The Coach

When Amos Alonzo Stagg first started to coach football at the University of Chicago, not one of the school's buildings had been finished. Jim Corbett had just won the heavyweight championship from John L. Sullivan; Knute Rockne was a four-year-old youngster in Norway; and it was eight years before the founding of baseball's American League. At Chicago only 13 men turned up for football practice, so Coach Stagg, a Walter Camp All-America end at Yale (class of '88), joined the fun and played on the team himself.

In his 41 years as Chicago's football coach, "Old Man Stagg," as he is still affectionately called, was always ready to join the fun--provided it was good, clean fun. He never allowed his players to swear on the field or in the locker room. He was a training-table model for his athletes because he never smoked or drank--not even coffee or tea. Always trying to improve the game, Coach Stagg devised one innovation after another--e.g., the tackling dummy (made from an old mattress), spread formation, tackle back shift and end-around plays.

Time to Retire. Stagg made other contributions to the game that do not show up in record books or statistics. In 1922, when Chicago was playing Princeton's "Team of Destiny" (Fullback Charley Caldwell, now Princeton's coach; Quarterback John Gorman; End Howard ["Howdy"] Gray), the Chicago offense was stopped cold on the Tiger two-yard line. After Chicago tried unsuccessfully to batter its way through center, Stagg's assistant, "Fritz" Crisler (later a Princeton coach, 1932-37), suggested that the Old

Man send his son, Alonzo Jr., into the game to try an end run. Stagg refused, and Chicago lost the game, 21-18. Afterwards, Crisler asked Stagg why he had refused. Stagg pointed to an obscure footnote in the rule book: "The committee deprecates the use of a substitute to convey information." Alonzo Jr. had lost his chance to become a football immortal (he never even won his letter) because Old Man Stagg refused to wink at the rule book.

When he was 70, the Old Man got a polite suggestion from the university that it was time to retire. Outraged, he flatly announced that he had at least 15 more years of coaching. As usual, he was right. He took over the coaching job at California's little (1,314 students) College of the Pacific, and his 1939 team upended big California, 6-0. Meanwhile, Chicago was losing by 61-0 scores. That was the year that once-mighty Chicago, which had won 241 games (107 losses) for Old Man Stagg, finally gave up football.

Time to Reform. In 1946, when Stagg was 84, College of the Pacific retired him once again. Again he refused to quit. He went East to Susquehanna, where he became coach of the offense. Defensive coach: Amos Alonzo Stagg Jr. But every spring, Stagg hops back to California for spring practice at College of the Pacific, where he assists Athletic Director Paul Stagg, another son.

Last week, chipper and tanned, Old Man Stagg spryly demonstrated a few football plays on the thick, velvety turf of Chicago's Stagg Field. He was there as guest of honor at a celebration of his goth birthday (actual date: Aug. 16).

Does the Old Man think that basketball scandals, commercialized football and athletic subsidization have ruined amateur athletics in the U.S.? No, not quite: "A lot of our amateur spirit is gone, yet I don't think it is irretrievably gone. But if the college presidents and faculties don't go through with plans to reform college football and athletics in general, they will be destroying something that is marvelous in our life." Football's elder statesman likes to remember the old days at Chicago when "the only reward the boys got was a sweater or a letter."

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