Missing in Action

If you think the BCS controversy over this season’s bowl games is big news, you should have been in Southern California in 1946.

That was the year Army, undefeated in three seasons, was prepared to play in the Jan. 1, 1947, Rose Bowl game with Glenn Davis, its Heisman Trophy winner from nearby Claremont, who would be making his first collegiate appearance before home fans after a phenomenal high school career.

On Nov. 21, however, little more than a month before the game, the announcement of an agreement among the Tournament of Roses Assn., the Pacific Coast Conference, forerunner to the Pacific 10, and the Big Nine, now the Big Ten, pulled the rug out from under Army. The conferences announced a five-year plan to put their champions, exclusively, in the Rose Bowl.

“Take it this year, or leave it,” said Kenneth L. “Tug” Wilson, Big Nine commissioner, in response to grumbling about waiting until Jan. 1, 1948.

The agreement was popularly called a shotgun wedding and the outcry was immediate. There was no television and there were no Web sites or radio talk shows to keep the criticism boiling, but at the time it was no less vociferous than today’s BCS arguments.

Paul Zimmerman, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, had a black border put around his column, part of which read: “In Memoriam. The Rose Bowl. Born January 1, 1916. Died November 21, 1946 ... Rest in Peace.”

Not only was Army, which had said it wanted to come to Pasadena to help with its recruiting program, insulted, but so were universities from the South, which had furnished opposing teams in seven of the previous nine games but now were locked out.

It didn’t help when Wilson told reporters, in what were taken as pointed remarks about Southern schools: “We must set up a policy whereby a boy will choose a school for its educational value rather than the school choosing the boy for his athletic ability.”

It also didn’t help when Montana and Idaho, then members of the PCC, voted in favor of the merger, which USC and UCLA opposed. Both Bill Ackerman, UCLA graduate manager, and Willis O. Hunter, USC athletic director, were openly miffed at the 6-2 vote in favor of the pact.

Wrote columnist Maxwell Stiles in the Long Beach Press-Telegram: “We don’t like being told by a bunch of professors in Missoula [Mont.] and Moscow [Idaho] and Ann Arbor [Mich.] that we must play a Big Nine team every year.

“Maybe someday we’d like to see Alabama or Columbia or Nebraska or Pitt or Duke. It isn’t that we don’t want to see Illinois or Michigan play, for we do. It’s that we don’t believe the closed shop has any place in intercollegiate football.”

Commented columnist Braven Dyer of The Times: “The Coast and Western Conference [Big Nine] are the laughingstock of the sports-minded nation today. The ridicule which will be heaped upon them is richly deserved. It doesn’t make sense that Montana, winner of seven conference games in 21 years, should tell fans of Southern California, who have built the Rose Bowl into a national institution, that they cannot see Army play.”

There were all sorts of ideas floated to counteract the idea.

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to invite Army to play Notre Dame in the Coliseum on either Dec. 22 or 25, with proceeds going to the Army and Navy Relief Fund and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. One council member even suggested playing it Jan. 1, directly opposite the Rose Bowl game.

Army rejected the idea and later turned down invitations to play in the Sugar and Orange Bowls.

From New York, the United Press’ Oscar Fraley wrote: “The tie-up between the Pacific Coast and the Western Conference and the resultant snub of Army, make it evident that the time may be ripe for [USC or UCLA] to go independent and become the Notre Dame of the Far West.”

Austen Lake, Boston Evening American columnist, suggested the agreement had come about because Pasadena real estate salespeople would find it easier to sell land “at higher prices to people from the Middle West than to the yokels from Dixie.”

Criticism was universal among Southern California writers.

Said Charlie Park of the Glendale News-Press: “John Q. Public has been sold down the river again. The fans who pay the freight were virtually unanimous in wanting to see the Army play, and their wishes have been ignored.”

Bob Hoenig, in the Hollywood Citizen-News: “A game that could have made football history fades out of the picture and in its place a tourist attraction takes form. There was a fumble on this play, and a bad one.”

In his book, “The Rose Bowl Game,” Rube Samuelsen, sports editor of the Pasadena Star-News and president of the Football Writers Assn. of America, wrote, “[Army’s] being by-passed when they were not only openly willing to come but had full War Department approval appeared downright stupid.”

Disappointment also was heard from West Point, where Coach Red Blaik allegedly had told the Cadets, who had 1945 Heisman Trophy winner Doc Blanchard as well as Davis in their backfield, that he would work to get them a trip to Pasadena.

“For two years, Coach said if we went undefeated, he would try and get us a bid,” recalled Davis, who had gone to West Point after compiling the greatest high school record in Southern California history at La Verne Bonita. His record of 464 points scored from 1940-42 was not broken for 24 years.

“I was captain in my senior year [at Army] and we were unbeaten again, so I reminded [Blaik] about his promise,” Davis said. “It looked like I was coming home and Coach was right, but then we got the word that it would be Illinois instead of us. I think it hurt Coach as much as it hurt me, and all my teammates too, who were looking forward to the Rose Bowl.”

Davis eventually got back to Los Angeles to play football, spending the 1950 and ’51 seasons with Rams in the NFL before embarking on a long career as director of special events for The Times. Had he and the Cadets made it to the Rose Bowl, Army would have been the second service academy to play in Pasadena. Navy tied Washington, 14-14, in 1924.

The Pacific Coast Conference and the Tournament of Roses Assn. had been wooing the Big Nine for years, though, hoping to get one of the Midwest teams to come West for the second time. Ohio State had come in 1921 and lost to California, 28-0. After that, the Big Nine had turned down all overtures. Until 1946.

“Some of us have worked 20 years to get the conferences together,” Wilson said in explaining the urgency. “The Rose Bowl question, brought up for decision three times, once lost by just one vote. This time, we started working in the summer, long before Army was considered a contender.

“We have no authority to bargain for a later date than Jan. 1, 1947, and frankly, we fear we’ll not get another chance if we fail to put the original agreement across.”

George S. Campbell, who’d been Tournament of Roses president in 1938, when California and Alabama played, was not pleased.

“The boys must have been badly advised to sign up with the Big Nine at this time,” he told the Star-News. “It adds nothing to the prestige of the Rose Bowl and certainly slaps our old friends from the South, who have been playing with us.

“I think we owed the invitation to the Army. First, because they have the best team in the nation, and second, it would have been a nice gesture to a branch of the service which did a mighty good job for us.”

Illinois got the bid when it defeated Northwestern, 20-0, and UCLA earned its place by defeating USC, 13-6, in the mud at the Coliseum on a field that Pasadena writer Mannie Pineda called “as treacherous as a 1939 Nazi.”

“We thought we had a team that could have given Army all it could handle,” said UCLA quarterback Ernie Case, who had been a prisoner of the Germans during World War II. “We sure would have liked to have the opportunity.”

UCLA opened as a one-point favorite on the basis of its 10 consecutive victories, one a 61-7 rout of Montana. Illinois had a 7-2 record, having lost to Indiana and Notre Dame.

Illinois Coach Ray Eliot did not help cool feelings with the press when he announced that West Coast writers would be locked out of Illini practices at Brookside Park. On the first day, when about a dozen showed up, Eliot had them ushered out by a Pasadena policeman.

Tournament of Roses officials, realizing that the pact was a done deal for years to come, laid out the welcome mat for the visitors, but there was no denying that just about everyone in Southern California would rather have had Army.

George Cecil Cowing, in his whimsical Boulevardier column in the Star-News, asked shortly before the game, “Now that the Coast Conference and the Big Nine Conferences are married, I wonder if the Army football team will send back the ring.”

As so often happens, though, the unwanted Illini came into the game with a vengeance and the Bruins, disappointed at not getting to play Army, were flat. In another touch of irony, Illinois was one of two Big Nine schools that had voted against the agreement.

The result: Illinois 45, UCLA 14.

Claude “Buddy” Young, a 5-foot-5, 172-pound Illinois scatback who had played in the service for Fleet City Naval Training Center in Northern California, proved more than the Bruins could handle. Young, who would play nine years as a professional, rushed for 103 yards and two touchdowns.

In the only bright spot for Bruin fans, Al Hoisch, a 144-pound running back from Los Angeles High, returned a kickoff 103 yards with only 31 seconds remaining in the first half. It remains the longest return in Rose Bowl history.