Frogs O' War - Buy the Book: Early TCU Football HistoryThe #1 TCU Athletics blog on the internet!https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/50293/fow-fav.png2013-07-15T20:34:22-05:00http://www.frogsowar.com/rss/stream/42616112013-07-15T20:34:22-05:002013-07-15T20:34:22-05:00Read FOW blogger's history of early TCU football
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<img alt="One former TCU head football coach also led the school band, orchestra, and choir." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/rS13kp3JWPx_ocBgtBREQQ7Xjto=/0x0:294x196/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/16450137/gyi0063338609.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>One former TCU head football coach also led the school band, orchestra, and choir. | Jamie Squire</figcaption>
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<p>TCU Press <a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/Riff-Ram-Bah-Zoo-Football-Comes-to-TCU,7600.aspx">publishes the only comprehensive history of early TCU football on the market</a>. Written by FOW founding blogger Ezra Hood, it includes an unprecedented game-by-game focus on pre-SWC Horned Frog football. Today we look at the unlikely career of TCU's most interesting coach.</p> <p>Pop quiz:</p>
<p>Which former TCU football head coach played the tuba?</p>
<p>And which former TCU football head coach directed the school's band?</p>
<p>And which former TCU football head coach played the violin professionally before coaching the football team?</p>
<p>And which former TCU football head coach also coached the school's men's and women's basketball teams, and baseball team (to a championship, no less)?</p>
<p>Bonus question: are these all the same person?</p>
<p>Indeed, they are all the same person. You've never heard of him, but he's the most interesting man in (TCU's football history) world. I don't know what fermented beverage he preferred, or if he drank at all, but when you tell the story of TCU football, you simply cannot leave him out.</p>
<p><a href="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Hood_football_cover_medium" class="photo" src="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover_medium.jpg"></a> <br id="1373938036143"> Perhaps the most fun I had writing this book was discovering the unlikely and almost unbelievable story of the band director (and choir director, and orchestra director) who coached TCU's football team (and baseball team, and basketball teams)-- and did a pretty good job doing it!</p>
<p>It started when TCU got kicked out of the TIAA for playing an ineligible player (in baseball) in the spring of 1913. The 1912 Horned Frogs were TIAA champs-- 8-1 and by a long shot the best team ever yet to line up for the Frogs (who did not yet wear purple on the gridiron). And then the dam burst, and suddenly TCU found itself scrambling to fill a schedule with high school teams, a local YMCA team (twice) and a couple of colleges. It was perhaps a disproportionately harsh penalty, thought TCU fans and students.</p>
<p>It was still common for a professor to double as coach-- in football, baseball, basketball, track and field, etc. TCU had hired coaches full-time for years already, but reverted to the less expensive option and asked a new professor who had come to campus to teach music to double as coach of all of its sports teams in 1913. He and his wife had recently returned from New York where they spent a few years as professional musicians. This remarkable professor was teaching at TCU for a second time; years before he has taught at the school and coached its championship baseball teams. He resumed those duties as well as football coaching, and also basketball for men and women. His primary job was music professor-- violin, orchestra, band (occasionally playing tuba), chorus, and eventually a glee club. His wife--by her maiden name probably from raised in an old Fort Worth family-- taught voice. They were immensely popular with the students.</p>
<p>But it was a coach that this man made his most indelible mark on TCU history.</p>
<p>His 1913 team only lost one game, which, considering the turbulence the program navigated, is worth a tribute by itself. But he stayed on as assistant coach for years, and probably deserves a lot of credit for the way TCU consistently outperformed in the face constant draining away of experienced players to the Army in the Great War.</p>
<p>It was this coach who led the students to build temporary stands (complete with suites) for the 1916 Baylor game-- the first truly big game in TCU's early football history. It was this coach who owned a motor car and toured with students as far as Denver. It was this coach who led the athletic department as athletic director prior to his unexpected resignation in 1919.</p>
<p>This coach and professor gets exactly two words in the modern media guide, and has otherwise been entirely forgotten at the school he helped shape.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/Riff-Ram-Bah-Zoo-Football-Comes-to-TCU,7600.aspx">Riff, Ram, Bah, Zoo! Football Comes to TCU!</a> restores his memory and stories to TCU football's proud history, and many others.</p>
https://www.frogsowar.com/2013/7/15/4521326/tcu-football-history-pres-ezra-hood-part-2Purple Wimple2013-07-10T19:59:46-05:002013-07-10T19:59:46-05:00Riff Ram Bah Zoo: Football Comes to TCU, part 1
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<img alt="TCU Press publishes "Riff, Ram, Bah, Zoo! Football Comes to TCU" this fall." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Z01eQ-vS1BFYhPyw2lcL_8P_z74=/0x492:731x979/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/16241365/hood_football_cover.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>TCU Press publishes "Riff, Ram, Bah, Zoo! Football Comes to TCU" this fall.</figcaption>
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<p>TCU Press publishes the <a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/Riff-Ram-Bah-Zoo-Football-Comes-to-TCU,7600.aspx">only comprehensive history of early TCU football on the market</a>. Written by FOW founding blogger Ezra Hood, the first section of the book traces the history of TCU and football as the two came together in the late 1890s and began to flourish in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.</p> <p>To tell the story of TCU or of football in the late 1800s is to tell the story of a school and a sport that differ widely from the school and sport we know and love today. TCU, believe it or not, used to be a very Christian school. (Hard to believe, I know!) It prohibited dating-- so much so that Addison Clark expelled one student from walking across campus together with his fiancee. Daily chapel exercises were mandatory.</p>
<p>The board of trustees were initially very suspicious of football, and tried to ban it several times. For several years they succeeded in banning away games, and in 1900, any games at all. But the sport's popularity among the students won the day, and by the time Add-Ran College became known as Texas Christian University, football was here to stay.</p>
<p><a href="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Hood_football_cover_medium" class="photo" src="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover_medium.jpg"></a> <br id="1373075880930"> But "football" in 1901, and "football" today, almost are not even the same game. It's pretty well known that forward passing was illegal before 1906. But did you know that before then that a team needed only to advance the ball five yards for a first down? that teams could have 10 players in the backfield? that there was no neutral zone, or penalties for hurdling, unnecessary roughness? Even forward passing, new to the game in '06, was restricted beyond recognition. Passes had to cross the line of scrimmage off center at least five yards, could only be caught by an end, were turnovers if incomplete, and could not be caught in the endzone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Imagine football without touchdown passes!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ball, when passed out of bounds, belonged to whichever team recovered it first and was turned over if it touched an ineligible player.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p>So, yes, it was football, but it wasn't really <i>football </i>yet. And TCU did not win many games until it hired a good coach-- its first good one-- in 1905. E.J. Hyde, who played for Fielding Yost before becoming a lawyer in Dallas, is TCU's first great coach. TCU football was a joke before he arrived, and when he left three years later, it was a respectable, modern (for its day) team.</p>
<p>Not all of TCU's opponents were so respectable. From the book:</p>
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<p>The following week, TCU began a weird attempt at a home-and-home series with Daniel Baker<span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%"> College, in Brownwood</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For the first scheduled match, TCU travelled by train 120 miles west to Brownwood</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">, arriving at two a.m. on Saturday, only to find themselves two miles from the lodging that Daniel Baker</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>had arranged for them—a barn, with oat-filled pillows.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Skiff</i></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>called it an "asinine environment."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In similar fashion, the playing field, "ideal for grazing," was thick with vegetation, rent with ravines and wallows, surrounded by barbed wire, and had a cannon facing it from one goal to intimidate visitors.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The mosquitoes were as big "as wolves" and just as poorly behaved as the townsfolk who rooted for the home team. They argued about the rules and may or may not have come to the game armed with knives and clubs to make sure no penalties were called against their team. In fact, Daniel Baker </span><span style="mso-comment-continuation: 1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%">kicked one field goal while the officials were conferring, reported John Pyburn</span></span><span style="mso-comment-continuation: 1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%">.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></span><span class="MsoCommentReference"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;line-height:200%"><span style="mso-special-character:comment"></span></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%">Legitimate or not, the field goal was the game’s only score. Daniel Baker won four to zero. Not minding TCU's string of shutouts that Daniel Baker had pushed to five, <i>The Skiff</i> issued a challenge to Daniel Baker</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">: </span></p>
<p><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%">"When you come up to Waco</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">, Brownwood</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">, we will treat you upon the erroneous assumption that you are college men.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We will establish you in a first-class hostelry, and show you the street-cars and give you an unmerciful drubbing at clean, straight, college football—but leave your bullying and violence at home, Daniel Baker, else there may be a new version of the ancient story of Daniel in the lions’ den." </span></p>
<p><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; line-height:200%">Perhaps the threat was credible, because Daniel Bakerdid not show up. It forfeited the return game, giving as an excuse <i>The Skiff</i>'s report of the game.</span></p>
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<p>In the 18 years from Hyde’s arrival to TCU’s entry into the Southwest Conference, the Horned Frogs had a .526 winning percentage (82 wins, 61 losses, and 13 ties), and outscored their opponents 2050 points to 1649. Some of those good teams' leaders are still famous among the Frog faithful: Milton Daniel, Pete Wright, and Cy Perkins, primarily. But Howell Knight, A.J. "The Heavenly" Muse, T.B. "The Flying Terror" Gallaher, W.A. "Ambrosia" Martin, and Manley Thomas excelled as well.
The first great line in TCU's history is the 1907 starters left end Albert Billingsly, left tackle M.C. Stewart, left guard J.O. Wallace, center William Massie, right guard Big John Pyburn, right tackle Pete Wright, and right end Manley Thomas. These fellows played both ways (because on those days everybody played both ways) and deserve a honored spot in every Horned Frogs' football heart.</p>
<p><i>Riff, Ram, Bah, Zoo! Football Comes to TCU!</i> tells their stories, and many others.</p>
https://www.frogsowar.com/2013/7/10/4497588/buy-the-book-riff-ram-bah-zoo-football-comes-to-tcu-part-onePurple Wimple2013-07-06T10:00:03-05:002013-07-06T10:00:03-05:00Buy the book: FOW writer publishes TCU history
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<p>The TCU Press publishes the history of early TCU football this fall, <a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/Riff-Ram-Bah-Zoo-Football-Comes-to-TCU,7600.aspx"><em>Riff Ram Bah Zoo! Football Comes to TCU!</em></a> by Frogs O' War founder Ezra Hood. This is the first of a multi-part series exploring the book. </p> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Because I fell in love, I fell in love with Horned Frog football.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I began attending TCU football games with a pretty co-ed in 2002, because the games made for easy dates, and because she liked football, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One game day she had to work and I decided I would enjoy the game alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did, and I've been hooked ever since<span style="font-family: ">—</span> to her (now my wife) and to it (TCU football).</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The more I learned about TCU football, and its then-tenuous place in the quickly changing landscape of college football, the more there seemed to be to learn about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The signs on the old scoreboard that read "National Champions 1935" and "National Champions 1938" were mute witness to the disparity in national relevance that TCU must have had in the radio days compared to the early 2000s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The disparity must have been all the greater in earlier decades!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Hood_football_cover_medium" class="photo" src="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2867731/Hood_Football_cover_medium.jpg"></a>I searched high and low to learn about TCU's football history, and grew ever more intrigued both by the Horned Frogs' story, or what I could learn of it, and by how hard it was to discover any more than brief, disconnected highlights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fort Worth<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>had, more or less, forgotten its home team's history.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Some efforts have been made to correct this amnesia, most notably the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vault</i> project, written by Dan Jenkins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that book passes lightly over TCU's founding and early football years; it merely whets a curious Horned Frog's appetite to know more about his team's founding, its first glories, and travails.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">So in 2011 I decided the void in the market for TCU football history only would be corrected if someone like me— interested in the subject and underemployed enough to have time to dig into it— took to correcting it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"It" was going to be the whole story, from A.C. Easley to Andy Dalton, from Waco before there even were football conferences to Waco again as a Big East team (and then a Big 12 one).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so commenced patient hours (and dizzying ones) at the microfilm reader at libraries all across North Texas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My patient wife endured evenings after the kids were finally in bed, away from me as I summarized games, read about the histories of Waco, Fort Worth, and the Texas Longhorns, and squinted at the scans I had harvested from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Skiff</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The Lariat</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Campus </i>(in issues long preceding the addition of the word "Daily" to their titles).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The narrative grew out of the summaries of games, which in the early years read like summaries of a different sport entirely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The modern vocabulary of the sport is as foreign to its antecedents as its play selection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Words like "aggregation," "rooters," and "buck" are as archaic to us today as a quarterback punting on first down.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Along the way I made discoveries small and great—that Andy Dalton was not TCU’s first redhead quarterback; that Dutch Meyer was the epicenter of a scandal that nearly shut TCU down; that the Baylor-TCU rivalry was hottest after TCU left Waco; that TCU once put its band director in charge of the football team!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">But the greatest discovery was that TCU played lots of meaningful football long before Dutch Meyer was coach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even in Waco the Horned Frogs were a well coached, dangerous team, and by the time TCU moved back to Fort Worth, it had developed a proud football history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the Horned Frogs joined the Southwest Conference at the close of the 1922 season, they brought to their new conference home a solid gridiron contributor with a varied and interesting football history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>History repeats itself, indeed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The toil required to write the book shows in the span of seasons the work covers—instead of covering TCU history to the present day, I chose the Horned Frogs entry into the Southwest Conference as a cutoff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My family rejoiced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So there is so much more to tell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But to throw light on the early years, in their richness and variety, has been a thrilling journey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope it draws you in as it has drawn me, and resuscitates the memory of some of TCU’s forgotten greats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their efforts for the purple and white are timeless; we are richer to know them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Frogs O' War will feature several stories in the coming weeks about those early seasons, some of them before leather helmets. <a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/Riff-Ram-Bah-Zoo-Football-Comes-to-TCU,7600.aspx">The book itself is due out by football season</a>, and will be available at booksellers and through the TCU Press for $20.</p>
https://www.frogsowar.com/college-football/2013/7/6/4485252/tcu-press-football-history-ezra-hood-bookPurple Wimple