SWC75
Bored Historian
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1930
A favorite plan of colleges who are struggling with fan discontent or apathy is to bring back a famous player of the past as coach. It tends to do little for the young people that need to be recruited to really turn things around, as they don’t know who the old hero is. But it makes the alumni happy- until the old hero starts losing.
But Syracuse had had success with this, primarily because they were able to hire the old heroes not long after their careers ended, since the NFL was not very highly regarded in those days. The Orange had hired one of Buck O’Neill’s star quarterbacks, Chick Meehan, at the age of only 27. He had had only one year’s experience as an assistant to O’Neill. Meehan was most successful going 35-8-4 in five seasons, including 4-1 vs. Colgate before he left to get NYU’s program going. It’s interesting to speculate if the Hoodoo would ever have begun if Meehan had stayed at SU. He went 2-1-1 vs. the Maroon while at NYU.
SU tried to catch lightening in a bottle again by hiring Vic Hanson for the 1930 season. He had been an even greater player than Meehan and many were convinced that that meant he would be an even greater coach. Lawrence J. Skiddy wrote in the Post Standard: “Vic Hanson, in his athletic days, had a happy faculty of finding a perfect stage setting and then coming through brilliantly. Big football games, basket ball, (it was still two words them), battles with the strongest foes and baseball games against traditional enemies found Hanson delivering in wonderful fashion…If ever a perfect setting was arranged for a man, Hanson, finds it as he takes over the football job…Hanson, in his athletic days, had a measure of luck just as all successful athletes must have and he came though to prove his ability when the pinch was the greatest. Dame fortune hasn’t rejected him now. The fickle goddess has at least made the foundation upon which he steps next month, one on which his feet should find a firm grip.
“The youth has had all season to himself and he has had a wonderful opportunity to study the methods of coaches, not so much as their methods of attack and defense but as to their handling of players in early season, in weeks between hard games and in the days preceding their big important battles of the year.”
But Skiddy had a warning: “The new coach may or may not change the general system on the hill, whatever steps he takes, he and his followers will in the long run find out that the best system is…MATERIAL!!!” That wasn’t a reference to uniforms. That’s what they called the players back then: the material out of which the team was woven.
Colgate had no shortage of “material”. They had Len “Iron Legs” Macaluso, a 6-2 210 pound fullback who led the country in scoring that year with 145 points. He was a first-team All-American. They also had triple threat star Leslie Hart. These two led the Maroon to 383 points as against only 27 for the opposition. The only blemish on their record was an early season loss at Michigan State by 7-14. That was more than offset crushing victories over Penn State by 40-0 and Columbia in New York by 54-0, a game that was 47-0 at halftime.
The closest thing Syracuse had to Colgate’s stars was Warren Stevens, originally just a speedster but now considered a more versatile player. He might have been close to Hart but we had no answer for “Iron Legs”. SU had had a somewhat bumpier ride to the big game, getting shut out by Pittsburgh, 0-14 and then being tied first by Brown, (who the Orange had not only beaten but shut out 8 times since 1905), 16-16 and then held to a scoreless tie by the same Penn State team that Colgate had completely destroyed shortly before. These games were sandwiched around a 34-6 win over St. Lawrence, a performance the newspaper termed “drowsy”.
Still, the newspaper spared no verbiage in drumming up interest in the week before the game, with headlines like “Hanson opens vigorous drive for Orange team.”, “Hill Coach Drives Men at Top Speed”, “Kerr and Hanson Predict Battle Royale Saturday”, “Orange Spirit Soars as Colgate Test Nears” and “Hanson Sees His Men Near Peak of Form”. But the text of those articles contained statements like “Prospects of breaking this supremacy which Colgate has held over Syracuse for the last few years are decidedly slim, it is generally regarded….Seldom, if ever, has Old Bill Orange gone into a Colgate game with his prospects at such a low ebb as that which prevails today…An awakened Orange team, traveling at high speed all the way, would give Colgate a real battle of it Saturday but the advance dope is entirely against such a thing happening. Every indication is a romp for the Maroon.”
As in previous years, the response was to refer to “the bugaboo” of overconfidence that supposedly was a big problem for Colgate and to refer to past upsets with the suggestion that the litany of them could be added to at any time. But the drum beaten most often was the reputation of Vic Hanson. “As an athletic competitor himself, Hanson was at his best when the odds were against him and he may be able to impart some of that fighting spirit for which he was noted to his pupils who are big and strong enough to do most anything out there on the gridiron.” Hanson banished any gloom from his public statements: “If Colgate has any idea of having an easy time here Saturday, it is due for the surprise of its life. We are going into the Colgate game with every man in first class physical condition and I believe we will be capable of our best game of the season. Now and then we have clicked sufficiently to show possibilities as a real football team and this much can be said: No team we have stacked up against has walked off the field with the satisfaction of having given us a bad battle. Every team we have met has known it has been through a fight and so will Colgate….I think our fellows will get out there and show themselves to be real competitors. If we do that, we win. I have plenty of respect for Colgate but I honestly believe that we have the best football team of the two.”
Andy Kerr publically expected a good battle. “The midget mentor of the Maroon insists that he expects the hardest battle of his first two years at Colgate when he trots his men out on the town onto the field in Archbold Stadium.” His reasoning was that, while Colgate won the 1929 game by three touchdowns, one was came on a freak play, (the tipped pass) and that Syracuse was now a more experienced team, perhaps a touchdown better, while Colgate, despite the big scores, was not as good as the previous year, perhaps a touchdown worse. That would make it an even game. He insisted that Columbia was not nearly their usual team, (he may have been right: another article reported that the gate receipts for the New York trip barely covered expenses as it had been announced in advance that Columbia, for some reason, would not be playing its starters in the game). And he said the Penn State game was a “perfect” performance the like of which he didn’t expect to see again.
Meehan, in his New York radio show, continued to support his old school, describing the situation as “perfect for Syracuse…arguing that there is real strength in the Orange forces and pointing out that the club has not yet reached its full possibilities…He is convinced that Saturday is the day and that his protégé, Vic Hanson will have compensation for some of the bad breaks he has had all season.” However, gamblers do not issue public statements and Skiddy reported that for the first time, the action on the game was not just about who would win but whether Colgate would win by 20 or more points.
Hanson had his team practicing into the night for the game, under the recently installed lights. Ticket sales were disappointing, with a crowd of only about 25,000 expected. ”The idea of a complete sell-out has been abandoned.” Skiddy bemoaned the impact on the finances of the two institutions, saying “neither is any too prosperous.” Part of it may have been the depression and part of it may have been depression over SU’s chances. However this did not dampen the enthusiasm of the students, who “paraded the campus in surprising numbers. There will be another gathering tonight and on Friday the Pajama Parade, (in which students marched downtown in their pajamas) led by the band, (in their pajamas?), will invade the business section. At least it convinced parents that the students did indeed wear the bedwear they had bought for them. Hanson broke with tradition and did not keep his players secluded the night before the game, (Colgate was back at the Linklaen House in Cazenovia), encouraging them to attend the various pep rallies on campus until 9:30, when they returned to the locker room for a pep talk by the coach himself, then to bed by 10:15.
An optimistic report came in that the Colgate team had had trouble stopping the SU plays, as run by their “scrubs” in practice. “Scrubs using Syracuse plays cut loose on the varsity to gain considerable yardage with the use of aerials. The pass and the running attack were eventually bottled up but not until the real power of the attack had been demonstrated as an added blow to Maroon overconfidence.” Jonah Goldman, a former SU end who now played shortstop for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, watched the SU practices and said “Past performances don’t mean anything to me. It looked like a great team out there this afternoon and after all is said and done there is only one game that means a lot to the team and that is the Colgate game. If they are right for that, nothing else matters.”
A game day article gave the weights of all the starters, (it lists Macaluso at only 190: the NCAA Guide in its All-America section says he was 210). Colgate’s line averaged 191 pounds, with the heaviest man being 220. Syracuse’s line averaged 194, with the heaviest man being 212. These days, they might be 100 pounds more that, at least on the offensive line. Even with the lower weight for Macaluso, the Maroon backfield averaged 188 pounds to only 169 for the smallish Syracuse line-up. Stevens weighed 170 pounds.
The photo on the front page of the Sunday paper showed Lenny Macaluso, a determined look on his face, following Hart into the line. The caption said “The Syracuse line has been blown to one side and Hart is free to work on Syracuse’s secondary defense as a path clearer for Macaluso.” Colgate started strongly with Hart and Macaluso leading two drives that began in SU territory after punt returns. Each drive ended with one yard plunges by Macaluso. An extra point was missed and it was 0-13.
But Hanson’s team did take his spirit to heart- for a while. Stevens completed a 20-yard pass to Joe Moran, putting the ball at midfield. Then he himself went over the middle to catch a pass “with a leap high in the air, one hand on the ball and brought it down in the fashion of a baseball player going into deep center field for a fly ball over his head.” Several plays later, on forth down, Stevens hit Dick Fishel for the score. It appeared those pass plays Colgate had had trouble with in practice were going to haunt them. The conversion made it 7-13 and we had a ball game.
SU quickly got the ball back and Stevens swept around end at midfield for what looked to be a good gain. But then “Si” Sullivan, the unheralded end who had caught two TD passes in the 1928 game, avoided the interference and hit Stevens with a crushing tackle. Stevens didn’t get up. And he didn’t get up. A picture in the paper shows him being carried from the field, still unconscious, in the arms of his concerned teammates. He would not regain consciousness for 15 minutes. His teammates responded in a rage, driving down the field until Fishel, trying to break free from a tackler, fumbled at the 6. That was as close as SU would come to scoring for the rest of the game. Even so, an aroused SU defense held Colgate out of the end zone for the rest of the half, leaving the score at 7-13 when they went in for halftime.
There they learned that their star player had been taken to the hospital for X-rays and that the doctors feared he might have a broken skull. Whether that simply took the wind out of the Orange sales or whether the bigger and better team simply wore them down, the Orange had nothing in the second half. Whereas they had matched Colgate with 6 first downs apiece in the first half, in the second, the visitors had 13 to the home team’s two. Colgate scored a TD to make it 7-20 in the third quarter and the deluge began. They got two more scores and a field goal in the fourth to make the rout 7-36, the worst defeat Colgate had wrung up on SU since 1893. Macaluso ran for 121 yards and scored 4 times. He also kicked two extra points and field goal for a total of 29 points. He was 28 points ahead of any other scorer in the country.
Rumors circulated that Stevens had died in a Syracuse hospital. The Herald Journal got over 200 calls asking if it was true. While Steven’s injury did not turn out to be fatal, a 16 year old named Raymond Lodarski was not as lucky when he attempted to climb a tree to watch the game and fell 20 feet, breaking his back. The paper said he was not expected to live, (I found no follow-up article confirming whether he did or not). On top of that, the game ended with an ugly scene as the Colgate fans again tried to make off with the Syracuse goal posts as souvenirs but about 500 fans felt that if the honor of their institution could not be defended by the team during the game, they would defend it afterwards by preventing the theft of the goal posts. The result as a knock-down drag-out brawl that lasted at least a half hour. One policeman was relieved of his hat, which was tossed into an impromptu bonfire. The Colgate student who did this, a freshman football player, spent the night in jail. “The pleading of several Colgate students for the release of young Wheeler went for naught at police headquarters. The policemen showed unmistakable displeasure at the antics of the celebrators.” One of those antics involved taking the hard-won goal posts to the steps of City Hall and “shattering them to splinters”.
Things were getting serious, both in the country and for SU football. At about this time, Grantland Rice published another poem which offered some hope:
“Lucky is he who knows that darkness goes with light.
That thorns still crown each rose and peace precedes a fight.
That life is full of sin and struggle, strife and strain.
And only those can win with fiber made from pain.”
There was more pain to come as the Hoodoo was far from over…
A favorite plan of colleges who are struggling with fan discontent or apathy is to bring back a famous player of the past as coach. It tends to do little for the young people that need to be recruited to really turn things around, as they don’t know who the old hero is. But it makes the alumni happy- until the old hero starts losing.
But Syracuse had had success with this, primarily because they were able to hire the old heroes not long after their careers ended, since the NFL was not very highly regarded in those days. The Orange had hired one of Buck O’Neill’s star quarterbacks, Chick Meehan, at the age of only 27. He had had only one year’s experience as an assistant to O’Neill. Meehan was most successful going 35-8-4 in five seasons, including 4-1 vs. Colgate before he left to get NYU’s program going. It’s interesting to speculate if the Hoodoo would ever have begun if Meehan had stayed at SU. He went 2-1-1 vs. the Maroon while at NYU.
SU tried to catch lightening in a bottle again by hiring Vic Hanson for the 1930 season. He had been an even greater player than Meehan and many were convinced that that meant he would be an even greater coach. Lawrence J. Skiddy wrote in the Post Standard: “Vic Hanson, in his athletic days, had a happy faculty of finding a perfect stage setting and then coming through brilliantly. Big football games, basket ball, (it was still two words them), battles with the strongest foes and baseball games against traditional enemies found Hanson delivering in wonderful fashion…If ever a perfect setting was arranged for a man, Hanson, finds it as he takes over the football job…Hanson, in his athletic days, had a measure of luck just as all successful athletes must have and he came though to prove his ability when the pinch was the greatest. Dame fortune hasn’t rejected him now. The fickle goddess has at least made the foundation upon which he steps next month, one on which his feet should find a firm grip.
“The youth has had all season to himself and he has had a wonderful opportunity to study the methods of coaches, not so much as their methods of attack and defense but as to their handling of players in early season, in weeks between hard games and in the days preceding their big important battles of the year.”
But Skiddy had a warning: “The new coach may or may not change the general system on the hill, whatever steps he takes, he and his followers will in the long run find out that the best system is…MATERIAL!!!” That wasn’t a reference to uniforms. That’s what they called the players back then: the material out of which the team was woven.
Colgate had no shortage of “material”. They had Len “Iron Legs” Macaluso, a 6-2 210 pound fullback who led the country in scoring that year with 145 points. He was a first-team All-American. They also had triple threat star Leslie Hart. These two led the Maroon to 383 points as against only 27 for the opposition. The only blemish on their record was an early season loss at Michigan State by 7-14. That was more than offset crushing victories over Penn State by 40-0 and Columbia in New York by 54-0, a game that was 47-0 at halftime.
The closest thing Syracuse had to Colgate’s stars was Warren Stevens, originally just a speedster but now considered a more versatile player. He might have been close to Hart but we had no answer for “Iron Legs”. SU had had a somewhat bumpier ride to the big game, getting shut out by Pittsburgh, 0-14 and then being tied first by Brown, (who the Orange had not only beaten but shut out 8 times since 1905), 16-16 and then held to a scoreless tie by the same Penn State team that Colgate had completely destroyed shortly before. These games were sandwiched around a 34-6 win over St. Lawrence, a performance the newspaper termed “drowsy”.
Still, the newspaper spared no verbiage in drumming up interest in the week before the game, with headlines like “Hanson opens vigorous drive for Orange team.”, “Hill Coach Drives Men at Top Speed”, “Kerr and Hanson Predict Battle Royale Saturday”, “Orange Spirit Soars as Colgate Test Nears” and “Hanson Sees His Men Near Peak of Form”. But the text of those articles contained statements like “Prospects of breaking this supremacy which Colgate has held over Syracuse for the last few years are decidedly slim, it is generally regarded….Seldom, if ever, has Old Bill Orange gone into a Colgate game with his prospects at such a low ebb as that which prevails today…An awakened Orange team, traveling at high speed all the way, would give Colgate a real battle of it Saturday but the advance dope is entirely against such a thing happening. Every indication is a romp for the Maroon.”
As in previous years, the response was to refer to “the bugaboo” of overconfidence that supposedly was a big problem for Colgate and to refer to past upsets with the suggestion that the litany of them could be added to at any time. But the drum beaten most often was the reputation of Vic Hanson. “As an athletic competitor himself, Hanson was at his best when the odds were against him and he may be able to impart some of that fighting spirit for which he was noted to his pupils who are big and strong enough to do most anything out there on the gridiron.” Hanson banished any gloom from his public statements: “If Colgate has any idea of having an easy time here Saturday, it is due for the surprise of its life. We are going into the Colgate game with every man in first class physical condition and I believe we will be capable of our best game of the season. Now and then we have clicked sufficiently to show possibilities as a real football team and this much can be said: No team we have stacked up against has walked off the field with the satisfaction of having given us a bad battle. Every team we have met has known it has been through a fight and so will Colgate….I think our fellows will get out there and show themselves to be real competitors. If we do that, we win. I have plenty of respect for Colgate but I honestly believe that we have the best football team of the two.”
Andy Kerr publically expected a good battle. “The midget mentor of the Maroon insists that he expects the hardest battle of his first two years at Colgate when he trots his men out on the town onto the field in Archbold Stadium.” His reasoning was that, while Colgate won the 1929 game by three touchdowns, one was came on a freak play, (the tipped pass) and that Syracuse was now a more experienced team, perhaps a touchdown better, while Colgate, despite the big scores, was not as good as the previous year, perhaps a touchdown worse. That would make it an even game. He insisted that Columbia was not nearly their usual team, (he may have been right: another article reported that the gate receipts for the New York trip barely covered expenses as it had been announced in advance that Columbia, for some reason, would not be playing its starters in the game). And he said the Penn State game was a “perfect” performance the like of which he didn’t expect to see again.
Meehan, in his New York radio show, continued to support his old school, describing the situation as “perfect for Syracuse…arguing that there is real strength in the Orange forces and pointing out that the club has not yet reached its full possibilities…He is convinced that Saturday is the day and that his protégé, Vic Hanson will have compensation for some of the bad breaks he has had all season.” However, gamblers do not issue public statements and Skiddy reported that for the first time, the action on the game was not just about who would win but whether Colgate would win by 20 or more points.
Hanson had his team practicing into the night for the game, under the recently installed lights. Ticket sales were disappointing, with a crowd of only about 25,000 expected. ”The idea of a complete sell-out has been abandoned.” Skiddy bemoaned the impact on the finances of the two institutions, saying “neither is any too prosperous.” Part of it may have been the depression and part of it may have been depression over SU’s chances. However this did not dampen the enthusiasm of the students, who “paraded the campus in surprising numbers. There will be another gathering tonight and on Friday the Pajama Parade, (in which students marched downtown in their pajamas) led by the band, (in their pajamas?), will invade the business section. At least it convinced parents that the students did indeed wear the bedwear they had bought for them. Hanson broke with tradition and did not keep his players secluded the night before the game, (Colgate was back at the Linklaen House in Cazenovia), encouraging them to attend the various pep rallies on campus until 9:30, when they returned to the locker room for a pep talk by the coach himself, then to bed by 10:15.
An optimistic report came in that the Colgate team had had trouble stopping the SU plays, as run by their “scrubs” in practice. “Scrubs using Syracuse plays cut loose on the varsity to gain considerable yardage with the use of aerials. The pass and the running attack were eventually bottled up but not until the real power of the attack had been demonstrated as an added blow to Maroon overconfidence.” Jonah Goldman, a former SU end who now played shortstop for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, watched the SU practices and said “Past performances don’t mean anything to me. It looked like a great team out there this afternoon and after all is said and done there is only one game that means a lot to the team and that is the Colgate game. If they are right for that, nothing else matters.”
A game day article gave the weights of all the starters, (it lists Macaluso at only 190: the NCAA Guide in its All-America section says he was 210). Colgate’s line averaged 191 pounds, with the heaviest man being 220. Syracuse’s line averaged 194, with the heaviest man being 212. These days, they might be 100 pounds more that, at least on the offensive line. Even with the lower weight for Macaluso, the Maroon backfield averaged 188 pounds to only 169 for the smallish Syracuse line-up. Stevens weighed 170 pounds.
The photo on the front page of the Sunday paper showed Lenny Macaluso, a determined look on his face, following Hart into the line. The caption said “The Syracuse line has been blown to one side and Hart is free to work on Syracuse’s secondary defense as a path clearer for Macaluso.” Colgate started strongly with Hart and Macaluso leading two drives that began in SU territory after punt returns. Each drive ended with one yard plunges by Macaluso. An extra point was missed and it was 0-13.
But Hanson’s team did take his spirit to heart- for a while. Stevens completed a 20-yard pass to Joe Moran, putting the ball at midfield. Then he himself went over the middle to catch a pass “with a leap high in the air, one hand on the ball and brought it down in the fashion of a baseball player going into deep center field for a fly ball over his head.” Several plays later, on forth down, Stevens hit Dick Fishel for the score. It appeared those pass plays Colgate had had trouble with in practice were going to haunt them. The conversion made it 7-13 and we had a ball game.
SU quickly got the ball back and Stevens swept around end at midfield for what looked to be a good gain. But then “Si” Sullivan, the unheralded end who had caught two TD passes in the 1928 game, avoided the interference and hit Stevens with a crushing tackle. Stevens didn’t get up. And he didn’t get up. A picture in the paper shows him being carried from the field, still unconscious, in the arms of his concerned teammates. He would not regain consciousness for 15 minutes. His teammates responded in a rage, driving down the field until Fishel, trying to break free from a tackler, fumbled at the 6. That was as close as SU would come to scoring for the rest of the game. Even so, an aroused SU defense held Colgate out of the end zone for the rest of the half, leaving the score at 7-13 when they went in for halftime.
There they learned that their star player had been taken to the hospital for X-rays and that the doctors feared he might have a broken skull. Whether that simply took the wind out of the Orange sales or whether the bigger and better team simply wore them down, the Orange had nothing in the second half. Whereas they had matched Colgate with 6 first downs apiece in the first half, in the second, the visitors had 13 to the home team’s two. Colgate scored a TD to make it 7-20 in the third quarter and the deluge began. They got two more scores and a field goal in the fourth to make the rout 7-36, the worst defeat Colgate had wrung up on SU since 1893. Macaluso ran for 121 yards and scored 4 times. He also kicked two extra points and field goal for a total of 29 points. He was 28 points ahead of any other scorer in the country.
Rumors circulated that Stevens had died in a Syracuse hospital. The Herald Journal got over 200 calls asking if it was true. While Steven’s injury did not turn out to be fatal, a 16 year old named Raymond Lodarski was not as lucky when he attempted to climb a tree to watch the game and fell 20 feet, breaking his back. The paper said he was not expected to live, (I found no follow-up article confirming whether he did or not). On top of that, the game ended with an ugly scene as the Colgate fans again tried to make off with the Syracuse goal posts as souvenirs but about 500 fans felt that if the honor of their institution could not be defended by the team during the game, they would defend it afterwards by preventing the theft of the goal posts. The result as a knock-down drag-out brawl that lasted at least a half hour. One policeman was relieved of his hat, which was tossed into an impromptu bonfire. The Colgate student who did this, a freshman football player, spent the night in jail. “The pleading of several Colgate students for the release of young Wheeler went for naught at police headquarters. The policemen showed unmistakable displeasure at the antics of the celebrators.” One of those antics involved taking the hard-won goal posts to the steps of City Hall and “shattering them to splinters”.
Things were getting serious, both in the country and for SU football. At about this time, Grantland Rice published another poem which offered some hope:
“Lucky is he who knows that darkness goes with light.
That thorns still crown each rose and peace precedes a fight.
That life is full of sin and struggle, strife and strain.
And only those can win with fiber made from pain.”
There was more pain to come as the Hoodoo was far from over…
