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by Michael Penn
IN DECEMBER 1944, amid the snow-crusted mountains of southern Belgium, Wallace Wade happened upon a young infantryman making coffee. Wade, a lieutenant colonel in the Army’s 106th Infantry Division, had been chasing Hitler’s army for seven months, commanding an artillery battalion that had fought the Germans at Normandy and helped force them out of France. But the relentless combat and the encroaching chill of winter were taking a toll. Wade’s men were out of ammunition and low on food. He himself hadn’t eaten in two days.
Cold and famished, Wade asked the soldier for some of his coffee. A round-faced, stout young man in his early twenties, the soldier poured a cup for Wade and then gathered some food. He didn’t appear to recognize Wade as anything but a superior officer. But as the men chatted, they realized their paths had crossed before. They had met almost exactly three years earlier, on a soggy New Year’s Day in Durham.
Ironically, the day was one Wade often wanted to forget. It had been his final game as coach of the Duke Blue Devils before enlisting in the Army, what was supposed to be the crown on a golden season. Instead, he walked away in disappointment and defeat. The soldier, whose name was Stanley Czech, had been a tackle for the victors that day.
But in another light— one that seemed clearer in the midst of a war half a world from home—the game had been a stunning success, if only for the fact that it was played at all.
Cars began to flood onto Main Street as soon as the news reached Durham. Horns blaring, windows rolled open to the late November air, they filled the artery between campus and downtown, forming a slow-moving parade of spontaneous joy. Young men in Sunday blazers piled onto convertible sedans, shouting to each other: Pasadena! Here we come!
In 1941, no one argued about the most prestigious of college football’s bowl games. The Rose Bowl was king. The oldest of the bowls, it was also the most transcontinental, pitting champions from east and west, something that rarely happened in those days. As a result, the game often served as a barometer of regional football power. When Alabama upset Washington in 1926, it helped legitimize the Crimson Tide— and Southern football, generally—as worthy of the national stage.
Sixteen years later, the man who coached Alabama in that game was at Duke, crafting a new legend. Wallace Wade had stunned the sports illuminati when in 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, he left Alabama to coach at Duke, a university with a splendid new Gothic campus, but comparatively little football glory. He quickly changed that, leading the Blue Devils to Southern Conference championships in 1933, 1935, 1936, and 1938. But he had yet to bring a bowl trophy to Durham. His only previous opportunity, the 1939 Rose Bowl, had proved demoralizing: After not allowing a point to be scored against them all season, the Blue Devils gave up a touchdown in the final minute of the game, giving Southern Cal a 7-3 victory. Following the loss, Wade had irked Los Angeles reporters when he declined to shake hands with the Southern Cal player who threw the game-winning pass. Although he denied spiteful motives— he said he wanted to congratulate Southern Cal’s coach first—sportswriters pilloried the coach in print, only deepening the frustration of the trip.
Wade had hungered for a chance at redemption, and his 1941 team had delivered one. Once again, the Blue Devils had galloped effortlessly through the regular season, winning their nine games by an average margin of thirty points. The Associated Press ranked them second in the country, behind only Minnesota. In Pasadena, Duke would face Oregon State, a team few had expected to contend for a bowl bid. Early on, the Beavers appeared destined to prove their doubters right, losing two of their first four games, before rallying to win five straight and claim the Pacific Coast Conference title.
And so, as the long procession slinked toward downtown that Sunday afternoon, most Duke fans liked their odds. Students and townspeople began making plans to make the 2,500-mile journey to southern California. One package offered a crosscountry train ticket, hotel accommodations, and a side trip to the Grand Canyon for $181. At the Western Union office, students lined up to send wires home, many of them begging for money to purchase a ticket.
For the next week, the campus brimmed with festive anticipation. And then it shuddered. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7—almost exactly one week after it rejoiced with news of the bowl game—Duke was thrown into sudden mourning. Teletype machines clattered with horrible details of the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor. As students scrambled for maps to locate the naval base, a solemn reality was beginning to dawn. The U.S. was at war.
Two nights later, students huddled around portable radios to listen to President Roosevelt’s radio address. The speech, calling for national sacrifice in a long, arduous war, hardly struck a mood for football. “College seems rather unimportant now,” remarked Duke student John W. Kennedy ’42, A.M. ’47 to a Durham newspaper reporter, “and the Rose Bowl doesn’t seem very significant.”
There was historical precedent for abandoning sports in the wake of war: In 1918, following America’s entry into World War I, the War Department ordered an early end to the major-league baseball season. The Olympic Games of 1940, scheduled to take place in Helsinki, had been similarly nixed. Some pundits thought college football should follow suit, keeping the nation’s focus squarely on the front. “In the light of this historic and unprecedented crisis,” wrote the Charlotte Observer in an editorial, “the nation needs to turn itself to more practical pursuits than those of any program of pleasure.” Others argued sports were important for maintaining morale and bolstering patriotism.
With no official pronouncement on the bowl, Duke went about the business of readying for the game. The team carried on with daily drills the week after Pearl Harbor, expecting to board a train for Pasadena the following Saturday. On December 13, however, California governor Culbert Olson informed Rose Bowl officials that he had received a request from Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commander of the Army’s West Coast operations, to cancel the game. DeWitt thought the game and the Tournament of Roses Parade, which combined drew more than a million spectators, posed too great a security risk, given the Japanese offensives in the Pacific.
What few in Durham realized was that Duke officials, anticipating the bowl might be canceled, had been quietly planning an alternative. That same day, Wade and Dean William Wannamaker issued an invitation to Oregon State athletics director Percy Locey to play the game in Durham, “either with Rose Bowl sanction or otherwise.” Although groups in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York were similarly organizing offers to host the bowl, Locey was eager to realize something from the school’s first Rose Bowl bid. Durham was certainly a defensible choice: Duke’s football stadium, built twelve years earlier, was the largest in the South outside of the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. And as Wade had so proudly noted in his invitation, “Our climate at New Year’s is usually favorable for football.”
A day later, Locey accepted the offer. Duke might not be headed to the Rose Bowl, but the Rose Bowl was headed to Duke.
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