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SERIES LINKS
— General history
— The games
— Comparisons then and now
— Wildcats nickname
— Military service
— Rankings
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Excerpt from L.A. Times, Nov. 8, 1914, authored by Bill Henry:
“Arizona’s cactus-fed athletes, despite heroic efforts on the part of their two halfbacks, (Asa) Porter and (Franklin) Luis, went down to defeat before the Occidental Tigers yesterday afternoon, the tally with all precincts heard from being 14 to 0 in favor of the Tigers.
Confident of rolling up a big score, the Tigers took the field with grins on their faces, but before the game was 10 seconds old they knew they had a battle on their hands.
The Arizona men showed the fight of wild cats and displayed before the public gaze a couple of little shrimps in the backfield who defied all attempts of the Tigers to stop them.”This site will conduct a countdown in a 100-day period, leading up to Arizona’s 2014 football season-opener with UNLV on Aug. 29 at Arizona Stadium. The 100 Days ‘Til Kickoff countdown will include information daily about the historic 1914 Arizona team that helped create the school’s nickname of “Wildcats” because of how they played that fateful day against Occidental.
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If you think the controversy over football-related concussions is bad today, try the numerous deaths related to the game 100 years ago.
On the day the New York Times reported about the United States’ largest sporting venue opening — the 70,000-seat Yale Bowl for the Yale-Harvard game on Nov, 21, 1914 — the newspaper ran an accompanying piece about deaths related to the game.
A couple of inches under the picture of the Yale Bowl and its American record capacity crowd was the headline: “Football’s Death Toll — Twelve Players Fatally Injured and All Were Young”. The story recapped the fatalities on the football field to that point in the 1914 season.
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The final tally of football-related deaths was 15 in the United States in 1914. Between 1914-1917, football claimed the lives of 61 players, a majority of them at the high school level where medical supervision and protective equipment (if you can call it that) were severely lacking.
In 1905, when 20 players died on the football field (including three in one day), President Teddy Roosevelt summoned a group of football insiders from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to address the growing concerns of brutality in football.
The 1914 Arizona football team that earned the honor of being named the first “Wildcats” was composed of (front row, left to right): Verne La Tourette, George Seeley, Leo Cloud, Richard Meyer, Asa Porter. Second row: Franklin Luis, Lawrence Jackson, Ray Miller, J.F. “Pop” McKale (coach), Turner Smith, Harry Hobson (manager), Orville McPherson, Albert Crawford, Ernest Renaud. Back row: Albert Condron, Emzy Lynch, Charley Beach, Vinton Hammels, Bill Hendry, George Clawson, Harry Turvey.
(AllSportsTucson.com graphic/Photo from University of Arizona Library Special Collections)
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Many of the fatalities were from brain hemorrhaging because some players did not wear helmets in that era, including 1914. The leather helmets that were used absorbed the hits instead of minimizing the force of the impact.
The Times article in 1914 mentioned that most of the deaths resulted from tackles, brain hemorrhaging and fractured skulls. One was from blood poisoning from a scratch.
Fortunately for J.F. “Pop” McKale’s legendary team in 1914, none of his players were severely injured. In the last game against Pomona that season, three Arizona regulars — tackle Bill Hendry, end Charley Beach and guard Lawrence Jackson — did not play because of injuries.
“This will weaken Arizona,” the preview in the Los Angeles Times reads. “But all other members of the team are in excellent condition and have been training hard for the game.”
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Arizona won the game 7-6 on Thanksgiving Day, claiming the Southwest Championship (by not losing games in Tucson and at New Mexico State).
Before the following season, a fatality occurred with one of Arizona’s players, but not on the football field. Leo Cloud, a reserve halfback who was also a tennis champion, was electrocuted from an accident while painting a water tower on campus.
ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He also writes articles for Bleacher Report and Lindy’s College Sports.
