COURTESY OF WEST TENNESSEE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL
The West Tennessee State Normal School Tigers 1924-25 football squad. One fellow continued to wear his Vanderbilt sweater, even when posing for the Memphis team’s yearbook photo.
Well, the college football season has come to a close, and it's been a wild ride. It's not every year (in fact, never) that the University of Memphis can brag about a 12-2 record and conference championship. And it's not every year (in fact, never) that The Commercial Appeal has compiled a book (titled Mighty Roar) celebrating such an amazing season.
Tiger fans have gotten a little spoiled. They've now come to expect this level of accomplishment, with all the winning seasons and thrilling victories in recent years.
It's especially amazing because we don't have to go back very far at all — not even 10 years — to recall those seasons when the Tigers posted records of 1-11 in 2010 and 2-10 the following year.
And I could keep traveling back in time, pointing out other seasons that don't even come close to the one we just enjoyed. But where am I going with this? After all, you're probably thinking, "Vance, why are you writing about sports? You know nothing about it at all."
"The Normal football team was not a huge success this year from the touchdown-scoring point of view."
This is true. I should (and will) leave the sportswriting to my talented colleagues, especially my pal Frank Murtaugh. But I bring this up because last night, I was flipping through a 1925 DeSoto yearbook for West Tennessee State Normal School (as the U of M was then called), looking up pictures of my old girlfriends. And I happened to come across a summary of their football program that was worth sharing, for several reasons.
First of all, I noticed that the Tigers beat Jonesboro College by a convincing score of 33-0. Not bad! But then something truly remarkable happened. The Memphis squad never scored a single point in any other game that year.
Meanwhile, their opponents poured it on.
They lost to Hendrix College 51-0, to Arkansas College 49-0, to Union University 25-0, and to the University of Tennessee Doctors 58-0. (Yes, the UT Medical School fielded a football team.)
By the end of that 1924-1925 season, they not only finished with a 1-9 record, but opponents had racked up 188 points, compared to the Tigers' 33. Boy, that Jonesboro College team must have been truly awful.
When this happens to a team, of course it's deflating to the coaches and players — not to mention the fans. But it's also a challenge, as I discovered, for the editors of the yearbook, who always try to shine the best light on things. For this particular season, they noted, "The Normal football team was not a huge success this year from the touchdown-scoring point of view" — which I thought was a bit of an understatement.
But then, they tried to explain that all the defeats on the field still amounted to ... well, something. In fact, "The Normal Tigers rolled up the largest score of moral victories of any team in the entire South."
Now, these kinds of victories seem rather hard to measure, if you ask me. So why did the DeSoto editors make this claim? It was because "so many [of the other teams] have their alumni funds, athletic associations, and scholarships," they noted. Memphis would have none of that, apparently: "The game was not in the least bit tainted with commercialism. No one can accuse the Normal athletes of being in any way helped by special funds that paid expenses and provided spending money in return for their services."
I'm sure the fans appreciated that.
But clearly, something had happened to diminish the team's strengths. The yearbook, devoting only two pages to the entire season, hinted at "the dark days of September, when many of the lettermen of the past failed to return." They mentioned "when the squad had been reduced to a lot of inexperienced candidates, many of whom had never played football before." Then, without going into detail, they said that "numerous other things frustrated the well-set plans for the year."
I don't know what happened that year, so let's give the team credit for trying. As the yearbook editors put it, "The Tiger spirit never fell, no matter how helpless they seemed before their foes."
And I'll add one other observation:
Football players don't seem to have nicknames anymore. But they certainly did back in those days, and the 1924-25 Memphis squad had some good ones. Looking over the roster, players included "Tombstone" Tyson, "Fuzzy" Mayo, "Nub" Grisham, "Little Bit" Shore, "Monzou" Wyatt, "Big Foot" Morris, and — my personal favorite of all time, "Hatchet Head" Davis.
With players like that, gosh, how could they lose?
