Ninety-Nine Iron: The Season Sewanee Won Five Games in Six Days
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Ninety-Nine Iron: The Season Sewanee Won Five Games in Six Days
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Overview
Ninety-Nine Iron is the story of the 1899 Sewanee football team. The University of the South, as it is formally called, is a small Episcopal college on Mounteagle Mountain in southeastern Tennessee. It is a respected academic institution not known for its athletic programs. But in that final year of the 19th century the Sewanee football team, led by captain “Diddy” Seibels, produced a record that is legendary.
In six days, on a grueling 2,500-mile train trip, the team defeated Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, Louisiana State University, and Ole Miss—all much larger schools than Sewanee. In addition to this marathon of victory, the 21 members of the Sewanee Iron Men won all 12 of their regular games, and of their 12 opponents, only Auburn managed to score at all against them. Ten of these 12 victories were against Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association opponents, which put Sewanee in the record books for most conference games played and most won in a season.
In Ninety-Nine Iron, Wendell Givens provides a play-by-play account of that remarkable season. He includes an overview of campus life at Sewanee and profiles of the players, the team’s coach (Billy Suter), the manager (Luke Lea), and the trainer (Cal Burrows). In the five years he researched the work, Givens conducted interviews with Seibels and visited the five cities in which the Iron Men had played—Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis. Givens has written a vivid account of a sports achievement not likely to be seen again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388287 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2014 |
| Series: | Fire Ant Books |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 138 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Wendell Givens is a retired editor of the Birmingham News and editor of Benny Marshall's All-Time Greatest Alabama Sports Stories.
Read an Excerpt
Ninety-Nine Iron
The Season Sewanee Won Five Games in Six Days
By Wendell Givens
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8828-7
CHAPTER 1
Mountaintop jubilee
The homecoming train finally came into view on the mountainside: two wood-burning locomotives laboring the last mile of a steep grade, one pulling, the other pushing a Pullman sleeping car.
Aboard the car were 21 football players with their coach, manager and trainer, returning to the little university town of Sewanee in south central Tennessee.
The year was 1899. The football team was from the University of the South, an Episcopal Church institution known familiarly then and now as Sewanee.
Waiting at the railroad station were hundreds of supporters, including virtually all of the 326-man student body. The team was returning from a 2,500-mile trip to Texas, Louisiana and western Tennessee during which it defeated five major opponents in six days, scoring 91 points while holding all five opponents scoreless.
The trip was then and ranks today as one of the truly remarkable feats in all sportsdom.
Now the bobtailed train had pulled up at the station and the players were stepping off the Pullman into a tumultuous welcome. After acknowledging the welcome and stretching their travel-weary legs, they were ushered onto a hack, a two-horse carriage—without horses on this occasion—for a victory ride. Jubilant classmates attached ropes to the hack and pulled it a half mile uphill to the campus. There the celebrating continued long into the night, capped with fireworks and a bonfire.
Five days after the team's return, in its Monday, Nov. 21 issue, the campus Sewanee Purple, under a heading "THE CELEBRATION—Most Enthusiastic Welcome Sewanee Ever Offered," busted all the buttons off its vest:
No other team in the country since the history of football was written ever played five games in six days and won them all, and all with zeros at the right end, and no team was ever welcomed with a more wildly enthusiastic welcome than that which greeted our returning heros last Wednesday afternoon and evening. Sewanee outdid herself, as the occasion demanded.
To begin at the beginning: The limping, laurel-wreathed lions arrived on the one o'clock train—this doesn't mean that the train came at one p.m., not at all, that's just a nickname employed for convenience's sake; we don't know its origin, probably sarcasm though. But that is by-the-way.
The lions came, were fed, given a little exercise, and then caged and paraded down the street. And a circus it was. The procession formed in front of the Hoffman (medical school dorm) at seven. The scene looked like a fancy dress ball at a home for mental cripples.
The Meds were there in all the eerie and ghoulish splendor of skulls, skeletons and sheets. St. Luke's (the seminary) turned out to a man, was distinctly evangelical in dress and voice, but showed high-church tendencies when it came to the fireworks.
The Law School was brilliant for once, with a transparency borne by President Scott, of the Law Club.
The Academic Department, the backbone, and we might add, the lungs of the University, yelled, and then yelled, and finally yelled a little more. The Grammar School (boarding school) caddied for them, and yelled when they got tired.
Appropriate music was furnished by the Registrar's drum and fife corps of 10 pieces, and by the Bobtown Band.
You could have read a copy of the Sewanee Purple out on Morgan Steep by the light of the bonfires, Japanese lanterns and torches.
During the afternoon great stacks of wood had been piled up in front of the Hoffman, Thompson Hall and the grammar School dormitory, and the poor old moon, although just as full as anybody in the crowd, was quite eclipsed.
The twenty-two gods were placed in two triumphal cars, the various departments fell in line, and the procession started. Down the street to the Grammar School dormitory it wound, and the light and the noise grew greater.
Back to Forensic then, and here the whole Mountain was assembled. Mr. Wiggins (Editor: vice-chancellor, president) presided. Mr. McVeigh Harrison spoke for the student body, Capt. Seibels spoke for the team, Manager Lea spoke for the trunks, and Coach Suter spoke for ten minutes and captivated the audience. Everybody else spoke for himself, and in the loudest tone at his command, so that Forensic (Hall) echoed to the Varsity yells the like of which had never been heard before even in Sewanee.
Enthusiasm like this is infectious; everybody caught it; an insensate Indoo idol would have broadened his smile and gone mad with the college spirit. Oh! it was great. It lasted for an hour or more, and the mob, having gotten all the noise possible out of their voices, had recourse to gunpowder. They adjourned to the Hoffman campus, and skyrockets sizzled, and Roman-candles sputtered, and cannon-crackers exploded, until a late hour.
The whole celebration was right royal in design and execution, and the arrangement committee is to be congratulated for the way in which they made the reception worthy of the received.
Had Abe Lincoln been in the welcome-home crowd, he might have recycled a Gettysburg line thusly: "The world will little note but long remember." That's how things turned out.
Newspapers of that day can be forgiven for little noting. The football sun still rose and set over the Ivy League, far to the northeast, as it had for football's first three decades. A few schools outside the Ivy were getting occasional mention in the press, but Walter Camp, "the father of American football" and chief chronicler of sports news then, seemed either unaware or unimpressed by events south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The New York Times, emerging as the nation's most prestigious newspaper, apparently was just beginning to sense the public's appetite for sports news. If the Times had a sports correspondent down South, where football had taken hold in the early 1890s, he was asleep at the switch. A cursory check of the Times the week Sewanee came home from its marathon trip found no mention of the five games in six days.
Some Southern papers, particularly those in the cities where Sewanee played the five games, carried accounts of the individual games but apparently didn't recognize the significance of the five games in six days as all that big a deal.
Again, understanding and forgiveness are in order. Football schedules had not settled into their Saturdays-only pattern. You played when your school and another could agree on a date. If that meant two games within five days or even three days, so be it. If, for example, Sewanee had a date to play Georgia in Atlanta and Georgia Tech was available for a game in Atlanta two or three days later, why not stay over, double up and take more gate money home? If the starters got banged up against Georgia, the trainer could rub them down, soothe their aches and wish them well against Tech. After all, then as now, football wasn't for sissies.
Chances are, if wheeler-dealer manager Luke Lea could have had another crack at the five-games-in-six-days event, he probably would have alerted newspapers as to what was happening. For some reason, he missed that opportunity.
When Sewanee played on through its 12-game schedule undefeated, the little mountaintop university did win modest comment, but that was more for being the South's No. 1 team than for the marathon trip.
Even Walter Camp tipped his hat to Sewanee in his pre-season outlook for 1900 in Outing magazine, the Sports Illustrated of its day. But trees obscured the forest for Camp, also. The five wins in six days went unrecognized. Only decades of once-a-week football would put the Iron Men trip in focus.
But the prophet was not without honor at home. The Sewanee Purple, which had cheered the team without ceasing since its opening victory, now called on the world to stop and recognize a feat not likely to be matched—ever. History has vindicated the Purple's pride.
Sample excerpts from the Purple near season's end in '99:
It is undoubtedly true that triumphs boasted of rob them of their virtue, but it also is a recognized principle that circumstances alter cases. That we are entitled to toast the team of '99 the records will show, for have not the sturdy sons of the old Mountain planted Sewanee's banner in the Temple of Fame, and ere darkness sets in on Thanksgiving Day will we not hail them as champions of the South?
The Varsity's achievements are unparalleled, and all honor and praise are due the men who have striven so conscientiously for their alma mater and established a record in the annals of football which will remain unequaled for many generations. No other eleven, east, west, north or south, can boast of ten successive victories with a goal line uncrossed by an opponent. (Editor's note: Auburn later scored the season's only points on Sewanee, but the men in purple defeated Auburn and North Carolina in their final two games.)
—
In all probability it will remain the trip for many years to come.
—
Our duty to posterity demands that we duly record in print that shall never die the achievements of these twenty-three brave souls (Editor's note: Referring to the 21 players plus coach and manager) who drew a Purple line all through the Southland, and claimed five winning footballs for their own and for Sewanee. The story might read like an epic poem if it had not become prosy to us through the dint of repetition, but the world must know, and those yet unborn must know what mighty things Sewanee can do and has done, and so they are writ here.
That remarkable season with its 12 victories, five of them coming in six days, is worth exploring.
First up: Introducing the 24 people aboard the Pullman special who rode west into history.
CHAPTER 2Iron Men roll call
Had a passenger from another car strolled through the '99 Sewanee squad's private Pullman, the stroller might never have guessed he or she was among football players.
Yearbook pictures indicate the players were clean-cut, handsome types. A few of the linemen might have provided an athletes tipoff, but as a group the young men could have passed as college students on a field trip. Many kept textbooks beside them, both to stay abreast in class and to help fill the long travel hours.
In the last years of the 19th century, as football spread from the prestigious Ivy League, the quality of player personnel dipped, sometimes markedly.
On occasion, "student" players at some schools went through the motions of enrolling, then stayed around campus for football only. Others didn't bother even with the motions. At one football-happy institution several key players reportedly never enrolled and never went near a classroom.
An observer of the college scene in those years wrote that on many campuses, players were viewed as "crude, muscular mugs, not worthy of attention from people of breeding and culture."
In contrast, consider the makeup of the Sewanee squad that made the 2,500-mile road trip and won the five games in six days. Of the 21 players making the trip, five were law students; four, medical; four, theological, and the remainder academic. Their average age was just over 21 and average weight 169, according to a Montgomery Advertiser story just prior to the Sewanee-Auburn game played Thanksgiving Day 1899.
No football-only types, these. Fifteen would go on to earn degrees (14 at Sewanee), and almost all would go on to success in chosen professions, as a later chapter will detail.
Three decades after the Iron Men trip, in a radio talk the night before the 1931 Sewanee-Auburn game, '99 team captain Diddy Seibels would have this to say: "To what was Sewanee's brilliant success due? I attribute it to one thing alone and it is the greatest thing any team can have: teamwork. There was about that team an esprit de corps that was truly wonderful. Like the Three Musketeers, their motto was 'One for all and all for one.'
"Discipline was perfect. There were no jealousies, only the indomitable will to win, that unconquerable never-say-die Sewanee spirit, the same spirit that won for us in the championship game against North Carolina."
Introductions of the about-to-be Iron Men, along with their coach, manager and trainer, are in order.
Billy Suter, coach
Born in Greensburg, Pa., Herman Milton "Billy" Suter played football for two schools—Washington & Jefferson and Penn State—before enrolling at Princeton. He became a star athlete at Princeton despite weighing only 140 or so. He captained the baseball team as a senior and excelled as an outfielder in the spring of 1899.
Noted sports columnist Grantland Rice, whose path was to cross Suter?s in later years, recalled that Suter once ran for a 95-yard touchdown against Harvard. That was some feat, considering that most running gains in those days (the mid and late '90s) were ground out through the line a yard or two at a time.
With Suter as senior quarterback, Princeton won all its 1898 games except against Cornell, which edged the Tigers 5-0.
After the 1898 Sewanee season when Coach J.G. "Lady" Jayne, also a Princetonian, was hired away by North Carolina, Jayne reportedly recommended Suter, with whom he had roomed at Princeton, as his successor. Jayne apparently convinced Luke Lea, the incoming student manager at Sewanee, that Suter could win there.
Columnist Rice was on three Vanderbilt baseball teams that played Suter-coached Sewanee teams. Decades later he wrote that Suter, with his keen spirit and thorough knowledge of both baseball and football, was a natural leader. His players believed in him and he in his players, Rice wrote, "yet he was one of the strictest disciplinarians I've ever known."
Luke Lea, manager
Born into a pioneer Tennessee family prominent in politics and law, Lea participated in numerous Sewanee activities, including publications, and earned a bachelor of arts degree in the spring of 1899, then stayed another year to earn a master's.
Whether he sought out the job of student manager of the football team or was asked to take it isn't clear, but because he was a man of action, it seems likely he was self-appointed, one account says. Sewanee historiographer Arthur Ben Chitty described Lea as "a negotiating genius."
The way American football evolved, for many years the team captain was on almost even footing with the coach, who often was viewed as an adviser. At Sewanee in 1899 Lea made it a triumvirate—coach, captain, manager. For all intents and purposes Lea was athletic director; as such, he began putting together the schedule that would land Sewanee in the record books for all time.
Lea's first target was Vanderbilt, which had beaten Sewanee in eight of the 11 games they had played since their intense rivalry had begun in 1891 (the down-the-road neighbors sometimes played twice a season). Apparently Lea felt that Sewanee wasn't getting a large enough share of the gate receipts and the disagreement resulted in the '99 game being canceled, if indeed it ever was formally scheduled.
Loss of the Vandy-game revenue may have started Lea's wheels spinning toward compensation from a more ambitious schedule. In any case, the early-season schedule as published in the Purple did not include the five games in six days.
The Sewanee squad acquired new uniforms for '99 and Lea probably had a hand in the acquisition. The '99 manager was not one to sit on his hands, then or in later life.
Cal Burrows, trainer
Long before team physicians, whirlpool baths and such, Burrows was therapist and healer at Sewanee, a kneader of sore muscles, bruised knees and tired bodies.
Burrows probably had no training to become trainer, but learned by doing. With four medical students on the squad, he had access to advice about rubdowns and treating injuries. That Burrows made the 2,500-mile week-long road trip makes clear his value to the football program.
Henry Goldthwaite "Diddy" Seibels, right halfback and captain
Two sons, Henry G. Seibels Jr. ("Buzz" to friends) and Kelly Seibels said the oddball nickname "Diddy" (sometimes spelled "Ditty") probably came either from his early attempts to say "daddy" or from relatives' baby talk as they bounced him on their knees.
In boyhood days on Montgomery's South Perry Street, Diddy was gung-ho for baseball. He showed talent as a pitcher and once ran away with a semi-pro team, Buzz recalled his father telling him. Diddy's mother was described as being totally opposed to her son's playing baseball until she learned that professional players made good money.
Diddy attended Starke military school not far from his home, then, as older brother Temple had done a few years earlier, enrolled at Sewanee. The opportunity to play college baseball or the still-new game of football may have attracted him there, along with the availability of quality education for a bargain price.
Seibels was on the Board of Editors, was president of the Sewanee Athletic Association, and a member of the German Club and Law Club.
Aversatile athlete, Seibels participated in several sports, including baseball and golf, but football ultimately got most of his attention and time. He liked the physical challenge of tackling and blocking, and his speed quickly won him notice as a breakaway runner.
Once against Georgia Tech, Buzz recalled, Diddy returned a kickoff for a touchdown, but Sewanee was whistled for an infraction, probably offside, and the run was nullified. Sewanee players were unhappy about the run being called back, but Seibels, confident and a little cocky, quieted them with a promise to repeat the touchdown runback on the second kickoff. He kept the promise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ninety-Nine Iron by Wendell Givens. Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
ContentsIntroduction
I. Mountaintop Jubilee
II. Iron Men Roll Call
III. The Way They Played the Game
IV. Sewanee, Pre-Iron Age
V. Prelude to History
VI. “Don't You Remember?”
VII. Sewanee 12, Texas 0
VIII. Sewanee 10, Texas A&M 0
IX. Sewanee 23, Tulane 0
X. Sewanee 34, LSU 0
XI. Sewanee 12, Ole Miss 0
XII. Sewanee 11, Auburn 10
XIII. Heisman Versus the Umpire
XIV. Sewanee 5, Carolina 0
XV. The Rest of Their Story
XVI. So, What Place for Sewanee
Index