Kazmaier Fondly Remembers Site of Greatness

The man with whom Palmer Stadium in Princeton, N.J., is most fondly identified isn’t saddened by its imminent closing. In fact, Dick Kazmaier considers the replacement of the ancient arena more in the nature of a rebirth than an end for Princeton football. Everything in the historic facility is outdated except the memories.

“And I believe I will be able to remember what Palmer Stadium meant to me after it’s gone,” said the most honored player in the history of an institution that participated in the first intercollegiate football game. Kazmaier, who was awarded the Heisman Trophy after leading the Tigers to a second consecutive undefeated season in 1951, will join Bob Holly, a quarterback who set school passing records 30 years later, in speaking to the past and the future during ceremonies between halves of the Princeton-Dartmouth game Saturday. After 82 years of service to the university and the sport, the stadium will be demolished following the season finale and a smaller, more comfortable arena will arise in its place.

There was a time when Palmer Stadium was among the showcases of football, but that era passed a long time ago, along with the single-wing formation in which Kazmaier starred. In its post-war heyday, the Tigers routinely attracted capacity crowds of 45,000 into the horseshoe-shaped edifice on the New Jersey campus. Kazmaier recalled the railroad spurs for the special trains from New York on autumn Saturdays.

He said the atmosphere on game days at Princeton wasn’t noticeably different from that at Michigan, whose games he and his Maumee (Ohio) High School teammates frequented after playing on Friday. That’s because, at the century’s midpoint, the sport was something of a national pastime. In his Massachusetts home, Kazmaier noted, he has all the Sunday sports sections published by The New York Times in the fall of ’51 and the front pages were thoroughly devoted to college football. “That world has changed,” he said.

Nowhere more than at Princeton and the seven other schools that comprise the Ivy League. After Kazmaier’s 1951 team won all nine games and finished the season ranked sixth nationally, members of the yet-to-be-formalized conference dropped spring football practice and banned participation in bowl games. As the level of the competition declined, so did the size of the audiences.

They’re all empty relics now, the stadiums that were at the center of the college football world in the first half of the century--Harvard Stadium, Franklin Field and massive Yale Bowl, which opened in the same year (1914) as Palmer Stadium. Kazmaier expects the new home of Princeton football, a $45 million facility expected to seat 30,000, to have a positive impact on the entire athletic program.

“Palmer can rest in peace,” he said. “We’ll have something newer and more appropriate to the times. The old place was pretty cold, especially if you weren’t on one of the wooden benches. It was not very functional from a spectator standpoint. The new stadium is a very meaningful commitment on the part of the university.”

Perhaps because he has been involved with the project as a member of Princeton’s board of trustees from 1991-1995, Kazmaier has viewed the transformation as necessary and constructive. “While you learn from the past,” he said, “you don’t live in the past.” And the stadium had to reflect the changing nature of the university.

“When I went to school,” he recalled, “everybody was male and white. Everyone wore khaki pants, blazers and ties. Everyone ate in eating clubs. It was a phenomenon. I go to reunions now and you’re reminded of the passage of time. It’s right there in front of you. The first women were admitted in 1970 and now the student body is multicultural and international.”

That, to Kazmaier, strengthens the institution even as it weakens the stature of football on campus. “I don’t think football has the same relevance in general,” he said.

To the last Ivy Leaguer to be recognized as the college player of the year, football was an opportunity to get an education. He worked his way through Princeton by waiting on tables and driving a laundry truck and he rejected the National Football League for the chance to earn a master’s degree at Harvard Business School. So his brief reign as a national sports figure that included a Time magazine cover story literally began and ended at Palmer Stadium.

He’s not quite sure what he wasgoing to feel Saturday, what he’s going to say. “I don’t pretend to be a sentimental person,” Kazmaier said. “But I can’t tell you what will happen when I sit there, when I realize it will be the last time I sit there.”

It is the stadium where F. Scott Fitzgerald, a onetime prep school quarterback in a raccoon coat, dreamed of continuing his athletic career, the stadium where future actor Jimmy Stewart led cheers along the sidelines, the stadium where Dean Cain began preparing for the role of Superman by flinging himself at opposition passes as a member of the Princeton secondary, some or all of which was remembered at a special dinner hosted by Frank Deford, class of ‘61, and Bob Costas in Dillon Gym Friday night.

Mostly, of course, it is the stadium of Dick Kazmaier, the triple-threat tailback from another age. “I think of it as an old and valued friend,” he said. He said goodbye in his own way on what was, coincidentally, his 66th birthday.