Good Wednesday to you, friends. WPW leads off with a classic shot of the B1G football coaches meeting prior to the 1931 season (see above). This photo, from the Big Ten meetings prior to the 1931 season, is probably worth its $44 auction price. On the floor you’ve got M headman Harry Kipke with Purdue coach (and former player under Rockne) Noble Kizer demonstrating life in the trenches. Minnesota’s Fritz Crisler, who would replace Kipke later that decade, watches from the back. Amongst the men seated is Illinois legend Bob Zuppke sitting next to the one & only Amos Alonzo Stagg. Great shot. Dress code in ‘31? White shirt, tie, Brylcreem in the hair (except for Stagg). I don’t know when wire photos started to be distributed to newspapers, but this has to be a fairly early one (from 1926) featuring the great Michigan quarterback and NFL HOF’er Benny Friedman. The seller claims it is an original and wants a mere $30. If it’s truly the original it’s worth over $100 easy IMO.
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TWIMFbH: Track Meet Cures Depression (1935)
Wire photo from the 1935 Penn game. That’s U-M’s Stark Ritchie toting the pigskin. (via eBay) Harry Kipke was an All-American start on Fielding Yost’s squads in the early 1920s, and then took a shot a coaching, first as an assistant at Missouri, then took the head coaching job up the road at Michigan State in 1928. When the head coaching job came free in Ann Arbor, Yost brought Kipke home and he got off to a fast start. But then 1934 hit: [display_podcast] That 16-6 win over Penn in 1935 was probably Kipke’s last great win of his coaching career. You can find more on the Willis Ward vs. Jesse Owens match-up here, and if you can stomach it, the run down of why Kipke was fired here. And if you need more on the 1934 Georgia Tech game controversy, grab Stunt3 Multimedia’s epic documentary today. You can catch all of the This Week in Michigan Football History clips here….sponsored in 2013 by Ziebart of Yspilanti. And don’t forget to catch it live today on the KeyBank Countdown to kick-off on WTKA 1050AM. Related: I’ll be shoving off to East Lansing so check back here and on Twitter for sights, snark, and sounds.
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Losing, Faking and Finding The Little Brown Jug (1931-1933)
Many of you know one of the best stories of Little Brown Jug Lore happened during the early thirties when the jug disappeared from U-M Administration building on campus (now the home to the Ticket Office FWIW). When I dug deep investigating this legend back in ‘09 I learned pretty quickly that U-M didn’t quite have the story straight. After some vintage MVictors-pestering I convinced #1000SSS to change the summary of the events in the 1930s in the online history on mgoblue.com and in the weekly game program. Unfortunately the old version is still stuck in the weekly press release: I’ll work on this next season. To summarize, no, the jug wasn’t missing between 1930 and 1934–it was actually 1931 and 1933. And saying “the actual jug was found behind a clump of bushes by a gas station attendant..” is mixing up two parts of the story and two separate reappearances of jugs in Ann Arbor. Seriously. For those who don’t know the full story, here’s a remixed version of what really happened in the 1930s: Sometime in mid-September, before the start of the football season in those days, the jug vanished from its home at the University of Michigan Administration building. News of the trophy’s disappearance made the headlines and U-M began a frantic search with the hope that…
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80 Years Today…The Real Jug Returns!
Many of you know the story—For those who don’t read on. For those who do, skip to the bottom for a little Jug update. PANIC(!) erupted in mid-September 1931. The coveted Little Brown Jug, the symbol of the Michigan-Minnesota rivalry, vanished from the U-M Administration building. A frantic search ensued sending media relations man Phil Pack (think of a vintage Bruce Madej) all over town chasing leads. Based on a tip Pack even searched a few cider mills..but those visits proved fruitless. /wink Then, on November 19, 1931, the very same week of the Minnesota game that season, a car pulled up to the Tuomy Hills gas station (now the Bearclaw Coffee at the corner of Washtenaw and Stadium) with four men wearing “dark goggles.” One of the disguised passengers rolled out a jug onto the pavement & it was scooped up by gas station attendant K.D. Smith. While initial reports were skeptical of the authenticity of the crock, which was said to have been “freshly painted”, Fielding H. Yost himself inspected it and said it was indeed the real McCoy. A local sports writer said Yost was full of it, calling it “a clever imitation.” Michigan retained the jug in 1931 but then headed back to Minneapolis in 1932. Yost went along on the trip (Harry Kipke coached the…
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The Parlay Card Peccadillo (1958)
In 1958 a Michigan Daily writer named Barton Huthwaite exposed a gambling ring on campus that led to the arrest of a few notable students including a fellow Daily writer and couple prominent athletes. While betting on football wasn’t (and isn’t) exactly unheard of around the country, the report and arrests caught the eye of the nation—all the way up to media heavyweights such as The New York Times, LIFE Magazine and Sports Illustrated.
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Willis Ward Blitz
Funny, for tomorrow’s game we were supposed to honor perhaps the most famous (non-POTUS) Michigan athlete of all-time—Tom Harmon. That didn’t work out. Instead, we will be recognizing honoring one of the most controversial moments in Michigan football history—Willis Ward and the 1934 Georgia Tech game– something that occurred just a few years before Old 98 stepped on campus. My mini Ward shrine I’ve had for a few years: student ticket booklet, order form for tickets to the Tech game and of course the stub. The Ward story is blowing up here and there and there’s more to come. There’s no pre-recorded episode of This Week in Michigan Football History as I will be live in the coveted WTKA Bud Light (M)Victors Lounge on Saturday around 1:30PM EDT discussing 1934, Ward, Ford, Kipke and much more with Sam, Ira and Brian Kruger from Stunt3 Multimedia—producers of the wonderful documentary Black and Blue. For those out of town, I highly recommend tuning in via iHeart Radio or via the iHeart Radio app. Elsewhere: * Don’t miss the piece by Stephen Nesbitt of The Daily on the Ward affair. Includes a small line from me and loads of Bacon, which is never a bad thing. From ‘The Forgotten Man: Remembering Michigan trailblazer Willis Ward’, check out this nugget: It was April 13,…
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Living Legacy: Interview with U-M Senior Melanie Ward
If you read this site you know that Saturday is officially Willis Ward Day in the state of Michigan. It is also not-so coincidentally the 78th anniversary of the infamous 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech game. I bet you didn’t know this: there’s a descendant of Willis Ward currently studying on campus in Ann Arbor. I met Melanie Ward, the grand niece of Ward (Willis is her grandfather’s brother), at a screening of Black and Blue at the U-M Alumni Center on campus earlier this year. Ward (left) is currently a U-M senior and was kind enough to chat with me this weekend as we approach the day that will honor her great uncle. MVictors: What did you know about your great uncle before coming to U-M? Melanie Ward: I knew that I had a great uncle who played football for the University of Michigan in the 1930s. I also knew a little later that Gerald Ford also played on his team. But I did not know anything about the Georgia Tech football game. MVictors: Do you have any other family members who attended Michigan? Ward: Just Willis and his sister-law, who is my dad’s mother. MVictors: So when did you learn about the controversy about the 1934 Georgia Tech game and Willis Ward’s involvement? Ward: At the screening of the documentary…
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What President Ford Might Have Said Today
Here’s most of a nice speech that President Ford delivered to the Annual Congressional Dinner of the University of Michigan Club back in March 1975. To me, much of it applies today as ever and if he were around I’m guessing he would have shared many of these memories on the field today: [Introductory portion omitted] You know, as a matter of fact, I can still remember spending a good part of my sophomore and junior years washing dishes in the DKE house–of which I was a proud member–and I mean washing dishes. As a matter of fact, I washed so many dishes I was the only athlete in Michigan history who ever had a football knee and dishpan hands at the same time. [Laughter] As I mentioned a moment ago, I was lucky enough to play football, first on Ferry Field and then in the stadium. And I was lucky enough to start a few games in the football season of 1934–and that was quite a year. The Wolverines on that memorable occasion played Ohio State, and we lost 34 to 0. And to make it even worse, that was the year we lost seven out of eight of our scheduled games. But you know, what really hurt me the most was when my teammates voted me their most…
