But he stuck it out, even breaking his leg during Hass's last game as a coach.
Sure, I was willing to hustle a few hours each week, but I would not
have considered playing if it had required the normal college football regimen. We lost the
ball so often, players on the sideline would part like the Red Sea to clear
a path for Schultzie's helmet to come flying through.In '74, with Maroon living-legend Jay Berwanger,
the very first Heisman Trophy winner, in the stands, we lost a homecoming game to
Oberlin 69 to 0. But Tony was our second-string nose tackle. But most of us,
cynical as we were about authority and the use of organized violence in the Vietnam
years, were inspired by Coach Hass's dream to resurrect a tradition.Hass believed that if we
would just keep taking the field each week, no matter how many times we lost,
the team would eventually become a respectable Division III contender. I was credited with the
longest gain for the Maroons; I fell on the ball during a kickoff return and
earned a 15-yard penalty when an Oberlin player speared me while I was down.Our growing
pains were ripe fodder for comedy; even the idea of a football team at the
University of Chicago seemed to inspire twitters. And one of the most vivid is that
Coach Hass was one of the nicest human beings I have ever known. According to
Dave Hilbert, the university's assistant athletic director for sports information, most books and records of
the '70s teams have been lost.Our memories will have to suffice. It was during this
inauspicious but historic time that I joined the team, in 1974.I'd grown up imagining the
football games of the Roaring Twenties, when my maternal grandfather played professional football and owned
a team. of C.-the Maroons compiled a heartbreaking record of nine wins and 40 losses.
By the end, they were the only fans still there.Satire and irony seemed inescapable. He
rarely raised his voice in anger, despite the teeth-grindingly poor execution of his teams. Wally
Hass ostensibly retired from coaching football when he left Carleton College to join the University
of Chicago's faculty, but he came to Chicago with a secret agenda: to restore football
as a varsity sport at the U. Too small to play high-school football, Tony Miksanek
was five feet six and a 135-pound varsity wrestler (or, at least, that's how he
was listed in our game programs; we often inflated our weights so the opposing team
wouldn't know how scrawny we really were). We did win the game following that ill-fated
Duhawks face-off, the final game Hass coached and my last as a player, by once
again beating Marquette. Our greatest accomplishment of that game was when their kicker missed the
final point-after, denying the visitors a perfect 70. With neighboring kids and fans in tow,
when not too frozen or inebriated from schnapps, the group would hit the field to
perform Brownian Motion, whereby all would run about chaotically, thereby illustrating random movement.One cheer all
the fans knew and yelled out on the rare occasion there was a play to
cheer about went like this: "Themistocles, Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War, X-squared, Y-squared, H2SO4, What for,
who for, who ya gonna yell for? Chicago! Chicago! Chicago!"It was a bittersweet experience, playing
during the Restoration Era of Maroon football. The coaching staff was jerry-rigged, too. Given that
legacy, it was with a heavy heart that I quit football after high-school tryouts because
I could not tolerate what my 14-year-old mind believed to be the coaching requin tn staff's fascistic
and brutal attitude.Wally Hass was different. Though I was for it, Hass ended up refusing
on the grounds that it would do irreparable psychological harm to his players to participate
in "The Toilet Bowl." He didn't relent when the magazine offered to change the name
to "The Brain Bowl."In those years, fan support was marginal; unless the visiting team bused
in onlookers, a large crowd for our games was 200. At a Maroon practice I
attended a couple of years ago, there were at least 60 players running crisply and
efficiently through drills, letting out bellows of effort and roars of team spirit. At one
time the winningest coach in collegiate football history, Stagg led the Maroons to four undefeated
seasons between 1892 and 1932, and snagged seven Big Ten Conference titles.When Stagg retired in
1932, however, the team hadn't won a championship since 1924, and the young president Robert
Maynard Hutchins reportedly summed up his opinion of collegiate sports with the quip, "Whenever the
urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while, and it passes."
Hutchins abolished varsity football after the 1939 season, and the sport remained non grata on
campus until 1956, when a new athletic director arrived. Hans was six feet three and
weighed 295 pounds, but he was so gentle the coaches tore their hair out trying
to motivate "Little Hans" to hit an opponent. The uniforms were the same as ours
of 30 years ago, but the players looked different-not just bigger and faster, but with
short hair, kids who were clean-cut and listened respectfully to their coaches and captains.These days
at home games, hundreds of enthusiastic fans pack the stands of renovated Stagg Field. of
C. Meanwhile, on-campus hostility to the return of football in any form mounted and, in
1963, some 200 students held a sit-down strike in the middle of Stagg Field, delaying
the game and resulting in four arrests.But Hass pursued his dream undeterred. of C. president
Ed Levi, took the field at halftime. Our one real ace in the hole was
Nick Arnold, the district-leading ground-gainer his senior year of high school in Missouri and our
MVP for the 1975 season. One player recalls his ragtag Restoration Era team, from the
six-foot-three gentle giant to the 135-pound nose tackleDuring halftime of a 1975 Bears game, CBS-TV
aired a segment on the difficulties of resurrecting a football team at the University of
Chicago. With the phoenix as our mascot, winning teams would eventually rise from the ashes
of our many defeats.But our performance sorely tested Hass's theory. There was a kind of
heroism, like Hector preparing to fight Achilles, in taking the field and losing week after
week.Times have changed. The piece focused on that year's squad-for which I played defensive back,
among other positions-and included a clip from our ill-fated November 8th game against the Loras
College (Dubuque, Iowa) Duhawks. We knew he was on the edge when he'd raise his
clipboard as if to hurl it to the ground, but he'd restrain himself, sigh, and
call the next play.Before I donned a helmet for spring practice in 1974, I received
assurance from Hass that players would not be punished for missing practices for academic reasons.
The coaches' strategic thinking was that Tony could slip between the legs of offensive linemen-or,
better yet, they might trip over him. Let no one say we weren't tough.Like Paul
and me, many of our teammates hadn't played prior to the U. I even employed
the tactic of scheduling classes to conflict with practice. of C.Hass tn was no fool, and
had no intention of returning to the Big Ten or Division I. He was an
idealist and loved using the term "scholar-athlete" when talking about sports at the U. Then
there was Hans Van Buitenen, whose father was a renowned Sanskrit scholar. Now, it's beautiful.When
today's Maroon players gather for their homecomings 30 years from now, they'll relive thrills, including
winning the University Athletic Association championship three times since 1998. A group of about eight
college musicians, the Lower Brass Conspiracy, served as the functional equivalent of a pep band.
At the end of each game, the players gather midfield and sing, "Wave the flag
of old Chicago, / Maroon the color grand," just the way the team did back
in the glory days of Stagg and the Big Ten. In 1971 a refrigerator was
crowned homecoming queen, and a line of utility vehicles from the physical plant led the
homecoming parade for several years. Paul Mankowski, a classics major who hosted a WHPK 88.5
FM radio show called The Baroque Masters, ended up on the team as the result
of a lost bet. I remember Jimmy Smith getting blocked so hard by a Grinnell
player he went airborne and landed out of bounds on the players' bench. Family lore
has it he played against the Bears' Halas. In 1961, when the Restoration Era was
still a twinkle in Hass's eye, The Second City staged its now-infamous skit "Football Comes
to the University of Chicago," which included a bit about a squeamish quarterback reluctant to
place his hands under the center's hindquarters to receive an oblong spheroid.And at the end
of the 1974 season, in which we had lost every game (the same year they
called us "the worst team in college ball"), People magazine offered to fly the Maroons
out to the Rose Bowl to play Cal Tech, whose team claimed to have a
higher average IQ than weight. There was the time Steve "Amtrack" Stwora, our hard-driving fullback,
lowered his head and ran over a referee, who exited the field on a stretcher.
Hass bided his time, however, and by 1962 he had organized a club team that
played high schools, other clubs, and college junior-varsity teams. of C. There was assistant Jesse
Vail, who had previously coached a prison team. As the weather turned colder, our small
but loyal group of fans would huddle in the exposed aluminum stands, lashed by lake
winds and sleet, with thermoses of hot chocolate laced with peppermint schnapps. The faculty senate
responded with a resolution opposing the return of football-ever-as a varsity sport. And, once again,
the fans tore down a goalpost.Jeff Rasley is the author of "Bringing Progress to Paradise,"
a book about combining adventure travel with service work in Himalayan villages. An anonymous steam
calliope player occasionally appeared and piped away during games. Since I worked for the athletic
department at that time, Coach Hass called me in to his office to talk it
over. Our most loyal supporter, Bernie DelGiorno, who has missed only one home game since
the first in 1969, remembers sharing an umbrella with linebacker Pat Spurgeon's girlfriend during a
particularly miserable rain-soaked game. The Maroons routinely compete for the conference title in the University
Athletic Association. It was the penultimate game of the final season of coach Wally Hass's
(and my) career at Chicago. But Nick lost interest in the Maroons-and school-after that year
and moved to France.Each player had his own motives, and some were quite bizarre, like
a teammate who told me tackling drills were good therapy for his Oedipal complex because
he really wanted to kill his father. Rarely, it seemed, did 22 members of the
team show up as scheduled, so team scrimmages were jerry-rigged affairs with ghost players, like
neighborhood sandlot games. That game marked a propitious beginning, but between that first effort in
1969 and 1975, when Hass retired-what I'm coining the Restoration Era of football at the
U. Looks like it's back at the University of Chicago." Well, in a way.It's true
that by the 1970s, the school had once again cobbled together a varsity football program
after a 30-year hiatus, but my ragtag, Vietnam-era teammates were nowhere close to approaching the
current team's Division III champ status, much less the glory days of that legendary coach
Amos Alonzo Stagg, whose players were the original Monsters of the Midway. Some of my
teammates shared this lukewarm interest in practicing and came only when moved. Paul later became
a Jesuit priest and ministered in the Calcutta slums. For Restoration Era Maroon players, our
recollections may be a bit different, but they're all we've got. In their rejoicing, jubilant
fans tore down the goalposts. We were ahead until the final minute, when our center
hiked the ball over our punter and into our end zone, where a Duhawk pounced
on it for a touchdown.The final clip showed me hanging my head and wiping away
anguished tears in our locker room. During "skull sessions," I remember him offering inspirational wisdom
such as, "The Russians will never defeat the U.S., because they don't play football!"Despite their
long and only occasionally washed hair, mustaches, and beards, the guys with whom I played
the 1974 and 1975 seasons were an extraordinary crew. In 2010 the team won every
conference game and had an 8-2 overall record. By the late sixties, a counterrevolutionary movement
had coalesced among those more interested in football than rebellion and, armed with 1,100 signatures,
students presented the faculty senate with a petition advocating the reinstatement of varsity football; the
senate approved it, as did the administration and the trustees. Football returned to the University
of Chicago as a Division III varsity sport in 1969, the same year student demonstrators
occupied the Administration Building, resulting in mass expulsions.In the first varsity football game played by
Chicago in 30 years, Hass led the Maroons to a 14-0 victory over Marquette University.
When he saw me crying in the locker room, I remember him remarking: "That's what
college football is all about. He started small, by adding a football class. My teammates
wouldn't have known the words to the song and would have considered such a sentimental
display very uncool. Whenever the offense fumbled or screwed up, our center, Tom Schultz, would
hurl his helmet at our bench as he came off the field. The Kazoo Marching
Band with "the largest kazoo in the Western world," nicknamed Big Ed after U. After
a 30-year hiatus, varsity football returned to the University of Chicago in the 1970s-sort of.
Each Tuesday and Thursday during the '74 season, while my colleagues sweated and grunted through
daily tackling and blocking drills, I practiced the more sublime exercise of translating Plato's Symposium
in James Redfield's Attic Greek class. It was Hass's 100th victory as a college coach.
That game was as close as the team had come to victory in the two
seasons I'd played for the Chicago Maroons, and to lose was a crushing disappointment.Bears founder
and owner George Halas was a guest in the broadcast booth when the segment ran.
He may be contacted on his website: http://www.jeffreyrasley.com.
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