CHAPTER TWO

IDOL WORDS

THEY GATHERED AT Floyd Bennett Field on a balmy December day—at least, by Brooklyn, New York, standards—sitting on the runway outside of a US Navy plane that had just flown over Broadway. Navy officials and the Midshipmen’s football captain, Al Bergner, were on board, but the contingent, led by Downtown Athletic Club director Bill Bradley was there for one reason, and it was written across the massive sign stretched out before them.

DOWNTOWN A.C. WELCOMES KINNICK 1939 HEISMAN FOOTBALL TROPHY WINNER.

Iowa’s Nile Kinnick, the first megastar of the award’s era, had arrived.

To be fair, more than a decade before Kinnick, Red Grange had captivated the nation at both the collegiate level at Illinois and in the professional ranks with the Chicago Bears and New York Yankees. In terms of Kinnick’s contemporaries, Michigan’s Tom Harmon was the one to appear on the covers of both TIME and LIFE magazines.

But it was what Kinnick represented in headlining an impossible turnaround for the Hawkeyes that captivated a nation.

“The city of New York and its 7,000,000 inhabitants, who rarely go overboard about anything, surrendered completely,” wrote a United Press reporter about the Hawkeye halfback and his coach, Eddie Anderson, who, a day after Kinnick received his Heisman, was honored as Coach of the Year by the New York World-Telegram. Along with his plane ride over the city and a luncheon with navy officials, Kinnick received a kiss from Mary Jane Walsh, a Davenport, Iowa, native who was appearing on Broadway as Eileen Eilers in a run of Too Many Girls. The Mutual Broadcasting System was transmitting both The Navy’s Tribute to Nile Kinnick, Winner of the Heisman Trophy and the award presentation ceremony.

“He has been in New York little more than 24 hours and already he has been presented with everything but the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the Trylon and Perisphere,” wrote Jack Singer in the New York Journal and American Sports. “He expects someone to try and sell him the Brooklyn Bridge, but we so secretly suspect that he is smart enough to buy it and then sell it right back at a neat profit.”

In 1938, Iowa had gone 1-6-1, but in 1939 a group that would be dubbed the “Ironmen” took down powers Notre Dame and Minnesota in consecutive weeks, allowing the team to finish 6-1-1. Kinnick played nearly every minute, including each play on offense, defense, and special teams over a five-game span.

Just 5-foot-8 and around 175 pounds, Kinnick ran for 374 yards and 5 touchdowns and hit on 31 passes for 638 yards and 11 scores. He delivered 16 of Iowa’s 19 TDs and, with his kicking duties, was responsible for 107 of its 130 points.

“Nile was their leader,” Dr. William Paul, the Hawkeyes’ team doctor, told the Daily Iowan in 1972. “Nobody on the team was jealous of him. They depended on him and they followed him—and most of the time, Nile did not disappoint them.”

Nor did he disappoint when addressing the press contingent at the Heisman dinner with a speech that, thanks to MBS, was broadcast across the nation.

After thanking his coach, teammates, the writers, and the Downtown Athletic Club, Kinnick said, “I would like, if I may, to make a comment which I think is appropriate at this time.”

Coming two years before the United States began its involvement in World War II, he proclaimed his beliefs that the nation would be better served by staying out of the conflict.

Iowa’s Nile Kinnick gave an impassioned speech in 1939, proclaiming his beliefs on whether the United States should be involved in World War II.
(Nile Kinnick Papers, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa)

“I thank God that I was born to the gridirons of the Middle West and not to the battlefields of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the football players of this country would rather fight for the Heisman Trophy than for the Croix de Guerre.”

At first, those in attendance remained silent.

The year before, TCU’s Davey O’Brien was praised for the humbleness he exuded in a speech in which he said, “I am certainly appreciative of the high honor, but I feel I must give credit to the men who made me; to coach Dutch Meyer who taught me all I know, to his assistants, to those great linemen, Ki Aldrich and I. B. Hale … I am not much at speaking so cannot begin to tell you how much it all means. But I hope this will help.”

The words of Yale’s Clinton Frank, the 1937 recipient, the Associated Press reporter on hand penned, were “as calm and unaffected as the young man himself.” The halfback closed out his acceptance by saying “Football has always been a sport, a game to me, and nothing more. I was interested in it as such, I played it as such, and I leave it as such.”

Never before had a winner used the Downtown Athletic Club as a pulpit to deliver a message, and after that initial silence, the AP’s Whitney Martin reported that “seven hundred men and women rose and cheered and whistled … You realized the ovation wasn’t alone for Nile Kinnick, the outstanding college football player of the year. It was also for Nile Kinnick, typifying everything admirable in American youth.”

****

Ironically, and tragically, Kinnick’s fate would lie in that war from which he wished the US to absolve itself. After a year of law school in Iowa City, he enlisted in the Naval Air Reserve, writing, “There is no reason in the world why we shouldn’t fight for the preservation of a chance to live freely, no reason why we shouldn’t suffer to uphold that which we want to endure. May God give me the courage to do my duty and not falter.”

He was called to active duty three days after Pearl Harbor and stationed in the Caribbean. On the morning of July 2, 1943, Kinnick’s F4-F Wildcat developed an oil leak over the Gulf of Paria near Trinidad. The plane plunged into the sea, and while another pilot saw Kinnick bobbing in the water, by the time a rescue boat arrived, he was nowhere to be found. He was twenty-four years old.

“He was loved by everyone who knew him; his kindness and consideration for others stamped as a typically ideal American,” Anderson said after word came from the navy that Kinnick had been killed in action. “In the uniform of his country he gave everything—that was the only way Nile Kinnick knew how to play the game.”

Kinnick’s legacy runs deep at Iowa, where the football stadium is named after him (he’s the only Heisman winner to hold that honor) and a fourteen-foot-bronze statue of the halfback stands in front of the facility. But in terms of the Heisman as an institution, Kinnick’s impact may have ultimately been in illustrating the potential of what the acceptance speech could be.

Kinnick set the precedent, and two years after his win, Minnesota’s Bruce Smith would deliver his own iconic words as a nation tried to come to grips with one of its darkest moments.

The Golden Gophers star was on a train en route to the Heisman ceremony with his family on December 7, 1941, when news broke that 353 Imperial Japanese Navy planes, bombers, and torpedo planes had hit the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The attack claimed 2,403 Americans and left another 1,178 wounded.

With the help of his father, Lucius—a former Minnesota tackle—Bruce Smith (the winner of an especially tight race—554 votes to 345 for Notre Dame’s Angelo Bertelli, making it the narrowest margin in the trophy’s short history) went to rewriting his speech while they made their way to NYC. He tried to find the proper way to accept an award when sports couldn’t seem much less important.

If there was any doubt as to the mood and the tensions the nation was dealing with, an anxious moment came as Smith stepped forward to accept the trophy, as a squadron of army planes had been mistaken for German bombers and an air raid alert was signaled along the East Coast.

“So much of emotional significance has happened in such a brief space of time,” Smith began his speech, delivered one day after the US had declared war, “that the task of responding on such an occasion leaves me at a loss to assign relative value.”

He spoke of adding his name to a list that began with Berwanger and, the year before, welcomed Michigan’s Tom Harmon, and of the gratitude and appreciation he felt. Smith thanked his coach, Bernie Bierman, and his teammates, before turning his attention to the tragic attack in Hawaii that would usher in the United States’ arrival in the conflict.

“In the Far East they may think American boys are soft, but I have had, and even have now, plenty of evidence in black and blue to prove that they are making a big mistake. I think America will owe a great debt to the game of football when we finish this thing off. If six million American youngsters like myself are able to take it and come back for more, both from a physical standpoint and that of morale. If teaching team play and cooperation and exercise to go out and fight hard for the honor of our schools, then likewise the same skills can be depended on when we have to fight to defend for our country.”

It was more than just a rally for the nation, as Smith—like Kinnick and Harmon—became a fighter pilot, though he wouldn’t see combat and played service football for the Great Lake Navy team.

A year after his Heisman victory, he played himself in an autobiographical movie Smith of Minnesota. “See this triple-threat bolt of greased lightning hit a new high for red-blooded entertainment!” a tagline on the original poster promised, but as his wife, Gloria, would tell ESPN.com, “If they took the word ‘swell’ out of the script, it would be a silent movie.” Nonetheless, after Smith’s death in 1967 at age forty-seven after a long bout with cancer, a Paulist priest, Rev. William Cantwell, proposed Smith for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. The priest told the National Catholic News Service he had invoked the intercession of Smith many times on behalf of cancer patients.

Kinnick and Smith provided a measure of the strength of a nation’s Golden Boys in a time when the opportunities to speak to such a vast audience were rare. They delivered words that met the moment, words both profound and galvanizing.

It’s something that 2001 Heisman recipient Eric Crouch has thought about over the years.

Three months removed from the September 11 terrorist attacks, the ceremony had to be moved to the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square due to damage suffered by the DAC, which stood blocks from Ground Zero. Eleven DAC members had died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.

As Crouch took the podium, he said, “A long time ago, I never thought I could do something like this, but I always believed in myself. Deep down inside you want that trophy, but win or lose I always want to be the same person—keeping my character and keeping composed.” But he made no mention of the attacks or the uneasiness felt across the country despite 9/11 weighing heavily over the proceedings.

“Maybe it was something that I missed, because if I missed it—which I did, clearly miss it on that stage—it’s something that I think about a lot,” Crouch said in 2016. “Not that I missed it, but [because] of what was happening time-wise, with the United States and that huge event.

“I think part of it was just maybe not thinking that was an opportunity for me to say something, I guess I want to say, almost politically. I think I have more of an opinion about it now than I did when I was twenty-three. If I had to do it again, I would have definitely mentioned it. There’s no doubt about. It affected me greatly, because I never got to experience the Downtown Athletic Club. That was the first year, because of 9/11.”

For decades, winners had the benefit of time, learning they were the Heisman recipient before even heading to New York, and could craft their speeches as such, unlike today’s players, who find out at the end of America’s longest-running reality show. As Wisconsin’s Alan Ameche, the 1954 winner, described the growth in an interview conducted in ’82: “There were maybe ninety or a hundred people in the room. Because the space was so limited, some of my relatives couldn’t get in … I come back almost every year and it boggles my mind to see the difference. They have a big dinner at the Hilton Hotel with two to three thousand people.”

The drama of a made-for-TV-moment has largely replaced thoughtfulness with spontaneity, the culmination of months of hype thrust upon a player who is asked to go before a massive audience and have his say. It’s no different than any other award show, but most other award shows aren’t centered around college students.

But there’s also the growth of sports and media at the center of what later players would feel was their responsibility. Kinnick and Smith spoke at a time when college football players were among the US’s biggest stars—it still dwarfed the pro game in popularity and at times overshadowed the whole of sport, with Kinnick beating out the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio and boxer Joe Louis for the 1939 AP Athlete of the Year. To them, the Downtown Athletic Club presented a rare opportunity to speak on a national stage, something modern winners have on an almost daily basis.

The speeches that followed Kinnick’s and Smith’s weren’t legendary moments with messages either political or patriotic. They, instead, delivered raw emotion.

“I wish I would have had more prepared,” Crouch said. “I really didn’t expect to walk away with the Heisman Trophy that night. It’s exhausting, because you’re on national television, cameras in front of you. It’s your opportunity and I remember the one thing I forgot to do is I was thanking everybody else but my team. Mentors and coaches and my girlfriend at the time—[who] is my wife now—parents. You thank everybody and you’re up there and I just happen to forget to thank my teammates.”

As Derrick Henry told reporters the day before he won in 2015: “It’s nerve-racking. But at the same time, we’re here to talk about what got you to this moment and who you’re thankful for. So I don’t think it’ll be that hard speaking from the heart. I wrote some stuff down. If it happens, I’ll speak from the heart.”

Henry did just that in an eight-minute, seventeen-second address. “I’m a little nervous. I don’t do this every day,” he began. The Crimson Tide star gave his thanks to those who had impacted him, but he struck a nerve when he closed by recognizing former teammate Altee Tenpenny, who had died in a one-car accident October 20, 2015. Henry had posted a message on Instagram after Tenpenny’s death, writing, “I will continue to keep your name alive & you always live through me & I hope I can keep dancing & smiling as I continue my journey while you watch over me.”

“Rest in peace, my brother Altee Tenpenny, he’s been a brother to me, who died this year,” Henry told a nation that night in New York. “I just want to tell him I love him and I miss him.”

Henry’s emotional tribute was not the first—nor will it likely be the last—delivered within the spotlight of the Heisman speech. John Cappelletti and Mark Ingram were among those who provided heart-rending moments that have often overshadowed what they did on the field.

****

Cappelletti, the Penn State running back, ushered in the dominance of his position in the history of the award, as the first of 11 straight victories by running backs, but his yardage in his winning season of 1973—1,522—was well below the 1,843 those runners after him averaged, and during that period, only Ohio State’s Archie Griffin had less with 1,450 in his repeat year of ’75. Cappelletti won handedly, though, coming in 533 points ahead of Ohio State offensive tackle John Hicks, while Texas’s Roosevelt Leaks—the closest running back—was in third, 575 points behind the Nittany Lion.

Likewise, Ingram was the workhorse of Alabama’s 2009 title team and the first trophy recipient in that program’s long, storied history. His win, though, was almost an aberration for a running back among an era dominated by quarterbacks putting up monster numbers, as the vacating of Reggie Bush’s ’05 trophy leaves him as the only running back in a fourteen-year span to claim the Heisman.

Neither player led the nation in rushing those seasons, either, but they are linked in another way in how they addressed the nation as a Heisman winner.

Penn State’s John Cappelletti was among those who had the benefit of knowing he’d already won when he stood in front of a packed New York Hilton ballroom, and what was more stunning was that what unfolded wasn’t scripted.

Nittany Lions co-captain Mark Markovich was rooming with Cappelletti that weekend, and he recounted to USA TODAY in 2003 that the running back had left a note card on the nightstand next to his bed and Markovich couldn’t help but peek.

“The card said, ‘To my coaches, to family and friends and someone special.’ I said to John, ‘What is this?’ He grabbed it from my hand and said, ‘You’ll find out.’”

That was it. Yet, as Cappelletti looked out into the crowd that included his eleven-year-old brother, he managed to turn the night and the award into a symbol of the human spirit.

His voice quivered as he spoke to the crowd, which included Vice President Gerald Ford, sitting next to him on the dais.

“The youngest member of my family, Joseph, is very ill. He has leukemia. If I can dedicate this trophy to him tonight and give him a couple days of happiness, this is worth everything …”

The Cappellettis first learned that Joey had leukemia when he was five years old, and the child entered Philadelphia Children’s Hospital for treatment with forty-six others afflicted with leukemia. Joey, at that time, was the only one still alive. He had to endure bone marrow tests and, in 1972, had slipped into a coma for a week.

Big brother John had to wipe away tears with a napkin as he continued.

“I think a lot of people think that I go through a lot on Saturdays and during the week as most athletes do, and you get your bumps and bruises and it is a terrific battle out there on the field. Only for me, it is on Saturdays and it’s only in the fall. For Joseph, it is all year-round and it is a battle that is unending with him and he puts up with much more than I’ll ever put up with and I think that this trophy is more his than mine because he has been a great inspiration to me.”

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, asked to give the traditional blessing at the conclusion of the trophy presentation dinner, said, “Maybe for the first time you have heard a speech from the heart and not from the lips. Part of John’s triumph was made by Joseph’s sorrow. You don’t need a blessing. God has already blessed you in John Cappelletti.”

Chemotherapy would drive Joey’s illness into remission, allowing him to play Little League baseball, but on April 8, 1976, he lost his eight-year battle, dying at his home in suburban Philadelphia. His brother John was at his bedside.

“We never gave up hope that he would live, but we always knew it was just a matter of time,” Joey’s father, John Sr., said at the time. “John can’t speak. He is very emotional about this.”

Watching Cappelletti’s speech, Jerry McNeely wept, but the writer-producer was also struck with an idea. A month after Joey’s death, he approached John about creating what became Something for Joey, a made-for-TV movie about the boy’s life and death starring Marc Singer as John Jr., Jeffrey Lynas as Joey, and Paul Picerni in the role of Joe Paterno, who was unavailable due to preparations for the ’77 Gator Bowl. Along the way, the family allowed him to spend a couple of weeks with them, and he also worked with Penn State. The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Made for Television and two Primetime Emmy Awards for top director Lou Antonio; McNeely was up for best original teleplay.

“I just want people to see it,” Cappelletti told the Los Angeles Times the night of its premier, “because I think there’s a message here for everyone. It was my parents’ decision to let Jerry McNeely go ahead and make it. They decided it would do more good than if nothing at all were made. It’s a touchy situation. But we’ve seen it and we feel everything was portrayed pretty close to what actually happened.”

It was turned into a book of the same name and published in 1983, and years later, the message of strength and courage that Cappelletti relayed continues to resonate.

“I get a lot of mail from kids who have brothers and sisters who aren’t all that kind to each other sometimes. After they read the book, they’re determined to change that stuff,” Cappelletti told USA TODAY. “It’s having an impact on a whole other generation, it seems like. Time doesn’t seem to change that.”

Cappelletti’s heartache was largely unknown when he took the stage, but the same can’t be said for Ingram when he won in 2009.

The Alabama running back took a deep breath after he was announced as the winner over Stanford’s Toby Gerhart in the closest vote ever—a mere 28 points. The legends behind him on the stage encouraged him to “Take your time.… Take your time.… It’s all right.”

“I’m a little overwhelmed right now,” Ingram said. “I’m sorry.”

He dabbed his eyes. A few miles away from what was then known as Best Buy Theater, Ingram’s father, Mark Sr., was watching in a New York holding facility.

Less than a year before his son won the Heisman, the senior Ingram was arrested in a Flint, Michigan, hotel room on January 2, 2009 where he was preparing to watch his son and the Crimson Tide play in the Sugar Bowl against Utah. Out on $200,000 bail after pleading guilty to money laundering and bank fraud, he had been granted a delay to watch his son play his freshman season at Alabama, then asked for another to see the Tide in the Southeastern Conference Championship Game on December 6, the day after he was supposed to report. The judge refused and Ingram fled to Michigan, failing to surrender to the federal prison in Kentucky to begin a seven-year, eight-month term.

“When it came to the eleventh hour, I had to make a decision,” Ingram Sr. told USA TODAY in 2009. “My decision was to be with my son in what would be my last chance to watch him play in person in college.”

An additional twenty-seven months would be added to his sentence the following March, but the father was still awaiting sentencing the night of the ceremony and watched on TV with fifteen other inmates who were also in limbo.

This was the reality Ingram Jr. lived with as he stood there, and let the emotions wash over him.

“I’d like to thank my family,” the running back said through tears, motioning to them in the crowd. “My mother and my grandparents are sitting right there. My father, who has been a great influence on my life and I love him to death.”

The following year, the absence of the winner’s father again became the focus. Auburn’s Cam Newton pointed a massive spotlight on the awkwardness of what should have been a coronation for the dynamic quarterback.

“I’d like to thank my beautiful mother, Jackie,” he said. “And my father. You know this …” Newton stopped, put his head down, and appeared to be fighting back tears.

What would he say? What could he say?

Cecil Newton wasn’t in the crowd. He had released a statement earlier that week saying, in part, “I have decided not to be in attendance … as it will perhaps rob Cam and the event of a sacred moment.”

Nonetheless, the elder Newton’s presence was unavoidable, with the specter of an NCAA investigation into a pay-for-play scheme with Mississippi State and the fact that Auburn had limited his access after the governing body declared the father had broken rules.

Despite a truly transcendent performance on the field, as the 6-foot-6, 250-pound junior threw for 2,589 yards and ran for 1,409 in totaling 49 touchdowns and a nation’s-best 188.1 pass efficiency rating, the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA) made his son pay, omitting him from the All-American team and now, the dark cloud prompted 105 voters to leave him off their ballots.

Would Newton come to his father’s defense? Would he address the scandal?

The quarterback stood there, trying to collect himself, and Bo Jackson, Auburn’s 1985 winner, told Newton, “Take a couple deep breaths, man. Take a couple deep breaths.”

“Thank you,” Newton said, composing himself. “Thank you.”

“WE LOVE YOU, CAM!” someone from the crowd yelled.

Newton flashed that smile, that thousand-watt grin that would soon be on commercials and seen while he was dabbing and dancing his way to the NFL’s 2015 MVP award for the Carolina Panthers, then continued, “My parents do a lot of things behind the scenes that go unnoticed.”

It was these words that would draw the most fire. Given his insistence that he knew nothing of the money his father was alleged to have wanted from the Bulldogs, Newton pointing to what his parents did behind the scenes drew criticism from those who watched the scandal unfold, and to include it in his speech seemed tone deaf on his part. Regardless, it shone a brighter light on the cloud that hung over the vote, none of it befitting of just how dominant his season was as the third player in FBS history to have 20 rushing touchdowns and 20 passing in the same season, following Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick.

“This is not an award, in my opinion, that has been won with my play this year,” Newton went on. “This is an award that has been won ever since I came out of your womb. Thank you for everything you do for me and my family—and to my father, I love you so much.”

With controversy swirling, it was what Newton could or couldn’t—depending on what you believed—say that created the most interest around his win.

Just a year later, Robert Griffin III managed to do something impressive in its own right: make a statement before he’d said a single word of his speech.

As the Baylor quarterback was announced as the seventy-seventh Heisman winner, he flashed Superman socks for ESPN’s cameras, then bowed his head and broke into a wide smile.

“Well, now that my socks are out there, I have nothing to lose,” Griffin said as he let out a sigh at the podium.

The socks, which were blue with the iconic “S” logo at the top, included a cape that hung down from his calf near the ankle. Griffin wearing them spiked sales, with pairs going for as much as $500 on eBay in the days after the quarterback’s unveiling. The Superman museum in the character’s “official” hometown of Metropolis, Illinois, sold out, but accepted preorders for “the reasonable price of $18.95 a pair.”

Those were apparently just a taste of what’s in his arsenal, as Griffin disclosed that his sock collection also includes—but is not limited to—Angry Birds, Cookie Monster, Elmo, Scooby Doo, and his favorite pair, SpongeBob SquarePants. Said the quarterback in his news conference after the ceremony, as he showed off his Superman socks again, “If I can get everybody in the crowd to laugh it can make my speech a whole lot easier.”

RG3’s speech didn’t offer the power of Kinnick and Smith or the emotion of Cappelletti and Ingram. Nor did it offer the intrigue of Newton. But Griffin’s Heisman speech served as a platform for setting a fashion trend.

That showed a true evolution.