ODU's football's past will meet present for a handoff

The old gang is enjoying a comeback. Ninety-year-old Johnny Brown had new jerseys with the old school colors made up for the big day. "We've got a lot of years on us," he said recently, "but that's no reason not to look good." Or to feel for a few fleeting moments like they did in 1939, when "the last real team" played football for the school that would become Old Dominion University.

Nobody counts the 1940 edition - according to Brown, the ODU Hall of Fame running back from the late 1930s - that failed to win a game in an abbreviated season and was outscored 121-0, bringing down the curtain on football on Hampton Boulevard.

Brown and six of his teammates will amble onto Powhatan Field today before the Blue and White Scrimmage, helping to kick off ODU's first foray into football since 1940. The old gang - mostly 90-somethings - will hand the football to coach Bobby Wilder and his team captains.

"They probably will make a little bit of a to-do over us," 95-year-old Rhea Walker modestly noted.

It's a safe prediction.

The football era was brief and largely unrecognized at the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary - the school's name before it became ODU. The ancestors of today's flashy fledgling program - the Braves, as they were called - sported green and yellow jerseys and played on sandlots around town before Foreman Field opened in 1936.

"We just went out and enjoyed football," Brown said. "There was no real league then. We didn't have much of the fancy part of it, like it is today."

A typical crowd at Foreman, recalled Brown, was a meager gathering.

"If we had two cheerleaders, we were lucky," he said. "And they were volunteers. The band might have been two guys making some noise. It didn't matter to us. We played as hard as we could with 250 people watching."

With America plunged into the Great Depression, it was not a fancy time. The football players lived at home with their parents. They rode the streetcar to what little campus there was. A two-year institution, the Division was "like high school extended," Brown said.

Does it even need to be said that there were no athletic scholarships or money for recruiting? For legendary coach Tommy Scott, recruiting amounted to selecting players as they showed up.

The attitude was: "Anybody who wanted to play football, come on out, we'd love to have you," Brown said. During an era that crushed a lot of dreams, they were grateful for an opportunity to play a little organized football. Then, in short order, most of them went off to fight in World War II.

For those who survived combat and the years since - the nonagenarians and those about to turn 90 - football at the Division represents a lush oasis amid memories of indigence and war.

"We went to school because we didn't want to compete with our own dads for what few jobs there were," Brown said. "Then, after leaving school, we changed from the leather helmet to the steel helmet, and instead of yard lines, we were crossing the Maginot line and the Siegfried line."

Over the years, vestiges of the football program were forgotten.

Joe Brichter was the quarterback for the 1939 team. He's 90 now and walks with a cane. He met a visitor the other day dressed in his old wool Norfolk Division basketball warm-up suit - nearly every athlete in those days played more than one sport.

"Three score and 10 years ago," he announced from the front porch of his Virginia Beach home.

Sure enough, it has been 70 years since he played. Still, he is the loquacious sort. His teammate Brown recalled that it used to take Brichter so long to call a play in the huddle that the team would be penalized for delay of game.

"You're going to hear a lot of stories," Brichter said. "We had 16 or 18 players, if that many. The rest of them were fodder. That's my opinion."

"This," he added with a big laugh, "is coming from an old man who was half-assed himself."

Anticipating today's scrimmage, Brichter said he wants coach Wilder to give him a football during the pregame or halftime festivities.

"I want to raise that football to the crowd and throw the ball to some kid," he said, "show them I can still throw it 20 yards."

Does he really think it will happen that way?

"All I've got," he said, smiling, "are my dreams."

When he wasn't dreaming aloud, Brichter's zigzagging recollections often came back to Brown.

"What a guy," he said of his former teammate. "He's a real Hall of Famer."

One of the most talented, versatile athletes Norfolk has ever produced, Brown didn't play football at Maury High School. He was a star in baseball and track, winning honors as a sprinter and hurdler, though his specialty was the pole vault.

After adding football to his resume at the Division, he was called "Norfolk's Jim Thorpe" for his all-around athleticism. He would excel for an armed forces football team just before America entered the war and later for the semi-pro Norfolk Shamrocks.

In yellowed newsprint from The Virginian-Pilot, Brown is described as "slippery-hipped," and as a "willow the wisp" and "speed merchant." In 1939, playing in Greenville, N.C., against East Carolina Teachers College, he returned a punt 85 yards for a touchdown.

The Division played other junior colleges, freshmen teams from larger colleges and sometimes even high school teams.

The policies governing academic eligibility were looser in the early years of the sport.

"You didn't have to pass anything," said Brown, who graduated from the College of William and Mary after the war and would coach football and track at Granby High before becoming the school's principal. "They could get you off the street."

Scheduling and player recruitment weren't the only contrasts with today's ODU program. Training facilities were virtually nonexistent.

Asked about his between-game regimen, Brown said he and a teammate would share a grilled cheese sandwich and an orange soda - "a big one, 16 ounces. We'd use two straws and split it. That was our training meal."

Given the times, it's not surprising that some of the players wore hand-me-down uniforms; they most likely were wearing hand-me-down clothes to school.

"We didn't look like much of a football team," said 92-year-old Louis "Hickey" Smith, who also plans to be at today's game. "But whoever we met on the field found out soon enough that we came to play. We didn't take much crap from anybody."

Probably the most daunting challenge the Braves encountered came in a 1932 game that never was meant to happen.

The University of Miami, a budding football power, wanted to play William and Mary over the Christmas holidays, but the invitation mistakenly went to Norfolk. Capitalizing on the error, the Division staff signed the contract and sent it back before Miami officials realized what had happened.

Game on. After raising money for the trip, Scott and his players climbed aboard a Pullman car to begin their Florida adventure.

Even more improbably, the Division held its own, losing only 6-2.

In most cases, though, Braves players roughed out an obscure legacy. Walker, a former halfback, tells of a road trip to Shenandoah College, located in Harrisonburg at the time.

"We had an old bus, and it got to this hill," he recalled, "but it couldn't make it over the hill. The team had to get off and push."

Those earliest teams started the program truly from the ground up. Players were given rakes and shovels and instructed to make their own practice field across the street from the campus, at the current location of WHRO's studios.

Foreman Field exists today, not because of any clamor for a football palace, but as a product of a public works program.

"We didn't need a stadium," Brown said. "The idea at that time was to put people to work."

But in little ways, the football team might have helped lighten the mood.

"After a tough stretch during the Depression," said Smith, "people were just beginning to smile a little bit. It was a great time in my life, and I think we brought some pleasure to others, too."

At today's scrimmage, people will make a big to-do over the surviving forefathers. Brown, Walker, Brichter, Smith, Roy Sutton, Billy Baker and Richard Scherberger, plan to be there; Dr. Samuel Norfleet "Junie" Etheredge, 95, who lives in Northern California, and Paul Bacalis, 89, a resident of Colorado, will celebrate at home. A ceremony will link past with present. It's a dress rehearsal for the really big day, the first game at refurbished Foreman Field on Sept. 5 against Chowan University.

"I expect to be there," Walker said, "if I'm still around."

Added Smith: "To go back to see the old girl dressed up will really be something."

Brown, whose vitality belies his years, intends to run onto the field before the game.

"That's why I do my exercises every day," he said.

Brichter is leaving nothing to chance.

"I pray a lot," the old quarterback said. "I've got to get to that ballgame."

Those who return in September will see lines of cheerleaders, a big marching band - all those fancy things they never had - and a crowd no less than 50 times larger than any they remember.

On that day, a pass from one generation to another will be completed.

Bob Molinaro, (757) 446-2373, bob.molinaro@pilotonline.com