Excerpt reprinted by permission from Duke Magazine, November-December 2011.
Cars began to flood onto Main Street as soon as the news reached Durham. Horns blaring, windows rolled open to the late November air, cars filled the artery between Duke's 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 stunned the sports illuminati in 1931, at the age of thirty-nine, when 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, 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 to give Southern Cal a 7-3 victory.
Wade had hungered for a chance at redemption, and his 1941 team delivered one. Once again, the Blue Devils galloped effortlessly through the regular season, winning their nine games by an average of 30 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 games to claim the Pacific Coast Conference title.
And so, as the long procession of cars 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. For the next week, the campus brimmed with festive anticipation.
And then it shuddered. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, December 7 - almost one week after Duke had rejoiced with news of the bowl game - it 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.
Rose Bowl eastbound
On December 13, 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 together drew more than 1 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 organizing similar 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 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.
Ten days after Durham inherited the Rose Bowl, the city was steeped in preparations for the event. Duke borrowed metal bleachers from the University of North Carolina andN.C. State to close in the end of its horseshoe stadium and expand capacity to 55,000. New grass was planted on the field. At the athletics department, extra workers were brought in to answer phones and process ticket requests, which came flooding in from everywhere. Reportedly, crooner Bing Crosby ordered 271 seats over the phone. Tickets sold out in three days.
The game won the approval of the Tournament of Roses Association, the bowl's sanctioning body in Pasadena, but there would be no plans for an elaborate parade. The tournament's queen would be crowned in a simple ceremony three days before the game.
In lieu of pageantry, Durham's plan was to pummel visitors with an unrelenting flurry of Southern hospitality. Townspeople wore ribbons on their lapels that read, "Welcome, Rose Bowl visitors." Nearly every storefront on Main Street displayed a wreath celebrating the event. Oregon State's arrival by train on Christmas Eve morning was regarded as a critical charm offensive. As the players disembarked, still bleary from their six-day cross-country journey, a local high-school marching band regaled them. Martin Chaves, the team's captain, was presented with a framed certificate making him honorary mayor for the day. In short order, the traveling party was whisked off for a tour of Duke's campus and breakfast.
Most in Durham welcomed the distraction from the sobering news of the war. But it would be naive to say the event united Durham in celebration. If anything, the national spotlight brought to the forefront tensions that welled deep in the city. Duke angered many in Durham's African-American community when it initially refused to sell Rose Bowl tickets to African Americans. The university had made a small, segregated bloc of tickets available for other games earlier in the season. Durham's black newspaper, the Carolina Times, published an article claiming that Duke would allow Japanese fans into the Rose Bowl before it admitted blacks. Duke eventually reversed its decision and released a few hundred seats for African-American fans.
Game day
Durham woke on Jan. 1, 1942, to a thick blanket of ashen clouds that doused the city in cold, relentless rain. By game time, the temperature barely topped 40 degrees. Many fans donned oilcloth table liners to keep the rain at bay. At least one group started a fire in the stands in a futile search for warmth.
Whether the rain was to blame or not, the game started inauspiciously for Duke. Duke fumbled the opening kickoff, setting the tone for a sloppy day. Two more fumbles and four interceptions would follow. The turnovers forced Wade's team to scramble out of trouble all day.
And yet, they had chances. Just before halftime, a Duke receiver dropped a pass in the end zone, costing the Blue Devils a go-ahead touchdown. Then, in the third quarter with Duke trailing 14-7, All-American halfback Steve Lach looped around the left end for a 39-yard run. Three plays later, fullback Winston Siegfried plowed into the end zone to tie the game. It seemed Duke was finally regaining its form. On the sideline, Wade was reminded of how his Alabama team had stormed back to defeat Washington and told an assistant, "It looks like 1926 all over again."
But it wasn't to be. On the Beavers' next possession, halfback Bob Dethman found Gene Gray open deep in Duke's backfield. Gray caught the pass, sidestepped a Duke tackler, and raced 30 yards to the end zone to make the score 20-14. The Beavers missed the extra point, but they wouldn't need it.
Duke's offense made valiant work of trying to score in the final period, probing into Oregon State territory on three separate drives. Each time, the crowd tensed with expectation, sure that the game would finally swing in Duke's favor. But the stout Beaver defense thwarted every drive. Duke's defensive line did force a safety, tackling Oregon State's Don Durdan in his own end zone, to narrow the score to 20-16.
The score would get no closer. With the seconds slipping away on Duke's perfect season - and Durham's glorious moment as bowl host - a last, desperate pass fell into an Oregon State defender's hands. Duke was out of chances.
As the game ended, Duke's All-American center, Bob Barnett, stood near midfield staring at the ground. It was just the fourth time in 28 games as a Blue Devil that he had tasted defeat, a sour note to finish his career opus.
Had Duke been cocky? Had they been distracted by the hullaballoo surrounding the game? Wade would blame himself, saying the extraordinary responsibilities of hosting the game took his attention away from preparing his players. But in retrospect, Barnett knew something else wasn't right with his team.
When the game was moved to Durham, several players voiced disappointment. Missing a holiday at home was one thing when there was the promise of a train trip to Pasadena, but a glorified home game - bowl or not - didn't strike some as worth the trouble. Barnett called a team meeting to sort it all out. In the end, Wade granted them a five-day leave to go home for Christmas.
"We were just not ready to play, emotionally and mentally," said Barnett in 2001. "We had too much on our minds."
On to battle
Indeed, as much as the Rose Bowl marked an end for players like Barnett, it also symbolized a beginning. For the first time in a generation, a new year found the U.S. at war, and players on both teams had already begun to contemplate their place in that fight.
Wade, an Army captain during World War I, decided to re-enlist, and he encouraged his players to follow him into battle. Barnett entered the Marine Corps on January 21, 1942. Within months, many of his teammates would also be in uniform, united against an enemy far more fearsome than anything found on a football field.
Years later, Duke's Jim Smith was asked what playing the 1942 Rose Bowl meant. Smith, who completed tours in both the Atlantic and Pacific on the deck of a U.S. Navy destroyer during the war and was on board the USS Bright when its fantail was slammed by a Japanese kamikaze pilot near Okinawa. He had a quick answer to the question: normalcy. Playing the game, Smith said, sent a message to the world that "we're still a nation. We're still here. We're still going about things."
We talk sometimes of football in the language of war, with its bombs and blitzes, its aerial assaults and battles in the trenches. But no one confused the battle that took place in Durham on New Year's Day with the real thing. The bowl was there to entertain, to let people forget for a moment that in other parts of the world, helmeted young men were fighting and dying. For a few hours, at least, the only combat that mattered was symbolic. The only wounds were dealt to pride.
Jessica Wood, of Duke's University Archives, contributed to the research of this article.
A collection of Rose Bowl memorabilia will be on display through Jan. 15, 2012, at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library as part of an Archives exhibit titled "From Campus to Cockpit: Duke During World War II."
