In the HELMET NEWS, HELMET REFLECTIONS series I've been quite
clear that there have been a number of significant "encounters" with
high school or college football uniforms and helmets that made a
tremendous impact upon me, certainly far greater than what could
have been predicted. From the Columbia blue externally padded
helmets of Long Beach High School to the gleaming gold and black of
Army that pushed me to paint my youth league football helmet, to
watching Auburn in one of the first televised games I had ever seen,
seemingly small "things" took hold and served as strong motivational
factors for many years.
We had a small Dumont television, the standard black and white,
eleven-inch screen sized that you had to sit right on top of in
order to identify players during any game. I can recall sitting and
watching Iowa play and carefully noting the description of the
uniforms given by the announcer. The yellow helmets with black
center stripe and black side numerals were set-off by my favorite
jersey design, the classic "Northwestern sleeve stripe" that
consisted in this case of a gold sleeve band with two thinner
flanking bands and enough separation between them to show some of
the jersey color. Of course, the front and back numerals as well as
the sleeve stripes were the contrasting gold on the black jersey.
Iowa players had single bar masks and I spied some white double-bar
masks with short, diagonal connecting bars. This was both new and
exciting for me. I noted that Willie Fleming was an Iowa back that
didn't seem stoppable. At the end of the collegiate season, there
was a month's wait for the four big bowl contests; the Cotton,
Orange, Sugar, and Rose Bowl games. The younger generations may have
forgotten or not known that the Gator Bowl came later than the
"originals", the first game played in 1946 between Wake Forest and
South Carolina. While the Sun Bowl had been around since 1936 making
it just a year younger than the Orange and Sugar and actually a year
older than the Cotton Bowl, it was considered to be a "minor league"
affair that pitted one of the lesser-known Texas colleges like Texas
Western (UTEP), Hardin-Simmons, West Texas State, or what was then a
small-time Texas Tech against other "smaller" programs which in the
mid-1950's included a fledging Florida State, College Of The
Pacific, and Drake. I can't now recall ever seeing one of the Sun
Bowl games on television.
The four bowl games were all televised on January 1st, or with
New Years Day falling on a Sunday, on the second. With the Gator
Bowl a poor-cousin and usually played the day before, the big four
bowl games filled the airways for the entire day and no one seemed
to mind hand-turning the big dial around to bounce back-and-forth
from channel to channel due to the overlapping play. Not fully
understanding that there were home and away uniforms, I settled in
to watch the 1958 season Rose Bowl and was shocked as both Cal and
Iowa took the field. I had anticipated the great black jerseys and
yellow/gold trim and even in black and white, could "see" the
gleaming helmets and numerals. I held this image in my mind until
Iowa entered the field of play. They had on white jerseys! One could
tell the front and rear numbers were black, the standard ten and
twelve-inch style, but the Northwestern sleeve stripe
wasn't present. Instead, Iowa featured what I presumed to be a gold
band with adjacent, flanking black bands on the white background. It
seemed "okay" but as a young, budding, self-appointed expert, I
realized how much I just didn't know about this entire sport of
college football. One of the obvious gaps in knowledge was my
ignorance regarding home and away uniforms. I thought that like our
youth league jerseys and pants, each team wore but one color and
style for an entire season.
The game was great from Iowa's perspective. It wasn't Willie
Fleming however that did the major damage but some guy wearing
number eleven named Bob Jeter who rushed for an eighty-one yard
touchdown and a total of 194 yards in only nine carries! Wow, and to
think Fleming scored twice too in this 38-12 shellacking.
Coincidentally, Fleming, and that day's opposing quarterback, Joe
Kapp of Cal, would team up on the British Columbia Lions of the CFL
to produce some of their most successful teams. This of course was
the hey-day of Iowa football under Head Coach Forest Evashevski but
a few years after handing over the post to assistant Jerry Burns who
later was a key man on the Viking's staff of Bud Grant and
eventually the team's head coach, Iowa football was at a low point.
However, with the Big Ten being "the big deal" in the northeast,
even supplanting the good football played by Eastern Independents
Syracuse, Penn State, and Pitt, I would get to see Iowa on
television at times and remained sympathetic to their plight and
three and four-win seasons. They also had a local player, John
Niland from Amityville, the town I was born in, playing guard so a
few of us who always kept track of the Long Island players tried to
get updates on Iowa football. Going into the 1963 season as I was
trying to build my high school resume so that I could be considered
a viable college recruit, Iowa's primary weapon was wingback/flanker
Paul Krause who was supposed to be among the best defensive players
in the country. As a short football player, my goal was to emulate
the style of the Oilers' Charley Tolar, who was obviously tougher,
stronger, and better than I was, or Dick Bass of the Rams who was
all of the above with twice the speed. However, the tall, lean
Krause just seemed so "good" that you had to like the way he played
and he had a terrific season.
At the end of the season, in addition to the bowl games, there
were a few college all star games with the Blue-Gray, Senior Bowl,
and East-West Shrine games the most publicized.
One of the best things about some of these games was that each
player wore the helmet of his specific college so that you could
have thirty or forty different helmets featured on the field at one
time. For an already obvious uniform "nut", this was a form of
heavenly escape. Imagine my surprise when they announced Paul Krause
of Iowa and he burst onto the field in his...Washington Redskins
helmet?
