Army's Super-Dupers

This week the football season reaches an early apogee: unbeaten Army and Notre Dame, rated No. 1 and 2 in the nation, are set to beat each other's brains out in Yankee Stadium.

The Irish are hot. They began the season with mediocre prospects, then gradually built up pressure. Last week, their torrid teen-agers outgained and outplayed Navy, but had to settle for a 6-6 tie when the Midshipmen refused to be outfought.

By almost any gauge, Notre Dame has worked up enough steam to press West Point's pants. But Army is a clear favorite with experts and public alike. The 1945 Cadets look and act just as unbeatable as 1944's unbeatables (who laid down a 59-0 barrage that was the worst beating in Notre Dame's history).

The experts might be too sophisticated to admit it, but in the public eye the Army team is a gang of super-dupermen who dwell high on the west banks of the Hudson, knock the sawdust out of tackling dummies all week, emerge from their caves on Saturday afternoon to scare women, children and mere mortal football foes. There is logic in the notion.

Power & Propulsion. As the first half-dozen victims, including Duke and Michigan, went through the grinder, Army out-scored its opponents 271 points to 33, outgained them 2,923 yards to 961. The only statistics that ran against West Point's wonders were those piled up by eagle-eyed officials. They have cracked down with a top-heavy 444 yards in penalties, mostly for illegal use of hands.

Some critics point to this penalty score as proof that Army plays dirty football. Those who have been through the grinder have made no such charge. Army's coach, Colonel Earl ("Red") Blaik, who believes there are more suitable places for pussyfooting than a gridiron, denies the charge and offers movies of their games as evidence that his Cadets keep within the slam-bang limits of big-time football.

Reason is also on Army's side. Its ably coached 204-lb. line and 183-lb. backfield know how to throw their weight around legally and still make it hurt plenty. Above all, Army has the two best backs to come down the pike in years. One is a human blockbuster named Felix ("Doc") Blanchard. The other is a jet-propelled gent named Glenn ("Junior") Davis. They make Army's cream-smooth T attack bubble and boil like no other T in the land.

Combined Fire Power. Those who insist on comparisons give 205-lb. Fullback Blanchard a sharp edge over Stanford's great Norman Standlee. Doc explodes with more muzzle velocity, hits the line with more downright destructiveness. With one more year of Army football to play, Blanchard may seriously challenge Minnesota's mighty Bronko Nagurski as the all-time exponent of straight-ahead brute force.

Once in the clear, Blanchard's beef-trust legs dance on eggshells. He has a 14-game average of 6.6 yards for every time he has carried the ball. He does Army's kicking, blocks and tackles with a killer-diller effectiveness that approaches perfection. Every pro team in the U.S. would jump to make room for Blanchard.

Halfback Davis has far too much leg drive to suffer comparison with such outstanding scat-backs as Yale's Albie Booth. Nor is he comparable to snake-hipped Red Grange. Junior carries a special kind of speed that is all his own. After a brief show of hippiness, enough to get around the end, he simply leans forward and sprouts wings. Once outside, he makes would-be tacklers look ridiculous as they try to cope with his speed, his willowy change of pace and starchy stiff arm. He has gained a grand total of 1,777 yards in his 15 games as an Army halfback--for a breath-taking average of 12.2 yards a try.

Davis and Blanchard's individual fire power combined in one backfield adds NT to Blaik's T. With a smart quarterback mixing his one-two punches, Mister Inside and Mister Outside are guaranteed to drive a rival defense nuts. Even conservative Red Blaik says: "I doubt if any team ever had two such players in the backfield at the same time."

Barns & Bowls. It was only natural that Felix ("Doc"') Blanchard Jr. should be a fullback terror; 240-lb. Felix ("Doc") Blanchard Sr. had been one at Tulane, at least when he got mad enough. In Marlboro County, S.C., where they lived, young Doc began to imitate his old man early. When he was two and a half, he got his aunt to hold a football (see cut) and managed to kick it a few feet. The next year he tried out his father's pipe and set fire to the barn.

After due seasoning on Wild West stories and his father's football yarns, Doc made his high-school football debut. A rival halfback ran straight over him for a touchdown. By the following year, when he transferred to St. Stanislaus Prep at Bay St. Louis, Miss., he knew how to tackle. On his 14th birthday, he played fulltime for the Stanislaus Rockachaws in New Orleans' Toy Bowl game.

"Pro" without Problems. On his football record, Blanchard could have picked his college and named his terms. Although he had a sentimental feeling about Tulane, he finally decided on North Carolina--because Coach Jim Tatum was his mother's first cousin. When he became Pfc. Blanchard in the Army, little persuasion was needed to make him accept an appointment to West Point.

The hard life of a Point plebe did next to nothing to Doc's impish, hillbillyish charm. He still managed to have fun. When he laughed, his mouth spread as wide as an oven door. He had a drawl that could pass for Amos & Andy's Kingfish, and an easy line of chatter about his important "social contacts."

The academic grind, which no West Pointer can laugh off, proved only a passing problem to Blockbuster Blanchard. Differential calculus could hardly be mastered in five easy lessons, but neither could shot-putting, for that matter. In fact, it took Doc almost a whole season to get good enough to win the Indoor Intercollegiate 16-lb. shot-put title. Starting from scratch, he worked up to a solid 50 feet in just one winter.

On the football field, so-year-old Doc Blanchard is the relaxed "pro" (coaches and teammates call him that) who never gets tough until the going gets tough. Then his lips smack shut, his eyes draw a bead and the opposition had better have its insurance paid up.

An old football story, which is dusted off only for the great, has been revived by West Point's 295-lb. line coach, Herman ("Kin Folk") Hickman. According to his version, it was Army's ball, third down and two to go in last year's Navy game. After the Cadets came out of their huddle, one lineman said to his Navy opponent: "Blanchard is going to carry [the ball], I don't know what you're going to do, but I'm going to get out of the way."

Double or Nothing. The other half of Army's high explosive charge is deer-footed Junior Davis, also 20 (he looks younger) and also a second-year Cadet. He was just about the best schoolboy athlete ever grown in Southern California. At Claremont, a citrus-belt town of well-manicured lawns and ivy-covered homes, his high-school sports were football, baseball, basketball and track. He won the Knute Rockne Trophy for being Southern California's outstanding schoolboy track star.*

Junior got his nickname by being born 90 minutes after his twin brother, Ralph. Everything since then has been a double-or-nothing proposition. When one of the Davis twins snipped the tail off one of their cocker spaniel pups and carried the butt as a souvenir, so did the other. They worked together summers, double-dated together, played high-school football together.

During one game, Junior flipped a long pass downfield that was called back for a penalty. Twice more he threw and connected, once to End Ralph, but both plays were nullified. So Junior just up and ran 50 yards for a touchdown. Capping his thunderous high-school career by scoring 236 points his senior year, he had a mild yen for nearby University of Southern California. When West Point beckoned, he said no--unless brother Ralph could come along too. Yes, he could.

Eight Bells & Books. Junior's plebe year ("suck up your gut and pull in your chin") was hard going. Low marks made him double up on some courses, and all but forget football. Sometimes too weary to open a book at night, he would hit the hay at 8, set his alarm for a chilly 4 a.m.

Being the Point's best all-round athlete was something else again. After he got the upper hand of his studies, he became the all-conquering football team's top scorer. He gave up indoor track to play on the Point's potent (won 14, lost 1) basketball quintet. As center fielder on the baseball nine, Junior won a $75,000 appraisal label from Dodger President Branch Rickey. In West Point's famed Master of the Sword test--the 300-yd. run, dodge run, standing broad jump, vertical jump, bar vault, rope climb, chins, parallel bar dips, softball throw, sit-ups--he scored an all-time high of 926 points out of 1,000 (cadet average: 540)./-

On the football field, Junior is the cool, brow-puckering type who insists on shouldering all the worries he can. His big problem is throttling his 175 pounds down to the speed of his interference. Totally unlike most high-pressure halfbacks, he takes high delight in mowing down a rival tackier while running interference for somebody else (he cut down two Duke tacklers with one swoop to make way for a 36-yd. Blanchard touchdown run).

Said Michigan's cagey Fritz Crisler, who had more luck halting Army's two super-dupers than most coaches: "Can they murder you, and in such different ways!"

Solid Citizens. Without Blanchard and Davis, West Point would have just another good wartime football team. Even with them, the old football fact remains that most games are won or lost by the solid citizens who perform up front.

The wheel horse of the Army line is bashful, 225-lb. De Witt ("Tex") Coulter, who plays tackle on offense, switches to center to make long passes back on punt formation, and is one of the best close-up pass-defenders in the business. At the other tackle is 195-lb. Al Nemetz, the only man on the all-conquering 1944 squad, who (his coach said) never made a mistake all season. Captain, guard and off-season wrestler is 190-lb. Jack Green. The ends are manned by 6 ft. 1 in. Hank Foldberg, a music nut, and 6 ft. 1 in. Dick Pitzer, who likes to make as well as eat apple pie.

With Quarterback Arnold Tucker in the driver's seat, Army's first team is at least as good as last year's. The reserves are nowhere near as strong. That leaves Coach Blaik in the sorry state of the multimillionaire down to a mere eleven million.

The best possible equipment helps pre serve that nest egg. The Cadet Corps's intense "school spirit" provides both winning inspiration and a constant brake against inflated egos. Keeping the team razor-sharp despite the heavy curricular chores is the nut that has to be cracked.

Naps & Breaks. The 5:50 a.m. reveille always makes the aching footballers gripe at their hard fate -- mostly in corn-pone drawls (there are six Southerners on the first eleven). And from reveille on, they are never allowed to forget that football runs a poor second to the serious business of being hammered into officers and gentlemen.

Army's football heroes must do everything that every other Cadet does, and do it just as right and just as quick. They have to take the standard three hours a week of physical training, in addition to their hour and a half of daily football practice. Says Cadet Glenn Davis: "I never used to think about taking a daylight nap. Now I get sleepy every time I see a sofa." The two breaks that the 38-man football squad gets over the other 2,500 Cadets are: 1) a seat at the training table, where steaks and ice cream are more fre quent; 2) an occasional chance to leave barracks in the evening to visit the locker room and nurse a hurt or throw the bull.

The squad's loquacious trainer, Roland ("Beaver") Bevan, is good at both. He is as well stocked with football lore as Doc Blanchard's father was, and he has enough pain-curing equipment to stock a hospital for hypochondriacs (which Cadets are not). Some of Beaver's newer gadgets: an infra-red lamp for bruises and sprains, an ultraviolet lamp for infections, a paraffin oil bath to provide extra heat for sprains, a short-wave diathermy machine for deep-penetration heat, frigidaire ice packs for inflammations.

Suffering Superintendent. Neither the physical nor mental state of West Point football was much when Brigadier General Robert Eichelberger (now Lieut. General, commanding the Eighth Army in Tokyo) became superintendent of the Academy in 1940. Watching the team take drubbing after drubbing, the general blew a fuse: "There never has been and there never will be a time when West Point will look with complacency on a 45-0 beating by Cornell and a 48-0 trouncing by Pennsylvania, especially in one football season." He spent a month persuading ex-Army Backfield Coach Red Blaik, whose single-wing formation was working wonders at Dartmouth, to return to the Point.

Spring training that year was a lot tougher than most September practice grinds. Boss Blaik hammered & hammered on fundamentals (he still does, devoting half of every practice session to them). That fall, Army won its first major game (from Columbia) in three years. In 1943, Blaik scuttled his tried & true single-wing power stuff, adopted the quick-opening, tricky T. From power blocking (two-on-one) to man-to-man and downfield brush blocking was an awful reconversion headache. Even in its simplest form, the delicate T timing proved too much to master in a single season. But by last year Blaik had perfected his own compromise T, incorporating his old reverse to the weak side and other single-wing carryovers, and his two-team terrors rolled up a terrific 504 points to the opposition's 35.

Facts & Futures. Earl Blaik has a fidgety stomach. Florid press notices about his team--and they are a steady diet again this year--give it the growls. No advocate of die-for-the-old-school pep talks, Blaik has only one antidote for incipient overconfidence: he preaches cold facts, chalks out in black & white how an inferior team can whip a mightier one that makes a few mistakes.

One prime fact about Blaik's job is that his players must be kept in step for future soldiering. West Point's former footballers have set a good example: of 513 wearers of the "A," no less than 88 have risen to the rank of brigadier general or higher.* Davis and Blanchard have their military sights set. The Speedster, who got airsick on a recent trip home, is air-force-minded. The Blockbuster thinks he will specialize, appropriately, in artillery.

This week the military future seemed far away; Notre Dame and its flashy Quarterback Frank Dancewicz were the immediate objectives to be taken (with Pennsylvania and Navy just over the horizon). Colonel Blaik had gone to Cleveland to see Notre Dame play Navy, and he had some facts to report. As the super-dupers perfected their defense against Notre Dame's plays, Junior Davis was fast approaching his best worrying mood, and Doc Blanchard's lips already had a Saturday afternoon tautness.

To South Bend, where the week's defense problem was to try and find a way of stopping Blanchard and Davis, a Notre Dame scout dispatched a one-word suggestion: ropes.

*Inscribed on the trophy is the late great Knute Rockne's favorite poem:

Dear Lord: In the battle that goes through life, I ask but a field that is fair, A chance that is equal with all in the strife, A courage to strive and to dare. And if I should win, let this be the code: With my faith and my honor held high. And if I should lose let me stand by the road And cheer as the winners go by.

/-Brother Ralph, who scored only 490 points in the Master of the Sword test, plays on the B football team and is Blanchard's shot-putting track teammate.

*The list includes: General Dwight Eisenhower, a 1912 halfback; Major General Vernon Pritchard, the pitching end of the Pritchard-to-Merillat team, a 1914 quarterback; Brigadier General La Verne ("Blondie") Saunders, a 1926-27 tackle; Brigadier General Charles Born, a 1927 All-America end.

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