Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Today’s Cougar fans, grumbling about Washington State playing football games in Seattle, might be gratified to know that the situation was reversed in 1911.

The University of Washington Huskies came to Spokane’s Natatorium Park to play the University of Idaho.

Why? Presumably Spokane was considered a more-or-less neutral spot.

This certainly worked out well for the Huskies. They beat Idaho 17-0, in what the jaded Spokesman-Review sportswriter called a one-sided, “mediocre” and “decidedly loose” contest.

The Huskies, coming off a championship season, scored their first touchdown after only four plays, and Idaho never truly threatened. Idaho “was outweighed” and in “worse condition” than the Huskies.

From an attendance standpoint, this Spokane experiment was a bust.

The crowd of 1,100 was “the smallest gathering at an intercollegiate gridiron struggle in Spokane in years.”

From the WSC beat: Meanwhile, 2,000 fans attended the game in Pullman between the University of Oregon and Washington State College (as it was known in those days), not counting people in the “scores of autos lining the north side of the gridiron.”

WSC lost 6-0.