All you gentlemen on this board pretend to be terribly shocked by this. You pretend you never knew we had a man like George Scott digging up talent for us. And you pretend that you believe football is conducted out of pure love and enthusiasm at this university. You pretend that you don't realize that football on this campus is a million-dollar-a-year business. A business that buys you books, buildings, endowments. Well gentlemen, I'm not going to let you pretend anymore. I'm the head of that business and I was put there because I can produce . . . Like all big businesses, we do a couple of things that we don't like to see in the minutes of our previous meeting. Professor, we buy talent the way manufacturers buy iron, cotton, oil. Million-dollar-a-year football teams that produce law buildings, gymnasiums and libraries don't grow on trees. You've got to go pick them out of mines, off of farms, from factories. Every big-time team in the country is doing exactly the same thing. But we've been unlucky -- we got our picture in the paper with some uncomplimentary remarks under it. Well just because we've been unlucky, we can't let that one boy take the rap for a whole dirty system. You wanted to be in big business, gentlemen. All right, take it. It's right in your lap. I'll raise a smell that'll wrinkle noses from here to Japan unless ..."
The modest money figure is a dead giveaway, but otherwise the above soapbox sermon from a college football coach -- or Hollywood's version thereof -- could have been uttered by Rick Neuheisel, Nick Saban, Barry Switzer or any other suspected rule-bender or out-and-out rule-breaker. Truth is, it's from the 1936 film The Big Game, which won't ever make AFI top 100 lists but is a very interesting view for anyone with an affinity for sports history. Sure, this is a fictionalized account of college athletics, but it must at least partially reflect the reality of the times. It's also a bit of a wake-up call for anyone who believes corruption in college sports is a recent phenomenon.
Heck, even the Duke got his hands dirty. Here's a passage from a 1982 issue of Sports Illustrated, which in turn quotes a book on USC football penned by Ken Rappoport:
If you leaf through The Trojans ... you find mention of a lineman named Marion Morrison of Glendale High School who entered Southern Cal in 1925. Rappoport says Morrison, on a football scholarship, "soon established himself as a scalper supreme. He got two tickets as a player himself and then bought tickets from other students. He turned these into fast profits, buying them for $10 and selling them for $15." Marion Morrison, as trivia fans know, became a great success later after he changed his name to John Wayne.
Coincidentally, Wayne went on to play a rule-breaking coach in 1953's Trouble Along the Way, a picture Sports on Celluloid will tackle next week.
In The Big Game, we see players who for all intents and purposes are professionals. One lineman even laments that he can't afford to get booted from college because he's got a wife and three kids to support. We also see gamblers assist the school with recruiting in return for an excuse to hang around the field and gain insider information.
But a glimpse at campus underhandedness in the '30s is only one reason wh
y The Big Game will keep the attention of sports fans. Take for instance the presence of nine honest-to-goodness football players in the cast, including Jay Berwanger, the University of Chicago alumnus who won the first Heisman Trophy (initially called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy) in 1935. Berwanger was also the first ever pick when the NFL draft was instituted in 1936 (just to show how small potatoes the NFL was at that time, Berwanger chose not to sign with the Philadelphia Eagles and instead became a sportswriter).
But a glimpse at campus underhandedness in the '30s is only one reason wh
y The Big Game will keep the attention of sports fans. Take for instance the presence of nine honest-to-goodness football players in the cast, including Jay Berwanger, the University of Chicago alumnus who won the first Heisman Trophy (initially called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy) in 1935. Berwanger was also the first ever pick when the NFL draft was instituted in 1936 (just to show how small potatoes the NFL was at that time, Berwanger chose not to sign with the Philadelphia Eagles and instead became a sportswriter).Other football players in the picture are Bobby Wilson of 1935 national champion SMU (whose football program would receive the NCAA death penalty a half-century later), Monk Moscrip, Bones Hamilton and Frank Alustiza of Stanford (known as the Indians in those PC-free days), Chuck Bennis of Illinois, Gomer Jones of Ohio State, King Kong Klein of New York University (yes, NYU once had a big-time football team, known as the Violets no less) and (we swear we're not making this up) William Shakespeare of Notre Dame (who even recites part of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in the movie).
A quirk of the movie is that the real-life footballers play themselves (or players with the same name in any event) except now most of them are playing for the movie's protagonist side, the fictitious Atlantic University.
For other viewers, more important than the history lesson are the aesthetics. The basis concept of the sport remains essentially the same through the years, but it quite often look
s very different. First and foremost there are those helmets, which inspired the term "leatherheads." They look really cool, although their practical value is certainly debatable.
s very different. First and foremost there are those helmets, which inspired the term "leatherheads." They look really cool, although their practical value is certainly debatable.The Atlantic uniforms are something elso, too. A certain apparel company based in the Pacific Northwest has justly been accused of creating some gaudy threads, but RKO (the production company that made The Big Game) certainly wasn't going for subtlety.
You like stripes? Atlantic's got stripes -- horizontal, vertical, short, long, you name it. And ya think those numbers on the back are big enough?
At various times (like many sports movies, the action scenes are a combination of original material and stock footage taken from real games, so the unis are anything but consistent) the Atlantic squad has a weird tailbone patch on the pants. Brings to mind the current ruckus involving the Idaho Vandals.
By comparison, the jerseys of Atlantic's opponents are rather drab. Check out the attire of "Midwest" and "Erie" -- although Erie does boast some knockout two-tone pants.
Below are some more visuals (click for larger view) from the movie, which was shown as part of Turner Classic Movies' gridiron theme day this week, including (1) some old-school cleats and shoulder pads, (2) a fedora-heavy crowd, (3) endzones with simple diagonal lines, (4) a classic scoreboard (note the manner in which possession is indicated), (5) candy-striped goalposts, (6) a de-zebrafied ref and (7) a monogrammed drink cart.
