• Can you Spot the Ringer? (1899)

    Listed on eBay as a 1936 wire pic featuring the great Point-A-Minute back Willie Heston, it’s actually an 1899 team photo of the team from San Jose State: Someone went through a little process of elimination to identify Heston: It’s the first time I’ve seen Heston photographed in his pre-Wolverine days.  Arguably the finest back in Michigan history, it’s true that he didn’t start his collegiate days as a Wolverine. He played two seasons in San Jose before following Yost to Ann Arbor. Yost discovered Heston on his short coaching stint in California 1899, where apparently he coached anyone with a pigskin in the gym.  As I understand it, Yost not only coached the collegians at Stanford but also helped out on Heston’s San Jose squad, at local Lowell High school and taught the Stanford freshman team as well. Heston wasn’t the only fellow that seemed to have caught Yost’s eye out on the west coast.  He also convinced San Jose prep star George Gregory to come to Ann Arbor and some claimed Yost offered Gregory cash, as much as $1500, to come to Michigan.  His old boss, Stanford President David Jordan, was the primary accuser and it apparently played out for nearly a decade.  Check out this entertaining news clipping from many years later, January 3, 1908, in fact,…

  • Forty-Nine More to the Left Column (1939)

    Look at this 1939 wire photo of Michigan’s Grand Old Man, Fielding H. “Hurry Up” Yost looking at a team photo of his dominant 1901 squad.  Yost is pointing to the great Willie Heston but it’s not clear why: Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a wire shot has shown up on eBay featuring someone holding a photo of Yost’s dominant 1901 squad.   Back in March, I did a short post on a Rose Bowl beauty queen from 1938 holding a large photo of the point-a-minute squad: Here’s one thing I didn’t notice in that March post.  In the team pic featured in the wire photo of the beauty queen and in today’s auction with Yost, the writing on the ball held by captain Hugh White reads “550-0”.   But in the official team photo (obviously the original) at the Bentley Library page for the ’01 squad, that ball reads “501-0” (right): Back in those days, the team gathered for the team photo after the season, to not only take the picture but also to select the captain of next year’s team.   Michigan was undefeated and outscored its opposition by the 501 to nothing margin—at least up to that point.   So they snapped the photo but they had one more game to play that year and which was…