TTHN Ep 7a - The Iron Men (Addendum) - Bonus Material: Interview with Norman Jetmundsen

We're making this interview, which previously required a Patreon subscription to be able to access, available to the general public now--no subscription required.

For Ep 7 - The Iron Men, I had the opportunity to sit down with Norman Jetmundsen—author, historian, and co-producer of Sewanee 1899: Unrivaled—whose work served as a primary narrative source for this episode on the Iron Men of Sewanee.  

This conversation goes beyond the story told in the episode.

We talk about:

• how the 1899 season has been remembered over time
• what makes that team’s achievement so remarkable even today
• the research behind Unrivaled
• and the details that didn’t make it into the documentary

If you’ve listened to the episode, this adds another layer.

If you haven’t yet, this will give you a deeper sense of just how extraordinary that story really is.

There’s a difference between hearing the story… and hearing from the people who have spent years preserving it.

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Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Okay, we have episode seven coming up with the Iron Men uh talking about the 1899 Suwannee football team. Was an incredible team. They they did some things that that never were done before them and will never be done after them. They they they uh hold a unique place in sports history. And to that point, I have with me today Norman Jetmanson, who is the author of Unrivaled 1899, and he's also uh would we say the director-producer, how how I know you were very very much the driver of the documentary.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah, I was a co-producer with my good friend David Cruz from Oxford, Mississippi.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Okay. And so what I uh know that that um having you know now have my own copy of the book, I'm pretty excited about that. But having looked through that actually before I got my copy, actually in the the the library that have a copy of it at Suwani at the University of the South being there, went through that thing and I just finished watching the documentary when I went up to the University of the South. And it looks like a lot of of one informed the other. There's some of the same pictures I would say. Of course, I'm sure that there's not a a huge wealth of pictures from that era. I mean there's there are quite a few, but not where you could have a totally different set of pictures for one project versus the other. But if you could please put into perspective the achievements of that team, because they're they're they're manifold. There are many things that they did that were that were pretty amazing, and and uh you're probably as as qualified to speak to that as anybody I know of. So I'm I'm gonna step back from the mic and let you speak to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Thank you, John. I love talking about this team and its season. Let me put a little bit of historical perspective on this. So in 1899, Suwannee was a very small school, about 126 students, all male. Um it this is 34 years after the Civil War, and that's very important for the context because football in the South grew substantially because we had been defeated in the Civil War. A lot of the players in 1899, their fathers or grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, most in the South from the Union, but from the Confederacy, but some from the Union. And so Sowanee was struggling financially. It was a small school on top of a mountain, very remote, accessible only by horse and buggy and train. And in 1899, a man named Billy Souter, who had come from Princeton, had been asked to be the Suwannee coach. And so he came down. Suwanee in 1898 had had a very successful season, and a lot of those players returned. One unique thing about this year is that there was a 20-year-old student at Suwannee named Luke Lee from Nashville, and he was a visionary, he was strong-willed, he knew how to get things done and how to get people to do them. So as a 20-year-old student, he had graduated from Suwannee the year before and came back to get a master's mainly so he could do this project with the football team. So he was called the student manager. A manager in those times, though, was more like an athletic director because at that time, football and all college sports were run by students. They weren't run were not run by the universities, not financed by the universities. So Luke Lee, a 20-year-old student, hired Coach Suter to come. He uh had some players returning who were very good. He went out and recruited some players. For instance, he went to South Carolina and found William Warbler Wilson, who uh had already graduated from college, was working in his father's law office, and Luke Lee came to him and said, Well, you come play football, which he did. And so you had this combination of experienced players, other players from other schools, and I should say too that at this time there was no restriction on how many years you could play.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

So a number of Suwanee's players were either in the seminary or in the medical school, which Suwanee had at the time, as well as undergraduates. And you could play six or seven years as long as you were staying in school. So it was uh it was a kind of a perfect storm of experienced players, Luke Lee, Billy Suter, who had played football at Princeton. He brought a lot of ideas from the Northeast down to the South. And of course, football was was very new in the South. Um, it had started really in the about the 1890 time frame, and Suwanee's first ever football game was 1891 against Vanderbilt. So football was very new, a lot of the rules were different from what we know today. And so here they came, and let me just I have to give this context. So they usually played three or four games a year because travel was so expensive. Right. And so in the 1890s, the biggest game in the South was Suwanee and Vanderbilt on Thanksgiving Day. And Swanee made enough out of the gate receipts from that one game to pay for the rest of the season. Well, for whatever reason, in 1899, Luke Lee couldn't come to terms with Vanderbilt on playing a game. I believe it was a dispute over how they were going to split gate receipts. And so Luke Lee said, Well, we're not gonna play you this year. Well, that meant he had to find another way to finance the season. And he had lost his primary source of revenue by not playing Vanderbilt. Well, as part of this, Swanee had gone out to Austin, Texas in 1898 and played Texas and beat him. So Texas issued a rematch challenge that if Suwannee would come back to Austin and play him again in 1899, Texas would pay the grand sum of $750. So Lueley agreed to do that, but he realized that that $750 would quickly get eaten up. So he decided to schedule games on the train ride back. So they were going to play Texas and Austin on a Thursday, Texas AM in Houston on Friday, Tulane in New Orleans on Saturday, they took Sunday off. Then they were going to play LSU in Baton Rouge on Monday and Ole Miss on Tuesday in Memphis. So they were going to play five games in six days, which was unheard of before or since, and they pulled it off, which is a reason why we wanted to do this film and book and tell this extraordinary story of we can truly say an event that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, it'll had never been uh never happened before, it will never even be attempted now. So we can say with certainty this is one record that will stand.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

And and you know, around that, you know, additional perspective. I mean, you've alluded to it, but that was like a 2,500-mile train trip, round trip.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

It was. It was a you know, from our standards, a brutal train trip. They were gone 10 days. They ate most of their meals on the train, they slept on the train during the the games. They would finish the games late in the afternoon, get on train, ride sometimes all night to the next destination, then get up and play that afternoon, then get on the train again, travel all night to their next destination. So when you talk about this, John, it's not just that they won these games, but look what they went through to play this kind of schedule. And then let's talk a little bit about the rules and what football was like back then. So in 1899, it was a very brutal, violent sport. There was no forward passing, so you had three plays to to make a first down of five yards. So you had three downs to make a five-yard first down, and there were no huddles, and you played both ways. So if you have a fumble or get stopped on the third down and don't make the first down, you go from playing offense immediately to defense with no break, or vice versa. So it was a very fast-paced, no huddle game, and the the halves were 35-minute halves, or a total of 70 minutes for a game, which but with basically non-stop action. So it was very fast-paced. Most of the players were fairly small because you had to run a lot, much more like soccer in that respect, football. And then on top of that, they had very little protective gear. Most players at that time did not have any helmets. They wore their hair long as extra padding to play. Um, they might have uh canvas pants with maybe a little padding in the pants, homemade, uh jerseys, no shoulder pads. They also had this kind of scary-looking uh nose guard that was made out of thick rubber that went over their nose and they held it in their teeth. But if you see pictures of them, it's pretty terrifying. So they didn't have much protective equipment. It was very brutal, all all running, and um at that time you could bite, you could kick, you could um scratch people, you could punch people. So it there wasn't really a line of scrimmage, so it was a very much a free-for-all kind of thing. Not nothing like what we think of as football today.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

And there were scoring differences.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Scoring differences too. At that time, touchdowns and field goals were both worth five points because kicking was considered one of the more important skills. So you could and you could either drop kick or a player would lie on the ground and hold the ball for the field goal kicker to kick it. So they were both worth the same thing, but you could go for an extra point in football, and if you ran it through just like today, you would get an extra point. So you could score six points on a touchdown.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

And the touchdown itself wasn't simply crossing the goal line.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Correct. It it was the player not only had to cross the goal line, but he had to literally put the ball and on the ground, and that's where the term touchdown came from, actually.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

As well as the formations, you would have a quarterback, and the quarterback was not allowed to run with the ball. So his sole job was to call the plays, get the ball from the center, and then either hand it off or toss it to one of the running backs. So the quarterback played a quarter of the way back, a halfback played half the way back, and the fullback was all the way back. So all this terminology that we kind of take for granted really had a basis in the world.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

In the T formation, what they call the T formation that was what it started out with. There weren't some of the exotic formations like we see today, or you know, split backs in the in the backfield, or you know, no, no, of course there wasn't no passing in those days, so it would certainly wasn't gonna be a matter where you didn't have a back in the backfield at all, uh except for the quarterback, it was because he couldn't run the ball. So so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

And there was a lot of deception involved, faking who was going to get the ball, faking which way were they were gonna run. And the um we talk about crazy rules, so at that time you were allowed to pick up players and throw them over the line of scrimmage. So if you had a short-yarded situation, say third and one yard to go, you could pick up the halfback and throw him over the line of scrimmage to try to make the first down. Conversely, if you were running sort of a flying wedge type offense, the defense could get one of their players and throw him over the line to try to tackle the running back. So it was kind of a crazy game in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

And and I don't want to get too far ahead on that because that definitely plays into the last game of the season, exactly what you were just talking about there.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

It does. We'll come back to that.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Yes, sir. And so um and another rule I think that's really, really well, there's two things here that are, I think that are kind of somewhat linked. Um, number one is the substitution rules, and number two was around how the coach, um, his behavior, what was required of the coach during the game.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Right. So you you've got to put out of your mind SEC football today. This Swanee started playing it, like I say, in 1891. So it's it's played its home games on the same field since 1891. It's the oldest football field in the South and the fourth oldest in the entire country. But there weren't big stadiums in the South. You know, places like Yale and Harvard had such stadiums, but in the South there were very there weren't many stadiums, and if they were, they didn't seat a lot of people. It was common for spectators just to stand around the field. But in addition to that, as you say, not only do players play both ways, but if they came out of the game, they couldn't go back in. So if you get gassed or hurt, or you know, you you just want to take a little break, you couldn't do it. So they stayed, they stayed out, and that's part of what I said earlier about the Civil War, they wanted to replicate the idea of combat, and that's why football took off in the South in particular, because it replicated combat. Well, part of combat is you don't get to take a break off the field of battle, and so that carried over. And generally, if a player came off, it was because he had been brutally injured, sometimes even killed. There were 18 or 19 deaths a year back then. So it it was a very brutal, hard sport, and you didn't really get any rest. In addition, the coach had to do a good job during practice because on the uh day of the game, he wasn't allowed to coach from the sidelines. If there were stadiums, he would have to sit in the stadium, but even if not, he was not supposed to coach from the sidelines. Although Coach Suter apparently did and had was criticized by some of our opponents for supposedly uh letting his uh thoughts be known during a game.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Right. And and and then from the standpoint of the substitutions that we were talking about, it was not just a matter of the rules didn't allow you to be re to go back in if you had to come out. The players would play very, very significantly injured in a lot of cases because of the dishonor for coming out if they if they get if they felt like they could help it.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Right. It it was considered cowardly to come out of a game, and so they didn't want to come out. There's a Suwannee player in 1898 who played a game with a broken leg, didn't come out. Um in the um 1899 season with Suwannee, the first game on the road trip against Texas, the star halfback whose name was Henry Siebel's, he had a nickname Ditty. Um he was the captain and the star halfback. First half of the Texas game, he gets his head split open. And instead of coming out of the game, he just runs over and Coach Suter puts some plaster repairs on it, and he went back in and played, he played that whole game, and he played the whole game against Texas AM and only sat out the game with two lane.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

And and that's pretty I mean that's uh that that's almost like a boxer with a cut man kind of only in some ways much more difficult. I mean, although you're getting your head pummeled in when you're boxing, you know, you're you're you're still um it's you you have a break. I mean you have a break after every round. Um there was no break except at halftime. That was the only break they got.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Right. And of course they didn't go back to locker rooms, they just huddle up on the field. And and remember too, there weren't any physicians on the sidelines. There wasn't a big bucket of Gatorade they could drink. They might have had a little bit of water, but really nothing in the way of uh medical supplies, water, much less electrolytes or Gatorade or things like that. So uh and I think uh up until probably through Bear Bryant's time, it was almost considered um you're sissified if you drank water.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Well you look at the like the junction boys, the way that they trained for when he was at at uh um at Texas and AM, yeah. The way it was then. They they uh it was unmanly to you know you know, we the the today high hydration is is understood a little differently, and um and the way that uh people do things is much different uh in terms of making sure players stay hydrated because they don't want to lose people to heat strokes and those kinds of things. But yeah, those days it was very different how they how they handled that. There was one other rule that I wanted to to kind of mention here as well, and it comes into play like we were talking about in that last game. Um, scouting.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Right. You you were not allowed to scout your opponents. It was considered uh unethical and against the rules to scout your opponents. So one of the things that Suwanee did in 1899 that Coach Suter brought down with him from the Northeast was the idea of the quick kick, because field position in that kind of game was vital. And sometimes uh it behooved you to quick kick to get the ball down to the other teams end of the field, hoping that they might fumble, and fumbles were sometimes called muffs, but to quick kick and get the ball down, because remember, there's no forward passing, so you don't have a way to get the ball way down the field unless occasionally a a runner broke through for a long run. So the tactics were a lot different too. Um and so the point is that Suwanee had this what one of the players later described as their secret weapon, which was the quick kick, which they did a lot of because Suwanee was in really good shape and they could run a lot, so they would wear people out with the quick kick. But because you were not allowed to scout, teams presumably did not know that Suwanee had that uh repertoire uh in its playbook.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

And one of the things, too, from a s a strategy standpoint that's very different from what we see today, of course, with only three downs, um only five yards for a first down, that kind of thing, but it was not uncommon for teams to punt even on first down because of the field position strategy that they would be employing, exactly what you were just talking about. If you know teams not expecting you to punt on the on first down, and you do, there's a lot better likelihood that they're gonna muff that punt than if they're already expecting it, and they're creating a a defense for their special teams to handle that. So that's right. So so yeah, that was uh that that that was a very different um set of things there. You've already um talked a little bit. I want to talk about some of these people that are involved here. You already talked a little bit about uh Coach Suter, and he came in um, of course, for for our our list. That may not realize this. He came in from Princeton. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but the very first game, football game ever played was between Rutgers and Princeton, if I'm remembering correctly.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

That's correct, 1869. But you wouldn't, even by 1899, you wouldn't have recognized that as a football game. It was just kind of a combination: rugby, free-for-all, and uh as one commentator has called it, it was basically a brawl called Kill the Ball Carrier. Well, with very little no rules, but out of that came football.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

And the thing is, is that at that point, of course, you know, we've got a lot of uh schools with long story traditions now, but at that point, the two teams that would have had the longest football traditions, regardless of how the you know, the nebulous beginnings rule-wise were Princeton and Rutgers obviously had the had the inside lane there. And and Suter came from Princeton. So he came from where there was already a tradition being developed uh in those early days, and so he's coming to the South where it it seems strange today. I mean, you you're an Alabama guy uh from growing up down here, of course, and you you mentioned Bear Bryant earlier, uh, and of course, growing up where I did, I I mean, I've the first guy in your the very first guy in the documentary is Johnny Majors. Um and you know, of course, Coach Nealand, I visited his grave last week. Um so there was a tr there's both both places you've got this long tradition that wasn't there then because it was so new still in in 1899. We're we haven't had those traditions developed. They were developing those traditions at this point. He comes in, Sugar comes in with a lot of ideas that are, you know, the quick kick is one of them. But I I remember one of the things that was was talked about is how undisciplined and uh even unskilled the players were when he first got here, was one of the comments that he made to the to the school newspaper.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Right. You had this core people who had played before, but he recruited some people to the team who had not not only never played football before, some of them didn't even know what a football looked like. So he had a lot of raw talent he had to develop quickly. And that's an interesting historical note. You know, Suwannee that year went 12-0. And for teams in the South, that had never been done before. Teams in the Northeast that were 10, 15 miles, 20 miles from each other, they could play sometimes 14, 16, 17 games a year. But in the um 1890s, because travel was so expensive, the teams in the South just didn't play many games. So to go 12-0 was remarkable. Swanee was the first team ever to travel widely and to show that could be done, and that was really the precursor to the SEC later. And SWANE showed that you could do this schedule, you could play a lot of teams, build an exciting season, and so they paved the way for a lot of modern football. They don't get credit for today, but they did.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Well, I mean, you stop and think about it, it still cracks me up that Stanford is now in the ACC. Stanford, a California team, is in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which is bizarre in this day of super conferences. But even with that, with you know, the the distance they're traveling, it's nothing at all like what the Sewanee team had to do with that road trip that that is the the I'll I'll say the cornerstone of this season.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Right, and that points to Luke Lee's vision. He he knew that he if he could craft a schedule like this and pull it off, he would have done something extraordinary. And of course, as Phil Savage says in our film, it was all well and good because he didn't have to be out on the field playing.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yeah, and you know, he was he was just the guy pulling the strings, so to speak. So so let's, you know, one of the things I would like to talk about a little bit is uh, you know, some of these key people we've talked about, Coach Suter. Let's talk about Luke Lee.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah, he is a fascinating individual. He left Sowanee and started the Nashville, Tennessee and newspaper at a very young age. He also was elected by the Tennessee legislature to be a U.S. Senator, and at the time he was elected, I think he was the youngest person ever to serve in the Senate. Interestingly, too, and not just Luke Lee, but several of the players, by the time World War I came, they probably were old enough that they wouldn't have had to serve. But a number of the players did serve in World War I, which I think is a testament to the character, the kind of people they were, that they could have avoided it and they didn't. Luke Lee himself was a part in the army in World War I. And just to give you one of my favorite stories, so at the end of the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II had gone to Holland to kind of escape. And so Lee got the idea that he would get a group of soldiers, they'd go to Holland, they'd kidnap the Kaiser and take him to the Paris peace treaty talks. And uh they actually got inside the castle where he was before they got thwarted. But it's an amazing story because not only that he would attempt that, he did it without any uh knowledge on the part of his superiors, so they didn't know what he was doing. He actually got in there before he got thwarted, but he also had the vision to see that if Kaiser Wilhelm himself had to pay reparations for a war he had started instead of the people of Germany, they'd be better off. And of course, a lot of that led to World War II. So he's uh he's a fascinating individual.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

And in and well, so growing up in Middle Tennessee as I did the Nashville, Tennessee and the Tennessee was you know the the local, you know, I say the local paper, it was the paper, the the state paper that we that we leaned on. There were two at that time, the Tennessee and the Nashville and the Nashville banner, of course, the Nashville banner went under several years ago. The Tennessean is still there. Um, unless they have moved into online uh type of distribution.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

And for your listeners who know Nashville, Percy Warner Park was given to the city of Nashville by Luke Lee and his wife, and they name the park in honor of Luke Lee's in-laws. So think about how extraordinary it is, one, to give that kind of property, and two, not to name it after yourself or even your own father, but to name it after your father-in-law. So pretty amazing fellow.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Yes, and I did not know that, so that's that that is interesting. Let's talk about some of the key players. One one that really comes to mind for me, and I and I hope I'm saying this right, uh Simp. Um, is it Simpkins? Simpkins. He was the fullback.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

He was.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

And uh he his story, and uh, you know, when we start talking the epilogue of the team here in a little bit, his his is a sad tale, but he was he he was absolutely integral to their success. From but on both sides of the ball.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Correct. So Orman Simpkins was the starting fullback. He apparently was a tremendous runner, very tough. And uh he and Diddy Siebles kind of did the backfield along with Rex Kilpatrick. They were all three talented. I think Simpkins was more of a just run at you kind of fellow. And years later, Coach Suter was being interviewed and said, uh, I've never seen anybody who was a more bruising tackler than Norman Simpkins, and said Simpins is the finest all-around player I've ever seen. And Simpkins hit another interesting tidbit, Simpkins was from Texas. His father was a cadet in Charleston at the beginning of the Civil War, and legend has it that his father uh helped fire the first cannon shot at Fort Sumter to start the Civil War.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Oh, that's interesting. So all kinds of things. So he was at the Citadel then and and was serving under Bourguard then.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

Yeah. And then Simpkins later graduated as the valedictorian at Suwanee. So he was also very intelligent. And anyone who goes to Suwanee, if you go down to the original gym, you'll see a plaque dedicated to Orman Simpkins. And do you want me to go on and talk about him later in life?

SPEAKER_01 31:41

No, we'll do that at the end because we'll we'll we'll come, we'll we'll swing back through and and kind of talk about after the after the story. And so I want to I'm hopefully I'm saying this right, warbler.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Warbler Wilson. He um I mentioned him earlier, he had already played football and graduated from South Carolina. And at that time, you didn't necessarily have to go to law school, you could be an apprentice in a law firm, which he was doing with his father. And Luke Lee came and got him and recruited him to come to Suwane. So he was he was the quarterback, he uh was very smart. Quarterback, although he didn't pass or run the ball, the quarterback called all the plays. They were numbered codes because you were you were ran a play. As soon as the play was over, you lined up and ran another one. There wasn't any huddles, there wasn't any real break, line up and run another one, and he would call out a numbered code and they'd run that play. So he had to be thinking ahead, he had to be ready for the next play, he had to know who he was going to give the ball to. And then he became a blocker. You think about modern-day quarterbacks, they don't want to block, but that was his primary job after he handed the ball off, was to be a blocker. So he he he again um the fact that Luke Lee talked him into coming back out of quote retirement to play again was something else.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Well, and and the other thing that I think is important, you you were talking about calling the next play and all that. The reason that was so very important is what we talked about earlier. The coach isn't on the sideline. He's in the stands, if there are stands, he's he but he's not allowed to coach. So the quarterback is the coach on the field. I mean, he's the Peyton Manning is the one in the that I think of in the modern era, especially when in his NFL time where he was actually literally a coach on the field, knew the the game plan as well as the coach did. So those kinds of that's right.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Those days gone, but Nick Saban talks about when he was in youth football, apparently he was so smart that the coach just let him as the quarterback call all the plays.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

But that doesn't happen much anymore.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

No, it does not. Well, first of all, the the coach, given how much he's his his job is on the line, he doesn't want to leave that in the hands of anybody else. They tend to be a little bit the way of control freaks now, certainly. But uh you know, other other people, I mean, we could talk about the there are a number of different players that we could talk about, and we we may come back to that. But I think probably the the unsung heroes that you don't hear about, and and and I'd never really thought about this until your documentary, and I thought that you your documentary did a great job of bringing this out, the rub-down men.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

That's right, and one of the things I'm most proud of is we highlighted their contributions to the team. So there were probably at least two African-American rub-down men that year.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

And we would call those trainers nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

We would call them trainers. They were called rub-down men because the game was so brutal after the game, they would literally roll the players down to help them with their injuries and to help them be able to sleep that night. And we we don't even know the other African Americans' name. And we don't know anything about Cal Burris except he was there in 1899. And while we were working on this the film, the film came up, and then the book, while we were working on it, uh Woody Register, who's a history professor at Sewanee, and who provided us a great deal of commentary, and he had he knew a lot about the team. He and some students who were doing some other research came across a photo of Cal in the 1914 student scrapbook. So it's the only photograph known of him. Woody and his folks have researched all the records they can find. There's no mention of Cal Burris after 1899 except for that photo. I went out to the African American Cemetery in Suwanee and tried to see if I could find his grave. Couldn't find that. So it's it's a unique story in the sense that not only did he do this, but we don't know anything else about him. But it's clear that the players could not have won all these games without him. And in particular, um Warbler Wilson has a great letter he writes about the contributions that they did on that road trip. Because apparently the players were screaming in pain, they were hurt, and Cal Burroughs had to stay up all night rubbing these guys down. Warbler said sometimes he had to be rubbed himself several times during the night during this trip. So basically, Cal Burrus probably didn't sleep any. He probably just went from player to player, rubbing them down, no credit. He also probably had to handle the laundry, carry the bags, and the players recognize his contribution, but the public didn't. And I'm so happy that we've given him this kind of recognition. And one of my proudest moments is Suwannee has a sports hall of fame. And I nominated Cal Burrus several years ago because of his contributions to the team. And Cal, who did not attend SWANE, was not educated, we don't know anything about him, but he was inducted into the SWANE Sports Hall of Fame. That's great. And I've that's one of my proudest moments.

SPEAKER_01 37:39

One of the interesting things, and in, you know, like we talked earlier, no Gatorade, you know, and of course, no water systems like we think of them nowadays. They did something kind of unique for that trip.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

They did, and again, this is a tribute to Luke Lee and Coach Suter and their uh foreseeing issues. So as you stated, sanitation was not a given in 1899. And so they got probably Cal, maybe his uh buddy, but they got them to get two barrels and fill them up with spring water from a spring in Suwannee called Tremlett Springs. And in fact, although I had walked past it as a student, I'd never really focused on it until this we researched this story. Tremlet Springs is still there today. You can go buy it. So they filled these two barrels up with spring water, put them on the train, and that's what the players drank during the trip to to make sure they didn't get sick from bad water. And it's kind of interesting too, as the train trip went on and they kept winning game after game, the players started thinking that the spring water was magic water, and kind of gave them an additional inspiration to play.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

And and one of the things I remember from Bull Durham, the movie Bull Durham, uh, he's he's talking to Annie Savoy and he says, if you think you're winning because you are doing something special, and I'm not gonna go into the whole speech there, he said, then you are, because it begins to give you that level of confidence. You start having that. Is it magical? No. But in your mind it is, and that's all it needs. That's that's all it takes, is because it gives you the level of confidence, going, yeah, we've got this talisman, whatever it is, that's making it impossible for us to lose, and we're gonna keep riding that as long as we can. That's right. So so you know that was that was an interesting aspect of it. Another thing on this trip that that happened, they almost it almost ended before it started because of a a problem when they boarded the train at Cowan. There was something that was right.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

And this again is is a real testament to uh Luke Lee's abilities and ability to think and and uh pressure situations. So they they took the mountain goat from Suwanee down to Cowan, and then they got on a train to go to Austin, Texas, and they were gonna go through Nashville. Well, after they took off from Cowan, Luke Lee somehow figured out that they left all the cleats at the train station.

unknown 40:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

So he had the presence of mind to telegraph, send a telegraph to the Cowan uh uh operator and tell him to put the uh cleats on the next train coming to Nashville. And of course, he must have had all the train timetables. There wasn't any internet, there wasn't any AI. So he's doing this with train tables and telegraph. He telegraphs uh a friend of his in Nashville and says, meet this train at at this time, get those cleats and put it on this train. And so he did that, and the cleats remarkably showed up uh on the same day the Suwannee team did, and Luke Lee's uh daughter who we interviewed said she doesn't think anybody even knew what had happened. He just pulled it off. And a remarkable, remarkable achievement.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

And and saved saved the trip. And and and the thing I would say, had he not had that presence of mind, the trip doesn't happen. I mean the the the trip happens, but now they're in the hole. They the they don't get to play the games, they don't have the res you know the receipts that come back, they certainly don't have the success. Um because you couldn't just run down to Dick Sporting Goods and get more more cleats.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Right. You you weren't gonna call Amazon and tell them to deliver them. And another aspect that gets lost in all this is a lot of these players didn't have any money, they didn't come from Maines. So their their pants and jerseys were made by the matrons at Suwannee. They were homemade uniforms. Uh not all, but a lot of these guys really didn't have money. So not only did they not have the cleats, even if they could have found them, a lot of these players couldn't afford it to buy them. And Suwanee certainly didn't have enough money to buy cleats for I think 18 of the 21 players went on the trip.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

And in those days the university wasn't funding them anyway.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Right. So and to and to get cleats, you had to get uh old uh uh leather work boots, and then you had to get strips of leather, glue them together, and then nail them to make the cleats, so it wasn't like you had ready-made cleats anyway. You you would have had to find somebody to make them.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

So talking about the trip then, 2,500 miles, five teams in six days. Some interesting things about that. And um, I'll I'll just give some highlights here that that to me I are are are notable. They, of course, won every game. They didn't give up a point that whole trip. And and we're not talking about lightweight teams. Um probably honestly, in those days, the team that's the most powerhouse team would have been Tulane. Um, but none of those teams were lightweights in those days. I mean, many of them are powerhouses now. Um you've you've a matter of fact, all of the other four teams have either won national championships in recent years or are um you know in contention. Um This is the one that that hasn't won that, but you know, they were in you know right up in in in the playoff uh contention there. So so it's not like they're lightweight nowadays. Um Tulane, of course, went a very similar route to what the University of the South did. They withdrew from the SEC eventually and and because they were charter members as well. But 1899, they were a powerhouse team, probably the most of those five.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

Right. All of them were they were bigger schools. And the the thing is, you got to put this also into perspective. Swanee had already played four games before they embarked on this trip. And uh out of the 12-game season, I think Suwannee only played three games at home. So they traveled for nine of the games. The road trip, they scored 91 points to the opponent's zero. But remember, not only had they played these other games, they're the ones traveling, these other teams are playing at home.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

Right. And the other teams are playing Swanee once, they're playing five game five teams. And and so it which really then I think gets into your magic water, but also most especially into to Cal and his his not just his diligence, but also his skill as a rub-down man.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

That's right. And and you've got to realize, too, that these players were tough. They were playing a tough sport, they were mentally tough, they wanted to play. And again, in 1899, Swannee's not only not funding the football program, none of these guys have athletic scholarships. They're all playing for the love of the game. And it the Swanee vice-chancellor, Benjamin Wiggins, required all the players to keep respectable grades. So it wasn't like, oh, you're gonna be a football player, so you don't have to worry about class. No, if they had to keep their they had to go to class and keep their grades up, or otherwise they would be kicked off the team. And the other thing for a season like this is conditioning, and that was where SWANE had a little bit of an advantage. Um, SWANE's school year at that time went through the summer, so they took some of the winter months off because of how brutal the winners could be. But they had school during the summer, so the football team started practicing in the summer. So they had several months of practice that other teams didn't have because they didn't start until the fall. So that was another thing. They got better better prepared for the season, but also they um were in apparently incredible shape. One of the players said in practice they would run 13 plays a minute. And think about that, for several hours of practice, and then at the end of practice, they had to they had to run a mile or so back to the gym. So they were in incredible shape. They obviously were mentally tough, and they were able to play with pain.

SPEAKER_01 47:10

And that means that they're running a play every four or five seconds. That's when you think about the play clock that we've got nowadays, and how you know you're you're sometimes you're not running a play every two minutes, it feels like. I mean, you're certainly you're you are, you're running a play about every every 45 seconds to a minute, but these guys would have been running in that same time period, would have been running 10 or 12 plays.

SPEAKER_00 47:41

Right. And suddenly they fumble the ball or they don't make a first down, and suddenly they're they're right on defense. They're not getting a rest and while the defense comes in, they're on defense, they're having to make the plays and be ready. So they had to be prepared offensively and defensively because that could change at any minute.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

So they play these five teams, don't give up a point, they outscore their opponent significantly. And Luke Lee, always the promoter, what's going on with him all this time?

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Well, he's he's enjoying the show. He he's uh obviously behind the scenes, he's making sure because think about this. In the days with no phones, just telegraph, no nothing other than timetables, he had to make sure all the trains were on time, he had to make sure that they made it to the next city on time, he had to make sure they had something to eat. Um, I think they spent most of the nights on the train, but he had to make sure they had a place to sleep at night. So behind the scenes, he's having to do all that. And one of my favorite lines in the film is I was talking to Coach Bobby Bowden about Luke Lee, and he laughed and said they'd be hiring 40 people to do that nowadays.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

Right. And and that that is a great line. Um but he's also in in addition to being the travel agent, being um being the uh concierge, all of those things, he's also making sure the folks back home are getting the news.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

That's right. So he had a he had an agreement before they left that he would send a telegraph. Sometimes he'd send two, one at the end of the first half and one at the end of the game, but he would send a t telegraph back to Swanee talking about the game, and then they had a big convocation bell, and when the telegraph came in, they'd ring the bell and all the students would come over and they'd tell them what was going on. And of course, as the road trip went on, everybody got more and more excited because even though they didn't know this would never happen again, they certainly knew this was uh an historic event. And um one funny thing, uh after the Texas game, uh and the Texas game was the one you remember where Diddy Siegels got his head split open, Luke Lee's telegraph after the Texas game said the men are all fit and well. Doesn't mention that he doesn't mention the injury to Diddy Siebles at all.

SPEAKER_01 50:36

And there was one of the things that the team was saying, nobody hurt or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Right. The uh Diddy Siegels, the captain of the team, had come up with the motto, nobody hurt, and that's not nobody in one word, but two words, nobody hurt. And there's a famous picture of the team on some steps, and they've got the nobody hurt chalked into the steps. So that was kind of their mantra for the season because it was so brutal. And what's remarkable is that they had 21 players on the team, but only probably 13 or 14 of them saw a lot of service. They had 21 players on the team, 18 on the road trip, but at the end of the season, they could all they they could all still play, and nobody had been so crippled that they couldn't play, which is really remarkable.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

That is remarkable. And I remember one of the things that that is mentioned in the movie, uh it wasn't about Suwani, it was about Auburn, that Coach Heisman shows up at the train station with his team. They've just played a game, and they're they're so beaten up that the people at the train station think that they're victims of a train accident, and they're trying to call ambulances for them because they're so beaten up.

SPEAKER_00 52:03

That's right. He had he had been a coach at Oberlin when that happened. Oh, is that Oberlin, okay? And um, they were so beaten up that the people at the train station thought they had been in a train wreck and offered to get them ambulances. That's that's a shows you this, it was really a brutal, brutal stuff.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

It's a testament to just how physical and and and violent it was. So now then we when we come to the end of that road trip, they've already played four games before the road trip. Now they've played five, so they're still there, they're they're nine games in. There's still three games left.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

That's right. And there's a famous poster that Solani people know about that says they played five games in six days, and on the seventh day they rested. Well, the truth of the matter is they didn't rest because they had three more games to go, including probably the two toughest teams in the South, Auburn and North Carolina.

SPEAKER_01 53:05

And let's talk about that Auburn game, because that one that's that's unique in one of the things I tell people when I'm when I'm talking about this this team, they went 12-0, and only one team scored on them. And oh, by the way, you may have heard of his coach, his name is John Heisman. You know, everybody's heard of the Heisman Trophy. So as soon as you say John Heisman, they're like, oh wow, he was the only one who was able to score on them. But that was um that that game had a lot of controversy around it.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

It did. I would I would love to be able to watch a movie of that actual game because it was played on Thanksgiving Day, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, and Auburn and Suwanee both traveled to Montgomery, but um Diddy Siebles later writes a letter to Luke Lee saying, didn't we arrive late that day and maybe they hadn't had breakfast, and it was very, as he said, unsatisfactory. So Thanksgiving Day in a field in Montgomery, there's no seating, no stadium, 4,000 people showed up to see this game. It was apparently extremely rowdy. Um there's another great story about Luke Lee is before the game, he and the his Auburn counterpart are talking about how they're gonna split the gate receipts. And the Auburn guy says, Well, let's just do it after the game. And Luke Lee supposedly pulled out a pistol and said, No, we're gonna do it right now, and they counted out, and then he he sent the money to a bank in in Montgomery for safekeeping. That's just a little bit. There were a lot of fights during that game in the crowds, people drew guns, and they stood all around the field. So Swannee later accused Heisman of playing 15, 16 players on a given play because the the the crowd was all the way around, there was a lot of rattdiness, and uh when they were playing close to the sidelines, it was kind of hard to see who was in and who was out. So it was a really hotly contested game. And of course, John Heisman was known to be a little bit arrogant, so he he didn't like being uh the loser of a game. This game had controversy as well at um at the first half when it uh ended. Swanee was winning 11-10. So here Auburn is the first team that even scored on them. Auburn's frankly running all over them. And uh I think it if I remember correctly, at the end of the game, Auburn had run for 323 yards and Swanee 82. So they were really running around Swannee. And Auburn Heisman had tied leather handles to the pants of the Auburn players so that they could grab hold and either pull a player forward or the player with the ball could grab hold of the guy in front of him. And Luke Lee and Souter complained, and the rest stopped the game to cut off the handles. So the fight slowed the game down, cutting off the handles slowed the game down. My friend Henry Siebles, whose grandfather was Diddy grandfather was Diddy Siebles, tells the story that at halftime, Siebles, who was from Montgomery, his brothers were all out there watching the game with him, and that supposedly Diddy's brother Temple came over to him at halftime and said, Diddy, you've got to do something. We bet the house on the game. If you lose, we're gonna have to kick your mother out. Because a lot of betting was a big thing back then. And there were a lot of bets during that game. So I love that story. So they started the second half, it's still 11-10. Auburn is really the better team that day. And they look like they're gonna score and go ahead. And 14 minutes into the second half, the ref calls the game for darkness. Save Swanee. Swanee hightails it out of town, but they they emerge victorious. And Heisman was so outraged because he thought they had been cheated, he wrote a letter to the Birmingham Age Herald newspaper where he basically, it's a long letter, but basically says the refs cheated us, and I've never seen worse refs. Interestingly, the next day the ref replies to that in the newspaper and says everybody knows that Heisman's just a crybaby. So it was amazing to think, think about a coach and a referee today have having a battle in the newspaper. So it it was a it was a really hotly contested, wild game. I'd love to be able to watch a video of what really happened.

SPEAKER_01 58:20

And Heisman also was one who would place bets. You were just mentioning the bets going on, which of course uh for obvious reasons uh the blacks that this is in advance, well in advance of the Black Sox scandal that happens uh about a decade or so later. Um that changed how betting could happen and gambling uh could happen with regard to Major League Baseball. But it you know, that was uh and I realize it's a different sport, but it's you know, sports betting. Um even today, of course, I don't know how it is in Alabama, but in Tennessee now, you've got sports betting allowed now, and anytime there's a uh um any kind of sporting event about every other ad now is for some sort of online sports betting. Um so it's still a huge thing. He was he going into the last game had bet evidently on Suwannee's opponent.

SPEAKER_00 59:22

That's right. So they they play on Thanksgiving Day in Montgomery. Two days later, Suwannee plays North Carolina in Atlanta, and North Carolina was a great team, and so everybody knew that whoever won this game would be called the champion of the South. So it was again a very important game. The Suwannee players, I said that scouting was not allowed, but on the same Thanksgiving day when Suwannee was playing, Georgia and North Carolina had played. And the Georgia players tipped off the Suwanee players that North Carolina had this uh professional athlete, and he called Kohler, and that he was a leaper, and that when they got to short yardage or down on the goal line, Kohler would leap over for the touchdown. So Suwane had advanced notice of co of Kohler, and Kohler um he was not a student, he was basically a professional athlete who had been brought on. So again, the rules were very lax, uh, but interestingly, Suwanee required all the players to be full-time students and maintain grades. So they were having to play some teams that didn't abide by those same rules. And the Suwanee players also learned that Heisman had apparently placed a bet that North Carolina was going to beat them. So one of the players said, you can bet that we found all the dimes and dollars we could find to match his bet.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:05

And so they bet on themselves to to match the bet. Again, that's something that would be very much forbotten nowadays. Um but it was it was not just a matter of beating North Carolina for the sake of beating North Carolina, they also wanted to thumb their nose one more time at John Heisman. So then this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, coming back to the leaper. And you know, we were talking about rules being different in those days that they could throw players over from both sides, uh both offense and defense, that uh they would pick them up and throw them, and and evidently this this guy at North Carolina, he was good at leaping, but he he would get a little help along the way sometimes as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

Yeah, he could he he could uh step on the backs of players. They may he may have been tossed as well, but like I say, he was a professional athlete, so he was a very gifted athlete. He just wasn't a student. And um one of the there were two um crucial plays in that game. One of them was that North Carolina had a first down on Suwannee's one-yard line. So they had a first down, one yard to go to score, and if they had scored, they probably would have won. And Suwannee is called for offsides twice. So they end up that North Carolina has five attempts to make one yard, and Suwannee stops them, and one of the stops is recorded that Diddy Siegels met Kohler head on, trying to leap over the line and stopped him. And the Suwanee student newspaper called The Purple reported on that game and said that he stopped uh Kohler and that Swanee was within three inches of defeat. So that was that was an incredible goal line stand. And the other one was that um Orbel Wilson was back to catch a punt. And at that time, there was a new rule called a fair catch, it wasn't very well known. But that time at that time you didn't wave your hand in the air, you kicked your heel in the ground to do a fair catch. And Wilson did that, and uh the North Carolina player either didn't see it or didn't know the rule and tackled him, so they they gave uh Swanee a 15-yard penalty, which got him close to the goal line, and they called in Rex Kilpatrick, who kicked a field goal and won the game 5-0. The third thing about that game, sort of like the Auburn game, is there were 35-minute halves, but the ref called the second half at 30 minutes for darkness. So again, um some odd things happened to all pull together to let Swanee be undefeated.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:22

And I think it's interesting. We we we look at we look at that road trip, and you think about what a what a tremendous trial that was. And and it was, and and so in total, it was it was very difficult. Probably the games themselves were not as difficult individually. It was the fact that the aggregate of them all together was what made them tough. Really, the last two games of the season were the hardest games.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:57

They were the probably the two best teams they played. And to your point, when Suwane got to Memphis to play Ole Miss, the Memphis newspaper had a story before the game started, and uh and then a story about after the game. But one of the comments the reporter made is that when Ole Miss lined up, they saw what he called the bandaged boys in purple, and they had a new respect for Suwanee. So apparently by the Ole Miss game, they were really beaten up, bandage, probably blood on their face, probably some missing teeth. So I'm sure that was quite a sight when they showed up in Memphis.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:41

Well, we know Diddy probably had stitches still. Um I mean, because that was less than a week after the the Texas game where he's been lacerated.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:51

Yeah, I think they kept plaster paris on the whole time.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:54

Oh wow. Not even stitches. That's just that's incredible. So, you know, they they made it to the end of the season, 12-0. They have played some really tough games. They've played 12 games in six weeks. They've played almost half of those games in in a week. They've survived. They have just pulled off something that will never, never even be attempted again, let alone matched. Certainly never exceeded. This is, you know, there's an old saying that records are made to be broken and there are no unbreakable records. I think this is one that is. But what they achieved came at a cost. And when we start talking about the epilogue.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:57

Sure. Let's talk about after the seasons, because we talk about undefeated, five games in six days, all this accolades, all this glory, but it's not just a story of glory and winning, it's a story about sacrifice. So Orman Simpkins, the star halfback, his knees and legs were brutally beaten by the beating he took playing football. And uh in 1916, he wrote his uh former teammate William McClaiburn, and his Suwanee Archives have this letter, it's very poignant and moving, where he says, uh being crippled for life is no easy matter. So that references that um in in the before 1916 he had a leg amputated because of all the injuries. And he was bitter. He thought that Suter and Lee had made him play when they shouldn't have, and he he had that leg amputated. And then but he ends the letter by saying, I am glad I went to Suwanee. I'm proud to be a Suwanee man, which is remarkable. Well, a couple years after that, he goes into the Georgetown Hospital in D.C. to have his second leg amputated because of the serious injuries, and he dies on the operating table. So he paid the ultimate sacrifice to play football.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:34

And he was only, if I remember correctly, 42 years old.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:37

I think that's right, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:40

And so, I mean, died young and you know, was never the same, obviously, after this season. And and and what we said is he was maybe the most athletically gifted player on that team. And after that season was over, he was a wreck.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:03

Well, and again, and of course, he played the next year too, because he's so but and he also played baseball. Apparently, he was a great baseball player. But we also have um two of the players, and we hear a lot about CTE these days, there's no way to connect this up, but two of the players later committed suicide. And one we know in particular was a chaplain in World War I, and apparently he was so scarred by what he saw uh overseas in World War I that he took his own life. So several of these players um ended up with not great outcomes at the end of their lives, but but others flourished. Um Diddy Siebles moved to Birmingham and started a company and it was extremely successful. He was um he was an amateur golfer who won the state title as an amateur golfer. He was uh really a remarkable, remarkable person. And my favorite, probably my favorite character on the team was William Wild Bill Claiborne, who was in seminary when he played on the team. He had a bad eye, so he wore a patch during games, and supposedly he had lined up with a new opponent, and he'd line up next to the across from the player in front of him and lift the eye patch and said, This happened last game, we'll see what happens today, and put the patch down, let leave him to worry about that. But after um after Sawani, he became an Episcopal priest. He served, he he also was a priest in World War I. Again, Luke Lee, Bill Claiborne, um, Diddy Siebel, several of those men went went on to serve in the war. But after um after he became a priest, he settled in uh near Suwanee on the Cumberland Plateau and had a remarkable ministry. He started a boys' school, he did a lot of things for the community, and he was known as the Apostle to the Mountaineers. And he uh he was really a remarkable man, what he accomplished after Swanee, and he was beloved, and he's buried in the Swannee Cemetery.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:40

Which well the which of the players I remember, and I can't remember the name of who it was, but it talked about him being um a theology student and being gifted at cursing, which I found an odd juxtaposition.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

Yeah, that that was I'm trying to think of his name offhand, but there was a player who's known for his swearing ability.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:05

And um but he was a theology student.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:10

I just that that I I found that amusing, and I but I couldn't remember which uh which which player that was. So we see with this team a mixed bag, obviously, and of course that's not unusual, you know, the the the uh mixed uh fortunes that that happen later. Um and but what we we we do see like with Sim Simpkins reaching out later, um was it to Claiborne that he wrote to, um there there was a um it was a brotherhood truly afterwards. They they they had very similar to what you see with combat veterans, they had been to the war together, they they had a a love and a um uh a camaraderie that that is one of those uh transcendent type of relationships that you see later on.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:17

That's right. And the letters we have are remarkable. Uh Luke Lee and Diddy Siebel's exchanged letters from time to time. Ralph Black wrote several letters, and um great thing in terms of research is kind of the resident historian at Suwanee was named Arthur Benchidti. And in the 50s he realized this story was a remarkable story, and so he wrote all of the living players and asked them to send him their remembrances, which a number of the players did, and that was a basis for a lot of our research is what these players said in those letters. If he had not done that, we'd have missed a whole lot of uh not only facts but lore about the team. And he actually, because of that, approached Sports Illustrator, which was a new sports magazine at the time, and they put that story on the cover of Sport, they did an article about Swan Sports Illustrated.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:23

That that is that is really neat. Um, because yes, I've I've seen uh I worked at as a guide at Cumberland Caverns, you probably are familiar with it. Being uh a student up there, I worked as a guide, and they actually in the early days of Sports Illustrated, it wasn't all professional sports and stuff like it is now. They would, I mean, Spelunky was something that they included in there that was which I found interesting. I saw an article from that time period. Um, but a little school like Suwannee, of course, that did great things uh at that point. Um and and something else that's interesting about Suwannee that is it being an Episcopalian school, uh All Saints Chapel, this season is literally recorded in stained glass.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

It is. There's a stained glass window in All Saints that shows uh two players, one of whom is Orman Simpkins holding a ball that says 1899, commemorating that season. So it's it's really interesting that a church has a stained glass to a football team.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:40

And that particular window, it shows um a number of things from right around that, I'll say that uh 20-year period. You've got the the football team, you also have the the ones who went off and fought in World War I, you had the uh starting of the medical centers all in that same section of glass there, but right in the center of it, there's that 1899 or Orman Simpkins there receiving the football from another player. 1899 on he's wearing like a baseball cap, if I remember correctly, even uh so so just in that what what what school does that?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:25

Right. And um we interviewed Gerald Smith, who is a religion professor, but also kind of a resident historian of Swaning now, and uh he said that um to him All Saints Chapel is the center of campus. Yes, and they have they have stained glass windows, as he said, we have windows to Shakespeare, but we also have a window to the 1899 team to show that this team and its legend is part of the fabric of Swannee, still lives today. You can see a a plaque at the football field to the team, you can see Orman Simpkins plaque, you can go to Trimlet Springs, you can see these posters. We made some posters too. So there are a lot of remembrances of the team in Swanee today.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:13

And and and I think that's incredible. You you look at um you look at how it was founded in in the late 1850s, opened, I think, uh started in 1857, opened in 1859, if I remember correctly, which is just in time for the Civil War. Um one of the founders becomes a general in the Confederate Army, Leonidas Polk. He's killed in the Atlanta campaign. The school is burned during that time period by the Union Army, has to rebuild. And so that that gets into some of what you were talking about, that they didn't have a great deal of uh funding. They were having to rebuild from in and you know that's not something you recover from. Something else I found interesting. My hometown was one of the towns that was considered initially. Um, McMinville, Tennessee. When I was looking, when I was researching this, I found all the places that they considered putting it: Huntsville, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, Chattanooga, Tennessee, McMinnville, Tennessee, and Swanee. Those were the five places that were the finalest. And you have the domain there, it they picked Swanee. That was just what seemed to be what they were looking for from a spiritual standpoint because it was um you know it was a parochial type of uh of a college.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:34

Well, the the sort of final straw to get the location was that the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company donated 5,000 acres, which later became 10, which later became 13,000. They donated the 5,000 acres, but they had said you have to start classes within 10 years. So after the Civil War, like you said, that everything on campus has been burned, all the books have been burned, there was no money left, and they had to try to start over. And they were cognizant of this requirement because they didn't want to lose the 5,000 acres. So they did indeed start a class before the 10 years ran out to save the 5,000 acres.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:21

That's that's that was not a part of it that I knew. I knew that the land had been donated, but I didn't realize the stipulation around it. So let's talk about the documentary a little bit now. I mean, we've we've alluded to it throughout this. I mean, there were some some names in here. Of course, some of these gentlemen are are are now no longer with us, but and of course, the first one, the first person in the movie is Johnny Majors. Of course, his dad coached, Shirley Majors coached for many years at Suwanee. Um Johnny was the runner-up for the Heisman. There it is again, the Heisman Trophy in the 1950s. Um, and then won a national championship at Pitt, coached at the University of Tennessee. You had Vince Dooley, you had Bobby Bowden, who you mentioned earlier, Nick Saban is in this thing, you've got Kirk Herbstreet, um, you've got um Tony Barnett, or not Barnett Barnhart, um, and and there are uh just a ton of others that you've got. The the people that you got to participate in this, astounding. I mean, to to get two or three of those guys would have been uh amazing, and and and um you've got from the time period that this was produced, you've got basically a roll call of football minds there. How did you do that and and what what what was involved in that?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:52

Well, um I tell people now, looking back on it, I have to say that God answered some prayers because think about this. I'm a lawyer. I had never done a film before. My good friend David Cruz in Oxford, Mississippi, had done a documentary on Governor William Winter in Mississippi called The Toughest Job, which had done well. But he he he was not a full-time professional filmmaker either. But the two of us decided to tackle this, and I didn't, the truth is I didn't know what I was getting into because it took five years and thousands of hours. But as we started getting into it, we had said at the beginning, we uh kind of our first meeting, we said, you know, 1899, there are no fo no really no photographs, no videos. We won't be able to find a lot of facts, but we'll just explore the lore. Well, it we did find a lot of facts, and the facts are better than the lore. So we got to talk about things that actually happened as opposed to just legend, although the the legend's in there too. So we started out, and uh all I can say is that over time things fell into place remarkably. So um, you know, Johnny Majors, his father had coached at Swanee, so he had a connection. Uh my son was a fraternity brother at Washington Lee with Vince Dooley's grandson. So through them they got Vince Dooley. Um Bobby Bowden, Phil Savage, who's in our film, who's a works in the NFL, he knew Bobby Bowden's son, so he said, Well, just contact him. He's a nice guy. So I contacted him, and his son said, Yeah, my dad'll do it. And so I drove to Tallahassee and interviewed Bobby Bowden. And Nick Saban turned us down, so we gave up, and then suddenly uh he his office contacts and said he'll do something for you, so he filmed his part. Remarkable. So all four coaches had won national championships. Uh they're they're all his you know students of the game, so they they knew they knew about Swanee. My good friend Brad Joy was the headmaster at Montgomery Bell Academy, where two of the parents in his school were John Meachum and Kirk Herbstreet. So we called Brad and said, Do you think you could get them to do an interview? He said, Well, let me see. He called back a couple of days later and said, They'll do it. So we got John Meachum and Kirk Herbstreet. I mean, things that I never would have guessed at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:38

And Kirk Herbstreet, this is this is the kind of thing that he just seems to want to do. Well, I I as a student of the game like he is.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:48

Interviewing him, I saw that he was the consummate professional. He knew he knew the game, he knew the significance of what Swanee had done. We also tracked down a number of descendants of the team, which was fascinating to get their family stories and to hear to record that. And John, what I tell people all the time is probably my greatest satisfaction is that we realized after the film was done that if we hadn't done it when we had, the story would have been lost forever. Right. Because we've already lost some of the football coaches. We've lost Luke Lee's daughter and Diddy Siebel's daughter-in-law who were in their 90s when we interviewed them. So a lot of those people are gone, and we realize that the descendants who are getting up in age two, their children don't even know or care about the story. So if we hadn't captured them, that would have been lost. And then, like I said, people stepping up, Woody Register, who had done a lot of research on the team, instrumental. John McCardell, the vice chancellor, gave us an interview, was excellent. Uh Joel Cunningham, Vice Chancellor, Reuben Brigadier, we interviewed him. So we got at that time all the living vice, Sam Williamson, who started out as a history professor. So we got all four at that time living vice-chancellors, and and um I know I'll leave somebody out because we had so many people help us. Gerald Smith, who I mentioned earlier, who did it a lot, Wyatt Printy, who's a writer and poet, but he had a phenomenal uh knowledge about the team and about the the kind of historical context of playing. So all these people, and what what I realized, because I'd never done a film before, when I went back to write the script later and I got all the talks transcribed. So I had from my attorney days, I used to get depositions, so I got them transcribed so I could read them. And what I realized is there were different themes that one person talked about that another picked up. They didn't know about the other person's interview, but there were different themes that kind of all fit together, so it was so much fun. And then because we didn't have any photographs, we tried to figure out what we could do to supplement it. And I have a friend Karen Fecto who is the co-author of my book. She had been helping me on some things with the film, and I called her and I said, Do you know anybody we could get as an artist to paint it? And she said, I do. Let me call him. And she called me back, said, said, Yeah, there's a artist in Birmingham named Ernie Eldridge, and he'll do it. So Ernie turned out to be a wonderful artist, but also a great person. So I would tell him about different scenes I wanted to show. And like, just to give one of many examples, but the last game of the year against North Carolina, I wanted to depict that goal line stand. Well, Ernie went back and said, well, what would December 3rd in Atlanta look like? What would the sun look like? What would the leaves look like? So that he could be accurate in depict what the what that you know the trees wouldn't have leaves by that time, or not many. The sky would have been, it would have been getting towards dusk. So he not only did a great thing painting, but he spent time really trying to make it authentic.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:34

The detail that he did.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:37

That's impressive. That's the main reason we did the book. After the film, I was talking to Karen. I said, you know, we've got all these original paintings by Ernie and another artist, Jim Trusillo. We've got all this archival information. It really needs to be preserved in a book. And she said, Well, that's what I do for a living make coffee table books. So again, I call it an answer to prayer, it just fell into my lap, but it was incredible. And then the third thing is I started thinking we really need some music with this. Well, although I didn't know him, I knew of Bobby Horton, who lives in Birmingham, who does the music for many of Ken Byrne's documentaries. He's also an expert on the war, the Civil War, and the music of the Civil War. So I called him up out of the blue. He didn't know me. I said, can we have lunch? He turned out to be the nicest person. We talked and I told him what we were doing. And first of all, he said he would be glad to help. So now we had this consummate documentary musician going to do our music score. And then he hadn't done any research, but he said, well, 1899, let me see, we we could have this song, this song, and he listed about 20 or 30 songs right off the top of his head that would have been between the Civil War and 1899. Because the way he works, which is brilliant, is he only plays music from the period in a documentary. Because he said if you play music from another period, it dates your film, but if you play that music, it it goes well. And it and he said there's kind of a spiritual component when you play music from the air. So the way he worked, which is just totally fascinating to me because I have no musical ability, he watched our film probably over a hundred times. And then he would say, well, for this 45-second segment, this piece of music would go well. And for this 3 second segment, this piece. Well then he so then he picks the song he wants to use. Then he says to himself, what instruments would sound good? So he gets vintage instruments, and let's say, I'm just gonna make up an example, but let's say he says, Well, these five instruments would go well with this song. So he plays all five himself, then melds them together to sound like five people are playing when it's just one. Really just incredible. And then he wrote he wrote several original pieces of music for our film too, which I think is so cool that we we had music, we had original paintings, and now we've got original music. And we figure out a way in the book, there's a QR code so you can actually listen to Bobby Horton's music score. So it and you talked about the book um a little bit earlier, but we wanted to preserve this material, and because of time limits on the film, we had to cut out some things that I really wanted in the film, but we just couldn't. And this allows you to have and this allowed us to put some fun facts in uh and and things that we couldn't keep in the film. Um and and then we we premiered our film at Montgomery Bell in Nashville, thanks to Brad Joia. Had a great opening, and then we had a second opening in Birmingham since I live here. And Bobby Horton, of course, I'd invited him to come, but he invited some people from Alabama Public Television, unbeknownst to me, to come watch. And at that time it was about two hours. After that film, we were in the lobby talking to people, and they came up to me and said, We were with Alabama Public Television, and we love your documentary. We want to show it, but but we need you to cut it down to 90 minutes. So we had to go back and cut it. But Alabama Public Television was the first person, and so they showed it a number of times. Well, then through an organization called NITA, N-E-T-A, which controls, works with all of the public televisions in the United States, they sponsored us into Nita, and Nita picked us up, and so we were shown on almost all 50 states on public television, as well as we were picked up by the World Channel. So our film got shown all over the United States. Again, I never thought in a million years this film would, I thought it'd be just a few people with Savani. So we were shown in all almost all 50 states. And then the icing on the cake for me was Delta Airlines picked it up and showed it for a couple of months on Delta. So I had emails from people who were literally traveling around the world who said, Hey, I saw your film.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:43

And and here's the the the crazy thing for me, because I have been following this story to some degree for at least 15, 18 years. And yet I had not come across this, um which is rem it's it's remarkable. I mean, I was listening to talk radio, uh, sports talk radio out of Nashville, uh, I'm gonna say 10, 12 years ago, um, there's a sports writer out of Houston by the name of John McClain. And he was kind of trying to speak very um very cryptically about this project that he was wanting to work on, um, basically doing what you've done. Um and he he um he's talking the the the the guy the the the the talk show host is George Plaster and he's talking to him. I'm on my way home from work, I I pull over and and and dial up their number, and I call him and says, This sounds like you're talking about the 1899 Swanee team. And he said, Yeah, that that's them, you got me. And and and Plaster's like, see, I told you my my my listeners, they know this stuff. So he was but but I'd not come across your your uh the way I came across it was when I was wanting to do this episode, this podcast, I wanted to have somebody that was a subject matter expert that I could speak to about it, who obviously knows a lot more about it than I do, which you obviously qualify on that. Um what I know uh probably at this point, at least 50 or 60 percent of what I know I learned from from from your from your documentary. Um they directed me to you. Of course, you know how they copied you on the and so that's how I ended up coming in contact with this, and that's when you know, after you and I talked uh the first time when we first started talking about getting together for this interview, that's when I started going into that. And and so what really kind of came out of that to me, too, because you you told me at the time, correct me if I'm 1976, you graduated from the University of the South? So you're an alumnus of Suwane. As a uh Suwani alumnus, what does this mean to you? What does this story mean to you? Um how does this journey that you've been on in doing this documentary, you know, one of the things you know, Simpkins talked about being a Suwani man, you're a Suwanee man. How does that how does that all play out in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:35:38

Well, it comes back to um when you go to Savanee for freshman orientation, I bet within the first week somebody mentions this team. It's just something that everybody knows about. And what I found through this is a lot of people think they know the story, but they really don't. I thought I knew some of the story, and I found out I knew almost nothing. And as I said earlier, we thought it'd be a lot of lore, but not much facts, and we've uncovered a lot of facts, which makes the story richer. And I I just think the 1899 team is part of the DNA of Suwanee, that we can say, hey, we used to be a football powerhouse, we're not anymore. Uh now we focus on turning out road scholars. But football and sports in general at Suwannee are still important, and it to me, Suwannee in Division III, that's what college sports is about. Students who love the game, but that's not their primary job. Their primary job is to be a student. But they play because they love it. They don't have athletic scholarships, they don't have all the uh amenities that major college people have, but they love that sport. And I want to make clear too, it's not because we're looking back at the past, stuck in the past, it's because I think the past informs the present and the future. And this is a a part of Suwannee's history, is a part of Swanee's lore, it's something we're all proud of, but we're not living in that. We're we're proud of it, but we've moved on to other things. And Suwanee is a top liberal art school, as I say, percentage-wise, we've turned out an amazing number of martial scholars, road scholars, and others, as well as people who are in all kinds of professions and jobs. So it's we moved on from the college sports that have taken over major college sports, but we haven't moved on from the real essence of what it means to be a student athlete.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:56

So as we wind down, I'm gonna do the same thing here with you that I have done with many folks. Um, I'm gonna take a page out of Dan Rather's notebook. What have I not asked you that I should have asked you?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:30

Well, you you hinted at it already, but to me, looking back on it, it's remarkable that we pulled this off in the way we did. I mean we were two Yahoos trying to put a film together. I had no experience. David had some experience. We had a Matthew Graves, who is a fantastic video editor to work with. But all these things came into place. Ernie, Bobby Horton, all these great interviews. But at the time, if you had said, what do you think the film will do? I said, well, I hope we can get some Suwanee people to see it, and maybe a few friends. Never my wildest dreams did I think we'd be seen in uh around the country. We'd be on Delta Airlines. The book has won 20 or so book awards, including one one named as book of the year, several named as Best Sports Book of the Year, several named as Best Coffee Table Book of the Year. Again, I I didn't do the book for the awards, but it's just a validation that other people see the it resonates. Yeah, they see the story and see the quality of what we put together. Um so that's and I didn't, you know, it's like everything else when you're in the middle of something, you you just bog down in the details and your many days we were discouraged, how are we gonna keep going? But looking back on it, you see all these remarkable what I call miracles that happen along the way that all came together in a fantastic way.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:14

So let's let's talk about it from up to the point where the people from Alabama Public Television come to you and say, Hey, we want to use your documentary. Up to that point, if you had only up to that point to base it on that you knew about at that, you know, and then was it worth it to you? Obviously, I'm gonna say since that point it's worth it. But the you know, you said thousands of hours. If you'd known then, could not you know, going into it and having never done a documentary before, sometimes it's better that you don't know what you're getting yourself into before you get into it, and you're like, wow, if I'd known what if I if I you what was there ever a point that if I had known what I was getting myself into, I would never have started this.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:03

Oh, absolutely. Ignorance is truly bliss. And I said many times that when we started, I thought, well, this take a couple hundred hours, um, we'll pull something together. And it just kept building, but as it kept building, we saw more and more potential. But I'll be brutally honest with you. If we had done this film and shown a couple of premieres and a few Suwanee clubs had shown it, and that had been the end of it, I would have said I wasted a lot of time. I didn't realize when I was in the middle of it that I was in danger of that. But looking back on it now, if public television hadn't picked us up, if we hadn't shown gotten shown in all these states, if uh we hadn't been able to really be proud of the fact that this film was seen everywhere, that this book has been recognized, then I probably would have said, you know, I'm gl I'm glad I preserve history, but it but I I'm sorry I did. It's only with that that I say, gosh, I'm glad I did it.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:14

Right. And so now public television did pick it up. You you know Paul Harvey, the rest of the story that is there. Um and here you are the um the the rookie, the you know, the the the greenhorn, whatever you want term you want to use in terms of producing uh a documentary and and you know first time at the plate, you hit it out of the park. What's that feel like now?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:51

Well, it feels wonderful. Um Bobby Horton, who's been part of a lot of Ken Burns documentaries, kids me a lot about saying your first time out and you hit you hit a home run, and uh that's very satisfying. And David and I, we've been friends for 50 years and great friends, and both of us, without really talking about, both of us understood we were only gonna put out a quality product.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:19

That might have not have been what we it turned out bigger than we thought, but I didn't want my name or and he didn't want his name attached to something that was mediocre. So it was either going to be done right or not done. And it could have come a point where we if we hadn't had all these things fall into place where we said, well, let's just cut it off or let's make a 20-minute short documentary. So in that respect, um, it's very satisfying having not never done a film in my life to have this happen. The problem is, I learned so much, I'd like to do another one, but I also know how how hard it is to do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:00

So Well, and and and the thing that's been going through my mind is, you know, in in a way, yeah, you captured lightning in a bottle because of the story itself. Now you've got to go out and find another story that is that compelling.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:16

That's right. Well, my wife kitted us that with Matthew and David and I, she caught us three men in a production company. And so I'd like to do another one, but I won't do another one unless A, it's fully paid for up front, and B, I've got enough people around me that it's not all on me. Because David and I put in a lot of hours, and Matthew put in a lot of hours, because it really it was just the three of us doing this film.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:45

I can I can I can sympathize. Um, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:50

So and um I'm glad I did it, but my wife said, for your next project, why don't you do something that actually might make us some money? You know, Dave and I did this all on our own. We didn't make a dime out of it. Um I'm hopeful I'll break even on the book. The book is very expensive, and again, Karen and I talked about it, and we decided to make it the highest quality book we could. So we went to the highest quality museum grade paper, we went to a state-of-the-art printer thanks to Robbie Stanford here in Birmingham, who knew a printer in in Atlanta. We went to had the cover hand sewn in Nashville. So we decided to make it first rate. First rate is also very expensive.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:42

Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:43

And trying to self-publish and market a book is also much harder than I ever thought. But I've also got something that maybe my children and grandchildren can remember me and be proud of.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:59

So this is um, I I will say, speaking of the book, speaking of the documentary, people who want to see the documentary, how do they how do they do that? What's the best way for them to do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:12

Two ways. Um we have uh it's available on PBS Passport. So anyone who makes any kind of donation to their public television station is eligible to to use PBS Passport, and they can they can uh access the film there. We have a website, Suwani1899.org, and on that website you can also purchase the film for I think eight dollars. So and if anybody can't figure that out, if they contact me, I'll get them a film one way or another. We also have DVDs. We learned after we started that that a lot of people no longer have DVDs, but but we've sold a fair number of DVDs too, so we've got in that format as well. And you can you can order a DVD from our website. We've got posters and prints available, so you can order any of those from our website as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:15

Okay, and then the book is also available on that same website.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:19

It is, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:20

And I know this because that's where my copy came from. So um Norman, thank you so much. This has been a tremendous pleasure and and an honor. I appreciate you taking the time to uh to meet with me today, and uh you arranged for the the venue. I really appreciate that as well. Um learned a lot. This really is um it's a a remarkable story. You guys did a fabulous job in researching it and and putting all this together and um and really really glad to be able to uh spend this time with you and and pick your brain a little bit more. And um thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:02

Well, it's a privilege to be on this show and to meet you. And I think you can tell I love talking about this team, the film and the book and the stories behind it, and uh it's really been a labor of love.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:17

And and it that comes through. That comes through when you when you're when you're doing something that you love, when it's a passion, um it it it it you can't hide that. And so, yes. But um, so for our listeners, this again, uh as we noted at the outset, this um this interview, um I will be, of course, editing for for we had a uh a squalling child at one point, I'll be uh probably editing that out, but otherwise the the the interview in total will be available on um the the Tennessee History Nerd Patreon site, and I say that wrong, I do it every time, the Patreon site. Uh the Tennessee History Nerd Patreon site is where this can be found uh and listened to in its entirety, and it is in conjunction with episode 7, The Iron Men, which tells the story of the 1899 Sowani football team. And I encourage you definitely, this is one of my primary sources as I'm as I'm working on this for uh the script. I encourage you to look into Mr. Jetmanson's work. Um, watch the documentary, you won't regret it, and definitely uh consider buying the book as well. Thank you all for listening. Thank you all for the time that you've spent with us, and uh have a great rest of your day.