Sometimes people and institutions stand on principle. Other times they don’t. In 1934, with the country in the depths of the Great Depression, Gerald Ford was a senior football player at Michigan. While they were undefeated in 1932 and 1933, the Wolverines failed to score in losses to Michigan State and Chicago to open the 1934 season, with Georgia Tech coming next. — www.footballarchaeology.com
Despite what people may have thought of him as a politician and President of the United States, Gerald Ford had great integrity and discipline. Perhaps this quality never shined as brightly as it did when he was the Michigan Wolverine's football team captain.
Timothy P. Brown joins us to tell the tale of the student having more integrity and conviction than the institution he played for.
Tim's original post can be found at
Michigan Football, Gerald Ford, and Idealism.
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Transcription of Gerald Ford's Inegritty with Timothy Brown
Hey, it's Tuesday, and we have Tim Brown. Now, Tim, welcome to The Pigpen.
Hey, Darin.
Thank you much. Always, I look forward to my Tuesday evenings and sharing football time with you. Yeah, it's a great time and we have, you know, a great story this evening to share with everybody.
This is one that's, you know, it's almost 100 years old, but it's really pertinent to today's social environment that's going on around the world. And it's also about a former president. And I will let you set that up for you to take hold then.
Yeah. So, you know, this is one where I, you know, I guess the story is I kind of rag on the University of Michigan. And it's not so much them specifically, although this incident did involve them, certainly.
There were lots of people at fault here, you know. So this is, it's just, they're an example. And, you know, for a university, I think typically is, you know, reasonably stand up, you know, group of folks.
But so the whole thing here is it's about, you know, standing up for one principle, but not another. This occurred in 1934 when Jerry Ford was a senior and the captain of Michigan's football team, you know, played center. And so, and they were national champs in 33 and 34.
So, you know, this is, they were big time stuff. They enter the season though, and they lose to Michigan State, which is not a good thing. And then they, and they didn't even score.
They play the next week, and they play Chicago. They lose, and they don't score. So, in the third week of the season, they're playing Georgia Tech. And again, you know, at that point, there weren't a lot of intersectional games, but you know, this is one.
And so, but at the time, Georgia Tech had a rule in place that they did not play games against teams that had black players. Michigan had one black player, and his name was Willis Ward, who, it turned out, was Gerald Ford's good friend. So Ford and Ward were buddies and, you know, and they were both starters for the football team.
And so there was going to be, there was controversy, and this happened all the time when Northern teams were going to play Southern teams and Southern, that borderline, you know, moved about a bit, you know, so Missouri was, you know, didn't, didn't play, you know, teams with black players and there were others, you know, Kansas. As the week progressed, it became apparent that Michigan was not going to play Willis Ward. And so, you know, Gerald Ford is looking at it saying, look, I'm the captain of this team, and this is my teammate, and he's a friend.
If we're not going to play Willis Ward, then I'm not going to play either. So he goes into the, into the coach's office, Harry Kipke at the time, and he told him he was quitting the team and it was because of that specific issue. So, you know, he leaves and everything, and then kind of word gets around what's happening and this Willis Ward basically asked Ford to go ahead and play.
You know, he didn't want, you know, I mean, it, you know, it was a very noble gesture on his part, but he wanted, he didn't want the rest of his teammates to be hurt and Jerry Ford to be hurt because of this policy and the decision that the university administration made. So anyways, it turns out then that they, you know, Ford plays, and he was apparently rather fired up for the game, and they beat Georgia Tech 9-2. And it turned out to be Michigan's only win of the year.
You know, they lost the first two, they beat Georgia Tech, and then they lost the rest of the game of their season. So that's, you know, there's kind of that, but so the standing, you know, they didn't stand up for one principle. And then there was a little bit later in the year when Michigan's athletic department learned that there was somebody out there who was basically making bootleg programs.
So they would, you know, use last week's program or whatever names and numbers of all the players. And, you know, they'd sell programs outside the stadium, and Michigan didn't want to lose that money. So they notified these people that they were copywriting the rosters and player numbers so that they could potentially, you know, go after them, you know, from a copyright infringement standpoint, which apparently, you know, led to them stopping selling programs.
So, you know, on the one hand, hey, Michigan has certainly had the right to do that. But, you know, they're chasing this money-oriented issue and out of, well, somewhat out of principle, but they didn't follow up on a more important principle earlier in the year. So it's just, you know, it's an example of just people being kind of two-faced, saying one thing, doing another, you know, that kind of thing.
And so, and the other side of it is, I mean, the broader theme is, you know, a lot of times we, people kind of, you know, if you're out of college and you've been working for a while and you've seen the world and you're one, you know, you have that kind of an attitude, it's easy to take this perspective that these idealistic college students are just, you know, kind of don't know what they're talking about. They haven't really been out there. And yet here's one where this college kid named Gerald Ford was far wiser than these administrators, whether it was Fielding Yost, the AD, or whomever it was at the time.
He demonstrated a hell of a lot more wisdom than his supposed elders, who were supposed to teach him something at the university. So that's just a bit, you know. But another thing that I take from that is, you know, you have, here you have the only man that served as president that was not elected some 40 years later, you know, or 40 years earlier, had the integrity as a teenager, probably, or early 20s to stand up for the rights of somebody else and, you know, make a, you know, sacrifice himself to do so.
And that gives me a whole new respect for Gerald Ford. Not that I disrespected him before, but that's quite a testament to his fortitude over his lifetime. So.
Yeah. And I think, you know, generally, you agree, disagree with him on political issues and things like that. I think most people felt, you know, he was an honorable man, right?
And he kind of played fair and square and all those kinds of things. And so, you know, this is just an early illustration, like you said, of him, of him doing that, you know, basically is what, what was he, 21 or 22 or something like that at the time. Yeah.
If we only had honest politicians like that these days, it's a better place. Don't go hoping for things you're never going to get. That's true.
That's true. Tim, you know, that's one of your great tidbits from back in February. And if you would, if you could share with the audience where they, too, could learn your tidbits on a daily basis?
Yeah. So, you know, you can find me on my website, footballarchaeology.com. I use the same name on Twitter. It's not the com part, just football archaeology.
So, you know, if you want to follow me on either, either mechanism, do so. And you can subscribe on football archaeology and that, you know, gets an email into your inbox every night. And then, you know, I've got a couple of books out there.
If you like the kind of stuff I write about, then you can find those on Amazon and most of the other, you know, major platforms. Okay. And on Amazon, they want to search under your full name, Timothy P. Brown.
Yeah. Timothy P. Brown or, or look for, you know, one of my book titles, like How Football Became Football. And you'll, if you search for that, you'll, it'll pop up this first thing that shows up.
And I can highly recommend, you know, the books too, because they are some great pieces of work and you learn a lot from them as a football, a person interested in football history. So I recommend those. So Tim Brown, thank you very much from footballarchaeology.com. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.
Very good, sir. Look forward to it. Thanks.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.
