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When Saturday Mattered Most is the stirring story of the 1958 undefeated Army football team and the controversial coach who inspired Vince Lombardi
It was the end of an era, the last season before the surge of professional football began to lure the nation's best young student-athletes away from the military academies. That fall, the Black Knights of Army were the class of the nation. Mark Beech, a second-generation West Pointer, recounts this memorable and never-to-be-repeated season with:
- Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner who rose to the rank of Brigadier General
- The long-reclusive Bill Carpenter, the fabled "lonesome end" who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for saving his company in Vietnam
- Red Blaik, who led Army back to glory after the cribbing scandal and had the field at Michie Stadium named in his honor
Combining the triumph of The Junction Boys with the heroics of The Long Gray Line, Beech captures a unique period in the history of football, the military, and mid-twentieth-century America.
- Sales Rank: #739285 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-18
- Released on: 2012-09-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.39" h x 1.13" w x 6.42" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
“If you like football history, get ready to read When Saturday Mattered Most, by Mark Beech (Thomas Dunne Books, $25.99). Beech, a West Point grad and a Sports Illustrated writer, tells the story of the 1958 Army team, including Heisman Trophy winner Pete Dawkins. Best of all, he describes how Red Blaik, the longest-tenured coach in the game, tweaked his old-fashioned T offense to take the Black Knights to their last unbeaten season and then retired on top. Beech tells a good story with style and efficiency.” ―ESPN.com
“Football began as a college game, and for decades, before the pro game captured fans' imaginations, college-football Saturdays mattered most. For many of those years, the Army and Navy service academies fielded some of the very best teams; Beech, a veteran Sports Illustrated writer and editor, focuses on the 1958 Army team coached by Earl "Red" Blaik. The Cadet football program was decimated by an academic-cheating scandal in the early fifties, and Blaik had been slowly rebuilding the team. Beech shows in fascinating detail how Blaik designed his schemes around the skills he had at hand (many elite athletes couldn't meet the academic requirements to attend West Point). But in '58, Blaik knew he'd brought the Cadets all the way back. Beech provides an extensive context by detailing the scandal and the anguished years it took Blaik to rebuild the program. He also profiles the key players, coaches, and opponents. His research consisted of first-person interviews as well as secondary print sources. Best of all, he re-creates the milieu of honor, dedication, and service to country in which the service academies flourished athletically. A memorable account of a bygone era.” ―Booklist
“In a grand homage to the hard-nosed tradition of Army football, Beech, an editor at Sports Illustrated, recounts a brilliant gridiron season in 1958 when the scandal-ridden Black Knights of Army proved as talented and resilient as any college varsity squad ever. "Red" Blaik, once a young promising coach at Dartmouth in the 1930s and a star end on the old Army football team, assumed control of the Knights football program in the 1950s and resurrected it from a 1951 costly cheating scandal, which ended the careers of 37 members of the varsity, including Blaik's younger son, Bob, destined to be the starting quarterback. Beech walks the reader with great detail and engaging narrative through Blaik's bold strategy of rebuilding the Knights with a new far-flanker scheme built on a pounding running game. Assisted by such capable coaching assistants as Sid Gillman and Vince Lombardi, the coach discovers "a more open game" to spare his teams from physical injury, relying on the humble Bill Carpenter as the gifted receiver and the bruising Pete Dawkins as the Heisman Trophy–winning running back to pull off an undefeated 1958 football season. In this memorable sports chronicle of a fabled Army football team at the birth of the space age and the NFL, Beech highlights a remarkable coach and his determined squad in a golden season of redemption and triumph.” ―Publishers Weekly
“There are teams and times in sport that deserve an ongoing appreciation, defining as they do the exceptionalism that we love to cheer. The 1958 Army team provided that quality and Mark Beech has put it into words that, like the cheers, resonate. Red Blaik (and Pete Dawkins and Bob Anderson and Bill Carpenter, etc., etc.) would be proud.” ―John Underwood, former Sports Illustrated writer and co-author of Bear and The Science of Hitting
“For most of the first sixty years of 20th century, the Army football team was among the best in the nation, fully the equal of Alabama and Ohio State today, and its undefeated team in 1958 represented the final burst of light in what turned out to be its last decade of gridiron magic. In this serious and admirably reported book, "When Saturday Mattered Most," author Mark Beech explores the history of the Black Knights leading up to that year, scandalous warts and all, develops all the characters against the rich backdrop of West Point's storied past---from legendary coach Red Blaik to Blaik's biggest Army booster, General Douglas MacArthur---and spins an eloquent yarn that makes compelling reading from beginning to end of that memorable season. They are all shown here developed in full---with stars Bill Carpenter, the Lonesome End, and Pete Dawkins, the Heisman Trophy winner, leading the way---charging through a year touched by grace and ending in glory.” ―William Nack, New York Times bestselling author of Secretariat: The Making of a Champion
“Take the drive with Mark Beech up the Hudson River in the Fall of 1958. Admire the foliage on the way. Settle into your seat at Michie Stadium on the gothic campus of West Point and watch the best football player in the country play on the best football team in the country for the best football coach in the country. Cheer along with the cadets. Go ahead. This is a special season, never to be repeated. Black and white photographs from the long ago gain color and life from some terrific writing. Enjoy yourself.” ―Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams: The Biography of An American Hero
“Championship seasons are magical, but Mark Beech does way more than make your skin tingle--he makes you understand how the iconic Red Blaik and one of America's greatest institutions have inspired and continue to inspire our nation.” ―Joe Drape, New York Times bestselling author of Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen
“I was privileged to see this team play. I was privileged to cast my Heisman vote for Pete Dawkins. I was even more privileged to get to know the General later in life. It was a great football team that deserves its own book, this one.” ―Dan Jenkins, New York Times bestselling author of Semi-Tough
About the Author
MARK BEECH has been a reporter, writer and editor at Sports Illustrated since 1997, and has covered a wide range of subjects, including NCAA football, horse racing and NASCAR. An army brat and second-generation West Point graduate, he lives with his wife, Allison, and their two children in Westchester County, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 birthday. 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 inspiration 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 exclamations were infrequent. Publicly, he hardly ever betrayed emotion or raised his voice, save to issue one of his crisp commands on the practice field. Though he despised being described in the press as “austere” or “aloof,” Blaik carefully cultivated his manner of dignified cool. He stood apart at practice and remained mostly mute throughout 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 command 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 imperturbable 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 civilian 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 everybody 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 becoming the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. As Army’s line coach for five seasons beginning in 1949, the unpolished and volatile Lombardi 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 organizing and preparing a team to win he’d learned from Red Blaik.
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 cadet gymnasium’s south tower hung an enormous portrait of MacArthur rendering a salute, and any visitor who climbed the steps to the coach’s aerie could not help but notice the physical resemblance between 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 himself 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 writing poetry in his room.1 Public outcry over the suicide had persisted through the spring and became especially intense in the halls of Congress. When MacArthur assumed command at West Point in June 1919, the issue of hazing was at the top of his agenda. He appointed 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 committee—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 before 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 MacArthur, 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 accomplishments, “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 football fan. Whenever he could make time in his official schedule, he 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 hundred 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 riding 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 himself 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 th...
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Premier Sports Writing
By VerbRiver
You've seen the titles before. The Most Astuounding, Greatest, Apocalyptic/Player/Team/Game Ever. So many of them and thousands of comparable books promise thrill-a-minute adventure, but stumble and fall slogging through descriptions of individual games.
By sharp and happy contrast, author Mark Beech is a sprinter pulling readers out of box score boredom to the living finish line of a splendidly told story.
When Saturday Mattered Most examines the history of Army's undefeated 1958 football team ... which immediately raises the question: Who wants to read about an old football team? The answer? Anyone who gives thanks for fine writing and a glimpse of timeless magnetism and courage; frailty and pain; scandal and character, the fascinating puzzle of men together.
The book far surpasses football. It tells the story of Red Blaik, a head coach of few words, who suffered the dismissal of more than 30 players (including his own son) because of honor code violations in a 1951 scandal. Here is Blaik clashing with the West Point brass over the place and future of Army football. Here is Blaik writing weekly summaries and game assessments to General MacArthur. And here is a coach evoking reverence among some and disdain among others, both views echoing down to the present.
This is also the story of the "Lonely (Lonesome) End", in the vanguard of the wideout style of football. And here is the story of Pete Dawkins the most decorated of cadets (Head of the Corps of Cadets; captain of the football team; class president; Rhodes Scholar; player of six musical instruments; tenth in his class; winner of the Maxwell Award; Winner of the Heisman Trophy) and possibly the second-best back on the Army team.
The book is so powerful and compactly written that Blaik's eventual resignation comes not so much as a surprise that he quit, but as a surprise that the book is nearly finished. The story and the writing are so appealing that I even read the acknowledgments. I never do that.
Best of all, the What-Became-of-Them section eloquently reminds us that those with a role on any Saturday that mattered most inevitably become the Monday-through-Friday everyday people, regardless of former status as hero, reserve, or fan in the stands. When Saturday Mattered Most ends with the stark fact built into every game: The fastest thing in sports is glory fading. A marvelous book.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Glory Days....
By Charles Leak
Mark Beech does a masterful job bringing the reader into Army's last great season and one of the last seasons before the Sunday Pro Football overtook college football as America's favorite sport.
As a fan of West Point and its storied football history, it was wondering to read stories about the greats: Pete Dawkins, Bob Anderson, Bob Novogratz, Coach Blaik, Bill Carpenter and others.
If you are a fan of West Point, a fan of football or even more broadly a fan of American history, this book is a must read.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Insightful...A Great Resource
By Michael
I know very little about Army football, but I read a lot about military history and the service academies. Having read "When Saturday Mattered Most" I find myself talking somewhat intelligently about it in casual conversation around the office. Compounded with what I digested from Joe Drape's recent contribution, "Soldiers First," I found the two books complement each other nicely--a look back at old school football and a look inside the modern era of college football.
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