The 4th Rose Bowl Game

One of the top experts in early football rules history Timothy P Brown joins us on the discussion to chat about the 1918 Rose Bowl Game between military bases Mare Island and Camp Lewis. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that are really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history in a very unique way and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link and you can subscribe for free to receive them yourself each evening.

The 1918 Rose Bowl, known as the Tournament East-West Football Game, was played on January 1, 1918, at Tournament Park in Pasadena, California. The Pasadena New Year's Day game quickly became a popular annual event in just a couple of years. Since most of the college football players were fighting overseas during World War I, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses decided to stage the game with military units, with the approval of President Woodrow Wilson. With players, travel, and large gatherings restricted, the game was played with players from the Mare Island Marines of California and the Camp Lewis Army from American Lake, Washington. Author Timothy P Brown has an excellent post on the Mare Island 1917 team on FootballArchaeoloogy.com.

Fox Stanton coached Camp Lewis while on the opposite sideline for Mare Island was the legendary Hugo Bezdek. Coach Bezdek led multiple teams to the Rose Bowl as Oregon in 1917, Mare Island in 1918 had victories, and Penn State appeared in the 1923 Rose Bowl.

Within weeks of the 1918 Rose Bowl Game, most players from both teams were scheduled to go overseas. John Beckett left tackle for Mare Island, acknowledged this fact and said, "this would be the last battle that we would fight in the name of sports."

Mare Island struck the scoreboard first in the game with an Ambrose 31-yard field goal in the second quarter. Camp Lewis responded in turn as Dick Romney, formerly a football star at Utah, played halfback for the Camp Lewis team, and scored the team's only touchdown on the next series. The Marines promptly answered with a Jap Brown 5-yard rushing score, but the kick failed for a 9-7 halftime lead.

In the locker room, Bezdek went to work with his adjustments. The Marines came out in the second half and scored on a fourth-quarter Hollis Huntington 1-yard TD plunge, and this time a successful Keith Kapp Ambrose kick, followed a bit later by Ambrose's 33-yard field goal. The Mare Island Marines triumphed 19-7.

-Transcribed 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowl Games Chat with Timothy Brown
  
Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. It is Rose Bowl month, and we are celebrating the great game that's coming up here in early January. And talking about the history of the first hundred and almost 20 years of the game.

And we're sharing it tonight with historian Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. 

Hey, Darin, thank you. Look forward to chatting. This one is near and dear to my heart. The first book I wrote was about the World War One Rose Bowl games.

So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the puzzle to this one. Well, why don't we? We should have done this in the first episode when you kicked it off and mentioned the book. And I apologize for not doing so. But why don't you give us the name of that book? And if it's still available, where people can get it called Fields of Friendly Strife.

It's kind of modeled off of the Douglas MacArthur phrase, but, you know, it's available on Amazon. So, you know, either a paperback book or if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free. OK, very good.

So, definitely, a lot of the information will be about tonight because we're going to talk a little bit about military football and its association with the Rose Bowl. So these are some exciting games we're going to be talking about. So I can't wait to hear about this history.

Yeah, you know, I guess one of the things that is just fascinating to me is just, you know, the. The we assume that football is either professional or associated with schools, but early on, there was a decent chance that the military could have been and stayed involved in football and other sports because they were for a long time. And there were a lot of games really from almost the start of football through into the 1960s.

The military bases and, you know, naval ships, etc. played a lot of, you know, played football games, you know, for both recreation and just, you know, for the, you know, physical fitness and etc. of the troops or sailors or Marines.

But so what happened, however, was it in, you know, they were planning to have a 1918 Rose Bowl game, but this thing called World War One kind of got in the way. And so in, say, you know, October or so of 1917, the Rose Bowl committee reached out to Woodrow Wilson and said, hey, you know. Is it going to be OK for us to play this game that involves likely bringing someone, some team from the East Coast? And, you know, travel was restricted.

And there are all kinds of, you know, concerns about that. And Wilson, who had been the manager of the Princeton team when he was an undergrad and had also coached when he was at, forget if it was Williams or Annenberg, but, you know, one of the two. So he's one of the four football coaches who became U.S. president.

So he was a big football supporter. And he ended up he said, yeah, have the game. It's important that we continue with these kinds of contests for the spirit of the nation.

So, then they were looking at, you know, military teams from the East Coast and military teams from the West Coast. So instead of well, they kind of were looking at colleges, too. But, you know, pretty much the colleges were fairly early on.

We're saying we can't play. You know, we're not we can't send people. We can't send our students out there with travel restrictions, et cetera.

So they started looking for military military competitors. And there was a group out in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Ambulance Corps team that had a pretty good record. And there were a couple of others out there.

And even I think Pitt was under consideration. But one way or another, different teams kind of got picked off. You know, the ones they were thinking about coming from out East got picked off.

And so there really wasn't anybody worth bringing out. So they ended up deciding to go with. They had already decided they were going to use the Mare Island Marines.

Mare Island is in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that was the training facility for marine recruits, you know, into, say, twenty-nineteen, twenty-four or so. So they had a heck of a team.

They had played a schedule that involved that included college teams from the West Coast, as well as some military teams. And in fact, they had played a team called Camp Lewis during the season and had beaten them. Camp Lewis was up and, you know, just outside of Tacoma, Washington.

And it was a big, you know, thirty-one thousand, you know, a soldier training camp for the 91st Division. Whereas Mare Island only had twenty-five, twenty-six hundred recruits. And as it turned out, you know, kind of one thing led to another.

And Mare Island was was invited. They were waiting to see who they're going to play. And, you know, Camp Lewis kind of went on a tear towards the end of the season.

One, you know, won the rest of their games. And so they were invited to to meet to meet Mare Island. So, you know, he ended up with an Army versus Marine game for 1918.

Well, Camp Lewis probably wanted to get a little bit of respect back after getting beat by Mare Island earlier in the season, wouldn't you think? Yeah, yeah. And well, you know, the funny thing, you know, both teams had a bunch of guys from the Northwest. There were nine players from the University of Oregon spread across the two teams.

There were a couple of guys from Minnesota, but I think there were two guys from Cal and, you know, Stanford, Washington, etc. So because Camp Lewis was in the Northwest and the Army, you know, if you got drafted, you went to a training camp in either your state or a neighboring state. Whereas the Marines, you know, they had people from anywhere west of the Mississippi, but they still had mostly guys, you know, at least from a football standpoint, guys from the Northwest.

So, these two teams knew one another. A bunch of them were teammates, you know, with guys on the opposing team. You know, they had.

In fact, the Marines got it because a bunch of them had played for Oregon, so they got the Oregon coach to come and coach them for the Rose Bowl. You know, a guy named Bezdek, who, you know, ended up having a great career, ended up, you know, he was at Penn State. He had been at Arkansas, et cetera.

So, anyways, it's just, you know, it's still this East-West game. Lots of national attention.

Lots of folks are interested in the game. Anybody who was at a Marine as a family member or a soldier as a family member, you know, was all getting into this game. So they finally meet on New Year's Day.

And, you know, Maryland led it half, like nine to seven. And then, so it's a pretty tight game in the first half. But then Maryland just kind of took it to them.

And, you know, they only won 19 to seven. But it was it was very clear who the better team was. You know, they had beaten them early or during the season, and then they beat them after the season as well.

So, you know, it's one of the neat things, and I'll hold off and cover this too much, but it's not so neat. However, one of the interesting things is that a lot of these guys played in the 1918 game.

You know, they were finishing their training. And then they were getting sent over either for additional training or sent overseas, you know, sent to France and the Netherlands. So, you know, maybe after the night, after we talk about the 1919 game, I'll kind of talk about what happened to some of these guys.

But there were a bunch of these, you know, I think like 14 of the 20 guys or 18 guys on the on on the Camp Lewis roster, you know, ended up in France, and they saw a fair amount of battle, et cetera. So it was, you know, a very bittersweet thing for these guys, too. A lot of them figured, OK, this is the last time I'm ever going to play football.

And, you know, they had no idea how long the war was going to last. So, you know, it was. And, you know, anyways, I'll kind of hold off on that for a minute, but because I think the implications of both of these teams are really pretty interesting.

Do you have any questions? No. So I sit there, and I start jabbering. And so, no, Mayor Island showed its dominance earlier in the season.

You played at Camp Lewis, played again in the Rose Bowl, overcame a close game at halftime, and won 19-seven. They're the Rose Bowl winners of the 1918 Rose Bowl. So, yeah.

So, OK, very interesting. So the war is still going on the following year. So I guess that sort of segues us into talking about the 1919 season.

Yeah, well, so it's the 1918 season. 1919. Right.

OK. But I mean, I get those. Well.

So then, you know, so, yes, the war is going on. And I think the 1918 season was the oddest in the history of football. For two primary reasons; one is that throughout the summer, the Army had been talking with and training folks at almost the vast majority of American colleges about this program called, you know, the Students Army Training Corps.

So it's SATC. And all along, they had been saying that this was going to be voluntary. If somebody wants to join, they can join it.

And basically, there's going to be something like ROTC. You know, you get paid. You wear a uniform.

Yada, yada. You take some military courses, but you remain a college student. Well, right before early September, all of a sudden, they announced, no, we've changed our mind.

This is going to be, you know, essentially it's mandatory. So if the school signed up to participate in this program, all able bodied men who were students had to be members of the SATC. And so and then they had tremendous restrictions on the soldiers and student soldiers.

You know, they had to take specified classes. They, you know, their day was laid out for them, just like being in the Army. Right.

Their weekends were pretty much laid out for them. They they couldn't be gone from campus, you know, more than about a 10 hour period on Saturdays. And so the the implication of all that was, how the heck are we going to play football games under those conditions? Because they didn't have much time to practice.

And so a lot of teams just didn't play at all. Or, you know, others played, but they kind of considered an SATC team than rather than a real varsity team. But most most schools went and carried on.

But all of a sudden, you had this thing going on where everybody had to reschedule themselves, you know because they had planned either they were going to be traveling or somebody else was going to be traveling, you know, to get to the game. So all you could really do was play neighboring schools, or the other people also got really attractive, which is kind of counterintuitive, but military teams weren't restricted. So they were the ones who did the traveling, which is kind of it's like, OK, we can't let the students travel, but we do let the military guys travel, which really made no sense.

But, you know, that's kind of the way it worked out. So you had that going on. Plus, and so, you know, people rejiggered their schedule, and like Mirror Island, you know, started off by playing a bunch of teams in the Bay Area.

They played St. Mary's and I think they played they played Cal twice, two weekends in a row, things like that. And out on the eastern side of of the country, there was a big training facility called Great Lakes just north of Chicago. And they ran into the same kind of thing.

But, you know, they started their season and most of the teams they played during the season were Big Ten schools. You know, they they opened with Iowa, then they played Illinois. They played Northwestern later on.

They played Notre Dame. But, you know, they, you know, as kind of so they had had to rejigger their schedule. And then, about four weeks into the season, this thing called the Spanish flu arrives.

And so it starts rolling across the country. And, you know, some places got hit real hard early on and then not too much after. And others, you know, waited another month or so.

So just depending on what was happening in each community, you know, the schedule that you just rejiggered, the health authorities might say, hey, you can't play this year, or you can't play this weekend in the state of Michigan or in the state of Missouri or whatever it may have been. So, I mean, schedules were just a mess. You know, Great Lakes travel to Pitt to play a game, and they arrive.

They practice. And then the authorities say, you know, no games. You know, there were teams, Great Lakes played, you know, one game.

There were no spectators. Well, Mare Island did that as well. So, you know, you had a lot of those kinds of bizarre things going on.

And through all of that, Great Lakes, for example, you know, as I said, they had started not they had boatloads of talent, just extremely talented team. And they they start the decision with some big ten teams. They do OK.

They tie here and there. Then we get all the Spanish flu things going on. And eventually they they they demote the coach, a guy named Bo Alcott, who had been Kansas's coach prior to the war.

And then a guy who was an ex-Navy player takes over McReavy. So then, you know, Great Lakes is like, you know, people think, yes, it's a really talented team, but can they really put it together? They go to Rutgers, and they're playing, you know, the Apollo Robeson Rutgers team. For, you know, the New York writers are thinking Rutgers is going to blow the doors off of Great Lakes, and just the opposite happens.

So they won like whatever it was, you know, 46 to 14 or something. You know, and that's a lot of points in that, you know, during that time period. Then they they go down the next week to play to play Navy and Navy basically was beating them most of the game.

They were up by they were up six, nothing with two or three minutes left. And. Navy's like inside the two.

They run the ball, their ball carrier gets hit, the ball pops up in the air, and a Great Lakes guy grabs it and starts running the other way. And as he's running, he's got open field and, you know, one or two guys kind of his own guys trailing him. And as he's running along that, you know, the Navy coach is saying, get him, get him, get him.

And so a guy pops up, pops off the bench, tackles him. And so then a quick little fight breaks out. And the Academy commandant, coming down, comes out and says, this is a touch.

You know, the rules didn't really allow for the refs to award a touchdown. But the commander said this is what's going to happen. And that is what happened.

So they awarded the Great Lakes a touchdown. They make the extra point, and they end up winning the game. So there and then literally in the locker room after that win, they get the invitation to go to the Rose Bowl.

So it's almost a precursor to what today we know as the eye in the sky where a higher power trumps an officiating crew. We sort of have it back in that World War one era. Yeah, so so, you know, so Great Lakes is fortunate because they basically have their invitation before Thanksgiving and they play another game or two.

I think they play Purdue after that. And so, you know, their season's done. They can rest and kind of relax.

Mare Island, on the other hand. You know, the Spanish flu is causing further problems on the West Coast, so they've started the season, then they take a month off, and then they were all like they couldn't leave the base. So then they start.

They take a trip north, and they plan, you know, kind of anybody they could get who could also guarantee the gate because this is a self-funding thing. So they had to make sure that, you know, there's a big enough gate to justify playing. So, you know, they play play their full schedule, end up.

They end up undefeated, and so they're thinking they're going to the Rose Bowl, you know, for the second year. But the Rose Bowl, people are like, well, you know, they weren't necessarily excited about having the same team. Plus, there are a couple of other teams that potentially could claim, you know, other military teams that potentially could claim state claim to it.

So anyways, they. They end up, they set up a tournament. So it was basically playoffs for the Western Service Championship.

And the odd thing is there were five teams. So it wasn't really a round-robin. I mean, the guys who set it up didn't know what they were doing, but.

And then they ran into some issues of like, well, when this team beat this team, this team, that team, you know, it wasn't like a real clear marker. But eventually, they play this, you know, Mary Island had to play two games, including on Christmas Day. So while Great Lakes is chilling out on the train, coming on up to Pasadena, they're still playing and they get a bunch of injuries and stuff.

And so and their quarterback and his brother end up with the flu. So they you know, the quarterback doesn't even play in the Rose Bowl. But eventually, you know, so Maryland wins the tournament and they get to play.

Great Lakes. Now, the other thing that's just kind of you talked about precursors of, you know, what's coming down the road. One of my favorite little stories about that team and the 1990 Rose Bowl is that by the time, you know, that by the time the football season was ending, the war was over.

Right. Because that it ended, you know, November, November 11th. And so, at that point, there was nothing the Marine commanders across the nation wanted more than to beat Great Lakes in the Rose Bowl.

You know, once once they knew that Maryland was playing. So Maryland was able to get a couple of players transferred into Maryland at the last minute. One guy from up in Washington, Bremerton, and then two guys from the Philadelphia Naval Yard.

So they get transferred out. And, you know, like they literally had just a couple of days to practice with the Maryland team. And but, you know, one of the guys got named John Budd ends up playing in the NFL.

So, you know, I mean, these were some pretty talented guys. So it was just kind of cool that there were these three agents in the military, you know, back in 1918. But, you know, whereas, you know, Maryland dominated the 1918 games, kind of the you know, the flip side, they were on the flip side in in 1919.

You know, they just didn't. You know, like I said, they were beat up. Certain guys had to leave the game early.

And it's a Great Lakes win, 17 to nothing. But the Great Lakes team. And so the guy who gets named the best player in the game is Patty Driscoll, who played in the NFL and was the head coach in the NFL.

But the guy who got the MVP award down the road when they named MVPs of previous games was George Halas. So. Patty Driscoll should have gotten it, but George is who ended up getting it.

So, you know, there are just a couple of other quick things about these games in general. There was, you know, one of the guys who played for Maryland in the 18th game. Well, the bulk of the team that played for Maryland ended up in battle, and a number of them were wounded.

One of the guys who had been considered the best rugby player in the nation, a guy from Cal, gets killed in action. There's a couple of other guys who are a number of other guys who were wounded, you know, in the during the conflict. But that Marine team, while a guy who was on the Maryland team early in the season, but not on the Rose Bowl, he was, you know, he was killed in action as well.

But the guys who played in the game of the 11 starters, five of them, ended up becoming Marine generals, which is just incredible. You know, incredible, incredible circumstance. I mean, that just is not, you know, it's not the norm.

And then Great Lakes, especially, they had, you know, a couple of guys from either Camp Lewis or Mare Island played in the early NFL. But, you know, I think Great Lakes had, you know, like ten guys who played in the NFL. They had a guy named Dick.

I've never had Dick Reichel, George House, and Paddy Driscoll on their team. And they're the only three guys who started in the Rose Bowl, started in the NFL, and played in the major leagues. So that guy, Reichel, played in the opening series when Yankee Stadium first opened.

And in the first game, a guy named Babe Ruth hits a home run. And then, in Sunday's game, Reichel hit a home run. So he was the second guy to hit a home run in Yankee Stadium, the old Yankee Stadium.

And then, like six different guys, five guys from Great Lakes became NFL head coaches. Another, you know, Dick Hanley from Mare Island, was a head coach of a number of places, Haskell and then Northwestern. He was the head coach of the Chicago Rockets and the AFC.

So, you know, it's just really a pretty supremely talented group of guys who, you know, played at a time when, you know, the world was at war. And especially guys in the 1918 game, a lot of those guys saw battle. And then from both, from all four teams, a number of these guys re-enlisted or rejoined during World War II and, you know, either saw action or were training officers, things along those lines.

So a lot of, you know, patriotic fellows. Yeah. Well, definitely a lot of talent and a lot of football history in both those games, especially that 1919 game, like you said, with the coaching trees and the players that went on to play in what would become the NFL, just a tremendous catalyst to sort of take football to a new era, a new level and a new decade in 1920.

It's so tremendous stuff. Tremendous. So even just a couple of, you know, a couple of other names that, you know, people may not realize we're on these things, but Roy Andrews, who even like a year or two ago was still in the top 50 of NFL wins as a coach.

Jimmy Konselman, who coached, you know, a couple of different teams, even owned a team for a while. Hal Erickson, then, you know, George Hallis, Dick Hanley, and Patty Driscoll. And then, you know, again, there are other guys who are just players, you know, successful, successful players along the lines.

Well, great stuff, as always, Tim, I really appreciate you. Maybe take this opportunity to let people know a little bit about football archaeology and how they can see your daily tidbits. Yeah.

So just football archaeology is, you know, is a website. It's on the Substack. It's on Substack, if that means anything to you.

So it basically allows me to send an email or a newsletter, which I send out every night, which, you know, kind of a quick little topic of football history varies all over the place. It's stadiums, its uniforms, it's equipment, it's guys, it's games, you know, kind of whatever, whatever I come across. I read a couple of long-form articles every month as well.

You know, more like five or 10 minute reads. So all of that's available. Just sign up, you know, subscribe, and you'll get access to them every day.

If you prefer not to do that, just go out to the site, roam around. Or you can also follow me on Twitter at football, you know, football archaeology. And, you know, everything that I post on the site, I also post on Twitter as well.

All right. Well, Tim Brown, thank you once again for joining us again. And we'll be talking again later this month on some more great Rose Bowl history.

But thanks for sharing the Rose Bowl history and the knowledge, especially right in your wheelhouse, of that military football that you wrote the great book on. Why don't you give us the name of that book again, too, so people can get that on Amazon? Yeah, thanks.

That book is Fields of Friendly Strife. You know, it basically covers some of the background on football and the Rose Bowl. But then it gets into, you know, talks about the war and the seasons that these guys go through.

So it's mostly focused on, you know, through the eyes of these players. Then, it covers what happened to all of them afterward. So, you know, whatever they did in life, I kind of as much as I could, you know, track down what happened to them all.

So it's all there in the appendix or in the content. All right, well, hey, make a great gift for the football fan in your life for Christmas here during the holidays. So something else to look at to order from Amazon.

So, Tim, thanks again for sharing. And we'll talk to you a little bit later this month. 

Hey, very good.

The banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of Football team sitting on bleachers, US Naval Training Station at University of Washington, 1917:

During World War I a temporary Naval Training Station was set up on the University of Washington campus, near where the university's health sciences center is now located. The training camp was active from 1917-1919, during which time over 5,000 mostly college students were trained for both naval and naval aviation units.

This image shows the Naval Training Station football team sitting on bleachers. Military leaders particularly emphasized football, considering it excellent combat training and arguing that it teaches discipline, teamwork, and following orders.

This photo is part of an album belonging to Anne Augusta Bathurst (1894-1984) who was a UW student and served as Chief Yeomen (F) (popularly known as "Yeomanettes"" at the Naval Training Station during the period in which the photo was taken. Women were recruited into the Naval Reserve Force in the WW I era to meet severe clerical shortages at shore stations. In 1922 Anne married Henry H. "Harry" Hoefs (1893-1979), a Lieutenant commander in the U. S. Navy during both WWI and WWII; they were stationed all over the world and retired to Bellevue.
Identifications from Herman Anderson photograph collection, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, PH Coll 1242.4: Top row: left to right: Bartlett, McDonald, Crowley, Saunders, Williams, Maris, Chaplain James. Third row: Neal, Crawford, Willard, Sharpe, Routley, Stewart, Tegart, Coach Anderson. Second row: Green, Smith, Anstett, Norris, Potter, McCullom, Moriarty, Fish. Bottom row: Oliver, Gilmur, Donnelly, Wrucke, Rubottom, Hunt, Captain Simmons, Lowry. Caption information source: "Camp Lewis 91st Division football team plays the Mare Island Marines in the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1918," by Duane Colt Denfeld, HistoryLink.org Essay 10686 Caption information source: The Seattle Daily Times, July 18, 1918, page 17 Caption information source: U.S. Navy Naval Historical Center website at http://www.history.navy.mil. Courtesy of Webster & Stevens.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites mentioned above includingTim's Football Archaeology and Wikipedia.