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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/AureliusCorvinus on 2024-07-03 00:24:58+00:00.
Original Title: In the lead up to a game in 1895, legendary coach Pop Warner gambled his entire salary on a game he was coaching, lied to administration, was forced to forage for food with his players, and lost to the Butte Athletic Club 12-10. This is that story.
January 15th, 1895, Butte, Montana. At 9:55 PM, the fire alarm rang out from the bell tower on the City Hall. Quickly the horses jumped from their stalls, and nine firemen mounted them and sped away to the scene of the fire. They arrive at the Kenyon-Connell warehouse, somewhat over a mile away. The nine regular fireman were joined by several volunteers and the men were busy with the work of unrolling hoses, blanketing the horses, and preparing the ladders. Just at the moment when the first water struck the fire there was a puff within the building, throwing up flames and cinders. The firemen stepped back a moment, but being reassured, immediately resumed their positions.
Directly after, there was a flash.
Bang.
All but two of the firefighters were instantly killed.
The fire had ignited a large store of dynamite in the wearhouse, resulting in a series of huge explosions that devastated several blocks of Butte. The warehouses had contained the usual stock stored in such places, including stoves and ranges, sheets of corrugated iron, gas pipe, coils of wire, wire netting, and iron wheelbarrows. For greater security, these latter had been piled up around the sides of the room in which the dynamite was stored. The force of the explosions hurled these articles in every direction, and they constituted a large part of the destroying element, cutting down relentlessly the human beings that stood in their way.
An estimated 57 people (13 of whom were a part of the firefighters) died. Only one of the horses, Jim, survived.
1895 was a different world compared to what it is today. That should go without saying. People risked their lives every single day to make less than 3 dollars a day. You had to find joy in even the littlest of things to keep yourself going, and not unlike today, a lot of the residents of Butte found that in football.
The Butte Athletic Club was a team that was comprised mostly of miners and blacksmiths, as well as Montana players paid by mine owners to entertain their workers. There’s not a lot of info and stats about them online but from this newspaper clipping they were apparently unbeaten. A worthy adversary for the then Iowa Agricultural College Cardinals. A team that went 6-1 in its first officially sanctioned season in 1894, and who now has it’s five star coaching hire.
Enter
Pop Warner
Now, despite already being the coach at Georgia, in 1895 he was offered $25 per week to come to Iowa State, whose season started in mid-August while Georgia’s started a month later, as well as to provide weekly advice during the rest of the season. He agreed. On September 28th, 1895, Pop Warner took Iowa State up to Northwestern and smoked them 36-0. The morning after, A Chicago sportswriter called the team “cornfed giants from Iowa” while the Chicago Tribune’s headline read, “Struck by a Cyclone”. Since then, Iowa State teams have been known as the Cyclones.
However, before that, Iowa State is set to travel up to Butte by train when they run into a few problems.
Problem 1: The game was set for Sunday, which was a much bigger deal back then than it is now…looks at BYU. In any case, Iowa State is not going to sanction a Sunday game and Warner knows it. Solution? Just lie and tell them the administration you scheduled the game on Saturday instead.
Problem 2: Weather. While traveling up to Butte, their train was briefly stranded by a freak blizzard forcing the players to forage for food. However, they finally make it to Butte Saturday morning.
Arriving in Butte, Warner bets his entire Iowa State salary on the game ($175). Splendid. At the time, Warner was nearly broke and still four years away from his signature tenure: 13 years building the Carlisle Indian Industrial School into a national power with a little help from one Jim Thorpe.
Sunday morning they make it down to the field. Or, the “place they will be playing football”. The game is played on a dirt field because ore smelters killed all the grass in town.
Sportswriter Francis J. Powers described the field conditions in a book from 1947.
“The game was played on a field as devoid of grass as a glacier and there was nothing green … It was impossible for the center to snap the ball to the quarterback on the bounce or even roll it without chances for a fumble … Whenever Iowa State threatened to score, the referee (a home towner) would make a decision which chilled the Cyclones’ offense … spectators, who followed up and down the sidelines, would whip out their six shooters and blaze away with enthusiasm, which also chilled the Iowa college boys.”
They then play the game, Pop Warner plays at right guard. Biased officiating against Iowa State causes Warner’s team to threaten a forfeit, but local officials warn that Iowa State will not get its guarantee unless they play the whole game.
The Butte Daily Post derisively labeled Warner “The Fat Boy”. A month later, the Standard dubbed him “the big bootsy dub of a football player who played here with the Iowa Agricultural eleven and played the baby act in order to save the bets he had made that the Iowans would win if the game was played out.”
Per the Anaconda Standard, the walkout ensued after Butte’s George W. King recovered a fumble and Warner held King’s face into the sand in what the paper described as “intentionally foul play”. Butte player/coach “Big” Jim Hooper, who’d feuded with Warner since the two squared off in a particularly rugged Michigan-Cornell game, lifted his adversary off Kelly and tossed him aside, tearing his jacket in the process.
Oh and the officials in part, are intimidated by miners who shoot their guns in the air when a call goes against Butte.
So y’know. Very good officiating indeed.
When the team returns to Ames after a 12-10 loss, Warner tells the faculty that the game had to be moved because of the weather and if Iowa State didn’t play on Sunday, they would not have gotten their expenses paid. And the administration just takes his word for it, and that was that.