Amos Alonzo Stagg

On this episode of the Inspiration Sensations we discuss Amos Alonzo Stagg, football's grand man with Author Jennifer Taylor Hall.

The picture in the banner above is from the US Library of Congress' collection and was contributed by photographer Theo Merceau circa 1906 and is titled " A.A. Stagg half Length Portrait ."

Jennifer Taylor Hall the author of Amos Alonzo Stagg: College Football's Man in Motion joins us in a special podcast to talk about Coach Stagg. In particular we celebrate this great man's life and the events that he partook on behalf of football in the month of March! The date that this episode releases, March 17 is significant beacuse Amos Alonzo Stagg passed away on 3/17/1965 at the age of 102 years old! Think about it, he played for Yale when Walter Camp was coaching and he himself was a part of football all the way into the middle of the twentieth century! Please enjoy the podcast, and get yourseldf a copy of Jennifer's incredible story of this pivotal man in gridiron history!

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Transcript

Darin Hayes 
In this bonus episode of the Pigskin Dispatch podcast, we commemorate the famous man Amos Alonzo Stagg, who died on March 17th, 1965, at 102 years old. And we have the author of his book, Jennifer Taylor Hall, joining us to tell us all about him in just a moment. Hello, my football friends. We're releasing a special episode of the pigskin dispatch on March 17th. This date is known for celebrating by wearing green and coloring. Just about anything could consume green too, but in football, we care to look at this day with a shade of maroon in mind, Chicago maroons, that is for the great man of the gridiron coach Amos Alonzo Stagg who died on March 17th, 1965 at the age of 102, this is not a morbid day. This is a day to celebrate a great man of football. And what better way to celebrate his life and early football innovations than to speak to someone who literally wrote the book on Stgag? Jennifer Taylor Hall wrote Amos Alonzo Stagg: College Football's Man in Motion. And we're glad to have her join us in this discussion on coach Stagg, Jennifer Taylor Hall. Welcome to the pig pen. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Thanks for having me, Darin. It's great to be here. 

Darin Hayes 
Well, we are glad to have you. I know you've been on many podcasts here on the Sports History Network. Um, and just for our listeners, because sometimes we have a slightly different listenership, could you tell us a little bit about your background and what got you interested in Coach Stagg? 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Sure, sure. So I've always loved the game, particularly the college game. One of my uncles played football for Ole Miss and went on to play for the Miami Dolphins. I grew up hearing stories of his glory on the gridiron and learned the game from him. Sharing that experience of watching games and listening to him, hearing the stories, just piqued my interest. And so I began to read biographies of great players and coaches and came across the name Stag, but I never found a biography that told me his story. His name came up so often that I knew he was significant to the game, and I wanted to learn more about him, but not finding a biography that answered all my questions, I decided one needed to be written, and I was the person to do it. So I was very fortunate to have his family's blessing, and I've gotten to know one of his granddaughters pretty well. A great-grandson and a great-grandson got to spend some time with them last year pre-COVID, and they're a wonderful family. Fortunately, they have saved many of his memorabilia letters from Mr. and Mrs. Stagg, photographs, newspaper clippings, and, you know, just excellent history they've preserved. The University of Chicago also did a great job of preserving Mr. Stagg's history. They have an entire archive in the library there and credit Mrs. Stag. She was a hoarder before hoarding was a thing, but in a good way, right? Just saved so many pieces of their history, and it dates back to 1890s, you know, he arrived at Chicago when the doors opened in 1892, and she did; she arrived as a student, and they were married a couple of years later, and she saved everything that chronicled their journey, their 40-year journey there at Chicago. 

Darin Hayes 
Well, you can tell that there's your connection to Coach Stagg in your writing because the book is excellent, by the way. And you can tell the warm feeling you have for Coach Stagg. And I guess the family participation and the University of Chicago helping out, it doesn't hurt, giving you all those great factual, significant pieces of information to put in the book. I know you've been on the other shows, and we sort of want to gear this to what Mr. Stagg did in February and March because we're in that time frame right now with this March 17th. Back on March 11th, I had a post, and I took some of it right from your book. And it was about Coach Stagg and James Naismith's relationship. And could you touch on that a little bit for our listeners? 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
They were students, and Mr. Stagg was a student coach at the YMCA International School, which is now known as Springfield College in Massachusetts. But they were there in the 1880s and late 1880s, and the president of the school, or superintendent, as he was called, needed an activity to keep the football players occupied in the wintertime to keep them well-conditioned and also keep them out of trouble. You can imagine the cold in Massachusetts. And so he told James Naismith to come up with a game, an activity to keep the boys busy and in good condition. And so that's how the game of basketball was born. Naismith had two weeks to come up with something, and he recalled some games from his childhood in Canada, pieced some things together, and came up with the early version of basketball, which was a little rougher than we know today. It may have had a little bit of rugby influence. The first few contests ended up with some blood, and I don't know that bones were broken, but there were a lot of bruises, let's say. But Alonzo Stagg was involved in those early games. 

Darin Hayes 
I know on my March 11th post, I found on a website, they had a newspaper clipping from the must be the day after and the writer who really didn't know what the game was called it a basket/football game. And I found that to be interesting. And in comparing that with the little note you had in your book about it of, you know, coach stag fouling every single player on a student team, I thought that was very befitting. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
That's right. Yeah. And maybe that's why the columnists referred to it as a bit of a football game. It was pretty rough and tumbled, and Mr. Stagg was right here in the middle of it. But of course, you know, the basket part of the name comes from the peach baskets that they initially used as the goals until one of the students who was in charge of fishing the ball out after every goal said, you know, this would be a lot easier if we cut the bottom out of it. And so, eventually, the basket morphed into a net. But but when it all started, they were using peach baskets for goals. 

Darin Hayes 
Well, I enjoyed you, you led up to the peach basket part by, you know, you went through the whole thing with, with, uh, coach nay Smith, uh, you know, being charged with trying to come up to this game for the, the students. And he, you have a great illustration of a small conversation you have with the janitor, uh, you know, and you illustrate it so well, you know, talking about the outgoing off the hardwood floors, everything that really put me into the picture of that, that day. And he asked for some boxes, so actually, the game of basketball could have been called a box ball. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
That's right, right. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, that was a great story—one of many in your book. Now, we have some other great events that Coach Stagg was associated with in the months of February and March. And I know one in particular has to do with the Big Ten conference for athletics that happened in February. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
So the formation of the Big Ten Conference, but back when Mr. Stagg was involved and the representatives from the other schools, and at the time it was Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Purdue, and Northwestern. And they got together in February of 1896 and formed what was then known as the Western Conference. And here we are 125 years later. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah, that's absolutely what significance Coach Stagg had in those talks. I know you alluded to a little bit in your book. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Right, right. So, back at this point in time, the University of Chicago was about four years old, and Mr. Stagg was the athletic director and coach of really all the men's sports. But he quickly learned that football was the revenue generator. No surprise, right? But he also, he and the other administrators, because he had a faculty-level position there, realized that the Chicago name also carried enough heft with it that when other schools, even schools like Michigan and Minnesota, would come to Chicago to play, those schools benefited from playing Chicago, because at that time, Chicago was a football powerhouse and really was for really the first three decades of Mr. Stagg's tenure there. And so it just kind of naturally followed that some rivalries developed, and particularly between Chicago and Michigan, for many years, they played a Thanksgiving Day game. And then also, just because of proximity, schools like Northwestern and Purdue would play Chicago every year or every other year. And so this kind of forerunner of a conference developed, and it became a natural fit for these regional schools to form an alliance, and that's what became the Western Conference, which, of course, would grow and add more schools over time. But Chicago was really the heartbeat of it when it began in 1896. 

Darin Hayes 
And you mentioned 1896, and in your notes that we discussed before the show, you say, and you're right, it's the 125th anniversary of actually the Big Ten, you know, that's, that's quite significant. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Right, right, it is. And I'm hoping that by this fall, everybody will be back in stadiums and we'll be watching Big 10 football again, as well as all the other conferences, but certainly that that's a significant anniversary to celebrate. 

Darin Hayes 
most definitely. Okay, now, if we fast forward a little bit, we stay going to the month of March, but we go, you know, some 14 years ahead of that, of that significance. Well, I guess even before that, we had some tragedies happening in football, as we know, and it's well-discussed how brutal it was. There were players that were dying or being severely injured. And you know, Teddy Roosevelt got involved, had, you know, had got Walter camp and others that were in the football world, get together and said, Hey, a solution needs to be made. And it came out, you know, among other things, the biggest swing was the forward pass. And coach Stag was quite a proponent of the forward pass. If you could 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
1906 was the year it was legalized, and it really transformed the game. That was a mandate that President Roosevelt brought to bear because of, as you mentioned, the dangers of the game. So many young men were either being critically injured or even dying that he said if you don't do something about this he called leaders from East Coast teams but also Mr. Stagg together and said you have to you have to change the way this game is played or we're going to have to get rid of it because it's just not sustainable and so one of those changes that was introduced was the forward pass and it's hard for us I think to imagine the game without it but at the time you know we just recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of college football so from 1869 through the early 1900s it was it was just a brutal running game very much likened to war and it just kind of stood to reason that men would be injured and so the introduction of the forward pass really opened up the playing field and it obviously spread it provided for spread formations and a much more open game that relied on speed and skill and for Mr. Stagg it it provided an advantage because even in the early days when Chicago was a powerhouse he had undersized players for the most part and so when he could rely on their speed and their skill rather than perhaps their brawn the the forward pass kind of fit nicely into his playbook. 

Darin Hayes 
Now you talk about the relationship that he had with his former players in your book, I mean, all through it. One thing in particular is segueing the forward pass discussion into a coach, Bezdik, who played for Mr. Stagg down in Arkansas. Please go into some attributes those two did together for the forward pass. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Sure, absolutely. So in March of 1910, Coach Bestik invited Mr. Stagg to come down to Fayetteville to teach his team the forward pass, and Bestik had just taken the reins at Arkansas a few years earlier. And he was struggling against other teams that had already adopted the forward pass. Imagine losing to St. Louis University. That's what happened because back then, the Billikens were a solid football team, but they used the forward pass. Bestik recognized that it was an innovation he needed to adopt. But it wasn't as easy as simply doing it; he needed to be taught, and his players needed to be taught. And so, who did he call? He called his mentor the man who had helped pioneer it. And so Mr. Stagg traveled down to Fayetteville and brought Walter Eckersall, one of his former stars and obviously a friend of Bestik's, to Fayetteville. And the two of them set up a clinic. I mean, for two weeks, they were down here. I say here, I live in Fayetteville. They came to Northwest Arkansas and had a laboratory where they experimented. And actually, Mr. Stagg kind of tweaked his playbook a bit as he saw another team running the plays that he had developed. So, it was beneficial to everyone. 

Darin Hayes 
Yeah. And a lot of those concepts are the basis of the forward pass formations and, you know, some of the route trees and everything that we know today, so, so, that's very, very fascinating. Now, why don't we get into some of Mr Stagg's other contributions to football, please? 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Sure, absolutely. And you mentioned expanding his playbook. One of the things he did was develop the man-in-motion formation, and that actually came before the forward pass. But once the pass was introduced, he was able to really expand the playbook with the forward pass and different formations. And so the shift and other things, again, that are so common to the game today and so familiar to us were innovative at the time. And he spent 40 years at Chicago fine-tuning that playbook. He was forced into retirement when he turned 70, but he was by no means ready to retire. So he took that playbook to California and coached for another dozen years at College of the Pacific. So again, he was able to continue his innovative style, and as you can imagine, the College of the Pacific in the 1930s and 40s wasn't recruiting powerhouse athletes. So he had a lot of undersized players, and he had to get creative, but that's exactly what he did. And he was named coach of the year there when he was 83 years old. So he was very successful really everywhere he went. 

Darin Hayes 
Absolutely. And he was; he actually played at Yale for Walter Camp, who many know as the father of football. So, there's a great connection to the beginning of the game. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
That's right, that's right. And it's interesting because football was not his first love. He was a baseball star, but he joined the football team in his upperclassmen years at Yale. At that time, graduate students could continue their eligibility. So he ended up playing when he was a graduate student at Yale and, of course, was a star. But yeah, his first love was actually baseball. 

Darin Hayes 
Very, very interesting. And I guess we enjoyed this book so much. I mean, I love the book. I reference it all the time in my posts and podcasts. And do you have anything else coming up that you're working on in the game of football or any other genre? Your writing style is unique and very entertaining. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Well, thank you. Thank you. Actually, I am working on another book. I'm working on the biography of Fritz Chrysler. I came to know him while doing my research for the stag book, and I actually got to know one of his granddaughters. She asked me if I'd be interested in telling her grandfather's story and if the Big 10 faithfully listened to the podcast. You, of course, know Chrysler's name because of his connection to Michigan, and so that's my current project. Unfortunately, COVID has kind of put the brakes on my research. The library in Michigan is closed right now to nonresident researchers, but as soon as it opens, I plan to get up there and Really pour over the Chrysler papers and Have that available. 

Darin Hayes 
No, he was he was part of those point a minute teams, I believe is what they called. Then you have that one. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
I was actually fielding Yost. Oh, that was Yost. Okay, I'm sorry. Yost was before Chrysler, but Chrysler really brought Michigan to the level of prominence that it is where it is today. He was the athletic director for many years and, of course, football coach, and the basketball arena is named in his honor. But he really elevated athletics at Michigan, but he did follow Yost, who was a pioneer in his own right, and he was a contemporary of Stagg, but so much of what Chrysler learned was from playing for Stagg and then coaching with him at Chicago. Chrysler coached with Stagg for about ten years at Chicago before he moved on. 

Darin Hayes 
And that was quite the rivalry back at the turn of the century, turn of the 19th and the 20th century, that Michigan and Chicago in football. And I know you're going back to your Alonzo Stag book. That's another interesting point. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
It absolutely was. In 1905, Michigan traveled to Chicago for their annual Thanksgiving Day game. They were on a 50-plus game win streak, and that came to a halt on Thanksgiving Day 1905 with a two-to-nothing Chicago victory. So quite a story that that game, I tell the story in the book, but it was was quite a rivalry. They would play every other year in Ann Arbor, and so they had a following on both campuses, but at that time, Michigan and Chicago really were the leaders of that fledgling Western conference. 

Darin Hayes 
Well, those are definitely two fascinating stories that will overlap. And I can see the connection. How did you learn about Coach Chrysler by doing your research on Amos Alonzo's tag? Right. You know, we really appreciate you coming today. Is there any social media following that you'd like to share with us so our listeners can follow your work? 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Certainly, I'm on Facebook, Jennifer Taylor Hall writes, and I'm also on Twitter. My handle there is three Hall bros in honor of my three sons. But but absolutely, I would I would love a follow on social media and I will keep your listeners posted with the progress of the Chrysler book. 

Darin Hayes 
Oh, absolutely. We were definitely interested in that. We can't wait for that to come out, and hopefully, you can get into that research library up there at Michigan soon so that we can all attend football games and enjoy the great game once again in person. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Absolutely. 

Darin Hayes 
But Jennifer, I thank you very much for your time today and spending with us and sharing and we'll have you back on again real soon because there's a lot of events in the calendar for Coach Stagg is associated with. 

Jennifer Taylor Hall 
Absolutely. I would love to come back. Thank you, Darin.