Coach Dick Maloney’s office overlooking Stagg Field is a glimpse into Maroons football past and present.
A tattered, oblong game ball from 1896, its stuffing falling out, sits on a shelf below a signed poster of 1935 Heisman winner Jay Berwanger. Plaques and players’ pictures line a wall above a table displaying the silver Founders Cup from last year’s win against Washington–St. Louis.
But there’s another memento the 16th-year coach hopes to add to his office: A picture of this year’s team, standing on the same Stagg Field where a group of “radicals” stood in 1969, when they helped realize a coach’s dream to bring the “Monsters of the Midway” back to the University of Chicago campus.
The Maroons will celebrate the 40-year anniversary of the return of varsity football Saturday during the team’s 1 p.m. Homecoming game against Denison University. Members of the 1969 squad, the first to play varsity football after it was eliminated 30 years earlier, will serve as honorary team captains for the pregame coin toss.
“These are the pioneers. These are the people who rejuvenated the torch. These are the people who rebuilt the city after it burned down,“ says Maloney. “I think it’s great to bring the old guard back.”
Charlie Nelson, AB’73, is among a half-dozen players from that 25-member squad who will return to campus. Nelson, a freshman center on that inaugural team who went on to start all four years, relishes the opportunity to revisit his past.
“It didn’t mean that much to me when I started, but being someone in the counter-culture of the University of Chicago was kind of a badge of honor in itself,“ says Nelson, who still proudly wears his UChicago letterman jacket and jersey. “I can’t believe that we would be part of history and changing the atmosphere at the University of Chicago into a complete collegiate experience.”
Phoenix Rising from the Ashes
More than a century ago, the Maroons were a national power under Amos Alonzo Stagg, who led them to seven Big Ten Conference titles over four decades before retiring in 1932.
But Chicago failed to field a winning team in the 1930s amid the changing face of intercollegiate athletics. So in 1939, University President Robert Hutchins, underscoring the importance of scholarship and research, pulled the plug on the storied program.
“By getting rid of football, by presenting the spectacle of a university that can be great without football, the University of Chicago may perform a signal service to higher education throughout the land,” Hutchins wrote, calling the sport “a major handicap to education in the United States.”
Tom Weingartner, UChicago’s Director of Athletics since 1990, says that although Hutchins may have gone too far in disbanding the program, he was right to focus on the value of education.
“He recognized the core values of the institution, he recognized the role that sport ought to play, and he made some tough decisions,” Weingartner says.
The gridiron remained quiet until 1956, when new athletic director Walter Hass organized a football “class” that swelled in popularity to 45 members in 1968. Despite hundreds of protestors at Stagg Field, Hass lobbied for the return of varsity football as a Division III program (Stagg’s teams were Division I). Armed with 1,300 student signatures, he petitioned and won the backing of the University Senate.
“It was a million-to-one shot,“ Hass told the Chicago Tribune in 1969. “I guess stubbornness sometimes pays off.”
Hass’ team finished 2-6 in its inaugural season, and he never enjoyed a winning record in his seven years as Maroons coach. But Maloney and Weingartner feel he is just as important to Chicago football’s modern era as Stagg once was to its birth.
“Let’s remember: This was 1969. This was the University of Chicago. This was an era where varsity lettermen did not wear their letter jackets around campus because you were thought to be part of the military-industrial complex,” Weingartner says. “It was a radical move. Without that vision and without that sense of adventure and energy, we wouldn’t have had a football program.”
Connecting the Old with the New
In fall 2003 Weingartner arranged for the dusty relics of an old, locked-up Bartlett Gymnasium trophy room to be featured in the lobby of the new Gerald Ratner Athletics Center. Front and center is Berwanger’s 1935 Heisman Trophy, the first of its kind.
“We did that in part because we like the history, and we connect with the history,” Weingartner says. “The fact that we dropped football doesn’t prevent us from being proud of Stagg and Berwanger and all the people before us.”
Maloney, a former Ivy League assistant, has added to the program’s lore in the modern era. He has won three conference titles in the University Athletic Association, which includes eight of the country’s top research institutions.
“Football at the University of Chicago is a teaspoon of sand in the giant sandbox that we exist in,” says Maloney. “I’ve been at places where it’s been a shovel, and I think it’s a great mix here.”
Senior linebacker Cory Swaim, a state champion at suburban Lincoln Way-East High School, was drawn to Chicago for its academics and rich football history. But the opportunity to play football in front of his family has its demands.
The Public Policy/Political Science major and aspiring lawyer is balancing three classes this quarter, a 50-page BA thesis, and football six days a week. The team’s captain, Swaim broke his wrist in the 2008 preseason but played the year with his arm wrapped like a club.
“Our guys are playing football because they truly love it and not because they’re on scholarship, going to school for free, and hoping to get drafted into the NFL,” says Swaim. “We’re just out there because we want to be, and there’s no ulterior motive.”
Just like it was in 1969.
By Michael Drapa
