The Specialist

Michigan's football team hasn't played in a Rose Bowl game since the first Tournament of Roses game in 1902. It was a sizzling New Year's Day in Pasadena, but Michigan's eleven "iron men" lasted the whole game, without using any of the four subs they had brought along.

The other team, Stanford, found the going harder. One banged-up Stanford man after another was helped off field--until there were no subs left. A third-quarter dialogue between Michigan's captain and Stanford's has been preserved-- though perhaps in slightly altered form --in Michigan's annals. Said the Michigan captain: "In view of the circumstances, I suggest we end the game by mutual agreement." Answered the Stanford captain bravely, through bloody lips: "We'll play on." A few minutes later, Stanford's W. K. Roosevelt (a cousin of Teddy's), one of whose legs had already been banged up earlier in the game, injured the other. That did it. The game was called off with six minutes left to play. Said Stanford's captain: "If you are willing, sir, we'll call it a day." The score: Michigan 49, Stanford o.

Modern Design. Michigan's 1947 Wolverines are a good bet to be the second team in Michigan's history to play in Pasadena's Tournament of Roses. They have been rated the nation's best. They are as unlike Fielding ("Hurry-Up") Yost's old-time Michigan teams as modern design can make them. There are no roughcast iron men on Michigan's 1947 squad. It is a collection of chrome-plated, hand-tooled specialists. Some never get a chance to make a tackle, others never throw a block. Usually none stays in a game long enough to work up as much sweat as the radio announcer, who tries to keep track of them as they trot on & off.

Michigan's shrewd Coach Fritz Crisler has taken advantage of the unlimited substitution rule. In the first four games of the season, Crisler's team used everyone but the water boy, and averaged 55 points a game.

The way they did it was something to behold. Lacking brawn, they have to be nimble. And jack-nimble is what they are --and as well-drilled as the Rockettes. Michigan's sleight-of-hand repertory is a baffling assortment of double reverses, buck-reverse laterals, crisscrosses, quick-hits and spins from seven different formations. Sometimes, watching from the side lines, even Coach Crisler isn't sure which Michigan man has the ball. Michigan plays one team on offense, one on defense.

Only two players (Halfback "Bump" Elliott and Fullback Jack Weisenburger) play on both. Thus, in effect, Crisler's first team consists of 20 men. Whenever Michigan's defensive team regains the ball, Crisler orders: "Offense unit, up and out," and nine men pour onto the field at once.

In the season's opener, Michigan State went down, 55-0. Then Michigan rolled over Stanford-(49-13), Pittsburgh (69-0) and Northwestern (49-21). Last week came the traditional grudge match: the Little Brown Jug game with Minnesota.

Brown Jug games have a way of turning into upsets, and this was nearly one. The gamblers had guessed that Michigan was 26 points better; Michigan was hard put to it to win 13-6.

But the big fact was that, on a Saturday full of surprises, Michigan came through, still undefeated.* It was a day on which Purdue humbled unbeaten Illinois, last season's Rose Bowl champions, 14-7, and Columbia gave mighty Army its first defeat (21-20) in three years.

The grunting Gophers on Minnesota's line averaged 201 Ibs., outweighing Michigan's line 19 Ibs. per man. All afternoon they smashed into Michigan's pony backfield, frequently upsetting Crisler's delicately timed plays. Outrushed on the ground, Michigan could well be thankful for its prize specialist, 6 ft., 182 Ib. Halfback Bob Chappuis (rhymes with happy-us/-). He is Crisler's triggerman. His job is to throw the forward passes, and there is no one in 1947 collegiate football who does it better. In the Minnesota game, it was his flat, sure, 35-yd. throw to Bump Elliott that gave Michigan its first score.

In Michigan's first five games, Specialist Chappuis was on the field less than one-third of the time, but of the 27 passes he threw, 19 were complete--five of them for touchdowns.

Born That Way. When Chappuis fades back to pass, he is a slow-motion study in coolness and concentration. To anxious Michigan rooters, it seems an agonizingly long time before he throws. Crisler, after 25 years of coaching (at Chicago, Minnesota, Princeton and Michigan), places Chappuis on the same lofty pedestal with deadeye Benny Friedman, a Michigan immortal of the 19203. Says Fritz: "You can't get much better than that."

Crisler believes that great passers are born, and that the difference between a great and a merely good passer is in the eyes. Chapp's brown eyes, in one panoramic glance, spot his receivers tearing downfield and the defenders rushing in to nail him. Chapp makes fine use of his blockers, sensing when to fade deep or step up inside to fire the ball. Like a good baseball catcher, he throws off his right ear, with a snap motion.

He throws what coaches call a "heavy ball." His passes are harder to handle than the "floaters" Benny Friedman used to pitch, but they are also harder for the other team to break up.

Last year, before the season began, Chappuis injured his right wrist, but put off getting an X-ray examination until after the last game. It turned out that his wrist was broken, but he set a new Big Nine passing record with 36 completions in 64 attempts.

As a runner, Chapp is much less shifty than his predecessor Tom Harmon, although last year his combined running and passing (for 1,235 yds.) far outstripped Harmon's best total. He is a heavy-legged, hippy runner along the lines of "Flatfoot Frank" Sinkwich, late of Georgia. He is a superb faker and a hard tackier. But he has one weakness--pass defense--which keeps him on the bench when the enemy has the ball. The way Chapp explains it": "You have to smell where to go on pass defense--and my sniffer's not too good."

The Crisler System. The intricate system that Chappuis fits into at Michigan is designed by a man who likes to construct puzzles. At 48, greying Herbert Orin ("Fritz") Crisler has the easy, competent air of a skilled physician (he once studied medicine at the University of Chicago). An ardent admirer of Robert E. Lee's battle strategy, he tries to imitate it: feinting at one point, hitting another.

Crisler hasn't a single so-called "power play" in all his bag of tricks. Yet he builds his plays on the single-wingback, a formation fundamentally designed for power. On most teams the fullback is a burly, bludgeoning line-plunger. Crisler's fullbacks must be slick ball-handlers; they start most of his plays.

A Crisler player has to have savvy: a brainless muscleman couldn't remember all Crisler's complex plays. Michigan's current squad is scholastically above the general student average at Ann Arbor. Crisler's system is built around nine basic delayed hits and the same number of "quick hits." But all 18 can be run from seven different formations: a single-wing (balanced), a single-wing (unbalanced), the five-one, the short punt, the "T," man-in-motion, and something he calls the "300." These, plus nine basic passing plays and some "Specials," bring the total to over 170. No iron man in the days of wooden stands ever had so much to learn.

"The Lord." Coach Crisler is known at Michigan as "The Lord." The boys say that it never rains in Ann Arbor before 6 p.m., when football practice is over; Crisler won't let it. He seldom bawls anybody out, but when he does, it takes. Sample: "Confound it, if you want to be sensational, bounce the ball, turn a somersault, then pick it up and run."

Scratch a football coach, and you generally find a man who fancies himself an amateur psychologist. Among Crisler's homemade convictions is the belief that a coach's approach to his players should vary with their national origins. Italian boys, he says, need encouragement because they are lethargic in action. Scandinavians are the hardest to stir up ("I begin needling them on Tuesday"). He plasters the locker-room wall with cautionary signs. This season the warnings are directed against overconfidence. Says one: "There are no savings deposits in football. It's what you do in each game that counts."

When his boys go to the dressing room at halftime, Crisler lets them rest for six minutes. For the next five, he explains with chalk and blackboard what changes have to be made in their tactics. He does it without dramatics. If Michigan has a big lead at halftime, Crisler always asks, as his players set off toward the field: "What's the score?" The proper answer, delivered in unison: "Nuthin' to nuthin'."

Thirteen Words. "In the days when I played, the opposition were bastards and barn-burners," Crisler says. That kind of approach, he considers, is now as outdated as the iron men. His pep talks are delivered in midweek. He boils down the basic difference between offense and defense to 13 words: "On offense, it's poise, finesse, determination. On defense, it's fury, fight, utter abandon." He gives his "offense unit" one kind of indoctrination, his "defense unit" the other. Crisler even has a "point-after-touchdown" unit--including a specialist place-kicker and seven of the biggest linemen on the squad.

No matter how far ahead they are, Michigan players always manage to look half undressed--their blue jerseys and yellow pants ripped and torn. Crisler has a reason for that too: once he lost a game at Princeton when an opposing player grabbed his halfback by the sleeve and brought him down. Now Crisler uniforms his teams in flimsy zephyr cloth so rippable that Harmon once used up 20 jerseys in one season.

Not for Hire. Where does Crisler get the specialists to make his system run? Like every other U.S. coach, he knows that Santa Claus doesn't leave them in his stocking every Christmas. Says Crisler: "I see nothing wrong with an alumnus helping a deserving athlete through college. What I object to is alumni who throw money into a kitty and say, 'Go out and get a football team.'"

About 70% of Michigan's players (including Chappuis) are ex-G.I.s and get their tuition free from the Government. Some no doubt get side help from alumni. Says Bob Chappuis: "Some boys back home ask me how much I'm being paid. When I say 'Nothing' they think I'm lying. And I'm not."

In his last year at college, Robert Richard Chappuis, 24, carries his football reputation lightly. Unlike hail-fellow Tom Harmon, he is incapable of calling everybody on campus by his first name. His snaggleteeth and sharp features earned him the nickname "Bird Face" when he was a kid. An easy way to make him blush (as his teammates do when things get dull) is to ask him for his autograph.

At the Phi Delt house, where he is president for the second year, he is a sharp bridge player and a whizz at cribbage. His card sense helps augment his G.I. allotment and the $50 a month he gets from his dad, who is an executive in a Toledo, O., porcelain-products company. On the practice field, Chappuis is very "coachable," which is exceptional in a senior. Chappuis learns easily, just as he does in the classroom, where he makes a C-plus average seemingly without ever opening a book.

When Dad Was Young. It was at the family dinner table that Bob Chappuis first heard about football. His dad had once played quarterback for Denison U., and like most fathers, liked to recall how good he was. The story Bob liked best was dad's quarterback sneak: "Mind you, I weighed only 135 Ibs. then. . . . I took the ball on my own 20, broke into the clear. The secondary had me trapped by the sidelines. . . . I spun away from one tackier . . . then another. . . ." The story grew each year; in the most recent version, dad ran from his own two-yard line, and was tackled on the enemy's one-yard line. Says Bob with a grin: "Dad has no clippings to prove it."

When it came time for Bob to go to college, Chappuis Sr. said he didn't care where Bob went so long as it wasn't Ohio State. Dad just didn't like Ohio State. Bob chose Michigan, which is only 56 miles from Toledo.

Danger Is Relative. The morning of a game, when the squad gathers around the training table at 10:30 for their pre-game lunch, Chappuis manages to swallow a cupful of beef broth, but he only nibbles at the filet mignon put before him. Football is still a deadly serious and unnerving game to him, even though he has faced, as have many players on 1947 squads, worse menaces than an onrushing tackier. On Christmas Day, 1944, Sergeant Chappuis rode in a B-25 as radioman and gunner, on his first mission. The target: a railroad bridge in Italy's heavily fortified Brenner Pass. After that, in the next seven weeks, there were 19 more missions. The 21st time, he got it.

The B-25 had been assigned to bomb a mountainside, so that rocks would fall and seal a railroad tunnel below. Over the target, a burst of flak knocked out one engine, then the other engine went out. When the order came to bail out, the tailgunner went out first, and got stuck in the escape hatch, pinned against the rear of it by the wind pressure. Chappuis kicked him in the only accessible place--his head --and knocked him loose. Then he jumped.

Bob and the plane's top-turret gunner landed just 20 yards apart. They buried their parachutes under the snow. Chappuis guessed that they were about 160 miles behind the German lines, and just north of the Po River. The day was foggy.

Uncle Tom's Cabin. The date was Feb. 13, but their luck was in. The first person they saw was an Italian peasant on a bicycle, a member of the Partisans, who led them to a house where they got a meal of noodles and pig's liver, met the tailgunner (picked up by another member of the local underground) and experienced their first bombing: some P-47s dive-bombed a nearby bridge. As days went by, Chappuis & Co. were moved from house to house, and village to village, towards the Swiss frontier. Once they walked right past a German sentry, without being detected. They were dressed in shawls and farmer hats--but they were still wearing G.I. shoes.

They got only as far as the town of Asola (pop. 2,304) and there sweated out the rest of the European war, on the second floor of a pink stucco house at No. 30 Via Toresano. The German headquarters was at No. 35, two houses away. Because the Germans' drill ground was directly across the street, they could not walk near a window. They never talked above a whisper.

After being cooped up in one room for a month, Chapp and the two gunners (both from Pennsylvania) grew tired of looking at each other. Says Chapp: "The other two boys went a little wacky and I guess I did too. I wanted to double up my fist and slug them so many times." What made life bearable for them was the generosity and courage of the Ugolini family, whose house they hid in--father, mother and two pretty daughters, Gina, 23, and Wally, 20. Gina and Wally brought the boys hot water, their meals, and the only English book they could find in the town (a well-thumbed copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and sometimes played cards with them in the evening. Chapp took a shine to blonde Wally, who was smart, and a year younger than he was. She called him Roberto.

One night, the most anxious of the three months in hiding, Gina's Fascist boy friend walked in the house unannounced and found her playing cards with the three men. He demanded to know who the men were, and Gina, without hesitation, told him that they were U.S. flyers. The Fascist turned around, started back down the stairs, and announced that he was going to turn them in. "Go ahead," said Gina. "But you will have a dead fiancee. . . . They will shoot all of us." The boy friend changed his mind.

After V-E day, Chappuis rejoined the U.S. forces, but only after a memorable week's celebration in Asola. The liberated townspeople toasted the Americans with red wine and white. The night of the peace, all seats were removed from the local theater for a victory ball, and while two orchestras played onstage, Roberto danced until 6 a.m., first with Wally, then with Gina.

Wally Doesn't Know. Roberto still writes regularly to Wally, and makes Italian one of his courses at Michigan. His father sends the Ugolinis weekly food packages, and has offered to pay Partisan Leader Aldo Camuci's way through college in the U.S. Bob Chappuis hasn't told Wally yet about his girl at Michigan, Ann Gestie, who is 20, wide-eyed and blonde. He gave his Phi Delt pin to Ann three weeks ago. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning they meet at Wikel's drugstore for a Coke. Says Ann: "Going steady sounds kind of corny, but that's what we're doing."

They talk about the future: Should Bob play pro football? Crisler thinks he shouldn't; Ann isn't sure. "All I know about football," she says, "is that one team goes this way and the other goes that way."

She also couldn't help but know, as does everyone at Ann Arbor, that this Saturday is the crucial one for Bob Chappuis and his fellow specialists on Michigan's team. They face Illinois, unbeaten until last week, and anxious to unseat a championship-bound Michigan as they did in 1946.

No one knew better than Chappuis and his mates that from now on they would have to point for every game, for so long as they were unbeaten, every team was pointing for them. Michigan's team was decidedly superstitious about their winning ways. At training table, no one would think of changing his seating order. In the locker room, players remembered which teammate had helped pull their jerseys down over their shoulder pads before the first game of the season, and made sure that the same man did it every game. The squad's biggest superstition: by unspoken agreement, no one ever mentioned the words that everyone thought about most: the Rose Bowl.

* The other top undefeated teams: Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Texas, Southern California, Penn State, Georgia Tech.

/- A family concession to U.S. unwillingness to get their name straight. Another branch of the family, living in Louisiana, keeps the French pronunciation, "Shap-wee."

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