SUPER ROSE BOWL
The dramatics and heroics of the latest Super Bowl, which I watched at Two Brothers Tavern in Middlebury, put me in mind of another great game I had watched 47 years ago. That’s not a typo, and if the afterglow has lasted from when I was 14, you can bet that was literally and figuratively one for the ages.
We didn’t have a TV, and back then nobody in Brandon had anything comparable to the visual banquet spread by satellite and cable. To show you how desperate people were, someone living a few houses away from our Park Street Extension home on Marble Street had run some kind of wiring to the top of the ridge that runs along from the hilltop Richard Baker has leveled for a shopping plaza south of the village past High and Marble Streets and on to Stone Mill Dam. (Please bear with me, folks from other towns—this is local history that is fading from view and I want to get it on the record). The ridge, a major playground for me and my two brothers, was not as choked with brush and second-growth trees as it is now; in those more agricultural days, you could see Old Lady Farr’s teahouse on Mt. Pleasant from a spot next to our barn, which had been built into the ridge as an energy-efficient way to bring in hay. The people who set up that hilltop antenna perhaps knew what later became clear when a developer proposed putting a tower right about where we boys found the remains of the antenna effort. The tower came close enough to reality for a maintenance road to be added, between the second barn on the ridge (which belonged to Sid Rosen) and the Rosen family house.
In 1961, there was another family along Marble Street with pretty good reception: the Walshes, who lived in the stone house. I asked if I could watch the bowl games there, and they said yes, even though they were going away that day. Imagine today turning your house over to some neighborhood kid. But I was known to be a “good kid,” very responsible, and I was. On another occasion, I led my Boy Scout patrol on a camping expedition on a hill on the east side of Route 7 south of Otter Valley Union High School, in early February, with no tents other than a canvas tarp and a big sheet of clear plastic, and it snowed six inches that night. “Oh, it’ll be all right,” the parents decided—“They’re with Ed.” And we were all right, though we left a trail of lost gear in the process of returning, the magnitude of which was not apparent until the snow melted that spring.
There were only four bowl games, in those blessed days before the concept was inflated beyond proportion to accommodate advertising vehicles for fast food, rental cars, insurance, banks, cameras, and more. In the evening, you had to switch back and forth or choose between two of them. Cotton, Sugar, Orange and Rose made New Year’s Day a wonderful day for football, then life returned to normal.
As has often been the case since, it was the Rose Bowl that created the most memorable spectacle in 1961. Or rather, that was the occasion on which I saw someone who would eventually become part of the College Football Hall of Fame, someone who today is one of only four players ever to be chosen twice as the Rose Bowl’s most valuable player: Bob Schloredt, Washington University’s one-eyed quarterback.
As
a kid, he had stood too close to someone who was lighting off firecrackers in
Coke bottles, and caught a piece of the glass shrapnel in a very bad place.
After he left college, he was drafted, and told the examiners that he could
only see out of one eye. "They sent me to an eye
specialist and he said, 'You can't be in the army.' That was the first time I
realized I had a problem. I also got a distinguished handicap award from
President Kennedy. I didn't realize I was handicapped. Nobody talked about
it." (This account is from Dan Raley of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
used with his permission).
I
didn’t realize, watching the game, that Schloredt had come into the Rose Bowl
as an All-American the previous year and had destroyed Wisconsin 44-8 with
Washington’s option attack. Nevertheless, they were not the favorites in 1961
because they were up against Minnesota, ranked number one in the nation.
With Schloredt running and
gunning, rambling and scrambling and gambling, Washington took the measure of
Minnesota 17-7. It wasn’t the greatest piece of over-the-top football play I
have witnessed—I was there in 1868 when Harvard “defeated” Yale 29-29 by
rallying for 16 points in the final 42 seconds—but at 14, I felt Schloredt was
truly a hero, someone who had overcome both obstacles and foes.
But
in 1969, another quarterback became another sort of hero. Frank Champi, who had
engineered the improbable comeback, decided not to rejoin the football team.
Football, he told the many surprised members of the Harvard community, just
wasn’t fun any more. To a generation that believed meeting your own
expectations was more important than meeting those of others, this made perfect
sense.
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