INTRODUCTION

An Icon Is Born

“I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED that the Heisman [Trophy] is a team award,” said Archie Griffin, the only two-time winner.

“Because I don’t care how great a player you are—on offense if you don’t have that line clicking for you, making holes for you to run through, or as a quarterback if you don’t have that offensive line protecting you to allow you to throw that ball the way you’re capable of throwing it, it just doesn’t happen.”

The Heisman is a 25-pound icon-maker, going, as the plaque below the ballcarrier states, TO THE OUTSTANDING COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYER IN THE UNITED STATES. Every new winner becomes forever tied to the likes of Davey O’Brien, Roger Staubach, and Barry Sanders. By its very definition, the Heisman is the bronze embodiment of this country’s golden boy spirit, not awarded to the team, but to a man.

Or, to modernize the connotation: The Man.

“Football is a team game, and I don’t care how you slice it, you have to have a team really clicking to win the Heisman Trophy,” Griffin said.

Funny thing about that stance, though: as the award’s unmatched winner believes, so too did the Heisman’s namesake, as well as the person who sculpted it. The concept of honoring the nation’s best player was ultimately the brainchild of Willard B. Prince.

In 1935, John Heisman—the first athletic director of New York’s Downtown Athletic Club, who had, in a famed coaching career, helped to bring the forward pass, handoff, and center snap to the game—was approached by Prince, the D. A. C. Journal ’s first publisher and editor, about a trophy to recognize the game’s best player.

“How about it, John?” Prince asked him. “We have this award and we name it after you?”

For Prince, the concept made sense. After an accomplished military career in which he was awarded the Silver Star and was the first American trained in aerial photography, he went into advertising. Prince saw the value not only in the debate that could come with such an award, but also what it could mean to the DAC, which was trying to separate itself from the city’s other private clubs.

Heisman, though, was taken aback.

“No, no, no,” he responded. “It’s a team sport. You can’t give it to an individual.”

Heisman was, if anything, a stickler. The vagabond, who coached at eight schools—among them modern-day powers Auburn, Clemson, and Georgia Tech—wholly believed in fundamentals and discipline, saying upon his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania in 1920, “Eating a piece of pie may not be very detrimental to a man’s physical condition, but irrevocably reduces the prestige of the team’s morale. The captain of the team must be addressed by his title, and all the coaches must be called ‘coach’ while engaged in practice.”

Breaking from those militaristic notions of a unit railed against everything Heisman preached as a coach, but Prince wouldn’t let up.

In 1926, the lawyers and executives who created the DAC bought up land by the Hudson River (the site was the location of George Washington’s farewell to the last meeting of Congress held in New York), dreaming of building an extravagant club. But the stock market crash stopped the group from buying any more land and they were forced to build a 45-story brick building on a plot of land so small that designers had to put the basketball court, tennis courts, pool, miniature golf course, driving range, and boxing ring on different floors.

The club was also burdened with debt and in need of members, so Heisman agreed to take Prince’s idea to his monthly meeting with radio personalities and newspaper writers. They loved the idea of the award.

Heisman relented, though with one major caveat: his name would not in any way be attached to the trophy.

John Heisman relented to the Downtown Athletic Club singling out an individual player for its award, but didn’t want his name attached to it.

Feeling that any traditional trophy wouldn’t do to capture the kind of achievement it was attempting to embody, the DAC sought out a unique design and Willard Prince—whom club management put in charge of the trophy—brought in a number of the leading sculptors of the day. They all turned him down.

He instead found a twenty-three-year-old recent graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, whose professional résumé included factory work making mannequins, dolls, and Easter bunnies.

“Whatever the job, it was always something where I could use some form of sculpting,” Frank Eliscu told FineArt-e.com.

Eliscu’s hands would create the likes of inaugural medals for President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in 1974 and the “Cascade of Books” that sits atop the entrance to the James Madison Memorial Building of the Library of Congress.

The latter would be arguably his most celebrated work, a five-story-high bronze screen that consisted of ninety-eight open books. It weighs twenty-seven tons.

“All that is man, his hopes, his dreams, his aspirations, would never be known if not for the gift of books,” Eliscu would say of his piece. “I wanted to create a work quietly evocative of the building’s purpose, yet powerful enough so that it would not be just a decoration that the eye of the beholder would pass over without a second glance.”

Yet, to the layman, Eliscu is best known not for that installation, his work on the statue of Thomas Jefferson for the Jefferson Memorial, or what he meant to the field of plastic surgery as an army sergeant, when he developed a technique of tattooing for removing birthmarks and aiding in lip reconstruction. His legacy revolves around something he did for his first commission, a sum of $200.

“He did much more significant things and that’s what people remember,” said Eliscu’s daughter, Norma Eliscu Banas. “He was very young and it was not important to him at the time, and he was very pleased that he brought it recognition, but as an artist, he did much better pieces.”

Long before he penned “Looks Like We Made It” or “Mandy,” Barry Manilow wrote commercial jingles, including Band-Aid’s “Stuck on Me.” If Manilow’s name conjured up that ad despite his string of number-one hits, that would be akin to what Eliscu experienced.

Or, as Eliscu himself explained in a 1982 interview, “It would be like trying to compare the golf game of Jack Nicklaus at age twelve to the golf game of Jack Nicklaus today.”

The sculptor had been given just one piece of guidance from the DAC; they wanted a football player in action, and Eliscu created three four-inch wax mock-ups of different poses.

The DAC would send Heisman, Columbia’s Lou Little, and Jim Crowley of Fordham—also a member of Notre Dame’s fabled Four Horsemen backfield—as consultants to see what Eliscu had come up with, and all of them picked a straight-arm runner. But Eliscu’s favorite was of a lineman tackling a ballcarrier, their bodies entangled into the shape of an S.

“He argued with them, and he did their pose,” said Eliscu Banas.

But he did so with a twist. The three Hall of Famers felt the player’s arm should be pointed to the side, a more natural position than the straight-back look that Eliscu had devised. He simply bent the pliable mold until the arm was in the requested spot. Heisman also insisted a smile Eliscu put on the sketch be replaced with a snarl and Crowley and Little pushed for fingers on the runner’s extended hand be splayed out.

“If I had to do it a again, I’d make some changes,” Eliscu told the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, forty-seven years after the fact. “I’d use different techniques and textures in the face and muscular structure.”

He looked to a newspaper picture for some of the details—prophetically, it was of Jay Berwanger, who would become the trophy’s first recipient—and more came from Eliscu’s imagination as he formed clay around a wire frame. But when it came to the uniform, Eliscu wasn’t willing to let artistic license lead him.

He called upon his friend Ed Smith—a running back at New York University who would later play for the NFL’s Boston Redskins and Green Bay Packers—and asked him to bring his uniform to Eliscu’s studio. Wearing his leather helmet, canvas pants, and high-top cleats, Smith posed for his high school friend, extending his right arm forward while cradling a ball with his left. It took nearly a month to complete the sculpture, with Smith posing multiple times.

“I really didn’t know what it was for,” Smith told the Associated Press in 1986. “He was looking for somebody who looked like a football player and he knew just what he wanted.”

A month after those sessions, Eliscu had finished the sculptor in clay and took it to Crowley, who had one of his Fordham players, halfback Warren Mulrey, mimic the pose to ensure authenticity. The working model would go through its final inspection on November 16, 1935 at a dinner in the McAlpin Hotel with Notre Dame coach Elmer Layden and his entire team on hand.

The end result was fluid movement. A look of steely determination is across his face, while the left hand is gripped around the ball with the bicep curled; the right hand is readied to push away a would-be tackler. Legs muscles bulge as he strides ahead.

“That is good football,” Eliscu said in 1977, “but it is not good sculpture because [the fingers] can be broken off too easily.”

It was nearly fifty years later before Smith found out that the trophy carried his likeness, with Eliscu telling a documentary film crew in 1982. In the years following the discovery, the DAC invited Smith to the awards dinners and provided him with his own copy of the trophy.

As for Eliscu’s original plaster cast, it sold in 2005—on the same day that Reggie Bush was awarded the seventy-first Heisman—fetching $271,360 in auction.

“This is the first time there will be two Heisman winners in one day,” auction house Sotheby’s director Lee Dunbar said at the time.

Days after the Fighting Irish had signed off on the pose, Prince sent ballots to writers east of the Mississippi River. His son John was seven at the time and recalls he, his sister (nine), and his brother (ten) helping to tally up the sixty-five votes.

“My dad put them in his briefcase, brought them home to Brooklyn, and set up a card table in the back parlor of this brownstone house and we counted ballots,” said John Prince, now eighty-seven.

That was the only year that the Downtown Athletic Club didn’t farm out the process to an outside company.

The ballots utilized the voting system that Prince had set up, and which is still used to this day. It includes three spots, with first place receiving three points, two going to second place, and one to third.

“He wanted to do something that would take away from piling up the votes on just one guy, so he set up the voting system of 3-2-1,” John Prince said of his father. “That really broke down a lot of favoritism in different parts of the country.”

In that first year, Chicago’s Berwanger received 84 total points, followed by Army’s Monk Meyer (29), Notre Dame’s William Shakespeare (23), and Princeton’s Pepper Constable (20). Seeking to get the word out in an age where there was no national newspaper, Prince and his daughter went to Manhattan to the CBS Radio affiliate that transmitted The Eddie Cantor Show to ask if they’d announce the winner. Berwanger, though, would first receive a telegraph in late November informing him that he had won the upstart award, along with a trip for two to New York.

The Maroons halfback would be the only winner of the statue known as the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, as less than a year after Berwanger’s win, John Heisman died of bronchial pneumonia on October 3, 1936. Two months after his death, with the blessing of Heisman’s widow, Edith Maora Heisman, the award was renamed in her husband’s honor. Every year until her death in ’64, the DAC sent Edith Heisman flowers the week of the announcement.

In the decades that would follow, as names like Niles Kinnick, Doak Walker, and Paul Hornung joined its fraternity, Heisman the trophy had in the minds of many come to overshadow Heisman the man.

“The award is wonderful,” Mike Garrett said upon his 1965 win, “but who’s Heisman?”

It’s now a spectacle, a primetime TV event with a votership that had ballooned to over 1,300 before being trimmed down, and as of 2016 sits at 930 with the addition of its most recent winner, Alabama running back Derrick Henry. The Downtown Athletic Club went bankrupt in 2002, largely due to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York that damaged the facility, and now the Heisman Trust, with a number of corporate sponsors behind it, administers the award.

But those humble beginnings, from a publicity push that was the idea of a journal editor and a hunk of bronze crafted by an impoverished artist, still matter and are still its backbone.

They are especially important to those whose family and whose hands brought it into existence.

John Prince and his wife were on vacation in Sarasota, Florida, in 1977 to see the Ringling Museum of Art and Sallie picked up a local newspaper that included an article on the sculptor who had created two bronze busts of John and Mable Ringling.

“Hey,” Sallie said. “There’s a picture of someone down here who they say sculpted the Heisman Trophy.”

“Well, if his name isn’t Frank Eliscu,” John said, “he’s lying.”

“That is his name,” Sallie answered.

“You’re kidding,” John replied, stunned.

Prince tracked down Eliscu and the two became close. When the sculptor died in 1996, the DAC reached out to Prince to write an article for its journal about his passing. Alongsde the article appeared a photo of the two with the original mold of the trophy.

For Prince, the Heisman has been a constant. Having helped to count those first ballots, he remains a collector of trophy memorabilia and has helped to raise hundreds of thousands for charity by selling signed balls that the Heisman Trust had supplied him.

But for Norma Eliscu Banas, the topic didn’t truly come up until she was a teenager. When she was a young girl in Ossining, New York, she would often join her father in his studio in the garage in the backyard. He helped her create the likes of a ceramic cat and a pin adorned with copper enameling, items the now eighty-two-year-old retired educator still has.

“I used to go and try to learn how to do things and he was very patient,” she said.

“He was dad. He was an accomplished artist.” But over the years she’d learn, “It was something that you just said ‘My dad did the Heisman Trophy,’” she said. “Wow. You got recognition.”

That also comes every December when she sees a new winner claim the award, a yearly exhibit of her dad’s work. It may not be “Cascade of Books,” but decades later, Frank Eliscu’s work is on display.

In that, Banas can’t help but have two prevailing thoughts: one of a legacy formed, and the other of one later realized.

“That’s my dad,” she said. “It’s tickling that people know who he is.… What’s nice also is a lot of people do a one-time thing—when they’re young, especially—but he did go and fulfill the promise of being something special and that’s very nice.”

That in itself is the story of this trophy, its winners, and the annual process of awarding it. Legends are made of youth, and the seeds of promise planted, but what is it that they do with the Heisman? Do they go on to NFL stardom? Do they flame out? Do they use it as a springboard to success in other walks of life?

The accomplishments of the four winners to go on to win Super Bowl MVPs—Staubach (’63), Jim Plunkett (’70), Marcus Allen (’81), and Desmond Howard (’91)—stand alongside those of Vic Janowicz (’50) and Bo Jackson (’85), the only recipients to play pro football and baseball, Charlie Ward (’93), who would spurn the NFL for the NBA, or war heroes Nile Kinnick (’39), Tom Harmon (’40), and Doc Blanchard (’45).

“It’s truly an honor to be elected to this fraternity,” said Reggie Bush, who won in 2005, but would return his trophy following a scandal at USC. “I’ve been in college for three years and it’s the first time I’ve been invited into a fraternity.”

They come together every December in New York, that football royalty, the few who have not just held that trophy, but understand that no other award in American sports carries the same cachet or expectations, no matter the endeavor.

“It kind of puts a lot of pressure on one guy,” Barry Sanders said in his winning year of 1988.

But its recipients will forever carry this designation, one that makes them touchstones and idols for generations.

“You’re known forever as a Heisman Trophy winner,” said Tim Tebow (’07).