John Heisman is perhaps best known for the college football trophy that bears his name. But the Ohio-born man’s impact on the game went far beyond the award given to the top player in college football’s top division each year. In the early days of the sport, Heisman was a successful coach at eight different schools and an innovator who helped shape the modern game.
“He was able to mold the game in his own image, or what he imagined it to look like,” says Jeremy Swick, historian and curator at the College Football Hall of Fame. “Many of those early pioneers had this ability to dictate how the game would be changed.”
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Heisman’s many innovations included the center snap, transfer, breaking the game from two halves into four quarters, adding a scoreboard for the fans, changing pre-snap and instituting the pace hike / hut. Perhaps Heisman’s most important influence was his role in legalizing the forward pass.
Heisman coached for 27 seasons, ending his career 186-70-18 and only one losing season, according to the College Football Hall of Fame website. In 1954 he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Swick says part of the reason the Heisman Trophy, awarded by the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City, received his name in 1936 was because Heisman was so well known.
“No one knew about the Downtown Athletic Club,” he says. “But everyone knew who John Heisman was.”
Who was John Heisman?
The Cleveland home where John Heisman was born on October 23, 1869.
Pat McManamon
Johann Wilhelm Heisman (John William) was born in Cleveland on October 23, 1869, the son of German immigrants from Bavaria. By the time Heisman was 7, his family had moved to Titusville, a small town in an oil-rich region of northwestern Pennsylvania.
An excellent student, Heisman gave a high school farewell speech, “The Dramatist as Sermonizer,” which included several references to Shakespeare. As a football coach years later, he weaved literature and developed terms in his speeches to players.
At the start of many football practices in the fall, Heisman was holding a ball and calling it “an elongated spheroid, that is, an elongated sphere, in which the outer leather shell is pulled tightly over. a slightly smaller rubber tube. Better to be dead a little boy than to grope this football.
At 17, Heisman went to Brown University, where he formed a club football team. After two years, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in hopes of obtaining a law degree. As a 5-foot-7, 158-pound lineman, he played three years at Penn. An accident – an obsolete battery lamp reportedly blinked in his face – nearly cost him his sight. So, rather than practice law, he returned to Ohio (the family had returned in 1890) and accepted the coaching position at Oberlin College in 1892.
In 1895 Heisman became a trainer at the Alabama College of Agriculture and Mechanics, now Auburn University. There, Heisman introduced the first hidden ball game, a bit of cunning that often confused opponents. Heisman asked quarterback Reynolds Tichenor to hide the ball under his shirt inside a (then legal) corner of players. The corner suddenly dispersed and Tichenor, who pretended to tie his shoe, stood up and scored without touching it.
Heisman’s longest and most successful tenure was with Georgia Tech, where he spent 16 seasons (1904-1919). His 102 wins there included a 33-game winning streak, a national title in 1917 and the most one-sided victory in college football history: 222-0 over Cumberland in 1916.
Despite his side’s 126-0 lead at halftime, Heisman urged his side to keep the pressure on. “You never know what these Cumberland players have up their sleeve,” he said. “So in the second half, go out and hit them clean and hit them hard. Don’t let go. Although Heisman has agreed to shorten the quarters to 12 minutes instead of 15, speculation remains that Heisman increased the score because that he thought Cumberland used professional players to beat Georgia Tech in baseball, which Heisman also coached.
In 1922, Heisman wrote Principles of Coaching, a full breakdown of the profession which included chapters on how to play each position. A coach, he wrote, should be “a little short of a czar”, but it was also essential that he admitted his mistakes and never used profanity. He called a coach “a man of education and culture” and important in world affairs. In a chapter on healthy training, Heisman banned smoking and coffee during the season and alcohol at all times. Ice cream was OK a few times a week, “so pure”.
“The boy is ‘deaf to the voice of inbreeding’,” he wrote of the players, “but he will do almost anything but commit murder for a winning coach.” Before a match against Pittsburgh in 1918, Heisman even gave a speech to his team that brought up the heroes of ancient Greece and a dead soldier in the ruins of Pompeii.
Heisman also defended his principles. When he coached Washington & Jefferson in 1923, he refused to play a game when Washington and Lee, a school based in Lexington, Virginia, asked Heisman not to use a black player. At Georgia Tech, he advised a Jewish player facing anti-Semitism.
John Heisman pushes for forward pass, helps save football
The Heisman Trophy, awarded each year to the best player in the first division of college football
Kelly Kline / Heisman Trophy Trust / Getty Images
Football was a violent game in the 1900s – most players did not wear headgear and helmets were not compulsory for players until 1939. In 1905, at least 18 people died and over 150 people died. were injured while playing football, according to the Washington post. That year, President Theodore Roosevelt, a college football enthusiast, called a White House summit to discuss how to make the game safer.
For three years, Heisman lobbied Walter Camp, the former Yale coach and so-called “father of American football,” and other members of the Rules Committee to allow the forward pass, believing it might open up the field and thus make it safer. . In 1906, the camp and the makers approved the change, one of the most significant in the history of the game.
“American football had crossed the line that separates the modern game from the old,” Heisman wrote in an article for Collier’s magazine after his retirement in 1927. “Whether it is my contribution to football or that of Camp is perhaps unimportant. Football had been saved from itself.
In May 1930, Heisman was appointed the first director of the Downtown Athletic Club of New York. In this role, he founded the Touchdown Club of New York and the National Football Coaches Association. At the insistence of DAC officers, he also set up the system that would award a trophy to the player voted best in college football east of the Mississippi River. The first Downtown Athletic Club trophy was presented in 1935 to Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago.
But before the next season was over, Heisman died suddenly on October 3, 1936, after contracting pneumonia. Soon after, the DAC award was renamed the Heisman Trophy and the award criteria were expanded to include the whole country.
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