I’ve happily accepted an invitation from the good folks at Centre College to moderate a panel discussing the 100th anniversary of what still is one of college football’s signature games – Centre 6, Harvard 0.
The administrative people in charge are now deciding whether to hold it during the college’s homecoming in mid-October or have a special event on Oct. 30, the date the game was played in 1921.
The truth be told, the game was one of the first examples of the cheating that plagued the sport from that day to this.
The gist of the story is that Harvard had put together a string of five consecutive unbeaten, national-championship seasons. In order to beat the Crimson, the “Prayin’ Colonels of Coach Charlie Moran, imported a couple of Texans, Bo McMillin and Red Roberts, who had no interest in attending classes.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award three times. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades and is perhaps one of the most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby. His book “Last of a BReed” is available on Amazon. The game itself is interesting enough, but I’ve told my Centre contact that I think the alumni and friends would enjoy it more if put into the context of all the changes happening in American Society.
It helped kick off “The Jazz Age,” in which the nation underwent various significant cultural changes. In fact, it may be argued that no decade brought so much change until Donald Trump came along to blow up our system of government as we have always known it.
Consider some of the other events that happened in 1921:
• The first religious radio broadcast is heard over station KDKA in Pittsburgh.
• The full-length silent comedy drama film, directed by Charlie Chaplin, was released.
• Bessie Coleman, 29, gets her pilot’s license in France, becoming the first African-American to get an international pilot’s license.
• The first radio baseball game is broadcast.
• Margaret Gorman, 16, becomes the first Miss America in Atlantic City, N.J.
• A White Castle restaurant is opened in Wichita, KS, the beginning of the world’s first fast-food chain.
• The Chicago Theater, the oldest surviving grand movie palace, opens.
So the times, they were indeed changing.
I think the audience at Centre would love to hear about the Centre-Harvard football game as a harbinger of the future and one of the catalysts for the changes that were sweeping America.
But if they want my panel to focus on the game and not the times, that will be easy enough. With no TV, the new medium of radio spread the news quickly. Then the story appeared in the major newspapers in the East.
Today it would be like, oh, Morehead beating Alabama. Except in these cynical times, nobody would accept the outcome without assuming Morehead had cheated in some way, shape or form.
However it shapes up, I’m looking forward to it. But I will not ignore Centre’s cheating. As I see it, that’s the game’s most enduring legacy.
BILLY
THE SCOURGE OF THE SOUTH IN THAT ERA WAS SEWANEE .JIM ELAM ,WHOHAD COACHED AT MALE AND TRANSYVANIA PLAYED FOR SEWANEE IN THE 20’S.WHEN I WENT TO MALE,JIM WAS A MATH TEACHER AT MALE AND TOLD Me SOME WILD TALES ABOUT SEWANEE..
GLAD YOU ARE WORKING FOR CENTRE.GREAT SCHOOL WITH LOTS OF TRADITION.
GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS,GUY STRONG