Among the original designs for the Heisman Trophy was one of a player tackling another. It was classic, contact football, equally depicting offense and defense. It was the favorite of the designer, 20-year-old Frank Eliscu.
Eliscu thought the pose the Downtown Athletic Club selected, the single, stiff-arming runner, looked too much like a doll, and Eliscu was a sculptor, not a toy maker.
Still, $500 was a lot of money in 1935, so Eliscu, and all the Heisman sentiment that followed, went with the guy on offense.
Until, that is, Charles Woodson of Michigan.
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This year’s Heisman race was the most provocative in years, due entirely to Woodson, a defensive marvel and an occasional offensive nuisance.
Without Woodson, this would have been your usual quarterback regatta, and not much of that given Peyton Manning’s head start. Recent Heisman quarterbacks have not, subsequently, justified the enthusiasm of Heisman voters.
It was not until after I had written a column explaining my Heisman vote for Manning that I became aware of how involved folks had become in this little football popularity contest.
Tennesseeans, including the athletic department of the school, let me know how grateful they were for my support, while Michiganians reviled me as a traitor to my Midwestern roots, which are, usually, sassafras.
The soundness of my argument–quarterbacks are more important than cornerbacks–was cheered loudly by the Dixons and jeered less cordially by the Masons, or whoever is where on which side of that line. I apologize to both sides.
The trouble with the Heisman is there are no real rules, no bylaws, no specific qualifications other than, and I am quoting from instructions on the ballot, (1) sign it, (2) mail it, (3) let the Downtown Athletic Club know if you have not received the first two instructions.
This was not just a regional debate, but also a division of labor, the glamor job and the grunt job. I suppose the only way actually to have answered the question of who does what better would have been for Manning to try to complete passes against Woodson. No doubt, that will come.
Manning may be a quarterback for the ages. The name Manning does span generations, his dad’s (Archie, who finished third to the last great Heisman quarterback winner, Jim Plunkett) and Peyton’s own, and just coincidentally, basketball’s Danny there in the middle, so that the last time big-time sports was Manning-free, we thought we wouldn’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
It was Manning’s trophy to lose from the beginning, and checking back to preseason contenders, Woodson was not among them. Nor was Michigan among those teams figuring in the national championship.
The two emerged in tandem, Michigan the powerhouse, Woodson, the reason for it. Maybe this is one time all the votes were in too early. We could have waited until we learn which team ends up No. 1.
The one remarkable thing about this Heisman race is that whatever natural and sincere reasons voters had for choosing Manning or Woodson, we were gratefully unfestooned with hype.
When the Tribune sports department was allowed to look like a rec room instead of an insurance office, we had a life-size poster of a Clemson football player thumbtacked to the wall, although we did not know it really was life size until we actually met Refrigerator Perry.
That’s another story. Originally Perry’s nickname was G.E., after the appliance maker, rather than the appliance. But because in the Heisman hype a college football player could not even obliquely endorse a brand name, he became the Refrigerator, shortened fondly to the Fridge.
Rashaan Salaam ran into a similar issue at Colorado when someone invented a sandwich, the Rashaan Salaami, which, thankfully, was never mailed to the Heisman electorate, or at least this particular one.
Somewhere in my junk, there with the Ty Detmer tie, my Chris Miller “Miller Time” clock, an old Paul Palmer comic book, I must still have a picture of Napoleon McCallum dressed in costume as, yes, Napoleon.
He is no doubt grateful that his name is not Horatio Nelson. He wouldn’t have had an arm to strike the Heisman pose.