Pigskin At Penn: A Real-life Drama

In the world of the theater, Philadelphia is a great place for out-of-town tryouts, and recently a triumphant curtain was rung down there on a real-life morality play. The root idea of this stirring drama was: Ivy League football—to be or not to be? Its setting was the University of Pennsylvania . The action spanned nine seasons and its plot had everything: long stretches of stark realism and despair, laughter, tears, skulduggery, low comedy, a rescue in the nick of time, the victory of right and justice. There were heroes and sub-heroes, villains adult and adolescent, mob scenes onstage and offstage, a man of mystery who was never identified, and even a kind of deus ex machina in the shape of Dr. Gaylord P. Harnwell, the university's president, who brought about the denouement.

The complete plot of this morality play, Pigskin at Penn, is herewith recounted for the first time. Like morality itself, its action is often involved and confused. It wasn't until after the last football season ended that the audience, with exit music still ringing in its ears, could take stock of the message, which came on the eve of the new year.

The protagonist of our drama was Steve Sebo , who signed a three-year contract to coach football at Penn in 1954. Some coaches are cold whip-crackers, as tough and impersonal toward their players as big league baseball managers are toward their own. Sebo isn't that type at all. Born in Petosky, Mich, in 1914 of Hungarian parents, he is a small-town Midwesterner, friendly and sensitive, a compact man of medium height, with blue eyes, high cheekbones, fresh complexion and thinning red hair. Maybe if Sebo had been the cold, tough type of coach, he might have fared better during his fearful ordeal. There is no kidding about how fearful the ordeal was: starting with his opener at Penn, a 52-0 shellacking from Duke, his teams lost 19 games in a row. During his first two seasons (0-18-0), Philadelphia , where the University of Pennsylvania is situated, in general behaved pretty well. Last season, however, when Penn had won four games and tied for third in the Ivy League , Philadelphia really let him have it—the alumni, his players, the press, both undergraduate and grownup—just about everybody. In giving it to him they used Louisville Sluggers shod with lead. If it hadn't been for Dr. Harnwell—but we'd better start the plot from the beginning.

As the curtain rises on our morality play, it is 1948. The University of Pennsylvania has installed a new president—big, blond, balding Harold Edward Stassen, who had thrice been governor of Minnesota (the Boy Governor, they called him) and had served on Admiral Bull Halsey's staff in the Pacific.

At this time, the Ivy League had not yet been formed, but it was in the process of fruition. Five years before Stassen attained prexyhood, the presidents of Princeton , Yale , Harvard , Cornell, Dartmouth , Brown, Columbia and Pennsylvania had begun holding annual meetings to discuss football in their group and how to handle it. The eight presidents were groping for an Ivy League formula, and had already drawn up some regulations for the group. One of these was against scheduling games more than two years in advance of the current calendar year.

Since the mid-1920s Penn's success in playing other Ivies had been phenomenal. During the decade before Stassen arrived in Philadelphia , Penn's coach, George Munger , had run up a record against them of 36 wins, three ties and only three losses. As Leo Riordan, the executive sports editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a very astute football critic, wrote: "For at least a generation, Penn has, by and large, been more eager to play the Ivies than the Ivies have been to play Penn.... Their feeling was that Penn was too much in the big-time class—that it had more scholarships to give football players, that its admission and academic standards were perhaps not quite so high." It had probably been a mistake for the Munger-coached teams to beat Yale (50-7), Brown (50-0) and Dartmouth (39-6) so badly; they beat Yale six years in a row.

In 1948 and 1949, the first two seasons that Stassen presided over, Munger beat Dartmouth, Princeton and Columbia , but lost to Cornell both years. Penn football attendance took a dive in 1949 from the 70,000-a-game average there had been since the war to an average of 55,000. Stassen was faced with other financial worries in the athletic department: 1) a mortgage on Franklin Field and the Palestra (which houses Penn basketball) that with interest and maintenance charges amounted to around $1,600,000, and 2) an accumulated deficit of about $200,000 from a dozen non-self-sustaining sports which football and basketball profits hadn't been able to meet. Quite a few Philadelphia eyebrows had been lifted at the appointment of Stassen, a man whose career had been devoted to political, not educational, affairs. But, like nearly all privately endowed institutions, Penn was having money troubles after the war, and the university authorities wanted a crack money-raiser in the president's chair. Nobody ever denied that Stassen was good at raising money.

During Stassen's first year or so at Penn, he was fond of saying, "I don't know anything about football; I come from Minnesota ." If the reader is too young to remember what Minnesota football was like during Stassen's time in the Gopher State, that was a joke, son. In the 10 years, from 1932 through 1941, before Coach Bernie Bierman joined the Marine Corps , Minnesota led the Big Ten six times and won four national championships. Like Notre Dame, its teams drew capacity crowds whenever they played. With the triumphs of his alma mater's Golden Gophers throbbing in his memory, with a huge mortgage to lift and Franklin Field to fill on autumn Saturdays, it was the most natural thing in the world for Stassen to put Penn into Big Football, the biggest football there was.

He had had White House ambitions in the summer of 1948, but had failed to obtain the Republican nomination. There are cynics in Philadelphia who will tell you that Stassen wanted to use Penn football to become better known nationally and thereby build himself up politically. By scheduling Notre Dame, they say, Stassen hoped to sew up the Catholic vote; by playing Texas he would charm the oil millionaires down there; other intersectional games with institutions in key territories would help local politicians and voters remember him kindly when the time came. All this is no doubt overcynical of the cynics; but the record does show that many strange things took place. For instance, the game with Harvard and/or Columbia .

In December 1949, Stassen was on a speaking trip in New England and became enraged at a remark attributed in the Boston press to Bill Bingham, Harvard 's director of athletics, who had given a postseason interview on his team's lack of success. Stassen construed the remark as a dirty crack at Penn's football-recruiting methods and let forth a blast. Harvard 's president, James B. Conant, was away from Cambridge , but its provost, Paul H. Buck, sprang to the task of cooling Stassen down. Everybody in Boston knows that Bill Bingham isn't as good a public speaker as Sir Winston Churchill , and Buck said it would probably be premature to interpret his remark—if, indeed, he wasn't misquoted—as university policy. After more mollification, Stassen, in effect, said, "All right, then, to show that we're friends, how about playing us on such-and-such a date?" ( Harvard hadn't played Penn since 1942.) Buck suggested an exchange of letters about it through channels.