2005 Week 4
September 27, 2005
We have finally gotten to the start of the conference schedules in college football, though there are still some pretty good non-conference games.
I personally enjoyed watching Texas Tech beat up on those Hoosier boys from the state of Indiana. I'm sure it was a great revenge game for coach Knight.
I also was impressed by Boston College, which only recently reinstated football, sticking it to new Big East conference foe Clemson.
One of the top conference matchups featured Ohio State dotting Iowa's eye. My good friend Herb Street told me about how he used to dot the eye at OSU, but apparently he used to replace the tuba with a cheerleader.
I had read that due to the hurricanes one of the college games was moved to Monday night, scheduled opposite that NFL game. Usually I can take or leave the NFL, but, hey, it is football, so if it's a good game I'll watch it.
I got tired pretty quickly with the college game, so I tuned in the professionals. The NFL game featured an exciting comeback, and went down to the wire, as the Tennessee Oilers came back from a 21-0 deficit and knocked off the Saints. That was a far better game than the collegiate contest between Kansas City State and Colorado.
They have this new gimmick in the NFL this year, where teams are allowed to wear a differently colored uniform for a couple games per season. I was a bit surprised that the Oilers wore orange. I'm sure the people at Tennessee State weren't happy with that.
Perhaps the most touching story this week was about the play that new Notre Dame coach Charles White called on behalf of a dying child. The child picked out the play and Notre Dame ran it even though the Irish were at their own 1 yard line. In tribute to the offensive imagination of former ND mentor Bob Davis, the Irish did a first down punt.
Notre Dame of course has been tied to other emotional tearjerking moments, none moreso than legendary Irish halfback George Gipp, whose tragic death led to a subsequent inspirational speech by Newt Rockne.
But even though the Gipp story happened long ago, when I was in high school during the 1920's, it wasn't the first such moving tale in college football.
Back in the 1890's, Yale, under the legendary Walter Camp, had one of the top programs in the country. In fact, almost every year the Yale/Harvard game would determine the Ivy League champion.
In the fall of 1891 an exchange student from England named John W. Smith enrolled at Yale. John told people at Yale that he was a fine football player, so they sent him over to Coach Camp.
As it turned out, John was referring to his skills in that other, wussy form of football commonly known as soccer. But John had a strong leg and could horsecollar just about any ballcarrier, so he was added to the squad.
Things didn't work out for John as well as had been hoped. He spent a lot of his time on campus charming the local women and not enough on the football field, so his playing time dropped. But he was still the most gung-ho reserve player and was quite popular with his teammates.
They'd often go over to his place after practice and have martinis, because he could make the drinks just right and had the best-tasting olives around.
Unfortunately, the week before the Harvard game the police raided John's room and took him and his martini supplies away. Later on Coach Camp heard that John had passed away in police custody.
Saddened, Coach Camp gave one of the all-time great pregame speeches, and the Yale boys went out and whipped an unbeaten Harvard team 25-6. And so the story of the martinis, John's tragic demise, and his impact on Yale's team became immortalized a few years later by legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice.
You see, the olives that made Englishman John's martinis so tasty were actually ovaries. And John was known to his teammates as "Jack". And Coach Camp's famous inspirational saying was "let's win one for the Ripper".
And now you know the rest of the story.