True Heisman Was Coach Who Deserved Trophy
On Saturday, college football’s most coveted trophy, the Heisman, will be awarded to the nation’s best player. Ironically, its namesake was an undistinguished 158-pound lineman at Brown and Penn.
John Heisman’s distinction, instead, came as an inventive but dictatorial coach at seven colleges between 1892 and 1927.
When some people wanted to ban the game because of its brutality, he saved it by pushing for legalization of the forward pass and finding other ways to use finesse to defeat brawn.
He originated new formations, the hiddenball play, the center snap, the word “hike” to get each play started and the long count to draw opponents offside.
And in words a Jimmy Johnson might have used with more than one butter-fingered running back he cut from his team, Heisman once held up a football before his team and warned: “Better to have died as a small child than to fumble this football.”
“He thought a lot about how to motivate players,” said B. Eugene Griessman, a Georgia Tech administrator and time management consultant who included a study of Heisman in his book “The Achievement Factor.” “He recognized that what motivated one might destroy another. He could be stern with one, encouraging to another. He said he was frightened that he might destroy the spirit of a ballplayer. “
Heisman began coaching at Oberlin in 1892. After a quick stop at the forerunner of Akron, he became the coach at Auburn in 1895.
It was in his first game at Auburn that he introduced the hidden-ball play. Quarterback Reynolds Tichenor took the snap and stuffed the ball under his shirt and fell to the ground after being surrounded by his teammates. When they then ran one way, taking the defense along, Tichenor got back to his feet and ran the other way. It was immediately declared illegal.
Heisman tried to get around that rule later by having leather patches the size of footballs sewn on the front of his players’ jerseys, said Griessman. On the kickoff, they swarmed together, then all ran upfield looking like they were holding the ball.
Heisman sometimes is given credit for inventing the forward pass. More accurately, he led the drive for its legalization, then popularized it.
Heisman first saw a forward pass while scouting a game between Georgia and North Carolina in 1895. When the Tar Heels’ punter couldn’t get off against the rush, he desperately threw it downfield, where teammate caught it and ran 70 yards for the only touchdown of the game. Though the Georgia players protested the illegal play, the referee allowed the touchdown to stand, saying, “I didn’t see the ball thrown.”
For 11 years, Heisman hounded chairman Walter Camp and the football-rules committee to legalize the forward pass. Camp never did agree, but two other committee members outvoted him and legalized the pass in 1906.
After five years at Auburn, Heisman in 1900 moved on to Clemson, where he coached the team to so many decisive victories over Georgia Tech that a committee of students and teachers journeyed from Atlanta to Clemson to convince him to switch sides.
He achieved his greatest success at Georgia Tech, where he coached for 16 years. From 1915 to 1917, his teams at Tech won 25 straight games, during which they scored 1,129 points to their opponents’ 61.
Against Cumberland in 1916, Heisman openly acknowledged running up the score in an astounding 222-0 victory. He did it to confound sports writers who evaluated teams by comparing scores against common opponents.
Other coaching stops would take him to Washington and Jefferson and Rice, where he retired from coaching in 1927 after compiling a lifetime record of 185-68-18.
He then became the athletic director at the Downtown Athletic Club in New York City, which in 1935 began awarding an annual trophy to the best college football player east of the Mississippi River. Later the field was expanded to the best player in the nation, and it was named the Heisman Memorial Trophy upon his death in 1936.