Sport: Frenzy in Atlanta

One afternoon last week a golden October sun beat down on one of the maddest sport spectacles that Atlanta ever saw. Georgia Tech’s football team, which had been unscored on while scoring 119 points in its first three games this season, lined up against Duke University’s powerful team. In the first five minutes of the game Duke took the ball in midfield and rolled forward in eleven plays to its first touchdown. That march was a sample of what the final statistics were to show—Duke gained 200 yards by rushing to Georgia Tech’s 79—but it gave no idea of the final score.

A few minutes after Duke’s first demonstration of power, Georgia Tech took the ball on its own 35-yd. line, and in ten plays scored a touchdown. That flight was also a sample of the afternoon’s play. It began with a 33-yd. forward pass, followed by a forward from Quarterback Sims to End Jordan who lateraled to Guard Wilcox for a first down on the 18-yd. line. Before the afternoon was out Georgia Tech had completed eleven passes, many of them breath-taking forward-laterals and lateral-forwards, for gains averaging over 15 yards apiece. The score seesawed, between brilliant running and dazzling passing: Duke leading 7-to-6, Georgia Tech 13-to-7, Duke 14-10-13, Georgia Tech 19-to-14. In the last five minutes of the game Georgia Tech’s quarterback fumble’d a punt on his 12-yd. line, Duke recovered and on the third down Duke’s Halfback Tipton skidded off right end for a touchdown. Score: Duke 20, Georgia Tech 19. State of 26,000 spectators: frenzy.

Sitting on the bench, Duke’s Coach Wallace Wade had an agonizing afternoon. He had to watch his team being whipsawed by the kind of inspired passing attack that is apt to demoralize the ablest of teams, and he was not used to the excitement of winning games by one-point margins. Only once before in his 19-year coaching career had that happened to him, on an historic occasion in 1926 when his Alabama team beat the University of Washington in the Rose Bowl by the exact score of last week, 20-to-19.

Sport Geography. The U. S. game of football captured first the East, then the Midwest, then the Pacific Coast. As its conquest went on, great football teams sprang up in region after region to contest the supremacy of the sections where football first reigned. To the South football came later than to any other section. The University of Virginia, which is generally credited with starting the modern game of football in the South, sent a team to try out the North in 1890, two decades after the first intercollegiate game was played in New Brunswick, N. J. The test was revealing. Princeton repulsed the invaders, 115-to-0

Southern football spectacularly emerged from obscurity in 1906 when the late Dan McGugin, brother-in-law and onetime pupil of Michigan’s great Fielding H. Yost, coached a team at Vanderbilt University which scored a 4-to-o victory over the football sensation of the age, Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indians. It emerged again after the War when Centre College, an almost unheard of institution of 200 students at Danville, Ky. flared up briefly with All-America Quarterback Bo McMillin* and upset a string of topflight U. S. teams.

But these were isolated flashes of brilliance. Just as the South was slow in taking up golf only to turn out a Bobby Jones, so it was slow to take up football, did not break into the big time until nearly twelve years ago, but then proved its mettle. The break can be dated from New Year’s Day 1926, when the University of Washington, Pacific Coast Conference champion, invited what it considered the best team in the U. S. (outside the Conference) to play in Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses game. That was Alabama’s Crimson Tide which in one of the most exciting second halves in Rose Bowl history won Coach Wade his first 20-to-19 victory.

In the eleven years since then Southern teams have played in the Rose Bowl six times. Southern Methodist, Alabama, Tulane and Georgia Tech, colleges which the East and Midwest had previously looked on with disdain, turned out teams good enough to be invited to play the West’s best. Today, football in the South still differs from football in other sections of the country. It is frequently played under a hot sun, while spectators sit in shirt sleeves eating ice cream, and players go onto the field barelegged, but the quality of Southern football wins respect from coast to coast. For, as a century ago the course of empire took its way Westward, the course of football now takes its way Southward.

Bowl Man. (William) Wallace Wade, whose teams have appeared in the Rose Bowl three times (more often than any other Southern coach), had been there once before his visit in 1926. That was on New Year’s Day 1916. as a guard on Brown’s great “Pollard team”—so-called for All-America Negro Halfback Frederick (“Fritz”) Pollard—which inaugurated the Tournament of Roses’ annual U. S. “championship” by losing to Washington State, 0-to-14. In 1917 when Footballer Wade graduated and returned home to his father’s farm at Trenton, Tenn. he found Trenton thinking not of the Rose Bowl but of War. After serving during the War as a cavalry captain, Wallace Wade surprised his neighbors by entering the apparently unpromising profession of football coach and athletic director, at Fitzgerald & Clarke Military School (now defunct) at Tullahoma, Tenn. When Fitzgerald & Clarke football teams won the State prep-school championship two years in a row, Coach Dan McGugin asked him to come to Vanderbilt as his assistant.

Dan McGugin, who was. born in Iowa but prefaced intersectional games with profane locker room descriptions of Sherman’s March to the Sea, was the father of Southern football. Other schools began speculating about Dan McGugin’s new assistant when for two years (1921-22) Vanderbilt produced undefeated teams. In 1922 both Kentucky and Alabama offered Wade their head coaching jobs. Wallace Wade went to be interviewed in Lexington where there occurred one of the crucial episodes in the history of Southern football. Having practically decided to take the Kentucky job, Wallace Wade waited in an anteroom while the Kentucky athletic council haggled over terms. After an hour, hot-tempered Wallace Wade burst in on the meeting and announced that he was going to Alabama. “And,” he is alleged to have added, “the University of Kentucky will never win from a football team of mine.”

On his own at Alabama, Coach Wade proceeded for eight years not only to keep his promise to Kentucky (which has yet to win a game from Wallace Wade) but to make his teams equally famed and feared throughout the South. Drilling his men in every play down to the slightest movement of hand or foot, using a metronome to insure proper timing, sometimes rehearsing a play for two months before using it, crouching on the ground with any player to demonstrate exactly what he wants, Coach Wade is today esteemed by his colleagues one of the most patient of football teachers.

A few things, however, he believes cannot be taught: “You can’t teach a back to be as shifty as you want him or a lineman to be as fierce as you want him.” Above all things Teacher Wade values economy of motion: “The best player is the one who does just what is necessary.”

Tide & Devils. In 1923, his first year at Alabama, Coach Wade pushed the Crimson Tide to second place in the Southern Conference, which then embraced all major Southern football teams except those in the Southwest Conference (six Texas colleges and the University of Arkansas). The next three years Alabama finished first. Year after the famed Rose Bowl victory with his 1925 team, Coach Wade received a second Rose Bowl bid—this time from Stanford, and this time he tied one of Glenn (“Pop”) Warner’s greatest machines 7-to-7. Having thus produced two teams which some experts rated as highly as any in the U. S., methodical Coach Wade proceeded to go into a relative slump until 1930, when his last and probably best Alabama team crushed all opposition, won the Southern Conference championship, went to the Rose Bowl and sensationally overwhelmed Washington State 24-to-0.

About that time one of the feeblest teams in big-time competition was the Blue Devil aggregation of mighty, tobacco-rich Duke, which, having re-entered football in 1920 after a lapse of 25 years, had changed coaches almost every year without making any appreciable dent on its neighbors. On Jan. 15, 1931 Wallace Wade went to Durham as football coach and athletic director at an undisclosed salary (reputedly $15,000 plus a share of the gate receipts). That fall Duke did nothing notable except tie its ancient rival, the University of North Carolina, 0-to-0. In 1932 Duke for the first time since 1920 defeated North Carolina (7-to-0). When a controversy over boxing between Virginia and Tulane precipitated the long impending split in the Southern Conference the following year. Duke wai the strongest team in the new Southern Conference and Alabama, coached by Notre Dame’s Frank Thomas, topped the new Southeastern Conference.

Wallace Wade’s Duke teams have been improving ever since (conference champions 1935-1936). His 1936 team was selected, by one statistician at least,* as the best in the U. S. But playing against his archrival, Tennessee’s jovial Major Bob Neyland, Coach Wade just missed an undefeated season by a last-minute Tennessee touchdown, 13-to-15.

This year, having lost five regulars by graduation, including his All-America Halfback Clarence (“Ace”) Parker, Wallace Wade put another undefeated Duke team on the field against Tennessee, this time at Durham where he has never lost a Duke Homecoming Day game. An offside penalty nullified Tennessee’s only touchdown, saved Coach Wade and his record, 0-to-0.

The death of Dan McGugin last year left Wallace Wade not only the most celebrated of Southern coaches but their “Grand Old Man.” He shortly lost the latter distinction by the return to the South this year of Dana Xenophon Bible, who in 1917 and 1919, at Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College produced teams that were not defeated, tied or scored on. Fresh from winning six Big Six championships for the University of Nebraska, Coach Bible turned up at the University of Texas with a ten-year contract calling for $15,000 a year (twice the salary of the University’s president). So far Coach Bible has been unable to approach with his first University of Texas team his earlier triumphs.

Wallace Wade, now 45, lives as quietly as his profession allows in a university-owned campus cottage with his vivacious wife, his daughter Frances Margaret, 17, and “Little Wallace,” 19, a Duke freshman who is too slight for football. He hunts, golfs (in the 70’s), cultivates a watermelon patch, talks occasionally of hiring another coach and retiring into his other post of athletic director. Neither Duke nor Wallace Wade believes that is very likely to happen until the Blue Devils follow the Crimson Tide at least once into the Rose Bowl. At present the chief obstacles to that ambition are Colgate, North Carolina and Pittsburgh, still to be hurdled on Duke’s tough schedule.

*Last spring Bo McMillin, now 40, signed a new ten-year coaching contract with Indiana University, where he has been head coach since 1934*Frank E. Wood—in his survey for the Intercollegiate Football Annual, figured on a basis of games won, lost & tied, and points scored by and against each team. Second Wood rating went to Alabama, third to Bernie Bierman’s “U. S. championship” Minnesota team.