The school hired Tom Scott, a former multi-sport star at Maury High, as athletic director and, almost as an afterthought, gave him the job of coaching a football team. A handful of students, including a quarterback who had not played the game in high school, showed up for practice.
Uniforms and a practice field were secured, and a schedule that included mostly high school and college freshmen teams, was thrown together. And so football at what was to become Old Dominion University was started.
In a meticulously researched book, “The Legacy Renewed,” Peter C. Stewart and Thomas R. Garrett recreate the Depression-and-war-plagued decade in which the school’s first and last football team flourished.
The book, so hot off the press that the authors took delivery of it last week, appears just before an ODU team runs onto the field this Saturday for the first time in 69 years.
About one week after the first practice, “Tommy Scott’s boys,” as a headline writer called them, lost 7-0 to Suffolk High, but came back and drubbed Oceana 47-0 and edged out South Norfolk 6-0. But the game everyone was waiting for was the matchup between the Division team, now called the Braves, against the freshmen Indians of the College of William & Mary.
“The home team took an early 7-0 lead,” the authors write, “but in the third quarter the Braves’ Jack Hawkins drove across the rival goal after Bill Abrams went off tackle for 30 yards. But the attempt for the extra point failed. With about two minutes remaining, halfback Billy Walker took a long pass from quarterback [Terry] Maxey and outran the defense for another 30 yards for a touchdown.” Final score: 13-7.
Stewart and Garrett begin at the beginning of area football in the early 1890s. A Norfolk YMCA team comprised of ex-collegians played Richmond College and William & Mary at a field in Ghent in 1893. In the 1920s, most local high schools like Maury and Booker T. Washington in Norfolk and Wilson and I.C. Norcom in Portsmouth had well-developed programs, as did several clubs (even a group called, egad, the “Clancies”), shipyards and military bases.
The early games were played at Bain Field near Church Street downtown. In 1935, with the help of New Deal public works funds and A. Herbert Foreman, who was both on the Norfolk school board and the William & Mary Board of Visitors, a beautiful new stadium was built. The following October, a crowd of 15,000 cheered the opening as the UVA Cavaliers beat the Indians 7-0.
The authors recount just about every one of the 89 games the Braves played, including all 48 wins, 36 losses and 5 ties. There’s a roster that includes every player and miscellaneous data, nicknames (“Skinny,” “Boney,“ “Ripper,” “Slug.”) There are dozens of photographs, with many stylized poses that remind you of vintage baseball cards.
The Division team was an odd duck, because the school, a junior college that held no graduations and was still tethered to the mother school, wasn’t in the same league as four-year institutions. But you could not tell that to coach Scott or the players on one mid-October day in 1932 when they journeyed by special train to Florida and took on the University of Miami Hurricanes – and almost won. Although the ‘Canes dominated the first quarter, scoring a touchdown and almost a second, the Braves “fought like tigers,” according to news accounts. Norfolk, the book recounts, “reached its rival’s 20-yard line late in the game, after benefitting from several passes from Junie Wilson to Terry Maxey. At that point an interception saved Miami from a possible embarrassing loss to Norfolk’s junior college.” The final score was 6-2.
For reasons that echoed the school’s status as a William & Mary “farm team” instead of a stand-alone institution, the Division came close to abandoning football. In 1940, with World War II threatening, only 12 students showed up for the first practice. The team lost all six games without ever so much as “threatening to score,” and that summer football ended for almost seven decades.
Stewart and Garrett make the leap to the present as the decision is made to resume football at ODU and rebuild the stadium. And they say, at the end:
“So, remember the Braves!
Hail to the Monarchs!”
Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com
www.paulclancystories.com.
Photo:
Members of the 1932 team show off for the photographer. The leaping backs include Rhea Walker, far left, and Dick Dozier, second from right. Dozier was killed when his F-6 Hellcat was shot down over Japan two days before the war ended. Courtesy of Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.
