Jackrabbit by Bill Chastain

Author:Bill Chastain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tilbury House Publishers
Published: 2011-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

10

A Freshmen Sensation

Arrives

Sixty U.S. colleges opted to shut down their football programs prior to the start of the 1942 season. Transportation would be a problem all season due to such wartime restrictions as the unavailability of chartered buses, which prompted many games to be shifted from small college towns to larger cities with their larger fan bases. The Illinois – Ohio State game was moved from Champaign to Cleveland, and Stanford’s games with Santa Clara and Washington were moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Texas A&M moved its game with Rice from College Station to Houston.

Addressing the Atlanta Touchdown Club during a weekday luncheon prior to Tech’s opening contest against Auburn, Coach Aleck stated his belief that college football would again have a season in 1943, despite the war effort. Though most colleges had instituted speed-up curricula that would allow students to graduate in three years rather than four so they could be funneled into the armed forces, Coach Aleck reasoned that the military still needed an officer corps of men educated in engineering and mathematics. In addition, those young men left behind—as well as those too young or too old to fight—needed a diversion from the war, as did the soldiers in the trenches who followed college football from afar. Other sports, such as major league baseball, offered diversion, but college football remained the only game in town for servicemen from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Despite Coach Aleck’s opinion, there clearly were doubts that college football would be alive in 1943. In essence, the sport appeared to be on trial. The odds of everybody adapting to the change of circumstances seemed remote, and if things began to unravel, college football would likely be put on the shelf until the fighting overseas had run its course. Conversely, a successful college football season—one in which the games were exciting and the changes were viewed more as inconveniences than stumbling blocks—would go a long way toward keeping the sport alive for future wartime autumns.

Tech football had already begun to feel the sting of war firsthand. Bobby Beers, a wingback on the 1939 team that won the Orange Bowl, went into the U.S. Army Air Corps as a bomber pilot and died in an airplane accident in England in August. Burtz Boulware, a former Tech end, was killed in Texas during an accident at an army airfield, and Mickey Finn, a former Tech halfback, died when his parachute failed to open after he bailed out from a damaged plane.

The Auburn game loomed, but news from overseas never allowed thoughts of the war to leave anyone’s consciousness for long. Still, Coach Aleck could take some comfort from letters like the one he received from Lieutenant R.W. “Buck” Murphy. Murphy, who had been a blocking back for Tech’s 1940 Orange Bowl champions, wrote, “At this time of the year, most people start thinking about football and I am no exception even though I am a long way from it. I will miss seeing the games and will be pulling for Tech just as hard as if I were there.

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