Uncovering Heisman’s First Trophy with Author Sam Hatcher

Jay Burwanger is considered by many to be the first Heisman winner of the trophy.

Our guest in this podcast has a little bit of a different idea for Heisman's first trophy and it affects the Cumberland game of 222 to nothing.

We have Sam Hatcher coming up in just a moment to tell us all about it.

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This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And boy, we have a really treat for you tonight.

We have an author of a book that I recently read and it's on a very famous individual and a very famous game.

But there's a lot of things that even I didn't really recognize.

And the author's name is Sam Hatcher.

We have him with us tonight.

He wrote a book on called Heisman's first Trophy.

Sam Hatcher, welcome to the Pig, Pennsylvania.

Thank you very much.

I believe it's my first appearance on a pig pen and it feels very comfortable.

Does it really?

Okay, well, that's good.

Don't get the mud on your shoes too much here in the pig pen.

You know, we want to keep you out of the mud.

Mud.

It will be okay.

I just don't want anything else on my shoes.

Okay, Ray.

Okay.

Sam, you wrote a very interesting book.

You know, the title sort of takes me as a reader one way.

You know, Heisman's first trophy, the first thing that's coming to my mind is the Heisman trophy named in honor of John Heisman.

So I'm thinking maybe it's going that way a little bit.

And then you, you, you know, dabble in a little bit, you know, in the precursors that it's on this Cumberland game that he coached of the 222 to nothing game, which a famous game in football history that.

Most of our listeners are very familiar with both these things.

But you.

You tell a sort of a different side of that story, which is.

Is really pretty interesting.

And we're going to get to that in a second.

But, you know, first, a little bit about you.

You.

You come from the town of where Cumberland College is.

That's where you're talking to me from right now.

And why don't you tell us a little bit about that and your background with Cumberland.

Sure.

I was in the news.

This is Lebanon, Tennessee.

We're 30 miles east of Nashville.

We're on I40.

And a lot of people will recognize Lebanon when I'm traveling.

They'll say, oh, yeah, you know, we passed through that town.

Yeah, it's on I40.

But probably Lebanon.

Outside of Cumberland University, Lebanon is probably most famous for Cracker Barrel restaurants.

It's the hometown headquarters of Cracker Barrel, really.

And it was started by 12 local friends here, as a matter of fact, and now they have over 650 restaurants nationwide.

But, you know, it's still got a small town tailored to it.

Lebanon is a town of about 35,000.

The university has grown substantially in the last seven years.

We've doubled enrollment.

I'm actually chairman of the board of Cumberland.

I was elected chairman of the board back in June of this year, so I'm beginning.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Been on the board for probably 40 years.

My career has been in the newspaper business.

I was the editor of the local editor and CEO of the local daily newspaper, and then with my company, ended up with, like, five community newspapers in middle Tennessee.

So, you know, I'm sort of a big print media guy.

But, you know, I feel sorry for the print media because we're sort of going the wrong direction, I'm afraid.

But now I do some consulting work, and I enjoy writing, to be honest with you.

Well, definitely you can see that there's a writing background in the way that your writing style is, and your book is excellent.

I know we talked a little bit before we came on here, but you took me, somebody that knew a lot about the individuals, especially Coach Heisman, and a lot about the Cumberland game, the 222 nothing game.

And you educated me in ways that I didn't realize that I could be educated on that game.

So, you know, it's a very interesting story, and you sort of take it from sort of the Cumberland side of things, which is not a perspective that we as football historians 100 years later get to appreciate.

And, boy, when you read this book, it's, you know, a great way to appreciate.

But before we go too much further and we'll.

We'll do this again, why don't you let folks know, again, the title of the book and where they can get a copy.

Okay.

The title of the book is Heisman's First Trophy.

And actually, you can buy it anywhere books are sold.

Amazon carries the books, but several, you know, notable bookstores carry the book as well.

And, you know, it's easy to access.

So.

Okay.

Yeah, nothing easier than that.

Go to your local bookstore or, you know, some of the big names on, like, Amazon on online to get it.

So however you prefer.

Now, you know, this is such a treat for me as a reader.

I read a lot of football history books during a year.

You know, I usually go between three and five books a month.

I'm reading on this.

But you had, you know, some really.

Some really neat little tricks and treats for me as a reader.

You would take me down one road of something familiar to me, like, you know, Coach Heisman or the story, and you would throw some twists and turns in there and bits of history.

And, boy, it was just a delicacy and smorgasbord of information.

And I. I really enjoyed the way you did it.

Is that a writing style that you.

You adopted?

Where did you get that kind of writing style from that.

That probably comes from.

From my newspaper background.

I.

And maybe from my own read.

I'm sort of a guy that reads right before I go to bed at night.

So I don't know if you noticed, and you.

I'm sure you did.

The book's chapters are rather short, and I hate books with really long chapters.

So I tried to write the book in very short chapters that were readable within, you know, a short period of time to sit down with the book and tried to make it interesting from that standpoint.

I actually start the book with one of the heroes in the book, a guy named George Allen, who was a student at Cumberland at the time, a law school student at Cumberland at the time playing golf with Dwight Eisenhower, and they were playing at Burning Tree.

And George Allen after graduation at Cumberland, and after beginning his practice of law, he became a consultant to four U.S. presidents.

And Eisenhower was one of those four presidents.

So he and Eisenhower really developed a really strong close relationship.

And they played golf frequently in Washington at Burning Tree Golf Course.

And I learned this from studying a little bit of history about Eisenhower and then obviously about George Allen.

And ironically I had played Burning Tree Golf Course maybe four or five times with a friend of mine who was a member there.

And I knew some of the nuances about Burning Tree there.

No women allowed on Burning Trees Golf Course at all at any time except on Christmas Eve.

And they let women come in on Christmas Eve to buy gifts for their husbands or their better half, you might say.

So I knew a lot about Burning Tree and it was sort of neat to throw that in the book.

And I thought, well, you know, that's probably a pretty good place to start this, this Burning know, start this story.

Yeah, that was sort of the first curveball you threw at me because the name George Allen to football historian is going to take you to a coach from the the 60s and 70s that you know.

And I started doing the math in my, my head and we, we've had some guests.

I've wrote books on George Allen recently of course, a famous LA Rams and Washington Redskins head coach.

So you made me start doing the math.

I'm thinking, okay, Eisenhower's president, George Allen in Washington.

That doesn't, that doesn't line up.

It's probably a couple decades off there.

So.

And, and you, you don't really reveal too much of it.

At least, at least I didn't perceive it of who this George Allen was.

I'm thinking, okay, maybe the George Allen I know is in there, but it's a totally different George Allen and you sort of unveil that later, later on.

But what, what an interesting way to start it and sort of take me down a path I wasn't expecting.

Well, ironically I tried every way in the world to connect those two George Allen's.

When I first started writing the book, I thought, well, you know, that's just too crazy that there'd be one George Allen at Cumberland in Tennessee and another George Allen with the Washington Redskins.

I think this may have been Redskins George Allen's grandfather or father, you know, and, and there were so many people.

Cumberland has got a real interesting history because it at one time it was known as the Harvard of the south because so many people came to Cumberland's law school.

If they didn't go to Harvard, they came to Cumberland.

Harvard had the most members sitting in Congress and Cumberland had the second most members sitting in.

So you know, it's pretty distinguished school from that standpoint.

And I thought, well, you know, maybe it's possible that these two George Allens are related.

Then when I started digging into the George Allen and Cumberland, I found out he was from a small town in Mississippi.

And there's no way you're going to connect those two George Allen's, you know, so that sort of killed that point.

As much as I wanted to make that happen, I couldn't.

I couldn't stretch it.

I just couldn't make that happen.

Yeah, that, that was.

It sort of took me to another point I was going to make.

I was gonna make it later, but maybe I'll do it while memory.

I didn't realize, okay, I'm from Pennsylvania, which is probably a little bit more mature in as, as a.

Well, it's a commonwealth, but as one of the 50 states in the United States than Tennessee is.

I think it got statehood, the second one to get statehood.

If I'm not, if I'm correct, and I'm sitting there thinking, okay, I know how many, you know, bigger colleges and stuff we have in football history here in Pennsylvania and a lot of football history.

But I'm sitting there thinking, okay, you're talking about Cumberland and, you know, some of the good teams that they had and, you know, despite this, you know, shellacking they took, which we'll get into a second.

But, you know, and I know, you know, Suwannee is down there and you have Vander Vandy and, you know, you just, just in that middle Tennessee area back over 100 years ago, that's really a hotbed for football in that era, which is.

I found that kind of surprising too.

Well, and that's really interesting that you say that it was a hotbed for football.

But.

And that's sort of the premise for the book nationally.

You know, football wasn't really respected in the south, as, you know, as we've discussed.

But, you know, a lot of people don't realize that about the strength of football in the South.

And at that time, and I'm sort of getting into the book, if that's okay.

But at that time, and you know, the subtitle to the book is how the Game Changed Football in the South.

And the story is the fact that most of the national media, they were in areas like where you are in Pennsylvania and they were in The Northeast, and at that time, Harvard, Penn, Army, a lot of the Ivy League schools, they became the national champions because the national media was close to those schools, and therefore they knew the strength of those teams.

And when they started voting for the consensus national champion, it was always one of those teams from that area because they weren't familiar with teams in South.

And, you know, it had, you know, they couldn't jump on an airplane and fly two hours to watch a game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or Knoxville, Tennessee.

They had to take what they had right there at home and, you know, and pretty much report on those.

On those games.

And couldn't watch.

Couldn't watch them on television or listen on the radio either.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

Frank Deford, the late Frank Deford did a great commentary on my book several years ago, and I'll never forget it.

It was in October.

There was a really good football game on TV that Tennessee was playing, sort of a Tennessee fan, and Tennessee was playing somebody.

And my wife and I are sitting in the den.

We got a fire going in the fireplace, about to watch the game.

And the phone rings, and the gentleman on the other end says in a really deep radio voice, Mr. Hatcher, this is Frank Deford calling.

I'd like to ask you some questions about your book.

And so, you know, I got all excited, jumped up, went to another room to talk with him.

And his point was, you claim that this changed football in the South.

I want you to prove to me that it changed football in the South.

So I go through the story and I go through about how the media covered the game because of the score of the game.

It was, you know, nobody had seen a score like 222 to nothing.

And I said, because of that, it got so much media attention.

And because of the game against Cumberland, the 222 to nothing, people started watching Georgia Tech and watching football in the South.

So after I went through this long explanation with Frank Deford, he said, Mr. Hatcher, you have convinced me.

I am convinced.

And his broadcast a week later was that, you know, this book had changed football in the South.

And he sort of made my point on the.

On the radio.

But anyway, one of the good things happened to me.

Yeah, yeah, you.

You definitely proved that point.

And you, you're.

I mean, you also brought an interesting facet to.

To this story with that.

Another thing that I didn't realize, you know, we have probably the most famous early journalist of football hero football, Grantlin Rice.

And if I'm sitting there, if I'm like sort of doing a CSI of this whole thing and I have a map up and I'm putting the pins in and putting the yarns.

I'm starting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which is not far from Lebanon, very close, and I'm putting a pin in there because that's where Grantland Rice is from.

So he's probably very familiar with Cumberland, I'm assuming.

And then you, you take that down to Atlanta where this game is.

Is played.

And Grantlin Rice is, is there at this game.

But he's.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

So you have this big triangle that's Cumberland's really sort of evolved as heavily and you have probably the best coverage and most respected journalists on of sports at that time.

Grantland Rice, who's sort of creating sports journalism, you know, in a big way and has a lot of influence him because he's the guy just less than a decade later takes over for Walter Camp and choosing the All American team and probably national champions and things like that, you know, which Walter Camp had done for the first 20 some years of football, 30 years of football.

No, I think you're exactly right.

And you know, that that's interesting because obviously he had an influence being in New York.

Grant and Rice had a tremendous amount of influence.

And you know what, what's always sort of bothered me about the story is.

And I'm sure you've had the same experience perhaps.

But when you say.

When I say I'm on the board at Cumberland University in Lebanon, and then there's somebody that always laughs and says, yeah, that's the school got beat by Georgia Tech 222 to nothing.

But they never know the story behind the game.

And you know, that's.

To me, it's always been sort of an insult.

I've always wanted to explain why Cumberland got beat 222 to nothing.

And it was, you know, it's sort of a David and Goliath story.

And that's really inspired me to write the book to tell the story.

And you sort of pointed that out yourself that there's a lot about this, this game that people don't realize, you know, on the outset, people just generally think, well, you know, Tech had a much better team than Koman, and they just chose to run the score up.

Well, you know, that's really not what the deal was at all, you know, so I don't want to get into that yet, but you tell me when and we'll get into that.

Well, I think.

I think we should.

But I think first of all, I mean, you set.

If I look in retrospect of looking back at the book, you have it set up like a normal story of a beginning, middle, and an end.

You have a protagonist and an antagonist.

And the antagonist is kind of surprising when you have a book titled Heisman's First Trophy.

And I think that's.

That's one of the ironies you threw at me.

Heisman is almost the antagonist in.

In this book because we're looking sort of through the lens of a Cumberland perspective, and our man, George Allen, is our protagonist.

Is that fair to say?

I have to say you're exactly right.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And George Allen was sort of my kind of guy.

He, uh, he often bragged about being second from last in his law school class.

He wasn't, you know, he wasn't the brightest law school graduate by any means, but he had an overwhelming personality, was very popular on campus.

He was like an athletic director.

You know, he's the one that made up the schedule.

He saw that the uniforms got washed week to week.

He packed them on in bags to take on a train wherever they were going to play.

So, you know, this guy was sort of in charge of the program, the athletic program at the university.

And, you know, it was George's fault that they got into the predicaments.

They got in with.

With Heisman and Georgia Tech.

If you might.

If I may, I'll sort of go on in.

Yeah.

But.

Yeah, why don't you tell us what George did to make Georgia Tech sort of angry with.

With Cumberland.

John Heisman was also the Georgia Tech baseball coach, and he had a nationally ranked baseball team that he brought to Lebanon to play Cumberland University in baseball.

And it was a big deal for the, you know, as you can imagine for a town, a small town, size 11 at that time.

Probably had maybe 2,000 people living in Lebanon at that time.

And here's this Georgia Tech team out of Atlanta, a nationally ranked baseball team coming to play Lebanon, or, excuse me, Cumberland's baseball team.

So, you know, it's a big deal.

The town got excited about it.

And so George Allen again was the manager of the baseball team and not wanting Cumberland to be embarrassed, he sort of, he sort of pulled a fast one on John Heisman and he went to Nashville and got some semi pro players from Salford Dale, that was the Nashville semi pro league.

They played at a stadium called Salford Dale in Nashville.

And he brought those eight or 10 players or six or eight players back to Lebanon and suited them up in Cumberland uniforms and let them play the Georgia Tech team.

And the bottom line was at the end of the game, come on, won that game 22 to nothing and beat the Georgia Tech nationally ranked baseball team.

And when the game was over, Heisman sort of, you know, starts looking around the field and, you know, some of these college students look like they were 35 and 40 years old.

And Heisman figured out that, you know, he'd been duped.

And he says to George Allen, you know, I'll get you for this.

At some point, I'm going to get you.

Because Heisman left there really, excuse me, PO'd about what had happened to him at Cumberland.

So, you know, at that time there was there, there was not an ncaa, so there's nobody really patrolling college athletics, so to speak.

And George Allen thinks, well, you'll never get me again because I'll be gone, you know, I'm graduating from school and I'll be out of here.

And later that year, the Cumberland board had.

Cullen had sort of fallen on hard times financially, and several players had left to prepare to go to war.

World War I and scuba didn't have the resources to have a football team in the fall.

So the board made the decision, the Cumberland board made the decision that they would do away with football and just not have a football program in the fall because it would obviously save money in a number of ways.

So the president of the university told George Allen to notify all the teams on the schedule that Coleman would not be playing them in the fall because they weren't going to have a team.

And George Allen did that.

He notified every one of the schools, but overlooked George Tech and did not notify George Tech.

And that's where the rubber sort of hits the road because that's how Heisman decided he would get some revenge and get, you know, get back at Cumberland So, you know, sort of the rest of the story.

So George Allen writes Heisman and says, look, I'm sorry I should have notified you earlier, but we're not going to have a team in the fall, so we won't be coming to Atlanta to play you.

And Heisman right Spec said, oh yeah, you will.

You'll be coming, you'll be coming to Atlanta to play this game or you're going to face the damages of a lawsuit, civil lawsuit.

And Heisman writes, or excuse me, George Allen writes back and apologizes, said it's his fault, he's a student manager and it's fault.

Heisman writes back, says, I don't care, you're going to play this game or come and will be responsible for the damages for not playing the game, which at that time would have been probably close to $100,000 in today's money.

And the truth of the matter is it could have closed and probably would have closed the doors at Cumberland University.

They would have, they couldn't come up with the money to pay, to pay the Georgia Tech and they would have probably closed the school.

So I'm really going through the whole.

Story, but if I could pause just a second just to highlight a couple things.

Okay, first of all, that baseball game and Heisman's the baseball coach.

And he had been at a variety of colleges, including you mentioned earlier, Clemson and Georgia Tech and some others around.

So this is a well established, probably one of the most respected college football coaches around.

And there really wasn't pro football at that time.

So it, this is like the man in, in football.

This is like, you know, Saban would be today, you know, coming in coaching a baseball team would probably maybe be a good correlation to the modern viewer.

So this is a big deal.

And you have these, these gents at, at Cumberland, they're excited to come in here and like and you build it up that Georgia Tech has a pretty strong baseball team too under Heisman and Cumberland's no slouch but you know, getting those recruits.

But they have, you know, the people of middle Tennessee and the Cumberland and Nashville area are looking at this.

It's, it's one of those dates on their calendar.

I'm sure they had circle and said, oh, Heisman and Georgia Tech are coming to play, you know, on, on our baseball diamond.

And we're going to be ready for them.

So that was a big deal.

And then when they won, I mean, what a perfect way to rate you.

You couldn't have made this up.

It's almost like Shakespearean to have a 22 to nothing game foreshadow a 222 to nothing, right?

It's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

And you can't make that.

You can't make that up so that they're right.

Crazy.

So, you know, George Allen feels badly about what's happened and he comes back to campus and the Kappa Sigma fraternity, they love this story.

So he comes back to Cumblin's campus and he organizes 14 Kappa Sig Fraternity brothers to go to Atlanta to play Georgia Tech.

And they go down there to play Georgia Tech to save their university, because George Allen tells them, look, it's my fault.

I'm the one that screwed up.

But if we don't put a team in uniform and go to Atlanta and play Georgia Tech, our school is probably going to close.

And I don't want that on my shoulders.

And he convinced the Kappa Sig fraternity to take 14 players, get on a train and go to Atlanta and play George 2.

Yeah, I'm still amazed too.

I mean, George Allen was, he was a hero after that baseball game.

I mean, you tell about parties and bands playing and he celebrated for weeks afterwards and they're patting them on the back and the great deal goes home for the summer and works his summer job to make, make money for school, Comes back in the fall and now all of a sudden, you know, knock at the door, the president of college comes in and his, his buddies are still there, you know, patting him on the back.

Hey, yeah, I remember that back last spring.

You know, this is great deal.

And then president sort of takes him out and to a private place and drops the bomb on them.

Hey, Georgia Tech.

Yeah, Georgia Tech may sue us and close our doors or we got to play football for a team that we just closed shop a few months ago on.

So, you know, he, he goes from hero to, to almost goat, at least in the eyes of the, the, the faculty at the school.

I'm sure his, his chums and the frat houses and the, the folks in the community are still behind him, say, hey, this is our guy, man.

He, he beat the big dog.

You know, it's.

So this is kind of a, a real ironic situation for, for, you know, very troubling to him.

You know, he, he takes it Very personally.

And like you said, he has to, he has to fix this issue that he sort of created by, you know, but I just can't believe the whole abrupt halt and of this whole momentum for, for Mr. Allen here.

So that's, that's kind of amazing.

Well, it is amazing.

You're exactly right.

And you know, he was obviously gifted in a number of ways.

And you know, these Kappa Sig kids, I'd call them at that time, you know, several of them never played football at all.

And you know, I know you read there's a sort of a humorous story in the, in the book where, and, and you know, sort of parenthesis in this.

A lot of people ask me, so where do you find this stuff?

How did you know about all this?

Well, number one, on the game itself, the Atlanta Piper carried, you know, factual stats about the game.

But these players had reunions ever so many years after this game.

They would have maybe a 25 year reunion, a 50 year reunion.

And these stories were swapped during the game.

So he recorded a lot of the things about the game in a history book about Cumberland.

And, and you know, I took a lot of the excerpts from that.

But, you know, I was amazed at the number of being a print media guy myself, I was amazed at the number of stories that were carried nationwide about the dad Gun game.

There was a small town in Texas that carried the story, and this story didn't run to like maybe 10 days or two weeks after the game was played because, you know, it took a while to get the story from the east coast to the Midwest or the west, you know, and, and, or Southwest, I guess, in that case.

But the, so this Texas newspaper carries the story and they say in their headline, let's see, the headline was, I believe, University of Georgia beats Cumberland 222 to nothing.

They had the score right, but they had the wrong school because they had the University of Georgia instead of Georgia Tech.

But you know, again, it just tells you about how much print coverage the dad Gum game got.

And, you know, it was significant.

I didn't finish the story, I guess, though.

But when John Heisman toward the end of the game was going down his bench, making sure all of his players got in the game, as you see today, you know, with, with the score being that much, he goes down the bench and he finds a kid on the bench with a, a blanket covering himself up.

And Heisman pulls the blanket back and It's a Cumberland player.

So Heisman thinks, well, you know, this kid has had a concussion in the game, has gone to the wrong side of the field, he's sitting on the wrong bench.

And he says to the kid, he says, son, you're a Cumberland player and you're on the wrong side of the field.

You're on the wrong bench.

And the kid looks up at Heisler and he said, yes, sir, I know that.

But he said, if I go back to that other side, they're going to put me in the game and I'd rather just stay over here.

It's okay.

You go, Tyler, play over there.

But, you know, there are a lot, a lot of funny things about the game, really itself.

Yeah, you, you bring up a lot of little, I mean, that, that was a hilarious story, I thought, not really entertaining and.

But there was little tidbits you had in there and you, you do it in a unique way where you, you have the story sort of on the white background with the black text and you have these little gray boxes pop up and you're bringing these tidbits of there little side stories of history of, you know, whether it be about George Allen or Coach Heisman or one of the other characters, you know, and one of them that you have, we're in the middle of this game.

You're.

You're coveraging a game.

You have probably, I don't know what, four or five chapters on the game itself at the end.

So going through the game play by play, painful, point by point, that, you know, they're just racking up, you know, all these 222 points in this game and you.

All of a sudden one comes up that you say, you know, I forget exactly how you said, but possibly the first occasion of a huddle in a football game.

That's true.

Yeah.

Why don't you, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

So Cumberland was going back to sort of get their breath and sort of figure out what they were going to do next.

And at that time, they didn't necessarily.

Teams didn't necessarily do that.

And that was sort of the introduction of the huddle to college football.

When Cumberland did that and went back and, you know, would, would sort of like figure out where they are and what they were going to do next.

And that, you know, that was the introduction of the huddle as far as.

And that.

That's been recorded too, in different places.

You know, the Philadelphia Inquirer did a tremendous story on this game.

And being from Your neck of the woods that might be of interest to you, but they actually did some history about the letter that Georgia Tech sent to Cumberland threatening the lawsuit and actually published the letter.

I believe if I remember that correctly, it was actually published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

So I'm sort of skipping around on you.

I'm sorry about that.

No, no.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned that letter because I wanted to bring up point of the letter that George Allen sort of hand wrote and got approved from the, the president of the college, President Hill, and sent back to accept the, the challenge that they were not going to pay the $3,000.

They were going to play the game.

And you know, it's, I don't know, you know, it brings up sort of the, the character of what George Allen must have been.

He was, he was a confident guy, sometimes a little bit arrogant.

Maybe, you know, this 20 something year old kid, maybe his, his youthful exuberance, you know, overtook him at this moment.

But he made a statement at the end of that letter telling Heisman and the president of Georgia Tech that they were going to play the game.

That sort of, you know, I don't know if it irked the fire, but you, you had it.

I think you even mentioned the book that Heisman must have took pause and had to ponder on a little bit.

So why don't want you to share with us what was in that letter.

You might have to help me on that one a little bit.

I'm not sure that I can.

Well, well, he goes through and tells Heisman in, in the.

I forget who the president of the college is of Georgia Tech that he.

We're going to play the game.

And he ends it with a statement, sort of like a, a postscript.

Oh yeah, and we're gonna win.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're not coming just to play.

We're going to win the game.

Yeah, yeah, that's funny about that.

Which sort of goes back to at the halftime of the game.

And you probably recall that Heisman tells his team, you know, they're up 111 to nothing at the halftime.

And Heisman warns the Georgia State team, watch out for those comer boys because you don't know what they're going to be doing next in the second half.

Keep be alert, watch out, don't take this for granted, that we got to win.

And I'm assuming that goes back to his baseball experience in Lebanon would be my only thought about that.

And you know, that that came right from the players, the Georgia Tech players themselves, that that line did, because that was something that came out of one of the reunions that they had said that Heisman warned them, you know, be careful down in the second half.

We're up 100 points or 111 points, but watch out for coming because you don't know what those boys are going to do in the second half.

Yeah.

And that sort of sets up a few moments later in time from Heisman telling his players that, you know, they come out of the half.

You know, George Allen's trying to protect his guys from, you know, getting their heads knocked off.

He wants to get everybody home in one piece and he knows they're, they're not going to win this game, you know, 111 and nothing.

I believe, like you said, halftime.

So Allen approaches the, the officials of the game and makes a request and why don't you tell us that's that scenario, the request he makes at halftime.

And then Heisman's response to that.

Yeah, about shortening, I assume about shortening the game.

Yes, Heisman agreed to that.

And I'm not sure I remember the exact verbiage in that, but, you know, as I told you earlier, it's funny about this, when you start asking questions, I swear to people, I did read the book, but sometimes I forget.

But you might have to help me with that part of that.

But Allan goes to the officials, he says, hey, can we shorten the half?

And I, I thought it was an odd request.

He asked for 12 and a half.

I think if I'm in his thing, I'm saying, hey, we have like five minute quarters.

But he asked for 12 and a half minute quarters.

And the officials are sitting.

Well, okay, but we have to get Coach Heisman to agree to it.

So they go over to Heisman and Heisman just, you know, like you just said, just got done telling his team, hey, watch out for these guys.

Because remember what happened up in, up in Tennessee, you know, these guys are clever and they're shifty and you can't trust them.

And he sort of gives that same message to the officials that come to him and say, hey, you know, we've been talking to coach over there.

Heisman has no idea what they're talking about.

He can, he's looking across the field and seeing a conversation.

So maybe that's.

That refreshes it on that conversation that Heisman tells the officials.

Yeah, and again I'm sort of blank on that.

But I do remember that he, he did say, you know, it's sort of like no funny business now, you know, is this going to be the truth or is this a trick?

You know, it was basically that.

And Heisman didn't have a whole lot of trust in George Allen at that time, for sure.

You know, not at all.

And you can't blame them either.

Not at all.

Not at all.

Not at all.

You know, a funny thing about the game, there were no first downs in the game, which I don't know if there's ever been a football game played where there would be no first down.

I can't think of one where I've ever, I've ever seen that before.

In Cumberland, Cumberland's longest play was a 14 yard pass.

So, you know, when you say that, when I've spoken to civic clubs and other groups and I say that, they say, oh, you made a mistake because they must have gotten the first down and they threw a 14 yard play pass.

Well, it was 4th and 22, so they, they didn't get a first down.

They were 8 yards short of getting their first down with their 14 yard pass.

So, you know, it always brings a roar of laughter when I tell that.

But that's as close as they got.

You know, crazy.

No first downs, record scoring.

Of course.

Most kickoffs of any game, I believe.

Yeah, most kick and most extra points.

There was a, a kid from Johnson City, Tennessee, which is up in the Tri Cities area in East Tennessee, that was the kicker for Georgia Tech.

And you know, I think that's a record extra points, you know, that he kicked in that game.

I'm not sure if you tell in there, but I believe they ended up, Georgia Tech ended up having to switch kickers because the original kicker, I think he got too tired kicking all those extra points.

He had to get replaced.

That's exactly right.

They did.

You know, and I hate to keep shifting back and forth on you, but I want to put out, I wanted to point out some people a little bit about history and about, you know, I included a line or two in there about the Kennedy Nixon debate.

And you know, I know a lot of people don't remember that, but I think that's an important part of history and they need to know about that and from the standpoint of the economy, and this won't mean much probably to your people in Pennsylvania, but there's a five star hotel in Nashville called the Hermitage Hotel.

And I have George Allen going to the Hermitage Hotel.

To sort of make his plans on what he's going to do to sort of, you know, make things right at Cumberland when he finds out that Heisman is pressing this lawsuit.

And at that time, you could stay.

I might have noted this one night at the Hermitage Hotel cost $3 and 50 cents, and a gallon of Jack Daniels whiskey cost $3.

So the Hermitage Hotel is in downtown Nashville.

It's across from the.

Diagonally across the street from the Tennessee Performing Arts Center.

And my wife and I and the president of Cumberland and his wife, we had season tickets.

Excuse me, we had season tickets to the former arts center.

And to tell you how things have changed in recent years, my wife suggests, well, on Friday night, instead of us driving back to Lebanon, why don't we just spend the night at the Hermitage Hotel, have breakfast on Saturday morning and come back to Lebanon the next day?

Nashville has gotten so compact with people at night.

It's just amazing how many people are on the streets in Nashville now at night.

And, you know, it would take us 30 to 40 minutes to get to the interstate to drive back to Lebanon.

So I said, well, that's a great idea.

I tell you what I'll do.

I will check with Hermitage Hotel on Monday and I'll book us two rooms, one for the President Kumler and his wife and for me and my wife, and we'll stay at the Hermitage next month when we come to tepac.

So I call the Hermitage Hotel and for one Friday night room, a standard room now at the hotel, it was eleven hundred dollars.

And, you know, I think it's sort of important for people to know that.

That, you know, to know a little bit about the history of, you know, from where we've come and, you know, what things were like then.

You know, the cars that they drove.

And just.

I wanted to include as much as I could in the book about football history, about, you know, there's a line about where the red elephant tag came from for Alabama.

There's.

There's talk.

There's a lot.

There's quite a bit of references to, uh, George, uh, uh, University of Georgia and Alabama and how Bent Stoolie and Bear Bryant sort of got at each other's throats.

Uh, you know, so I, I tried to sort of mix as much.

You.

You said you had some Civil War references and Civil War references.

And, you know, in.

In respect to how Cumberland survived.

I mean, I. I thought that was all.

That was all brilliant and it was very, very engaging as a reader to, to listen to and read.

So yeah, very, very well done on that.

So, so how.

Okay, now you sort of make a broad statement.

I think we said this a little bit at the beginning of, you know, this may have been one of the most important games to bring the spotlight to football in the south, which, you know, in recent times is.

That's, that's the mecca of, you know, or the powerhouse of football is the sec.

You know, everybody, until this year with Michigan winning it, I think that either Clemson or Bama or LSU or, or you know, Auburn, somebody was winning it from, from the South.

So tell us a little bit, how exactly did that bring the, the spotlight, the, you know, a 222 to nothing shellacking to the South?

Well, the, you know, the.

Again, the print media was.

The stories were.

And they were coming out of the Northeast and you got to remember the Northeast controlled college football at that time.

And the story came out of the Northeast essentially was one team beats another team 222 to nothing.

So this team must have a lot of offense, they must have a really good defense because the other team never scored on them.

So.

But you can imagine if you read that in the print media, the story was Georgia tech beats Cumberland222 nothing.

And because of the score was so exaggerated, so large, that meant other newspapers across the country carried the story of the game.

You know, if it had been a 14 to nothing or a 50 to nothing game, it wouldn't have been so unusual at that time.

But 222 to nothing made that, put the spotlight on football in the south and, and made the difference.

So, you know, I always like to say in a lot of ways, Alabama, Georgia, these teams in the south owe common a lot because Clemson, because if it hadn't been for the Cumberland, Georgia State game, you know, there'd been no spotlight on football in the south because I know that's an embellishment and an exaggeration, but you know, at the time it was, it was the only thing, you know, to report really that was sizeable.

I mean, it was a major news story.

A major news story.

Yeah.

That's.

No, I guess something else that's kind of interesting.

Okay.

We think of, you know, the Heisman Trophy and we think that is, you know, that's the, the honor that goes to the best college football athlete of the year.

I mean, it's.

I mean, I don't think it's defined as that, but that's what it's become as us, the public, we associate it with that.

If you're the Heisman Trophy winner, you're the guy in college football and you have.

So Heisman's name is sort of associated with, you know, good sportsmanship and playing by the rules.

And, you know, that's sort of the.

I don't know that that's.

That's sort of the.

The aura that the name Heisman comes probably a lot from the trophy.

And you, you bring in a statement of Coach Heisman saying, you know, he's.

He's against the rules, makers of how they're choosing the national champions.

Because at that time, like you said, they're looking at the scores.

And however lopsided your scoring is against your opponents for the year, that's a major factor in you being crowned the national champion or the mythical national champion.

At the time, they really didn't, I think, announce.

So these are a lot of retroactive things.

But he, he's arguing the point, but yet he's the coach that made the.

The big, most lopsided score in football history things.

So it's kind of another irony that comes up out of that.

And I think, you know, he was showing that, you know, he could beat this team that didn't really have a team by that score and get that kind of press off of it.

And.

And it was meaningless.

He knew it was meaningless, you know, that, that he beat Coleman 222 to nothing.

He knew that.

You know, I thought he's a really interesting guy from a lot of different standpoints.

But, you know, he was a Shakespearean actor.

And when he was at Auburn, I believe it was at Auburn in the summers, he would tour and do stand up Shakespearean plays by himself to raise money for the football team so they would have money come fall.

Raising money for his football team.

Jokingly I said that.

But he, you know, he.

He was a really interesting guy from another standpoint.

And he.

His divorce I thought was really interesting.

And a lot of people don't know that's why he left Georgia Tech.

But as they was going through the divorce with his wife.

Excuse me, with his wife, you know, he was wanting to do that in a way that was not upsetting, that didn't place a cloud over their marriage, so to speak.

And he told his wife, he said, wherever you choose to live, I will either stay here or I will leave Atlanta.

And he said, you, you choose.

If you want to stay in Atlanta, I'll leave.

If you don't, I'll stay in Atlanta and coach at Georgia Tech.

And his wife made the decision that she wanted to stay in Atlanta.

And that's why he resigned from Georgia Tech was because of the divorce.

Now, you know, how many times would that happen today?

That's not going to happen today.

No, no, not, not for that, that reason.

But he might be the first major college coach to have that abrupt, unexpected, hey, I'm taking off, you know, you know, like Kelly did at Notre Dame to move to LSU recently or, you know, Coach Saban this year, you know, hey, I'm, I'm done coaching for Alabama.

You know, those fans are probably going, oh, my gosh, what, you know, here's our guy that brought national championships and honor back to the programs.

So, but yeah, it was, it was interesting the way too that you had Heisman presenting that to the board of directors of Georgia Tech.

He invites him over to his home.

You know, yeah, I, I, I, I doubt that the Nick Saban had the Alabama folks over in his living room and said, hey, I, I quit.

You know, I'm sure it didn't go down like that, but different time and just a very respectable way to do it, to be on his own home turf to, to do that.

And that was recorded, I believe in Atlanta Journal, that that story was that they had gone there for a, a breakfast and that, you know, he had made the announcement and the explanation was made as to why, you know, he was leaving.

So.

Well, I'll tell you what, that it was just a brilliantly told story from so many different ways.

You know, folks, I, I highly recommend as you're going to be entertained, there's a lot of little tidbits and nooks and crannies to the story that Sam wrote.

And telling the story and bringing the bits and pieces of history, we're only touching on some of them, so make sure you get a copy of this.

Like Sam said, you can get it on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

And Sam, why don't you go ahead and tell us the title again.

It's Heisman's first trophy and I promise you it will not bore you.

Not because I wrote it, but just because the story is really interesting story.

I think most of your readers, if they like football, they'll find this is a, you know, it's really interesting story, to be honest with you.

Thank you so much for letting me be in the Pikmin tonight.

I really enjoyed this very, very much.

Great interview.

I got to tell you, you might be the best one I've done.

I've been doing these interviews for several years.

The book is in its fourth printing and it's done really well.

So really well.

And I got to tell you, this is the best interview I've ever had on the book.

And I really appreciate you taking the.

Time to do this well, Sam, I thank you for the kind words and I, in return, thank you for coming on here and sharing in opening up your book to us and telling the story and your background and your giving us this view of Cumberland.

You know, these, these, these folks that took the worst beating in.

In football history and g. Giving a little bit of humanistic nature to them and we can feel their.

Their pain and their joy and, you know, and something we didn't even say is when Cumberland comes back from that, that loss, they're celebrated in Lebanon, in.

Nashville for their heroes.

They're heroes.

They saved the university and they're heroes.

And bands playing and thousands watching the train come in for a team that got beat 222, nothing.

I'm.

I'm sure that a team that gets beat 60 to nothing today doesn't go back to their campus and have everybody waiting for them.

I guarantee you that's the truth.

At least not.

At least not with kind words.

Maybe they're.

They're.

Yeah, the Boobirds or their.

Maybe props, but yeah.

Sam, again, thank you so much for, for joining us tonight and telling your story.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Best wishes to you.

Thank you very much.

Bye bye.

Peeking up at the clock the time's running down.

We're gonna go into victory formation.

Take a knee and let this baby run out.

Thanks for joining us.

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