When Saturday Mattered Most is the stirring story of the 1958 undefeated Army football team and the controversial coach who inspired Vince Lombardi
It was the end of an era, the last season before the surge of professional football began to lure the nation's best young student-athletes away from the military academies. That fall, the Black Knights of Army were the class of the nation. Mark Beech, a second-generation West Pointer, recounts this memorable and never-to-be-repeated season with:
- Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner who rose to the rank of Brigadier General
- The long -Reclusive Bill Carpenter, the fabled "lonesome end" who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for saving his company in Vietnam
- Red Blaik, who led Army back to glory after the cribbing scandal and had the field at Michie Stadium named in his honor
Combining the triumph of The Junction Boys with the heroics of The Long Gray Line, Beech captures a unique period in the history of football, the military, and mid-twentieth-century America.
When Saturday Mattered Most is the stirring story of the 1958 undefeated Army football team and the controversial coach who inspired Vince Lombardi
It was the end of an era, the last season before the surge of professional football began to lure the nation's best young student-athletes away from the military academies. That fall, the Black Knights of Army were the class of the nation. Mark Beech, a second-generation West Pointer, recounts this memorable and never-to-be-repeated season with:
- Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner who rose to the rank of Brigadier General
- The long -Reclusive Bill Carpenter, the fabled "lonesome end" who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for saving his company in Vietnam
- Red Blaik, who led Army back to glory after the cribbing scandal and had the field at Michie Stadium named in his honor
Combining the triumph of The Junction Boys with the heroics of The Long Gray Line, Beech captures a unique period in the history of football, the military, and mid-twentieth-century America.
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Overview
When Saturday Mattered Most is the stirring story of the 1958 undefeated Army football team and the controversial coach who inspired Vince Lombardi
It was the end of an era, the last season before the surge of professional football began to lure the nation's best young student-athletes away from the military academies. That fall, the Black Knights of Army were the class of the nation. Mark Beech, a second-generation West Pointer, recounts this memorable and never-to-be-repeated season with:
- Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner who rose to the rank of Brigadier General
- The long -Reclusive Bill Carpenter, the fabled "lonesome end" who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for saving his company in Vietnam
- Red Blaik, who led Army back to glory after the cribbing scandal and had the field at Michie Stadium named in his honor
Combining the triumph of The Junction Boys with the heroics of The Long Gray Line, Beech captures a unique period in the history of football, the military, and mid-twentieth-century America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250013569 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/18/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
When Saturday Mattered Most
The Last Golden Season of Army Football
By Mark Beech
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2012 Mark BeechAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01356-9
CHAPTER 1
LINING UP IN THE SNOW
Start with the man and go from there. In January 1958, Earl Henry Blaik was a month away from celebrating his sixty-first birthday. But at six feet two inches tall, the figure he cut still recalled his form from nearly four decades before, when he had been a sleek 182-pound end on the Army football team. He had kept his body fit through a lifelong aversion to both drinking and smoking, as well as adherence to a diet that was as bland as it was meager — his good friend Stanley Woodward, the urbane sports editor of the Newark Star-Ledger, often referred to Blaik as "strictly a Shredded Wheat man." A long nose and deep-set blue eyes accentuated his angular, patrician face. And the thatch of auburn hair he kept neatly parted to the side, a provision of his Scottish heritage, as well as the inspiration for the nickname "Red," which he would carry throughout his life, was almost as thick as it had been the day he played fifty-eight and a half minutes of a 6–0 loss to Navy in 1919. He had been coaching football for over twenty-four years, the last seventeen of them at West Point, but he looked nothing like a man in the waning days of his career.
In addition to being a teetotaler, Blaik was also something of a prude. The closest he typically came to vulgarity was the starchy phrase "Jeebers Katy!" Only rarely "Jesus Katy!" But such exclamations were infrequent. Publicly, he hardly ever betrayed emotion or raised his voice, save to issue one of his crisp commands on the practice field. Though he despised being described in the press as "austere" or "aloof," Blaik carefully cultivated his manner of dignified cool. He stood apart at practice and remained mostly mute throughout each ninety-minute session. Indeed, he almost never spoke to players. And rather than fly into a rage when he saw someone make a mistake, it was instead his habit to summon the wayward cadet to his side, where he would dispense a quiet, private correction. His command presence was overwhelming. Despite having been off active duty for nearly forty years, Blaik was known to just about everybody at West Point, including his civilian assistants, as "the Colonel," and they addressed him that way. They did it not just out of deference to the rank he'd held at retirement — he'd been recommissioned in the reserves in the early days of World War II — but also out of respect for his authority.
Blaik's dominance over his program was total. To his players, most of whom were old enough to remember Army's storied, unbeaten national-championship teams of 1944 and '45, their distant and imperturbable coach was not so much a mentor as a living, breathing artifact of Americana. They held him in awe and accorded him the respect usually reserved in the army for general officers. To his civilian assistants Blaik was a powerful executive. Instead of dictating policy, he set agendas and left it to them to formulate solutions. He encouraged vigorous debate, and it was only after he had heard everybody out on a matter that he would render his decision, at which point all discussion came to an end. So compelling was the force of Blaik's personality that it had once brought to heel the man who was soon to become football's most famous authoritarian — Vince Lombardi, who when 1958 began was just a year away from becoming the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. As Army's line coach for five seasons beginning in 1949, the unpolished and volatile Lombardi could become surprisingly meek in Blaik's chilly presence. Indeed, Lombardi came to see his boss as both a mentor and a father figure. Years later, after he turned Green Bay into Titletown, U.S.A., he rarely missed an opportunity to say that all he knew about organizing and preparing a team to win he'd learned from Red Blaik.
The Blaik persona was the result of the nearly four decades he had spent emulating Douglas MacArthur, his idol, whom he had met as a First Class, or senior, cadet in 1919. That was the year the then-thirty-nine-year-old brigadier general, who had risen to national prominence as the second-most-decorated officer of the First World War, had become the youngest superintendent in the history of the academy. Behind Blaik's desk in his office on the top floor of the cadet gymnasium's south tower hung an enormous portrait of MacArthur rendering a salute, and any visitor who climbed the steps to the coach's aerie could not help but notice the physical resemblance between the two men. It was no coincidence. Blaik had been devoted to MacArthur since their first encounter at West Point, when at a formal reception for members of the First Class the superintendent had made a simple gesture of goodwill. Ignoring academy protocol, he greeted the star-struck Blaik and a handful of his classmates, all of them decked out in their full-dress uniforms, with an informal handshake and a pat on the arm. He then offered them their choice of cigarettes — Fatimas or Melachrinos. Never mind that smoking was strictly forbidden for West Point cadets, or that Blaik, then twenty-two, didn't smoke. It was MacArthur's effort to put his guests at ease that won him over. From that moment forward, as far as Blaik was concerned, the general could do no wrong.
The two men saw each other frequently that first year. On New Year's Day 1919, Blaik had been among the first cadets to discover the body of Fourth Class cadet Stephen M. Bird, who had shot himself in the chest with a Springfield rifle. The shooting was obviously intentional; the freshman had tied one end of several feet of string to the trigger and wrapped the other around the butt-end of the rifle, giving himself the necessary leverage to fire the weapon. Bird was apparently distraught over a hazing session from the night before, which began after several upperclassmen had discovered him writing poetry in his room. Public outcry over the suicide had persisted through the spring and became especially intense in the halls of Congress. When MacArthur assumed command at West Point in June 1919, the issue of hazing was at the top of his agenda. He appointed seven cadets, including Blaik, to a Fourth Class Customs Committee and tasked them with spotlighting areas of abuse in the treatment of plebes. Among the recommendations made by the committee — of which Blaik was chairman — were that upperclassmen should not be permitted to "lay hands" on fourth classmen and that plebes should not be denied food. MacArthur, who two decades before had been the subject of some particularly brutal hazing sessions as a Fourth Class cadet, threw his weight behind Blaik's committee, adopting a number of its recommendations.
The relationship between Blaik and MacArthur grew even closer as a result of the superintendent's obsession with Army football. Two decades earlier, accompanied by his doting mother, Pinky — who would reside in a room at a nearby hotel for the next four years — MacArthur had arrived at West Point a gawky teenager, standing five foot eleven and weighing just over 130 pounds. MacArthur had grown up in the army. His father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War, and Douglas, the youngest of his three sons, always liked to claim that his first memory had been "the sound of bugles." Driven by his family legacy, MacArthur would go on to graduate in 1903 as the most decorated cadet in academy history, becoming both the top student in his class and the highest-ranking member of the Corps of Cadets. But for all his academic and military accomplishments, "Dauntless Doug" had never been able to achieve the success in athletics that he craved. As a scrappy, light-hitting right fielder on the baseball team, the highlight of his three-year career had come in 1901, during a 4–3 loss at Annapolis in the inaugural Army-Navy game. MacArthur, notorious for his inability to hit a curveball, went hitless in three at-bats but also walked, stole a base, and scored a run. The closest he had come to playing football was in the autumn of 1902, when he had served as the team's manager.
Upon his return to West Point as superintendent, MacArthur quickly set about establishing himself as Army's number-one football fan. Whenever he could make time in his official schedule, he liked to summon Lieutenant Elmer Oliphant to headquarters for a visit. Oliphant was then a young Army assistant coach, but just a few years before, as a member of the Cadets' backfield, he'd been perhaps the finest fullback in the country, twice named All-America. The office visits were mutually beneficial: MacArthur got an inside perspective on the team, while Oliphant received weekend passes to travel to upstate New York, where he earned as much as two hundred dollars a game playing Sunday football for the Buffalo All-Americans.
Even more than talking about the Army team with Oliphant, however, MacArthur loved to see it up close. On fall afternoons, it was not uncommon for him to leave his office early to walk over to the Plain — the academy's vast parade ground doubled as a practice field — so he could watch as the coaches put the squad through its paces. There he would walk the sidelines holding his signature riding crop, the same one he'd so famously carried in lieu of a sidearm across the battlefields of France just the year before. He made himself conspicuous, and his presence did not go unnoticed by Blaik, already the general's committed disciple, who was Army's star right end.
During the war, MacArthur had been profoundly impressed by how well athletes among the army's officer corps had performed in combat compared to nonathletes, and he also took note of how greatly enlisted soldiers tended to admire accomplished sportsmen. His love of football sprang from his conviction that the game provided a nearly perfect metaphor for warfare. In this he was hardly alone. Walter Camp, the venerable Yale coach so influential as a framer of the game, often referred to teams as "armies" and the kicking game as "artillery work." MacArthur took things even further, formalizing the academy's intramural program at the same time he was broadening and upgrading its academic curriculum, and proclaiming that every cadet would be an athlete, and every athlete would be a cadet. He also vigorously promoted varsity sports, with the goal of raising the academy's national profile. No longer would Army leave West Point only to play Navy. MacArthur sent his teams out into the world. In 1921 the Cadets made their first trip away from West Point, traveling to New Haven, Connecticut, where they fell 14–7 to mighty Yale in the Yale Bowl. The ambitious young general harbored dreams of luring the nation's gridiron superpowers to the banks of the Hudson and had plans drawn up for a hundred-thousand-seat football stadium that would sit on the river's western shore, hard against the rocky bluffs on which the academy stood. It was during this time that MacArthur uttered one of his most oft-quoted lines, of which he was so fond that he ordered it carved into the stone portals of the cadet gymnasium:
UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE ARE SOWN THE SEEDS THAT UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY
The young Blaik believed every word. In MacArthur, he saw a man — a great man, in his estimation — who not only loved football but who had also articulated precisely why it was the best game a young man could play, especially if that young man was a soldier. The affinity Blaik felt toward the general was reciprocated, in part because Blaik, never the total cadet that MacArthur had been, was named the best athlete in the Class of 1920 — an honor that certainly impressed the superintendent. When Blaik was laid up in the hospital over Christmas after his final game against Navy (an ungentlemanly Midshipman had stuck a finger into his right eye, causing a corneal ulcer), MacArthur sent his personal aide to visit him daily, and even arranged with the academic board to excuse Blaik from his first-semester examinations, a special exception made for a special cadet.
When MacArthur's tour at West Point came to an end in 1922 and he was reassigned to the Philippines, he wrote to Blaik and invited him to become his aide de camp. The young lieutenant was then galloping horses in the 1st Cavalry Division at dusty Fort Bliss, Texas, where he found himself less than enthralled with the lack of opportunity presented by a peacetime army. In a twist that Blaik would rue for the rest of his life, MacArthur's letter arrived at his Fort Bliss address the very day his resignation from the army had been accepted by the War Department. By the time the message finally reached him at home in Dayton, Ohio, it was too late to go back. Nevertheless, the general's invitation initiated a regular correspondence that the two men would continue for the next forty-two years, until MacArthur's death in 1964. Their letters covered a wide variety of topics, including war and politics, and were at times intimately personal. But always they returned to Army football. In 1924, MacArthur wrote to Blaik from the Philippines to comment on the team, then coming off a 12–0 win over Navy: "I agree personally with what you say that the system of play at West Pont is antiquated, too involved and totally lacking in flexibility and adaptiveness. Had I stayed at West Point, I intended introducing new blood into our coaching staff. Rockne of Notre Dame was the man I had in mind."
That MacArthur was so well versed in the deficiencies of the Army team from more than eight thousand miles away is a testament to the thoroughness of Blaik's correspondence, as well as to his abiding passion for the game of football. Immediately upon returning to Dayton, Blaik had gone into business for himself selling real estate and insurance. Within the first year, he had dumped the insurance racket to partner with his father, William, in the elder Blaik's long-established real estate and home-building concern. But Earl craved the sort of action that the business world couldn't provide, and neither games of squash nor rounds of golf were enough to satisfy his hunger. Blaik was so bored and restless that he would often borrow his father's car on autumn Saturdays to drive up to Oxford and watch games at Miami University — where he had played football and earned a bachelor's degree before entering West Point in the final months of World War I — or he would strike out for Columbus to see Ohio State play in its new sixty-six-thousand-seat stadium on the banks of the Olentangy River. In December of 1923, he and his bride, Merle, spent their honeymoon at the Polo Grounds in New York City watching Army and Navy play to a scoreless tie. The next autumn, he began volunteering as a part-time ends coach at Miami. More coaching jobs followed, first a temporary job at Wisconsin and then a permanent one at West Point. By 1934, when Dartmouth hired him away from Army to become the Indians' head football coach, his course through life was set.
The game consumed Blaik. He'd been infatuated with it since his days at Dayton's Hawthorne grammar school, when as a fourth-grader he had formed a neighborhood team, the Riverdale Rovers, and appointed himself its coach, captain, and quarterback. Now that football was his profession, he rarely thought, or spoke, of anything else. It was a labor of love, and Blaik — never a social creature — enjoyed few things more than drawing up game plans or breaking down film, play by play and position by position. He had been one of the first coaches in the country to make extensive use of film study, and his enthusiasm was so great that, even in the off-season, he had been known to phone up assistants after the workday had ended and order them to meet him at the gym so that they could brainstorm with him late into the evening.
In January 1958, nobody in college football had been a head coach as long as Red Blaik. Such titans of the game as Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner, whose careers stretched back into the nineteenth century, were still active when he had landed his first job at Dartmouth in 1934. And the men alongside whom he had dominated the game in the following decade — Michigan's Fritz Crisler and Notre Dame's Frank Leahy — had long since departed the arena. A new generation whose legends were still to be written, including Woody Hayes at Ohio State, Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma, and Bear Bryant, then making preparations for his first season at Alabama, had taken their place. None of them was more than forty-four years old, but Hayes and Wilkinson had already combined to win three of the last four national titles. Blaik had not won an outright championship at Army in more than twelve years, and his teams hadn't won more than seven games in a season since 1950. Football, it seemed, might finally be passing him by.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When Saturday Mattered Most by Mark Beech. Copyright © 2012 Mark Beech. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
DEDICATION,
INTRODUCTION,
1. LINING UP IN THE SNOW,
2. THE PROMISE,
3. THE SOLDIER'S SON,
ILLUSTRATION,
4. OLD ENEMIES,
5. THE LONELY END,
ILLUSTRATION,
6. JUGGERNAUT,
ILLUSTRATION,
7. MR. WONDERFUL,
8. THE END OF PERFECTION,
9. THE CRUCIBLE,
10. GOLDEN DAYS,
11. NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY,
12. FAREWELL,
EPILOGUE,
THE A SQUAD,
KEY RESERVES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
FOOTNOTES,
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,
PHOTOGRAPHS,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
COPYRIGHT,