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 toymaker.
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.
Becoming the first defensive player to win the Heisman is very like the bull beating the bullfighter. It has always been possible, but that just isn’t the way the game is rigged.
As Woodson himself admitted, had he not had some stunning moments on offense, it would not have happened. Most likely Woodson won the thing on his punt return against Ohio State.
Woodson won not because he had more significant, brilliant moments than Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning, but because he had enough. Woodson gave Heisman voters a chance to reconsider the obvious.
Without Woodson, this would have been your usual quarterback regatta, and not much of that given Manning’s head start. Recent Heisman quarterbacks have not, subsequently, justified the enthusiasm of Heisman voters.
Woodson’s advantage is that however good a defensive player he becomes in the pros, he will be the standard.
Woodson not only breaks tradition but also reminds us of the award’s original concept, to honor the best football player in the country, not merely the best quarterback, running back or odd pass-catcher.
I voted Manning first and Woodson second, and am still convinced of my argument–quarterbacks are more important than cornerbacks–but no voter honestly knows who is the best football player in the country.
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 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.
It would have been appropriate for Manning to hand the Heisman to Woodson because it was Manning’s trophy to lose from the beginning. 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 was that whatever natural and sincere reasons voters had for choosing Manning or Woodson, we were gratefully unfestooned with hype. Woodson earned it on the field.
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.
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Somewhere in my junk, there with the Ty Detmer tie, my Chris Miller “Miller Time” clock and 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 enough arms to strike the Heisman pose.