John Heisman

John W. Heisman
John W. Heisman John W. Heisman
Title	Head Coach
Sport	Football
Born	October 23 1869(1869-10-23)
Place of birth	Cleveland, Ohio
Died	October 3 1936 (aged 66)
Career highlights
Overall	185-70-17 (71.1%)
Coaching stats
College Football DataWarehouse
Playing career
1887-1889 1890-1891	Brown Pennsylvania
Position	Center / Tackle
Coaching career (HC unless noted)
1892,1894 1893 1895-99 1900-03 1904-19 1920-22 1923 1924-27	Oberlin Akron Auburn Clemson Georgia Tech Pennsylvania Washington & Jefferson Rice
College Football Hall of Fame, 1954

John William Heisman (October 23, 1869 – October 3, 1936) was a prominent American football player and college football coach in the early era of the sport and is the namesake of the Heisman Trophy awarded annually to the nation's best college football player.

His career as a coach lasted 36 years and included stints at Oberlin College, Auburn University, Clemson University, University of Pennsylvania, Washington & Jefferson College and Rice University. His career at Georgia Tech lasted 16 seasons, where his teams won four national championships and won 33 straight games. He concluded his coaching career in 1927 with a 190-70-16 record.

He was a pioneering coach who helped create a surge in popularity for intercollegiate football with his many innovative contributions to its development. His greatest innovation is considered to be the forward pass, which he fought to get legalized for three years.

Heismann was the man who made the motion to form a permanent organization of coaches which became the the American Football Coaches Association in 1921. He became its president in 1923 when he was head coach at Pennsylvania and again in 1924 following his move to Rice. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.

Early life

John William Heisman was born Johann Wilhelm Heisman, on October 23, 1869, in Cleveland, Ohio, two weeks to the day before the first official intercollegiate football game was played on November 6, between Rutgers and Princeton University in New Jersey. His parents were Johann "Michael" Heisman and Sarah Lehr Heisman, both German immigrants to America not long before Heisman's birth.

At the age of seven Heisman's family moved to Titusville, Pennsylvania. His father was a cooper and his business supplied barrels to such notables as John D. Rockefeller for his Standard Oil company. In 1890, the senior Heisman sold out his business and returned to Cleveland.

He matriculated at Brown University as a 17-year-old freshman in 1887, the same year that the school discontinued its intercollegiate football program. Nonetheless Heisman, weighing just 144 pounds, played baseball and football with a club team. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania with the intention of getting a law degree and continued to play football.

Because of an eye problem that developed while he was in school Heisman took his final exams orally and graduated with his law degree in the spring of 1892. His eye problem would lead him to decide to return to Ohio to accept the job as Oberlin College's first football coach rather than pursue a career in law.

Coaching career

Oberlin

At Oberlin his first team went undefeated and allowed only 30 points to its own 262 points. Oberlin defeated Ohio State twice under Heisman's leadership, both times keeping them scoreless. He remained at Oberlin College for only a single season before moving to Buchtel College (The University of Akron) for one year.

At Buchtel Heisman coached the baseball team to a state championship.[2] and the football team managed to beat Ohio State 12 - 6 while finishing with a 5-2-0 record. Also at Buchtel, Heisman had his hand in the first of many permanent alterations he would make to the sport: the center snap. This came out of necessity because the previous rule, which involved the center rolling the ball backwards, was too troublesome for Buchtel’s unusually tall quarterback, Harry Clark. At six foot four, it became clear that if the ball was thrown to him, the play could go on with less complication. This evolved into a common practice now known as the snap that begins every play in present National Football League (NFL) games. In spite of his successful coaching, Heisman’s overly competitive nature was never welcomed at Buchtel and he returned to Oberlin for one season.

He returned to Oberlin for a 4-3-1 season in 1894.

Auburn

In 1895, he was offered a job as a coach and English professor at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) where he stayed for five years. The lack of talent at Alabama Polytechnic led to his famous hidden ball play. During a game against Vanderbilt a player hid the football in his jersey, a move that is no longer legal.

Though Heisman followed three previous football coaches at Auburn, he became the school's first full-time head coach. His record during that time was one of 12 wins, 4 losses, and 2 ties.

Heisman was coaching at Auburn when he observed what would come to be known as a "forward pass" for the first time. Technically, the play was illegal. During a game between Georgia and North Carolina in 1895, as Griessman described it, "Toward the end of the game, North Carolina, with its back to the goal, was forced to punt. The fullback retreated until the crossbar of his goal was just above his head. Georgia rushed him mercilessly, and in desperation, he lobbed the ball forward to one of his teammates, who caught it and ran for a touchdown." Though Georgia's coach, Pop Warner, disagreed with the decision, the referee held fast to the opinion that the fullback could have fumbled the ball, allowing the touchdown to count. Heisman realized almost immediately that such a pass could open up the field during a game, and wrote to Walter Camp who was then the chair of the rules committee, petitioning him to make it legal. After years of campaigning, and due to the rise of public opinion against football due to the compounding of serious injuries and death, Camp and his committee finally relented. In 1906 the forward pass was confirmed as a legal play in the game of football. In his later years writing for Collier's, a popular American magazine, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, Heisman recalled that with the change that one play brought, "American football had come over the line which divides the modern game from the old. Whether it was my contribution to football or Camp's is, perhaps, immaterial. Football had been saved from itself."

Auburn's team lost only once during the 1896 season, and that was to Georgia, the team that Heisman would eventually lead after he left Auburn. When the rematch on Thanksgiving Day 1897 had to be canceled due to the death of one of Georgia's key players, Auburn had to cancel the rest of the season due to the grave financial losses suffered from that one change. The next year's team was small but worthy with an average weight of 148 pounds. Still, the team racked up a season of two wins against Georgia Tech and Georgia and a loss to North Carolina. Heisman maintained throughout his life that his stay at Auburn was highlighted by never having a team there he "did not love," quoted Griessman, nor with whom he had any quarrels. He remained friends with all of his players.

As the originator of deceptive plays, John Heisman was tired of being accused of bending the rules and set his sights higher. Never lacking self-assurance, he published a promotional pamphlet about himself that caught the eye of Clemson University.[3]

Clemson

From Auburn, Heisman went to Texas briefly to raise tomatoes, investing nearly all of his money. When Walter Riggs, the Clemson University professor, and later its president, founded the school's first football team in 1895, he also served as head coach for the team in 1896 and in 1899. Riggs had played under Heisman at Auburn and urged him out of the tomato fields back into football at Clemson.

When he coached at Clemson for the 1901 through 1904 seasons, Heisman enjoyed a 19-3-2 record. His 1900 team had a 6 - 0 season, the first undefeated season in its history. Griessman noted "he would throw five men into a sweep ahead of the man with the ball, a play subsequently copied widely, but Heisman seem to have originated." One of his best-known tactics was that of using a player in one position for more than simply that one position.

On Nov. 29, 1900, Clemson defeated Alabama 35-0, which allowed Heisman's team to finish the season undefeated. It was the only team to win all of its games in a season until the 1948 squad went 11-0. The Tigers only allowed two touchdowns the entire 1900 season and won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association championship.

Clemson opened the 1901 season with a 122-0 win over Guilford. The Tigers averaged 30 yards per play and a touchdown every minute and 26 seconds. The first half lasted 20 minutes, while the second half lasted only 10 minutes. Legend has it that every man on the Clemson team scored a touchdown in this game.

In his third season, on November 27, 1902, Clemson played in the snow for the first time in a game against Tennessee. The Tigers won the game, 11-0, and claimed the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association crown. (This early conference had several southern colleges and universities as members).

In his final season in 1903, Clemson defeated Georgia Tech 73-0 on October 17. Clemson rushed the ball 55 times for 615 yards, while Tech ran the ball 35 times and collected 28 yards. The second half was shortened to 15 minutes.

In 1903 Heisman married Evelyn Cox, a widow with a twelve-year-old son.

On November 24, 1903 Clemson participated in its "First Bowl Game." Clemson and Cumberland met on this date for the Championship of the South. The contract for the game was drawn up two weeks before the game was to be played. Cumberland who had earlier defeated Auburn, Alabama, and Vanderbilt was considered to be champion of the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Clemson was considered to be the best team in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The game was played on a neutral site, Montgomery, AL. Cumberland and Clemson fought to an 11-11 tie. John Maxwell scored as a result of a 100-yard kickoff return. After the news came back to Clemson that the game ended in a tie, the students and the local townspeople built a bonfire and paraded around the campus. [4]

Family

Heisman continued to enjoy dabbling in the theater during his Clemson days and while doing so met his first wife, a widow named Evelyn McCollum Cox who was an actress in a summer stock company. Heisman had many side jobs, including roles in Shakespearean summer stock plays. She had one son, Carlisle, who would stay close to Heisman long after his mother and the coach were to divorce. Heisman and Cox married in 1903 when Carlisle was 12.

By 1918 Heisman and his wife had mutually agreed to a divorce, and he decided that he wanted to prevent any social embarrassment by letting Evelyn choose where she wanted to live, and then he would choose another. When she decided to stay in Atlanta Heisman accepted a job as the head coach at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.

Georgia Tech

John Heisman was the head coach at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta from 1904 to 1919. He led Georgia Tech to the first of its four national championships in 1917 and posted a career record of 102-29-7 in sixteen seasons. Heisman's career winning percentage of .779 remains the best in school history by a wide margin.[5]

the Yellow Jackets posted a record of 8-1-1 in 1904 in Heisman's first season in Atlanta. Tech had a winning percentage of .500 or better in each of Heisman's sixteen seasons and went a combined 37-4-2 in his final five seasons. That stretch included a 33-game unbeaten streak during which Tech outscored its opponents by a margin of 1,599 wins to 99 losses.

Georgia Tech, whose team Clemson had defeated by 73 - 0 in the last game of the season, offered Heisman the position as head coach beginning with the 1904 season. The day after the offer had officially expired, he accepted the post at a salary of $2,250 per year, plus 30 percent of net receipts to coach its athletic teams. Heisman and his new family moved to Atlanta where he would coach the best games of his career and stay through 17 football seasons. It was Heisman's 1916 team that entered the Guinness Book of World Records, as it beat the once-powerful southern team of Tennessee's Cumberland University/Cumberland College with a score of 222 - 0.

In the spring of 1916, Tech's baseball team (Heisman also coached baseball and basketball) was humiliated 22-0 by a Nashville pro team masquerading as Cumberland College. That fall, Cumberland decided to drop football, its athletic program in disarray. But Heisman was determined to avenge the baseball loss and embarrass the sportswriters who awarded the national championship to the highest-scoring team. So Heisman offered Cumberland a $500 guarantee and an all-expenses-paid trip to Atlanta.[6]

Pennsylvania

Heisman stayed there for three seasons. He followed that with positions at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, known at the time to be a serious football contender, having played in the Tournament of Roses game in 1921. When he refused to remove a black player for a scheduled game with Washington and Lee College in Virginia, that team backed out of the game. In 1924, he was married a second time, this time to Edith Maora Cole, who had been a student at Buchtel College while Heisman coached at the school. They had been sweethearts but decided not to marry due to Edith's bout with tuberculosis. They met again during the years following his divorce and married. Shortly after that, Heisman took what would be his last coaching position with Rice University in Houston, Texas. His agreement was to be in residence during spring training and for the football season, making him available for a sporting goods business in which he was involved in New York City. He was granted a five-year contract and a salary of $9,000 - a cut for him from Washington and Jefferson, but $1,500 higher than the highest paid faculty member. But with the two initial seasons bringing disappointing results, Heisman resigned after a third even more disastrous season. Heisman left college football coaching behind him and headed back to New York.

Later coaching career

In 1900, Heisman went to Clemson University, where he coached for four seasons and a street on the campus bears his name today to honor him. He moved from Clemson to Georgia Tech where he put together a spectacular 16 seasons, including three undefeated seasons and a 32-game undefeated streak. He was coaching the Georgia Tech Engineers when they defeated the Cumberland College Bulldogs 222-0 in a game played in Atlanta in 1916, in the most one-sided college football game ever played. Heisman's running up the score against a totally outmanned opponent was supposedly motivated by revenge against Cumberland's baseball team running up the score against Tech 22-0 the previous year with a team primarily comprised of semi-pro players,^{[citation needed]} and against sportswriters who were too focused on numbers.

After a divorce in 1919, he left Atlanta to prevent any social embarrassment to his former wife, who chose to remain in the city. He went back to Penn for one season in 1920, then to Washington and Jefferson College, before ending his career with four seasons at Rice University.

Final Years

In New York, John Heisman found more time to write as well as serve in advisory positions. His articles were published in magazines such as American Liberty and Colliers Magazine. He also served as football editor for the professional publication Sporting Goods Journal. This prodigious outpouring did not go unnoticed. On May 23, 1930, John W. Heisman was named the first Athletic Director of the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City. Serving in this capacity, Heisman organized and founded the Touchdown Club of New York, and later the National Football Coaches Association.

At the insistence of the DAC officers he organized and set into motion the structure and voting system to determine the best collegiate football player in the country. Though Heisman initially opposed pointing out an individual over a team, he ultimately felt it a consummate team accomplishment to have such recognition. In doing so the first Downtown Athletic Club Award was given in 1935 to Chicago's Jay Berwanger. On October 3, 1936, before the second award could go out, John W. Heisman succumbed to pneumonia. The officers of the DAC unanimously voted to rename the DAC Award, the Heisman Memorial Trophy that year. [7]

Heisman became the man chosen by a recruiting committee to become the first athletic director of New York's Downtown Athletic Club (DAC), a name that would become synonymous with athletic excellence, particularly in football. In 1933 Heisman helped to organized the first Touchdown Club of New York and, in 1935, inaugurated the first Downtown Athletic Club trophy for the best college football player east of the Mississippi. On December 10, 1936, just over two months after his death on October 3, 1936, in New York City, the trophy was re-named the "Heisman Memorial Trophy," in his honor.

The Heisman Trophy is now given to the player voted as the season's best nationwide collegiate player. Voters for this award consist primarily of media representatives, who are allocated by regions across the country in order to filter out possible regional bias, and former recipients. Following the bankruptcy of the Downtown Athletic Club in 2002, the award is now given out by the Yale Club.

During the years following his coaching career, while at DAC, Heisman wrote and published a book, The Principles of Football, wrote magazine columns for various popular magazines, and was at work on another book at the time of his death. Heisman was buried in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, his wife's hometown.

Death and Burial

Heisman died October 3, 1936 in New York City. Three days later he was taken by train to his wife's hometown of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he was buried in Grave D, Lot 11, Block 3 of the city-owned Forest Home Cemetery.

Legacy

Oberlin College named its athletics Hall of Fame the John W. Heisman Club's Athletics Hall of Fame.

He was an innovator and developed one of the first shifts, had both guards pull to lead an end run, and had his center toss the ball back, instead of rolling or kicking it. He was a proponent of the legalization of the forward pass.

Head Coaching Record

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References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Brandt, Nat. 2001. When Oberlin was King of the Gridiron: The Heisman Years. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College. ISBN 0873386841
• Heisman, John W. 2000. Principles of Football. Athens, GA: Hill Street Press. ISBN 1892514990
• Umphlett, Wiley Lee. 1992. Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football. Contributions to the study of popular culture, no. 34. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313284040

External links

• John W. Heisman Heisman.com.
• John Heisman – University of Pennsylvania video
• Pennington, Bill. 2006. John Heisman, the Coach Behind the Trophy Nytimes.com.
• John Heisman at the New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Georgia Tech profile
• Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football. Books.google.com.

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