JOHN HEISMAN

'John William Heisman' (October 23, 1869 – October 3, 1936) was a prominent American football player and college football coach in the early era of the sport and is the namesake of the Heisman Trophy awarded annually to the season's best college football player.^[1]

Contents

Early life

Later coaching career

Legacy

References

External links

Early life

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but grew up in Titusville, Pennsylvania,^[2] where he played football for Titusville High School, graduating in 1887. He went on to play football at Brown University 1887-1889 and at the University of Pennsylvania 1890-1891. He coached at Oberlin College in 1893, went to the University of Akron in 1894, and returned to Oberlin the next year. In 1895, he became the fifth coach at Auburn University, where he stayed for five years. With all these schools combined, he lost only five games.

Later coaching career

In 1900, he went to Clemson University, where he coached for four seasons before moving to Georgia Tech. He put together a spectacular 16 seasons there, including three undefeated seasons and a 32-game undefeated streak. He was coaching the Georgia Tech Engineers when they defeated the Cumberland College Bulldogs 222-0 in a game played in Atlanta in 1916, in the most one-sided college football game ever played, during which the Engineers scored with every possession of the ball. Heisman's running up the score against a totally outmanned opponent was supposedly motivated by revenge against Cumberland's baseball team running up the score against Tech 22-0 the previous year with a team primarily comprised of semi-pro players, and against sportswriters that were too focused on numbers.
After a divorce in 1919, he left Atlanta to prevent any social embarrassment to his former wife, who chose to remain in the city.^[3] He went back to Pennsylvania for one season in 1920, then to Washington and Jefferson College, before ending his career with four seasons at Rice University.

Legacy

He was an innovator and developed one of the first shifts, had both guards pull to lead an end run, and had his center toss the ball back, instead of rolling or kicking it. He was a proponent of the legalization of the forward pass.
Heisman subsequently became the athletics director of the former Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan, New York, and in 1935 the club began awarding annually in his honor what is now almost universally referred to as the Heisman Trophy, given to the player voted as the season's best collegiate player. Voters for this award consist primarily of media representatives, who are allocated by regions across the country in order to filter out possible regional bias, and former recipients. Following the bankruptcy of the Downtown Athletic Club in 2002, the award is now given out by the Yale Club.

References

1. John Heisman
2. Heisman Trophy
3. Tech Timeline: 1910s

External links

★ John Heisman – University of Pennsylvania video

★ John Heisman, the Coach Behind the Trophy Bill Pennington

★ John Heisman at the New Georgia Encyclopedia

★ Georgia Tech profile