvania_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in 1890.
There is little in the early stages of football that Heisman did not see, including the growing fanaticism of booster groups and the interest of gamblers, as regional powers began to face off.
Scouting a North Carolina-Georgia game in 1895, Heisman said he saw the first forward pass in history when a bungled punt attempt led a desperate punter to illegally fling the football over the line to a teammate who ran for a touchdown. Heisman walked away convinced it was the play that would save football from itself. As Heisman wrote, violent scrums based around bruising running plays were “killing the game as well as the players.”
In 1904-5, 44 players had been reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries. Heisman said the forward pass “would scatter the mob.”
As Wiley Lee Umphlett wrote in his 1992 book, “Creating the Big Game,” Heisman began to forcefully lobby Walter Camp, shepherd of the national rules committee. When Camp did not act swiftly enough, Heisman rallied other coaches and newspaper reporters to pressure Camp and the committee. In 1906, the forward pass was legalized with several constraints that limited its effectiveness. Heisman pressed on, and the restrictions were eventually lifted.
Heisman’s 36-year coaching career, after more stops at Penn, Washington & Jefferson, and Rice, concluded in 1927 with a 190-70-16 record. He happily retired to New York, where he owned part of a sporting goods company. When the newly opened Downtown Athletic Club recruited Heisman to be its athletic director in 1930, he started a popular touchdown club. Five years later, the club came up with the idea of an annual award recognizing the best college football player in the land.
The club would give away a trophy, and it wanted to name the award for Heisman. Although he had never been shy about self-promotion, Heisman vociferously declined. He did not like the idea of an award singling out one player in a team game. The 1935 trophy was named the Downtown Athletic Club award. Two months after Heisman’s death, the club renamed the award. For the next 28 years, until her death in 1964, Edith Maora Heisman received a bouquet of flowers from the Downtown Athletic Club during the week of the award announcement.
At the Forest Home Cemetery, where Edith and John Heisman are buried, the current sexton and his longtime predecessor said that a few people stop by every December looking to visit the gravesite.
“It was never anyone famous,” said Richard Winquist, who retired as the sexton in 2003 after 32 years and whose father had been the sexton for 14 years before him. “One time, it was a couple of newlyweds on their honeymoon. The woman wasn’t too happy about it, but the bridegroom said he was a big college football fan and he knew Heisman was buried here, so he stopped to have his picture taken. Like I said, she wasn’t too happy. But he was.”
About 10,000 are buried at Forest Home Cemetery.
“It’s pretty hard to find without help,” Winquist said. “One year, 1983, somebody left four football tickets to a Minnesota-Illinois game on the grave and then wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the local paper saying we should do more to promote Heisman.
“I always kept an eye on the grave. I’d walk by it every morning. He’s a piece of history. You just sort of felt it. Who hasn’t heard of the Heisman?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/sports/ncaafootball/08heisman.html?ei=5070&em=&en=a9125502d405d2d9&ex=1165726800&pagewanted=print
December 8, 2006
John Heisman, the Coach Behind the Trophy
By BILL PENNINGTON (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/bill_pennington/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
The old football coach had a cold, and as it worsened that September, his wife summoned a doctor to the couple’s Midtown Manhattan apartment. A week earlier, the coach had played 18 holes of golf and worked out at his local gym. But now he had pneumonia, and his condition was deteriorating by the day.
Then, on Oct. 3, 1936, a crisp Saturday and a good day for a college football game, the man with what would become the sport’s most famous name died at home.
Seventy years ago, the passing of John William Heisman a few days before his 67th birthday caused little stir in New York, not as the Yankees were defeating the Giants (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/profootball/nationalfootballleague/newyorkgiants/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in their first World Series with Joe DiMaggio (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/joe_dimaggio/index.html?inline=nyt-per). Several days later, Heisman was buried in Rhinelander, Wis., the hometown of his widow, Edith.
Tomorrow, the 72nd Heisman Trophy will be awarded to the nation’s most outstanding college football player. In the seven decades since Heisman’s death, the small, flush-with-the-ground gravestone at his resting place has rarely been visited. It has never, for example, been visited by a Heisman Trophy winner, cemetery officials said.
Mike Garrett, the 1965 winner, might have best summarized the attitude of the college football community. Handed the trophy 41 years ago, Garrett asked: “The award is wonderful, but who’s Heisman?”
Heisman, born two weeks before the first American football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, is often referred to as a pioneering coach — when he is remembered at all. It would be more accurate to call Heisman someone who acted as the game’s conscience. He was a forceful defender of its soul and a tireless advocate of its potential.
Without John Heisman, there might not be a forward pass in football, and without a forward pass, the game would probably have died from disinterest or been abolished because of its fatal brutality.
Aside from leading the fight for the legalization of the pass in the early 1900s, Heisman pushed to divide the game into quarters and created the center snap. The ball had previously been rolled on the ground. Heisman introduced the “hike” vocal signal and the first audible at the line. He invented the hidden ball trick and what would now be called the fumblerooski. Because he wanted fans to understand play-calling, he made it easier for them to follow the downs and yardage needed by erecting something else new at games: a scoreboard.
He was a man of many faces and skills, and in a lifetime, he used them to help create what is now an accepted cultural American character, the autocratic football coach. Despite an Ivy League (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/ivy_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org) education in law, Heisman never became a lawyer, but he instinctively honed a talent for commanding, melodramatic locker-room oratory.
Heisman, standing before his players when he first met them, would hold aloft a football and ask, “What is this?”
Answering his own question, Heisman said: “It is a prolate spheroid in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.”
Heisman would pause and add: “Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”
He moved around the country helping spread the growth of the game like a coaching Johnny Appleseed, taking jobs in Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia. With the game’s popularity surging in the South in the 1910s, Heisman’s 1917 Georgia Tech (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/georgia_tech/index.html?inline=nyt-org) squad became the first Southern team to win the unanimous college football national championship. Heisman, who was known to bench players for poor grades, also became among the first football coaches to anger an institution’s faculty when his annual salary of $9,000 was higher than any professor’s.
He was also a prolific writer, authoring a book, “Principles of Football,” and a series of football columns for Collier’s magazine. Ever curious, Heisman had many side jobs, including roles in Shakespearean summer stock plays. But football was his life’s work. He had played the game since 1883 as a high schooler in the western Pennsylvania oil town of Titusville and later as a 150-pound lineman for Brown and Pennsylvania universities.
He seemed a paradox to most who knew him. As a middle-aged coach, he would bang shoulders with his 20-year-old linemen in practice, then excuse himself to leave early to attend the opera. He used a silken cord around his neck to hold a small, effete set of eyeglasses that he would prop on a flattened nose he broke while blocking a punt against Penn State (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pennsylvania_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in 1890.
There is little in the early stages of football that Heisman did not see, including the growing fanaticism of booster groups and the interest of gamblers, as regional powers began to face off.
Scouting a North Carolina-Georgia game in 1895, Heisman said he saw the first forward pass in history when a bungled punt attempt led a desperate punter to illegally fling the football over the line to a teammate who ran for a touchdown. Heisman walked away convinced it was the play that would save football from itself. As Heisman wrote, violent scrums based around bruising running plays were “killing the game as well as the players.”
In 1904-5, 44 players had been reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries. Heisman said the forward pass “would scatter the mob.”
As Wiley Lee Umphlett wrote in his 1992 book, “Creating the Big Game,” Heisman began to forcefully lobby Walter Camp, shepherd of the national rules committee. When Camp did not act swiftly enough, Heisman rallied other coaches and newspaper reporters to pressure Camp and the committee. In 1906, the forward pass was legalized with several constraints that limited its effectiveness. Heisman pressed on, and the restrictions were eventually lifted.
Heisman’s 36-year coaching career, after more stops at Penn, Washington & Jefferson, and Rice, concluded in 1927 with a 190-70-16 record. He happily retired to New York, where he owned part of a sporting goods company. When the newly opened Downtown Athletic Club recruited Heisman to be its athletic director in 1930, he started a popular touchdown club. Five years later, the club came up with the idea of an annual award recognizing the best college football player in the land.
The club would give away a trophy, and it wanted to name the award for Heisman. Although he had never been shy about self-promotion, Heisman vociferously declined. He did not like the idea of an award singling out one player in a team game. The 1935 trophy was named the Downtown Athletic Club award. Two months after Heisman’s death, the club renamed the award. For the next 28 years, until her death in 1964, Edith Maora Heisman received a bouquet of flowers from the Downtown Athletic Club during the week of the award announcement.
At the Forest Home Cemetery, where Edith and John Heisman are buried, the current sexton and his longtime predecessor said that a few people stop by every December looking to visit the gravesite.
“It was never anyone famous,” said Richard Winquist, who retired as the sexton in 2003 after 32 years and whose father had been the sexton for 14 years before him. “One time, it was a couple of newlyweds on their honeymoon. The woman wasn’t too happy about it, but the bridegroom said he was a big college football fan and he knew Heisman was buried here, so he stopped to have his picture taken. Like I said, she wasn’t too happy. But he was.”
About 10,000 are buried at Forest Home Cemetery.
“It’s pretty hard to find without help,” Winquist said. “One year, 1983, somebody left four football tickets to a Minnesota-Illinois game on the grave and then wrote an anonymous letter to the editor of the local paper saying we should do more to promote Heisman.
“I always kept an eye on the grave. I’d walk by it every morning. He’s a piece of history. You just sort of felt it. Who hasn’t heard of the Heisman?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/sports/ncaafootball/08heisman.html?ei=5070&em=&en=a9125502d405d2d9&ex=1165726800&pagewanted=print