What if Kenny Wheaton had guessed wrong on that sunny October afternoon in 1994? How different would things be at Oregon if #20 hadn’t had the chance to cut back to greatness? Considering the circumstances, things could have been very, very different at Oregon…
This post is about Game Zero.
The first official Oregon football game is documented as having played out on a muddy field during a drizzly day in March of 1894.
But the first game played involving Oregon students is said to have taken place years earlier, sometime between 1888 and 1892, on a meadow north of Skinner’s Butte. It was described in the October 1929 issue of Old Oregon by one of the participants, Frederic S. Dunn, class of 1892, and later a professor of literature at Oregon. The article is a tongue-in-cheek plea to have the game’s participants declared the first Oregon football lettermen, although the author can’t recall any other specific players in the game.
The plea, sadly, fell on deaf ears; but Dunn deserves an honorable mention for his colorful prose.
… For, be it known to you, my unknown confreres, the publicity now first accorded this story through the courtesy of OLD OREGON will clinch the claim we undoubtedly have to be recognized as the earliest wearers of the O . My own personal insistence upon this phase may in some measure account for the previous failure of the event to get into print. I have volunteered to repeat the story to several interviewers, who seem thereafter to have confused their notes with some of their mental-test quizzes . Their indifference toward this bit of archaeological information has been most regrettable…
Think of it, my hoped-for confederates. If we can put this over, when next Homecoming Day recurs, you and I can boldly walk down the cinder path, taking precedence even over Frank Matthews and Doc Keene in the march of the “immortals,” for our event antedates by several years that much chronicled so-called “first Football Game” in the mud.
These, then, are the generations of the first athletic contest ever participated in by students of the University of Oregon. Its recounting takes us back into times now almost impossible to visualize, when lonely Deady, the University’s only Hall, loomed up like a haunted Norman stronghold out of acres of wilderness. The present delightful maze of trees and shrubbery was not yet a transplanted probability. The vast Campus square was enclosed by a white-washed board fence, with one entrance; a style of four or five steps right at the end of Twelfth Avenue.
Like a moat on the outside of that fence was eocene mud, which, however, in season was of the proper consistency to foster about our only athletic possibilities; leapfrog, the broad jump and half hammond. (I never have known the origin of this latter word. To enlighten our modern gymnasts who may never have indulged in this primal sport, it was a “hop, step, and jump.”) The mud was awfully nice to measure one’s length in and you could toe your mark in it so much more legibly than in your modern sawdust.
Since the University provided no schedule of student activities such as now keep the campus in anticipation of coming attractions, about the only diversion we boys had, aside from playing Duck-on-the-Rock at street intersections, was to make a daily pilgrimage of afternoons to watch the south-bound Roseburg Express come in. There was an uninterrupted view of the track clear to Blair Crossing, and when, sometimes after weary minutes of delay – for not even then was the Southern Pacific always on time – we heard a far-away whistle and caught the first glimpse of the engine with its wide-flaring smoke-stack emerge from the woods and round the bend on its eastward swing into Eugene, there would be an almost concerted shout of “Here she comes.”
The mail-sacks would be dumped into a push-cart, trundled off down the street, and we boys would break up into desultory groups, to congregate again at what was then our Post Office, on the corner of Ninth and Willamette, where the First National Bank now stands. Here we would “pass the time of day” while waiting for the mail to be distributed and then would come the tedious falling-in-line for our turn at the window.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the later ’80s, there had arrived in town a new, up-to-date grocery firm, Smith and Hall, from New York State. The latter’s son is still a substantial business-man of Eugene. Carl Smith, the son of the former and now a distinguished Judge in Hawaii, was fresh from an eastern law school. His rather assertive and somewhat aquiline face was held in corresponding respect by us of still-primitive Oregon. And to us, late one afternoon, as we were gathered on the Post Office corner, came said Carl Smith and displayed to our wondering sight the first foot-ball of modern type most of us had seen. We had previously known only the spherical kind, something like the basket-ball of today, and such we used to kick about on vacant lots in a free-for-all knock out. But here now, in Carl’s arms, was the real thing, an ovate pig-skin foot-ball.
We were not long in deciding to adjourn to the space back of Skinners Butte, where there were no Municipal Auto Camp or Gravel Plant at that time — just a great open meadow between the river and the wood on the north slope of the hill. And here we nominated two captains who in turn selected their men, naming them alternately in the good old choose-up style. How in kingdom come I got in on the deal, I do not know, for I was a thinnish sort of chap and never considered much of a husky. But, would you believe it, I was booked as quarter-back, and told off to guard the east goal, down toward the river-bridge. I had no idea what my title meant – in fact, as I walked away from the bunch, I was inclined to interpret it as a sort of slight. There were “fullbacks,” and “half-backs,” and here I was a yet smaller fraction. And goal? I saw nothing of that semblance. And so, while they were still discussing, I sat down on a moss-covered rock and waited for developments. Anyway, I was prepared to make a great kick if that ball ever came my way. There never entered my head the possibility of a punt which I might gather in. I most certainly would have kicked and very probably would have waited for the ball to bound before essaying that kick.
What were the other fellows doing up there in the middle of the field? It was the funniest foot-ball game I had ever seen. Every time the ball was put in play, there would be a long pause, to find out what next to do. Both teams would all gather round Carl Smith and he would expound the law to them out of his manual of rules. And from where I sat on my lichened rock, I could hear much dispute and often loud words. The warm afternoon sped on. Nothing happened to distract my attention. The discussing became a sort of monotonous drone to me. I felt drowsy and nearly tumbled off my rock. So I played mumbley-peg for a while.
Finally, as it was nearing supper-time, I shouted that “if they were not going to give me a chance at that ball, I was going home.” So, off I meandered down Pearl Street. If a touch-down was afterwards made through my having abandoned my post, I do not know. I never even inquired. And as Carl left for the east in a few days and took his precious pig-skin with him, nothing more about foot-ball was broached. I graduated in June of 1892 without any farther experimental knowledge of the game, and was quite unprepared for the shock i met with at Harvard in the fall of that same year, where foot-ball was the Tsar of sports and the games with Yale and Princeton and Pennsy were climacteric occasions.
I am confounded by my own failure to recall a single other participant in that scrimmage behind the Butte. Judge Potter was probably not there. He was not athletically inclined, if I remember his student days and, besides, he was wearing a silky beard which fell almost to his waistline. Ed Orton may have been in the fray. He was be-whiskered too, but i do not think he would have counted it an alibi. Darwin Yoran, our Hon. ex-Mayor and now our Hon. Postmaster, could have been there. His long legs were admirably adapted to end runs. And Clyde Patterson – were you there, Clyde? So long absent from Eugene, but lately returned to the scene of your former escapades: maker of skiffs to ply our stumpful Mill Race, rider of a bicycle whose front wheel had the hub-spokes, felloes, and tire of a farmer’s truck-wagon, such that, when you started down Eleventh Avenue on the loose board walks, we knew it was you and not a typhoon – into all sorts of scrapes and out just as soon – you surely could not have missed that game back of Skinner’s. And Herbert Condon, now indispensable Comptroller of the University of Washington, owner of a similar wheel but painted a different hue – were you delivering Morning Oregonians that afternoon on your real flesh-and-blond pony – the pony on whose back you used to stand when lighting our old-fashioned kerosene streetlamps – or did you yield to temptation and ditch your bundle of papers under a sidewalk until you had played the game?
Well, this is much like speaking through a microphone. I hope someone will hear my appeal. So, boys, now all together! – WE WANT OUR O.
— excerpted from “And Here’s Another One”, Old Oregon v11-7, April 1929. Public domain.
On February 3, 1972, the sporting world learned that Dick Enright, 37, an Oregon assistant coach with just two years of college experience under the recently departed Jerry Frei, had been named head coach. Enright signed a one-year contract for $22,500 — state regulations only allowed University contract employees to be hired on annual contracts, but UO Athletic Director Norv Ritchey assured Enright, and the public, that Enright had a “four year commitment.” Thus ended one of the more bizarre “searches” in the long history of college football at Oregon.
Ever wonder how fans back home followed an away football game as it was being played back in the day?
Consider that KDKA, the nation’s first radio station, didn’t begin broadcasting from the Westinghouse factory in Pittsburgh until November of 1920, and the first football game broadcast – West Virginia at Pitt – wasn’t until October of 1921. It didn’t take long for the new medium to explode in popularity, but the Rose Bowl wasn’t broadcast nationally until the 1927 game pitting Alabama and Stanford. ;)
Guy with a megaphone.
Without a play-by-play, or a knowledgeable sidekick explaining the action on the field, what was a fan to do?
In Eugene, on New Year’s Day in 1917, the solution involved a theater, a Western Union guy, a contraption on a stage and a guy with a megaphone.
***
;)
Heilig Theater, circa 1958. The theater was the Heilig, on Willamette Street between 6th and 7th, a venerable, balconied Vaudeville edifice, later a movie house, eventually among the many victims of urban renewal in the Seventies (the Hult Center occupies its former location).
The Western Union guy was J.A. “Mac” McKevitt, manager of the Eugene ;)
A telegraph operator.Western Union station. McKevitt started work in 1906, when the Western Union office was established, on what is now West Broadway, with one “lady operator” and a part-time messenger boy on his payroll. Starting in around 1915, all road games were reported via Morse code from the remote site to Eugene.
The contraption on the stage was a miniature football field, slightly inclined at ;)
Something like this.the back for ease of visibility to the crowd, made of plywood. Above the field was suspended a small football, connected to a series of pulleys and strings that allowed an operator to move the ball back and forth. Western Union ran a telegraph line from the Broadway station to the Heilig, where McKevitt would set up his portable “ticker” backstage.
McKevitt would translate the dots and dashes received from the remote game transmitter into English, relay them to the guy with a megaphone, who would in turn announce the play by play results to the Heilig’s audience, while the boy running the pulleys would move the ball back and forth across the field, and another would track the score on a small scoreboard.
In a 1931 interview, McKevitt said one of his greatest thrills was in the 1917 Tournament of Roses football game, when Oregon defeated Penn by two touchdowns:
McKevitt took the results of that game play-by-play off the wire and gave them to the announcer at the Heilig theater. The house was packed, Eugene fans were standing in the aisles and clear back to the top of the balcony. The little gridiron was rigged up on stage, and the miniature football was being worked back and forth with the plays. “Mac”
Shy Huntington.remembers getting the message and giving it a word at a time to the announcer: “HUNTINGTON …. MAKES …. TOUCHDOWN!” Pandemonium broke loose, and Mac couldn’t find out whether Oregon converted the [extra] point because the place was so full of noise that he couldn’t hear the ticker, even with his ear down against it. McKevitt was sitting on the stage, with the footlights turned on, and he said as he looked out over the glare of the lights, the theater looked like a giant fountain with hats, coats, sweaters, everything being thrown into the air.”
— Roy Craft, Eugene Register-Guard, 1931
***
In the mid-1920s, Jack Benefiel, graduate manager of the football team (the equivalent of today’s athletic director), upgraded the “broadcast” technology by purchasing a “grid-graph,” a vertical board equipped with electric lights, that showed the position of the players on the field. But the back end of the system was the same; McKevitt would receive the telegraph updates, communicate them to the grid-graph operator, and the lights would be changed to show the action.
;)
A “grid-graph” from the early 1920s. Note the 7-bit scoring system at the top. Presumably, games would never top 63 points.
Of course, the Human Element could occasionally intrude in an event interpreted by grid-graph, with farcical results:
When the Huskers opened their season against the University of Illinois, it was an historical game for several reasons. It was the first Nebraska game to be broadcast on the radio, and the first to be depicted on the Grid-graph. Of even greater importance, it featured the varsity debut of one of the footballs greatest heroes, ‘the Galloping Ghost’, ‘Red’ Grange.
Red GrangeNebraska held its own for most of the game, but ended up losing 24 - 7. The performance of ‘Red’ Grange was too much to overcome. He scored three touchdowns, including a punt return. He showed more brilliant open field running after catching a pass, rambling for 50 yards and the score.
Back in Lincoln, Nebraska, the crowd at the Armory were the only ones to see the most spectacular play of the day. They were the only ones to see the play because it never really happened. The play was the result of confusion by the operators of the Grid-graph and the radio station. The play by play account of the game was being relayed to the Armory by a special wire from Western Union. The same account of the game was being shared by the radio station in its broadcast of the game.
The telegraph operator would type the information, and hand it to the operator of the Grid-graph . When he was done, another man would take the same card and phone the information to the radio station. Occasionally the Grid-graph operator would fall behind, and the dispatches would pile up.
On one occasion, the man relaying the information to the radio station eagerly snatched up the dispatch before the Grid-graph operator had a chance to post the information. The papers that were taken out of sequence contained the record of a touchdown. When it was discovered that a mistake had been made, the Grid-graph operators realized that their score was incorrect. They resolved the situation by showing the crowd a spectacular 70 yard run, by ‘Red’ Grange. A run that never really happened.
— “Watching Away Games Before TV,” Leather Helmets Illustrated
***
By the late 1920s, radio had come to any household that wanted it; all the major college games were broadcast, and the grid-graph technology, along with the theater dates, fell by the wayside (although the concept of packing a house for a transmitted event continued well into the late 20th century, with closed-circuit broadcasts of boxing matches; and of course the modern “sports bar” is essentially performing the same service, sans exclusivity).
Next time another off-the-cuff inanity by Craig James Brock Huard makes you want to throw your remote at the big screen, consider how far we’ve come in 95 years.
Then, go ahead and throw it.
Unlike Oregon’s other recent Big Game opponents, teams with significant winning traditions and great pedigrees, the 2012 Rose Bowl saw the Ducks playing a team that was in many respects a mirror image of itself.
Not in the style of play or physical attributes – the differences between Oregon and Wisconsin on the field are well documented, and a subject of great debate on other sites – but in their histories, and what they’ve put their fans through over the years.
If Oregon’s dividing line between The Suffering and success is 1994, Wisconsin’s equivalent Year of Demarcation is 1993, when the Badgers, in Barry Alvarez’s third season, broke a 30 year Rose Bowl drought and a string of eight straight losing seasons.
As close chronologically as the teams respective Years of Demarcation are, their respective records during the preceding Decades of Suckitude, and subsequent Ages of Enlightenment, are also eerily similar:
|
Period |
Wins |
Losses |
Ties |
Pct |
|
|
Oregon |
1965 – 1993 |
126 |
186 |
7 |
.406 |
|
Wisconsin |
1964 – 1992 |
114 |
192 |
9 |
.376 |
|
Oregon |
1994 – 2011 |
158 |
68 |
0 |
.699 |
|
Wisconsin |
1993 – 2011 |
166 |
69 |
4 |
.703 |
It would be difficult to intentionally manipulate the performance of two teams to generate records this similar over almost identical periods.
There are so many similarities in Oregon and Wisconsin’s histories that it’s almost easier to find the differences. (There, one can start with Camp Randall Stadium, with almost twice the capacity of Autzen, and the legendary fanaticism of football fans in Wisconsin. Fan support for the Badgers is so solid that in 1968, when the team was suffering its second consecutive winless season, the stadium was still filled to 54% of capacity. Only during the Don Morton era did attendance regularly dip below 40,000 – a major factor in his termination; he was replaced by Barry Alvarez in 1990. By contrast, during the years of abject apathy for the Ducks, in the mid-70s, the stadium was regularly half-empty, or worse… and Oregon has never gone winless once, never mind twice.)
Now, those similarities…
Separated at birth? |
Oregon |
Wisconsin |
|
Modern Rose Bowl drought |
37 years (1958 – 1995) |
31 years (1963 – 1994) |
|
9+ win seasons, 1945 - 1993 |
1 (1948) |
None |
|
9+ win seasons since 1993 |
11 |
10 |
|
Bowl appearances, |
6 |
3 |
|
Bowl appearances, 1964– 2012 |
19 |
20 |
|
Losing seasons, 1964 – 1993 |
20 |
24 |
|
Losing seasons since 1994 |
1 |
2 |
|
Longest losing streak |
15 games |
24 games |
|
Ten horrible but representative pre-1994 losses (* = home) |
1972: 68-3, Oklahoma 1974: 61-7, Nebraska 1974: 66-0, Washington 1975: 5-0, San Jose St * 1976: 53-0, USC * 1976: 46-0, UCLA 1977: 54-0, Washington * 1982: 10-4, Fresno St * 1983: 21-15, Pacific * 1985: 63-0, Nebraska |
1968: 20-0, Utah St * 1974: 52-7, Ohio St 1975: 41-7, Kansas * 1977: 56-0, Michigan 1978: 55-2, Michigan St 1978: 42-0, Michigan * 1988: 24-14, Western Michigan * 1988: 62-14, Michigan * 1989: 51-3, Miami FL * 1990: 24-18, Temple * |
|
Swan Dive Season |
1988 (6-1 start; 0-5 finish) |
1977 (5-0 start; 0-6 finish) |
|
Immovable Force Offense |
1982 (103 points in 11 games) |
1968 (86 points in 10 games) |
|
Irresistible Object Defense |
1977 (allowed 377 in 11 games) |
1969 (allowed 349 in 10 games) |
|
Minor bowl appearances that felt major to the teams at the time, considering |
1989 Independence (W) 1990 Freedom (L) 1992 Independence (L) |
1981 Garden State (L) 1982 Independence (W) 1984 Hall of Fame Classic (L) |
|
Brief period of optimism |
1979-1980 (winning seasons with John Becker as offensive coordinator) |
1981-1984 (three bowls in four years under head coach Dave McClain) |
|
Setback after brief period of optimism |
Probation, 1980-1982 |
Sudden death of head coach (Dave McClain died of heart attack during offseason, 1985) |
|
Coach named Don who was fired after 3 years of blowout losses and declining attendance, who won a national championship in a lower division |
Don Read (fired 1977; won D 1-AA title at Montana in 1995 ) |
Don Morton (fired 1989; won D-II title at North Dakota State in 1983) |
|
Athletic Director who replaced a Hall of Fame legend (and damn near ruined everything) |
Norv Ritchey |
Ade Sponberg |
|
Athletic Director who saved the program |
Bill Byrne (1982-1992) |
Pat Richter (1990-2006) |
|
AP poll appearances, 1964 - 1992 |
13 of 361 polls (.036) |
9 of 361 polls (.025) |
|
Anomaly |
Celebrated 1993 win over Michigan by hospitalizing 73 fans after stampede to field |
|
|
Signature win that finally ended The Suffering (or whatever Wiscy calls it) |
||
|
Established team as national power in his only Division 1 head coaching job, then became Athletic Director |
Mike Bellotti |
Barry Alvarez |
|
Quarterback who threw for a zillion yards and set multiple Rose Bowl offensive records, despite losing |
Danny O’Neil (1995) |
Ron Vander Kelen (1963) |
|
Longtime, bitter rival that has been utterly dominated for years |
Washington |
Minnesota |
1 Oregon was ineligible for bowl games other than the Rose Bowl from 1916-1958 and 1963-1974, but was granted an exception in 1948 season to play in the Cotton Bowl. From 1959-1963 Oregon played as a “Western Independent” and was eligible for other bowl appearances. As a member of the Big Ten, Wisconsin was ineligible to appear in any bowl game other than the Rose Bowl until 1977, when the conference relaxed its postseason rules.
benzduck;)
