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Lowell Tuttle
For Aggie and Cotton Bowl fanatics.
NATIVE TEXAN
Aggies pull an upset in century-old bowl game
JOE HOLLEY
Courtesy Texas A&M University Press
Sam Houston Sanders Jr. was a star running back for Texas A&M, standing 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 125 pounds. He played in the famed Dixie Classic of 1922 at Fair Park in Dallas.
While the 12th man watched, his Texas Aggie teammates upset a newlywed 100 years ago next week.
Not long after a phone conversation with John Adams Jr. about his new book on the Aggies’ 12th man tradition, we learned that Texas A&M would not be playing in the Gator Bowl on New Year’s Eve. So many players tested positive for COVID-19, the Aggies needed not a 12th man but 12 men times two, at least, to take on the Demon Deacons from Wake Forest. On the 100th anniversary of the tradition, Jimbo Fisher’s boys will not be spending New Year’s Eve in sunny Florida.
Remarkably, some of those long-ago Aggies also were college students at a time when a pandemic was raging. As Adams noted in a previous book — one of several he’s written about his beloved alma mater — the Cadets, as they were known back then, had to cancel three games in 1918, and interim head coach D.V. Graves was down with the flu for two weeks before the team’s delayed season opener. Although the entire campus was in quarantine that fall, 51 people died, including 44 in October alone.
Life was pretty much back to normal by Dec. 29, 1921, when head coach D.X. Bible, back from military service in France, bused his boys to Dallas for the inaugural Dixie Classic at Fair Park, precursor to the Cotton Bowl Classic. Their opponents would be the mighty Praying Colonels of Centre College, a tiny school in Danville, Ky., that had been a David among gridiron Goliaths all season. With victories over Clemson, Harvard, Kentucky, Auburn and Tulane, the “Wonder Team” had outscored their opponents 314 to 6 and had finished the season 8-0. They arrived in Dallas after punishing the University of Arizona 38-0 in their first postseason game, the Christmas Classic in San Diego. The Colonels were 20-point favorites over the Aggies, who finished the regular season with a 6-1-2 record.
The Aggies stayed in a spartan dorm at Holy Trinity College, forerunner to the University of Dallas. The Colonels, who had been on the road since Dec. 16, stayed at the luxurious Hotel Adolphus in downtown Dallas.
Game Day — Monday, Jan. 2, 1922 — was Centre quarterback Bo McMillin’s wedding day. The whole team got up early, hustled down to Union Station and boarded a train for the 9 a.m. wedding in Fort Worth. After the wedding and high Mass at All Saints Catholic Church, the Colonels piled into cars and rushed back to the Adolphus for a lavish post-wedding brunch. “Slow down on the eating; we have a big game in a few hours,” coach Charlie Moran warned.
The Aggies slept in until 9. After breakfast in the college’s dining hall and a skull session that lasted about an hour, they headed to the practice field to go over assignments one last time. After suiting up in the dorm, they headed to Fair Park in a school bus.
With 15,000 fans filtering into the stadium for the 2:30 p.m. kickoff, the Aggies already were on the field when the Colonels swaggered in. Years later, the Aggies’ star running back, Sam Houston Sanders Jr., recalled their entrance.
“They were like conquering heroes,” he told Adams, “and the new bride was on Bo McMillin’s arm as they walked in. That’s what I really remember. She sat on the bench the whole game.”
Warming up, the Colonels put on a show, Sanders recalled. “The passers were throwing left-and right-handed, and the punters were kicking with either leg. Meantime, our punter’s kicks into the wind were flying back over his head.”
My friend Robert Hicks (Texas A&M, class of ’70) grew up on a ranch outside Franklin, the Robertson County seat, and likes to point out that county’s connection to that ancient gridiron classic. The speedy Sanders, 5 foot 6 inches tall and 125 pounds, played his high school ball for the Franklin Lions. He had spent a portion of his early years in Oxford, Miss., where, as he recalled years later in an oral history, he had two pals. One was a fellow named Tubby Tate, who taught him how to smoke. (Although Sanders quit at 9, he wondered if tobacco might have stunted his growth.) The other was a kid named Bill Faulkner, who grew up to write a novel or two.
Sammy was a sickly child, and his parents moved several times, looking for a lugubrious climate for their undersized son. About 1911, they settled on a farm in Robertson County, near Franklin.
The Aggies’ second-string quarterback was Billy “Bo” Mc-Millan of Calvert (also Robertson County), not to be confused with Alvin “Bo” McMillin, the Colonels’ newly married All-American quarterback.
McMillin played football at North Side High School in Fort Worth for a Centre College grad named Robert Lee “Chief” Myers. When Myers was named head coach at his alma mater, he took McMillin and several other Texas boys with him.
In Dallas that long-ago afternoon, the Aggies took the fight to the Colonels, jumping out to a 2-0 lead in the first three minutes. The Aggies were in trouble, though. With only 18 men on the squad — 17 after running back Buck Buckner broke his leg in practice — they kept limping off the field, never to return. Team captain and running back Heine Weir was the first casualty, suffering a broken leg in the first quarter. The diminutive Sanders was knocked unconscious trying to field a punt. The whole starting backfield was gone before the half. Bo McMillan — not to be confused with Bo McMillin — replaced an injured A.B. “Bugs” Morris at quarterback and did the kicking.
Bible worried he wouldn’t have 11 players to finish the game. He looked up toward the press box, where E. King Gill was working as a spotter for Waco News-Tribune sportswriter Jinx Tucker. Gill, a sophomore, was a member of the football team but wasn’t on the traveling squad. He had hitchhiked to Dallas on New Year’s Eve and had dropped by Fair Park for the game. He didn’t have $3 for a ticket, so he mingled with his teammates and strolled through the stadium gates.
In his rich new book, Adams quotes Gill’s 1956 recollection of that now-legendary summons from his coach: “It was at that point that I glanced down at our bench. Old D.X. was waving at the press box and motioning toward the empty bench. He knew I was up there. He had seen me leave with Jinx. And I knew what he wanted.”
Under the grandstand, Gill quickly pulled on the injured Heine Weir’s uniform. The only man left on the bench, he watched his battered teammates stop Bo McMillin at the 6-inch line on their way to a 22-14 upset. He never left the sideline of “one of the greatest games ever played in Texas,” to quote the Houston Post.
Back in Danville, fans could hardly believe their Praying Colonels had lost to a team reputedly without a prayer. A sportswriter for the Danville newspaper observed: “Bo McMillin would agree tonight that weddings and football games should not be scheduled on the same day.”
Adams, a retired international banker whose hobby is researching Aggie history, was lucky enough to track down some of the old players before they passed away, including Gill and Sanders. Their reminiscences are at the heart of his book.
After Sanders graduated from A&M, he went to medical school in Tennessee and played on the medical school football team, known as the Tennessee Docs. While learning to heal people, the pride of Franklin, Texas, punished Docs opponents. Playing Ole Miss, Tulsa and other college teams, Sanders and his fellow Docs were 22-6 over three years.
Bo McMillin, the Centre quarterback — not to be confused with Bo McMillan, the A&M quarterback — became a successful football coach at Centenary, Kansas State and Indiana University, as well as for the NFL’s Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles.
Bo McMillan, the Aggie quarterback — not to be confused with Bo McMillin, the Centre quarterback — became a Lubbock contractor and Texas Tech booster. He figured out an ingenious way for Tech to expand Jones Stadium before the Red Raiders joined the Southwest Conference.
Gill would go on to be a starting pitcher for the Aggies baseball team, the starting fullback for the football team and an all-conference center on the basketball team. Like Sanders, he became a doctor, serving as an Army Air Forces medical officer during World War II before beginning a 40-year career as an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in Corpus Christi.
A modest, unassuming fellow, as Adams remembers him, E. King Gill is known today for the greatest game never played. djholley10@gmail.com Twitter: holleynews
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