THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS .

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

WHEN SATURDAY MATTERED MOST. Copyright © 2012 by Mark Beech. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 978-0-312-54818-6 (hardcover)

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First Edition: September 2012

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Chapter 1
LINING UP IN THE SNOW

Start with the man and go from there. In January 1958, Earl
Henry Blaik was a month away from celebrating his sixty-first birth-
day. But at six feet two inches tall, the figure he cut still recalled his
form from nearly four decades before, when he had been a sleek
182-pound end on the Army football team. He had kept his body fit
through a lifelong aversion to both drinking and smoking, as well as
adherence to a diet that was as bland as it was meager—his good
friend Stanley Woodward, the urbane sports editor of the Newark
Star-Ledger, often referred to Blaik as “strictly a Shredded Wheat
man.” A long nose and deep-set blue eyes accentuated his angular,
patrician face. And the thatch of auburn hair he kept neatly parted
to the side, a provision of his Scottish heritage, as well as the inspira-
tion for the nickname “Red,” which he would carry throughout his
life, was almost as thick as it had been the day he played fifty-eight
and a half minutes of a 6– 0 loss to Navy in 1919. He had been
coaching football for over twenty-four years, the last seventeen of
them at West Point, but he looked nothing like a man in the waning
days of his career.
In addition to being a teetotaler, Blaik was also something of a
prude. The closest he typically came to vulgarity was the starchy
phrase “Jeebers Katy!” Only rarely “Jesus Katy!” But such exclama-
tions were infrequent. Publicly, he hardly ever betrayed emotion or
 6 | W H E N S AT U R D AY M AT T E R E D M O S T

raised his voice, save to issue one of his crisp commands on the prac-
tice field. Though he despised being described in the press as “aus-
tere” or “aloof,” Blaik carefully cultivated his manner of dignified
cool. He stood apart at practice and remained mostly mute through-
out each ninety-minute session. Indeed, he almost never spoke to
players. And rather than fly into a rage when he saw someone make a
mistake, it was instead his habit to summon the wayward cadet to his
side, where he would dispense a quiet, private correction. His com-
mand presence was overwhelming. Despite having been off active
duty for nearly forty years, Blaik was known to just about everybody
at West Point, including his civilian assistants, as “the Colonel,” and
they addressed him that way. They did it not just out of deference to
the rank he’d held at retirement—he’d been recommissioned in the
reserves in the early days of World War II—but also out of respect for
his authority.
Blaik’s dominance over his program was total. To his players, most
of whom were old enough to remember Army’s storied, unbeaten
national-championship teams of 1944 and ’45, their distant and im-
perturbable coach was not so much a mentor as a living, breathing
artifact of Americana. They held him in awe and accorded him the
respect usually reserved in the army for general officers. To his civil-
ian assistants Blaik was a powerful executive. Instead of dictating
policy, he set agendas and left it to them to formulate solutions. He
encouraged vigorous debate, and it was only after he had heard every-
body out on a matter that he would render his decision, at which
point all discussion came to an end. So compelling was the force of
Blaik’s personality that it had once brought to heel the man who
was soon to become football’s most famous authoritarian—Vince
Lombardi, who when 1958 began was just a year away from becom-
ing the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. As Army’s line coach
for five seasons beginning in 1949, the unpolished and volatile Lom-
bardi could become surprisingly meek in Blaik’s chilly presence.
Indeed, Lombardi came to see his boss as both a mentor and a father
figure. Years later, after he turned Green Bay into Titletown, U.S.A.,
he rarely missed an opportunity to say that all he knew about orga-
nizing and preparing a team to win he’d learned from Red Blaik.
 LINING UP IN THE SNOW | 7

The Blaik persona was the result of the nearly four decades he
had spent emulating Douglas MacArthur, his idol, whom he had
met as a First Class, or senior, cadet in 1919. That was the year the
then-thirty-nine-year-old brigadier general, who had risen to national
prominence as the second-most-decorated officer of the First World
War, had become the youngest superintendent in the history of the
academy. Behind Blaik’s desk in his office on the top floor of the ca-
det gymnasium’s south tower hung an enormous portrait of MacAr-
thur rendering a salute, and any visitor who climbed the steps to the
coach’s aerie could not help but notice the physical resemblance be-
tween the two men. It was no coincidence. Blaik had been devoted
to MacArthur since their first encounter at West Point, when at a
formal reception for members of the First Class the superintendent
had made a simple gesture of goodwill. Ignoring academy protocol,
he greeted the star-struck Blaik and a handful of his classmates, all
of them decked out in their full-dress uniforms, with an informal
handshake and a pat on the arm. He then offered them their choice
of cigarettes—Fatimas or Melachrinos. Never mind that smoking
was strictly forbidden for West Point cadets, or that Blaik, then
twenty-two, didn’t smoke. It was MacArthur’s effort to put his guests
at ease that won him over. From that moment forward, as far as Blaik
was concerned, the general could do no wrong.
The two men saw each other frequently that first year. On New
Year’s Day 1919, Blaik had been among the first cadets to discover
the body of Fourth Class cadet Stephen M. Bird, who had shot him-
self in the chest with a Springfield rifle. The shooting was obviously
intentional; the freshman had tied one end of several feet of string to
the trigger and wrapped the other around the butt-end of the rifle,
giving himself the necessary leverage to fire the weapon. Bird was
apparently distraught over a hazing session from the night before,
which began after several upperclassmen had discovered him writ-
ing poetry in his room.* Public outcry over the suicide had persisted
through the spring and became especially intense in the halls of

* Wrote Blaik years later, “That this had disturbed him and that he was probably morose
by nature was indicated by the poetry itself.”
 8 | W H E N S AT U R D AY M AT T E R E D M O S T

Congress. When MacArthur assumed command at West Point in

June 1919, the issue of hazing was at the top of his agenda. He ap-
pointed seven cadets, including Blaik, to a Fourth Class Customs
Committee and tasked them with spotlighting areas of abuse in the
treatment of plebes. Among the recommendations made by the com-
mittee— of which Blaik was chairman—were that upperclassmen
should not be permitted to “lay hands” on fourth classmen and that
plebes should not be denied food. MacArthur, who two decades be-
fore had been the subject of some particularly brutal hazing sessions
as a Fourth Class cadet, threw his weight behind Blaik’s committee,
adopting a number of its recommendations.
The relationship between Blaik and MacArthur grew even closer
as a result of the superintendent’s obsession with Army football. Two
decades earlier, accompanied by his doting mother, Pinky—who
would reside in a room at a nearby hotel for the next four years—
MacArthur had arrived at West Point a gawky teenager, standing
five foot eleven and weighing just over 130 pounds. MacArthur had
grown up in the army. His father, Lieutenant General Arthur Mac-
Arthur, had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the
Civil War, and Douglas, the youngest of his three sons, always liked
to claim that his first memory had been “the sound of bugles.”
Driven by his family legacy, MacArthur would go on to graduate in
1903 as the most decorated cadet in academy history, becoming
both the top student in his class and the highest-ranking member
of the Corps of Cadets. But for all his academic and military accom-
plishments, “Dauntless Doug” had never been able to achieve the
success in athletics that he craved. As a scrappy, light-hitting right
fielder on the baseball team, the highlight of his three-year career
had come in 1901, during a 4–3 loss at Annapolis in the inaugural
Army-Navy game. MacArthur, notorious for his inability to hit a
curveball, went hitless in three at-bats but also walked, stole a base,
and scored a run. The closest he had come to playing football was in
the autumn of 1902, when he had served as the team’s manager.
Upon his return to West Point as superintendent, MacArthur
quickly set about establishing himself as Army’s number-one foot-
ball fan. Whenever he could make time in his official schedule, he
 LINING UP IN THE SNOW | 9

liked to summon Lieutenant Elmer Oliphant to headquarters for

a visit. Oliphant was then a young Army assistant coach, but just a
few years before, as a member of the Cadets’ backfield, he’d been
perhaps the finest fullback in the country, twice named All-America.
The office visits were mutually beneficial: MacArthur got an inside
perspective on the team, while Oliphant received weekend passes to
travel to upstate New York, where he earned as much as two hun-
dred dollars a game playing Sunday football for the Buffalo All-
Americans.
Even more than talking about the Army team with Oliphant,
however, MacArthur loved to see it up close. On fall afternoons, it
was not uncommon for him to leave his office early to walk over to
the Plain—the academy’s vast parade ground doubled as a practice
field—so he could watch as the coaches put the squad through its
paces. There he would walk the sidelines holding his signature rid-
ing crop, the same one he’d so famously carried in lieu of a sidearm
across the battlefields of France just the year before. He made him-
self conspicuous, and his presence did not go unnoticed by Blaik,
already the general’s committed disciple, who was Army’s star right
end.
During the war, MacArthur had been profoundly impressed by
how well athletes among the army’s officer corps had performed in
combat compared to nonathletes, and he also took note of how
greatly enlisted soldiers tended to admire accomplished sportsmen.
His love of football sprang from his conviction that the game pro-
vided a nearly perfect metaphor for warfare. In this he was hardly
alone. Walter Camp, the venerable Yale coach so influential as a
framer of the game, often referred to teams as “armies” and the kick-
ing game as “artillery work.” MacArthur took things even further,
formalizing the academy’s intramural program at the same time he
was broadening and upgrading its academic curriculum, and pro-
claiming that every cadet would be an athlete, and every athlete
would be a cadet. He also vigorously promoted varsity sports, with
the goal of raising the academy’s national profile. No longer would
Army leave West Point only to play Navy. MacArthur sent his teams
out into the world. In 1921 the Cadets made their first trip away
 10 | W H E N S AT U R D AY M AT T E R E D M O S T

from West Point, traveling to New Haven, Connecticut, where they

fell 14–7 to mighty Yale in the Yale Bowl. The ambitious young
general harbored dreams of luring the nation’s gridiron superpowers
to the banks of the Hudson and had plans drawn up for a hundred-
thousand-seat football stadium that would sit on the river’s western
shore, hard against the rocky bluffs on which the academy stood.* It
was during this time that MacArthur uttered one of his most oft-
quoted lines, of which he was so fond that he ordered it carved into
the stone portals of the cadet gymnasium:

UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE

ARE SOWN THE SEEDS THAT
UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS
WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY

The young Blaik believed every word. In MacArthur, he saw a

man—a great man, in his estimation—who not only loved football
but who had also articulated precisely why it was the best game a
young man could play, especially if that young man was a soldier.
The affinity Blaik felt toward the general was reciprocated, in part
because Blaik, never the total cadet that MacArthur had been, was
named the best athlete in the Class of 1920—an honor that cer-
tainly impressed the superintendent. When Blaik was laid up in the
hospital over Christmas after his final game against Navy (an ungen-
tlemanly Midshipman had stuck a finger into his right eye, causing
a corneal ulcer), MacArthur sent his personal aide to visit him daily,
and even arranged with the academic board to excuse Blaik from his
first-semester examinations, a special exception made for a special
cadet.
When MacArthur’s tour at West Point came to an end in 1922
and he was reassigned to the Philippines, he wrote to Blaik and in-
vited him to become his aide de camp. The young lieutenant was

* MacArthur’s stadium was never built. In 1924, two years after his tour at West Point
came to an end, the academy opened Michie Stadium, a sixteen-thousand-seat structure
that sits on a high bluff overlooking the river valley.
 LINING UP IN THE SNOW | 11

then galloping horses in the 1st Cavalry Division at dusty Fort Bliss,
Texas, where he found himself less than enthralled with the lack of
opportunity presented by a peacetime army. In a twist that Blaik
would rue for the rest of his life, MacArthur’s letter arrived at his
Fort Bliss address the very day his resignation from the army had
been accepted by the War Department. By the time the message fi-
nally reached him at home in Dayton, Ohio, it was too late to go
back. Nevertheless, the general’s invitation initiated a regular corre-
spondence that the two men would continue for the next forty-two
years, until MacArthur’s death in 1964. Their letters covered a wide
variety of topics, including war and politics, and were at times inti-
mately personal. But always they returned to Army football. In
1924, MacArthur wrote to Blaik from the Philippines to comment
on the team, then coming off a 12– 0 win over Navy: “I agree per-
sonally with what you say that the system of play at West Pont is
antiquated, too involved and totally lacking in flexibility and adap-
tiveness. Had I stayed at West Point, I intended introducing new
blood into our coaching staff. Rockne of Notre Dame was the man
I had in mind.”
That MacArthur was so well versed in the deficiencies of the
Army team from more than eight thousand miles away is a testa-
ment to the thoroughness of Blaik’s correspondence, as well as to his
abiding passion for the game of football. Immediately upon return-
ing to Dayton, Blaik had gone into business for himself selling real
estate and insurance. Within the first year, he had dumped the insur-
ance racket to partner with his father, William, in the elder Blaik’s
long-established real estate and home-building concern. But Earl
craved the sort of action that the business world couldn’t provide,
and neither games of squash nor rounds of golf were enough to sat-
isfy his hunger. Blaik was so bored and restless that he would often
borrow his father’s car on autumn Saturdays to drive up to Oxford
and watch games at Miami University—where he had played foot-
ball and earned a bachelor’s degree before entering West Point in the
final months of World War I— or he would strike out for Columbus
to see Ohio State play in its new sixty-six-thousand-seat stadium on
the banks of the Olentangy River. In December of 1923, he and his
 12 | W H E N S AT U R D AY M AT T E R E D M O S T

bride, Merle, spent their honeymoon at the Polo Grounds in New

York City watching Army and Navy play to a scoreless tie. The next
autumn, he began volunteering as a part-time ends coach at Miami.
More coaching jobs followed, first a temporary job at Wisconsin and
then a permanent one at West Point. By 1934, when Dartmouth
hired him away from Army to become the Indians’ head football
coach, his course through life was set.
The game consumed Blaik. He’d been infatuated with it since
his days at Dayton’s Hawthorne grammar school, when as a fourth-
grader he had formed a neighborhood team, the Riverdale Rovers,
and appointed himself its coach, captain, and quarterback. Now
that football was his profession, he rarely thought, or spoke, of any-
thing else. It was a labor of love, and Blaik—never a social creature—
enjoyed few things more than drawing up game plans or breaking
down film, play by play and position by position. He had been one
of the first coaches in the country to make extensive use of film study,
and his enthusiasm was so great that, even in the off-season, he had
been known to phone up assistants after the workday had ended and
order them to meet him at the gym so that they could brainstorm
with him late into the evening.
In January 1958, nobody in college football had been a head
coach as long as Red Blaik. Such titans of the game as Amos Alonzo
Stagg and Pop Warner, whose careers stretched back into the nine-
teenth century, were still active when he had landed his first job at
Dartmouth in 1934. And the men alongside whom he had domi-
nated the game in the following decade—Michigan’s Fritz Crisler
and Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy—had long since departed the arena.
A new generation whose legends were still to be written, including
Woody Hayes at Ohio State, Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma, and Bear
Bryant, then making preparations for his first season at Alabama,
had taken their place. None of them was more than forty-four years
old, but Hayes and Wilkinson had already combined to win three of
the last four national titles. Blaik had not won an outright champi-
onship at Army in more than twelve years, and his teams hadn’t won
more than seven games in a season since 1950. Football, it seemed,
might finally be passing him by.
WHEN  SATURDAY  MATTERED  
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