One of College Football’s Giants : Wallace Wade Was Both Feared and Respected

The name Wallace Wade is unfamiliar to the 40-and-under crowd because it has been 36 years since the “Iron Duke” retired from coaching.

But those who followed college football before there was a televised game of the week remember Wade, who died this week at age 94, as one of the game’s most dominant coaches.

“He was one of the giants of his time,” said former Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Dodd, who played against three of Wade’s Alabama teams (1928-30) and coached against his last five Duke teams (1946-50). “Whenever you went up against a Wallace Wade team, you knew you were in for a rough afternoon.”

Wade had a reputation as a disciplinarian, much in the mold that Bear Bryant adopted in the early years of his coaching career.

Mike Souchak, who became a successful professional golfer after playing under Wade at Duke in the late ‘40s, used to tell about riding in a car with Wade and two other players en route to a game.

“There wasn’t enough room on the team bus, so Coach Wade decided to drive the three of us,” Souchak said. “We got pretty far ahead of the bus, so Coach Wade pulled over to the side of the road to give the rest of the team a chance to catch up.

“While we were sitting there, we noticed that he’d parked too far off the shoulder and the car was slipping toward a ditch. Trouble was, nobody on the team ever talked to Coach Wade until he talked to us first, and we weren’t about to start then. All three of us kept quiet until the car actually slipped into the ditch.”

“That was a true story,” Dodd said. “I found Wallace Wade to be a perfect gentleman, but his players wouldn’t have dared to cross him. I’ve heard of times when players seeing him come down the walk would cross to the other side of the street so they wouldn’t have to confront him.

“My dealings with Coach Wade were always cordial,” Dodd added. “He didn’t like losing any more than any other successful coach. But all three of those years when I beat him right after the war (1946, 1947 and 1948), he came across the field and had something nice to say about our winning. You’d have thought he was a Georgia Tech fan rather than the losing coach.”

Dodd, who kept in contact with Wade during their retirement years, said Wade once told him that his biggest disappointment in his 24 years as a head coach was Duke’s 7-3 loss to USC in the 1939 Rose Bowl.

“He was so proud of his ’38 team,” Dodd said. “It had gone through the regular season unbeaten, untied and unscored upon, and that record was still intact through the first 58 minutes of that Rose Bowl game.

“As I understand it, Eric Tipton (best known for his punting) was playing defensive back at the time and had asked to stay in even though he had a sore foot. On the pass that scored the only touchdown Duke gave up all that year, Tipton got beat on the play.”

Tipton had been the hero in Duke’s final regular-season game in ‘38, driving Pittsburgh back time and again with booming punts after the Panthers kept storming deep into Blue Devil territory on the running of Marshall Goldberg. Duke won that game, 7-0, by recovering a Pitt punt in the Panthers’ end zone.

“My first dealings with Wallace Wade came when I was playing for Tennessee,” said Dodd, a former quarterback. “My first two years, we beat Alabama--15-13 in ’28 and 6-0 in ’29. But, in ‘30, Wade’s last year at Alabama before he went to Duke, they beat us 18-6 and went unbeaten and to the Rose Bowl.

“I always had the greatest respect for Coach Wade, both as a coach and a man. His contribution to college football was tremendous. I always envied him for all those Rose Bowl games he was involved in (1925, 1926 and 1930 with Alabama and 1939 and 1942 with Duke).

“I think I might have had a chance as a player to have gone to the ’29 Rose Bowl if we (Tennessee) hadn’t had that scoreless tie (against Kentucky) after winning all our other games,” Dodd said. “By the time I became head coach at Georgia Tech, it was too late. The Rose Bowl had that pact with the Big Ten, and the Southern schools were shut out.”