University Place  Bob Jacobson Sports and Dreams in America  November 8, 2012 UP797   cc >> I'm excited to introduce to you our two authors tonight. We have with us Dan Manoyan who's written "Alan Ameche: The Story of the Horse." Dan Manoyan grew up in and is currently a resident of Alan Ameche's hometown of Kenosha. Manoyan was a sports writer for such newspapers as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dallas Morning News, and Kenosha News for 37 years. In 1997 his beat was the Wisconsin Badger football team. His book, "Alan Ameche: The Story of the Horse," is a portrait of not only Ameche but also the history of football, of the UW, of Madison, Wisconsin, and even America. I found it a fascinating read, and I think that anyone who sort of came of age as I did in the '70s and learned about football at that time will really sort of get a refresher course of about football was really like and how it sort of came of age. It's a fascinating read. Joe Schuster is also with us tonight. Joe's book is called "The Might Have Been." It's a novel about Edward Everett Yates, who's a career minor league player and manager. I found it to be rich with detail. 

And if you have any appreciation at all for the struggle that athletes go through in not just getting to a point of excellence but dealing with maybe being beyond that point and on the downside, I believe you'll enjoy reading it. Joe, his short fiction has also appeared in the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Missouri Review, among other journals. He's a professor and Chair in the Department of Communications and Journalism at Webster University in St. Louis. He has published more than 600 articles, essays, and reviews in national, regional, and local newspapers and magazines. He is married and the father of five children. So, please join me in welcoming Dan and Joe. [APPLAUSE]  >> Do you want to go first? >> I don't care. I'm happy to go first. >> Okay. >> I was going to start of just by, I'll go over here and do this, I was going to, by the way, I'm really pleased to be here and I'm grateful that the festival invited me to appear here. 

I am going to read a very short excerpt from my book. Since the theme for the festival is Lost and Found, I'm going to read a short section from my novel that centers on those specific elements. I'm going to read the last page of chapter two and the first few pages of chapter three. It will only take about three and a half hours. I'm kidding. [LAUGHTER] To kind of set up, this is what you need to know. The first part of the book takes place in 1976. The principal character, as you heard, is a guy named Edward Everett Yates who spends 10 years in the minor leagues. In his 10th season in the minor leagues, he finally gets a call to the St. Louis Cardinals where he get a chance to pinch hit in a game, but he gets asked to lay down a sacrifice bunt and then he rides the bench for three weeks until a game in Montreal on a rainy day and then he has an amazing game. In the first five innings, he has a single, a double, a triple, and a home run, the cycle, which is one of those magic events in baseball. 

But, and in fiction there always has to be a but, it's been raining, as I said, and by the bottom of the fifth, the Cardinals are leading 11 to nothing and the rain is falling harder. So, for the game to count and for his cycle to exist, it has to get through five full innings. If it gets called before five full innings, it's as if the game never happened, and his accomplishments are wiped out. And so, here we pick it up with two outs in the bottom of the fifth inning. And the other thing I want to point out is there's a specific architectural aspect to the ballpark where they're playing. They're playing at old Jarry Park in Montreal, and there's a specific architectural aspect in that the way I describe the right field wall is the way the right field wall really was in Jarry Park in 1976.  The third batter was left-handed, someone who didn't hit for much average, but had some power, 17 home runs already, and Edward Everett drifted back slightly. The rain was falling harder; from two hundred feet behind the infielders, he felt separated from them by a liquid silver curtain that shifted in the wind. At the plate, the hitter stepped out, and even from where he was, Edward Everett could tell he was making some remark to the umpire about the lunacy of playing in such weather, but the umpire gestured him to step back in, and he did. Because of the wind and the rain and the distance, Edward Everett could see him swing at the one-ball, two-strike pitch, but the sound of the bat striking the ball got swallowed up and came muffled a moment later, and he had no idea how to judge it; he saw a flash of beige arcing toward him and he wondered, come in or drop back? He hesitated, unable to figure its trajectory, watching it push through the rain: was it climbing or falling, climbing or falling? And then he picked it up, descending, and he started to run in to catch it, before realizing he had misjudged it. 

He backpedaled, tripping momentarily over his own feet but keeping his balance, his eye on the ball, until he felt the change in the ground beneath him, grass no more, but clay and cinders, the warning track, and then his back was pressed against the eight-foot-high chain-link fence and he knew if he jumped, he could catch it for what he knew would be the end of the game, five full innings in the books, his cycle safe, not erased by the rain. He locked his fingers into the chain link to give himself balance for his leap and then he jumped, reaching for the ball, knowing he had gauged the flight of it impeccably, but then he was twisting, falling away from it, one of his spikes caught in the fence, and he was flailing, still reaching for the ball, although he knew it was beyond him, out of the park, and he was falling to the ground, his cleat still caught in the fence, his right knee twisting in a direction he never thought it could go, and still the fence held him, dangling, his shoulder on the wet track, gravity pulling him against his own body, until the fence finally let him go, and he lay there, pain slicing his knee. Then he was two people: the body lying there, pelted with rain and something else, hail the size of peas, and the self saying to the body, All right, get up now, and the body saying No. He was laughing, he realized, the body of him was laughing, and the other self was thinking, You're in shock, you're in shock, and the pain rolled in waves up his leg, into his hip, and then rose higher on his body, seeming to swallow him for the briefest of moments. He blacked out. Years later he thought of that moment when he was caught in the chain link fence in another country as a kind of border defining the geography of his life. There was his self on the far side of the line, the major league ball player, and his life on the other side, where he was in exile from the country where he wanted to be. You brood about it too much, his second wife said to him on one of the days when he was more taciturn than usual. A day not long before he came home from a trip and found she'd moved out. I'm not thinking about what you think I'm thinking about, he protested. 

Although, he was. He didn't want to be one of those men whose lives were all about missed opportunities and regret. Men like his father, for example, who stayed in the same high school coaching job for more than 20 years, but he was haunted by what he saw as his moment of failure. When Woody Hayes invited him to be one of his assistants when he left high school football to coach a bad Denison University team, his father had turned him down because it was too risky. What if they went to Denison and they failed there? He remembered too well the depression. His own father sullen and unemployed for three and a half years, his family renting out their house to a family who did have a husband and a father with a job and moving into the basement. His own father sitting in a basement corner staring angrily at the ceiling, grimacing every time the other family made a noise upstairs in what should have been his home. Their feet clomping on his floors. Their scraping a chair across his dining room. Worse yet were the days in which the family upstairs had a party. 

The door opening and closing and opening and closing as they admitted their friends. The explosion of laughter or the high chatter of children. Edward Everett's father remembered that all too well and didn't want to become his father, an exile in his own home, and so he said no to Woody Hayes. The first year when Hayes' team went 2-6 it seemed the shrewd decision, but then Hayes became a coaching god at Ohio State. And so Edward Everett's father did become his own father, unhappy in his life, waking up on a Saturday morning after yet another loss by his own poor high school football team, sitting in the living room not wanting to tune in the Ohio State game on the radio but doing so, and then turning it off and then on again, thinking about the country that could have been his life instead of the one that was. The coach of a mediocre high school football team. Until he hung himself from a ceiling joist in his office just off the locker room in the high school. It's not the same, Edward Everett's wife told him that day shortly before she left. It wasn't as if you walked away from the major leagues. No, I was carried off the field away from them, he said. 

And she shook her head in what he thought was a gesture of mock frustration but which, in the end, was real. In the hospital, he had his own room that looked out across the street to a church he later learned was called --. From his bed, all he could see was part of its green/brown dome rising above a thick stand of trees and the cross at its apex. But all through Sunday morning, he listened to its resident bell clanging the call to Mass. He wasn't much of a church-goer anymore. The idea of getting up early on a Sunday to go to Mass when he was with his team embarrassed him. On his first Sunday when he was in rookie ball, 18 and full of self-consciousness, he was awakened at dawn by the sound of one of the three teammates who shared his room moving around. The click of the suitcase latch. The huff when he opened it. The clang of his belt hitting his bureau. 

Edward Everett was lying on the carpet where he slept the night before. The room had two double beds, but no one shared them. First two men in the room took the beds; the other two earned the floor. He realized it was Sunday and thought, I ought to go to Mass, but before he could get up another of his teammates snapped, Jesus Christ, Turner, keep it down. Turner apologized and left. As the door closed, the player who'd complained spat out, goddamn holy roller. Edward Everett debated for less than a second, thought about the damnable offense it was not to go, and then got off the floor and fell into the bed Turner had left, plumped the pillow thinking, mattress, and went back to sleep. But in the hospital, he realized the foreign country with his right leg in a cast from above the knee to the middle of his shin, he longed for the comfort of the ritual and surprised himself by beginning to weep. It was the injury, he knew, as well as the affect of the painkillers and the fact that, despite the drugs, he slept not at all. At the same time, he realized that he nonetheless felt like a child and told himself to stop what his mother called a pity party. 

Break out the hats and favors, she'd exclaim when he sulked as a boy. Pity party, can I come too? Sunday was the longest day he could remember. Through the window he could see that the poor weather of the previous two days had passed, and the sky was a deep blue. When the nurse would come in with his breakfast at 7 o'clock, she'd pull up the blinds and crank open the casement windows saying something in French he couldn't understand but which he took to mean fresh air. The breeze that came in was warm and every once in a while a gust pushed into the room, the blinds clanking against the window frame. All he could do was lie there, listening to the sounds of the life outside the cathedral. The cathedral bell, the traffic, muted singing during one of the Masses, and then, when the service was over, the rise and fall of human conversation from the street, the occasional shriek of a child. Around noon, a nurse came in with his brunch on a tray, a different nurse this time. A slip of a girl, 16 or 17. Maybe she wasn't even a nurse but a Canadian version of a candy striper. 

Setting the tray on his bedside cart and removing the plastic cover, she gave him a shy smile. Thinking noise would mute the evidence of outside life, he asked for the TV remote, but she gave him a look that made him wonder if she spoke English. And so he gesture toward the TV repeating, the remote, the remote! As if she were a pet who would learn commands from repetition. She flushed but gave him the remote, holding it toward him in a way that their hands would not meet even accidentally and fled the room. He turned on the television and clicked through the channels. There were only two that came in with any clarity. One that showed a program that appeared to be about gardening, a white-haired woman standing behind a rosebush, shears in her hand. It was in French, and he could understand none of it. The other program, also in French, had four well-dressed men in a studio arguing animatedly. He turned off the television and, after deciding he didn't want to eat, pushed the bedside cart away and tried to sleep, but he couldn't because of the sunlight and the noise pouring in through the open window. 

He wondered if anyone from the team would come to see him. It was 12:30, half an hour before the game, and so they would all be at Jarry Park in the clubhouse, changing from their batting practice jerseys into their powder blue road game jerseys, going through their before-the-game rituals he knew after living side by side with them for three weeks, close enough that they were living in one another's jocks, as the joke went. Checking the rawhide knots in the fingers of their gloves, some of them shaving, some taping weak ankles. At one point, a priest came to his door and tapped on the frame. He might have been 80 or so. Skinny and slightly hunched, almost entirely bald save for thin wisps of hair over his ears and on the back of his head. He carried a small, ragged black zippered leather case, and Edward Everett wondered if he were also a doctor. May I enter, he said in accented English, wheezing slightly. When Edward Everett told him he could, the priest pulled the room's one armchair up to the bedside, then consulted a piece of paper he unfolded after removing it from his pants pocket. The tips of his index and middle fingers were stained yellow and he wreaked of stale tobacco. 

Monsieur Yates, he said glancing up from the paper. Yes, Edward Everett said. You have indicated Roman Catholic, do you wish to receive the Eucharist? It had been since early February that he had set foot in a church, still playing the dutiful son when he visited his mother before the season started, but he said yes. The priest nodded and unzipped the case and took out a wrinkled white stole, kissed the cross emblem embroidered near one end of it and draped it around his neck. You are in a state of grace, the priest asked? From down the hall, a child let out a gleeful laugh and a woman shushed him. Edward Everett thought of telling the truth, that he wasn't in a state of grace, but then he might leave, and Edward Everett didn't want to be alone. The priest nodded at his ascent, snapped open a small pewter case, extracted a thin host, and held it in his hand a moment, inviting Edward Everett to recite the Our Father with him before extending the host for him to take onto his tongue. The priest groaned slightly from the exertion as he leaned closer to Edward Everett to give him communion. As he took it on his tongue, he tasted nicotine from the priest's fingers and considered for a moment the sin he might be committed but thought, you're not a boy any longer. While the priest sat beside him with his head bowed in a moment of reflection, a nurse came to the door and said in a grave tone that she had to close it for a moment and did. 

He wondered why she had to do that. As if the priest could read his thoughts, the old man said, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact tone as if he were commenting on the weather, "Someone died." They close the doors because they don't want the patients to see them removing the departed. Indeed, in the hall, beyond this closed door, a gurney rattled past, a wheel squeaking. The priest began murmuring something in French in a low voice, a prayer, Edward Everett realized. The Hail Mary perhaps. When he finished, he looked up at Edward Everett and coughed slightly. "They will open it when they are finished, he said. How did you...?" He nodded toward Edward Everett's leg that was in a cast. "Playing baseball," Edward Everett said. "Ah," the priest nodded. 

"For your college?" "No, for the Cardinals." "The Cardinals?" the priest said, cocking his head in a quizzical manner. "The St. Louis Cardinals." The priest chuckled, "Naturally I was thinking the College of Cardinals." "Naturally," Edward Everett thought. "I imagined you performing on a field of play before the princes of the church, entertaining them with you athletic skill." The picture came to Edward Everett out of the man's assumption and a stiff manner of speaking, himself doing leaps and somersaults in the middle of a wide meadow while a cluster of older men in crimson vestments sat in bleachers applauding politely. Then they were in an uncomfortable silence for a while longer until Edward Everett blurted out, "I lied before." He hadn't meant to say it and was surprised that the words welled up in his throat on their own, as if the priest were some sort of magician, finding coins behind Edward Everett's ears and producing ping-pong balls from his mouth, coins and balls and admissions he hadn't known were there. The old priest closed his eyes and nodded. "Would you like to make a confession?" Edward Everett considered the question. It had been how long since his last confession? Since before he'd gone off to play ball. The previous December when he'd gone home for Christmas, his mother asked him about receiving the sacrament of penance and Edward Everett had left the house on a Saturday afternoon, telling her he was going and drove off toward the church but instead went to Memorial Park where he sat overlooking a frozen lake where a teenage girl was teaching a half dozen small children how to ice skate. He sat in his car watching the children stutter-step and fall on the ice, drinking coffee he'd bought at a gas station, as snow swirled like dust across the frozen water. After an hour, he went home. 

Was there a statute of limitations on forgiveness, a point at which he had accumulated too many sins and had been too long since his last confession? But he began, "Bless me, Father, I have sinned. My last confession was eight years ago." And then paused to see if the priest would blanch, would say, yes, any hope he had of absolution had expired. But the priest merely nodded, and Edward Everett began telling him of his life, beginning with the lies he had told his mother about going to confession; about the times he'd gone to communion although he was not in a state of grace; about how he had slept with so many women whose names he could no longer remember, had taken amphetamines to wake himself up for a game after long and uncomfortable bus rides, had not kept the Sabbath, the sins tumbling out in no particular order, as if he were some sort of spiritual bag of marbles that had gotten torn and the aggies and cat's eyes were bouncing madly around the room. He had been envious of teammates who had been called up before him and once slept with a teammate's girlfriend after the teammate had been promoted ahead of him from single A to double A. He had done it, he knew even at the time, while the girl undressed in the dark, less for the sex and more for the anger he felt at being passed over. She, of course, had done it out of her own anger, knowing her boyfriend would not come back for her. But still, it was a violation; one did not sleep with a teammate's girlfriend. When Edward Everett finished his litany, he realized he was weeping quietly, and the priest was handing him a tissue from the box on the bedside table. As he wiped his cheeks and said his act of contrition, the priest traced the sign of the cross through the air and told him to say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as his penance before giving him the final admonishment: "Go and sin no more." Not long after the priest left, what turned out to be the last Mass of the day let out across the street, and the chatter of the faithful floated through his window. He imagined them going home to mow lawns or off to restaurants for pleasant Sunday brunches. 

He thought, I am one of them again, a good and true Catholic, and fell asleep. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> First of all, I'd like to thank the Wisconsin Book Festival for inviting me. When I found out in August it was a pleasant surprise. I hadn't expected it, and I'm glad to be here. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why they paired Joe and I together. I'm glad they did. We've exchanged books, and I'll tell you, Edward Everett Yates is a hell of a guy. Joe brings that out in his book. That's what I liked most about his book was the character development. 

I think, we discussed this beforehand, probably the biggest commonality between our two characters, and maybe this is why they paired us together, is they both left something out on the field. His character didn't fulfill his dreams in baseball because of an injury, and the same could be said of Alan Ameche. As great as his career was, and believe me, it was great, it ended short. It ended after he was six years in the NFL with the Baltimore Colts. He led the league in rushing his first year. He scored the winning touchdown in the greatest game ever played, the 1958 championship game with the Colts and the Giants. But, unfortunately, he didn't get along with his coach, a guy by the name of Weeb Ewbank, who some of you may remember was also the coach of the New York Jets when they won their first Super Bowl. I think it was Super Bowl III. And Ameche had a career ending injury, but it shouldn't have been a career ending injury. When he was in his sixth season in 1960, he got up from his fullback position to block Alex Karras, who you may know just passed away a week or two ago, and he tore his Achilles heel. 

And that's a serious injury, but it's not an injury that you can't come back from. But Alan Ameche chose not to do the rehab because during that off-season he ran into Weeb Ewbank, along with his best friend on the Colts, Gino Marchetti, and Ameche wanted to test the waters and just feel how Weeb felt about Ameche coming back for another year. So he asked him. He said, well, Weeb, this is really a tough injury. What do you think? Should I put in the work and come back next year? I'm actually thinking about retiring. And Weeb, who was, for some reason, always jealous of Alan Ameche, maybe it was the $15,000 a year he was drawing in salary, I don't know, that was a lot of money back then, he told Ameche, he said, I think that's a good idea, Alan. So Ameche ended his career right then. That was it. He said why do the work if I'm not wanted here. So, in that regard, as great as his career was and I'll recap it here in a second, he probably felt a little bit bitter about that and took that to his grave. 

For those of you who don't know it, Ameche died on the operating table at Debakey Institute in Houston in 1988. He was awaiting a heart transplant. To go back in time, he was born in 1933, June 1st, in an upstairs flat above a tavern in 52nd Street in Kenosha. His father, Augusto, would come to this country in the 1920s and lived in Kenosha for about 20 years working at the Simmons Mattress Factory. The only problem was he couldn't find, there were a lot of Italian women in Kenosha at that time, but he couldn't find one that he cared about enough to marry her. So he went back to the old country to Canino, which is about 20 miles north of Rome, and he found Benedetta Lentini, who was about 20 years his junior. And Benedetta already had a boyfriend and she didn't really want to come to this country, but Augusto had a strong ally on his side. It was her father who believed at that time that the streets were paved in gold in the United States, in Kenosha in particular. So he pretty much forced her to come to this country. They had two children. 

Alan has an older brother. His name was Lyndo who later shortened it to Lin. And Alan's real name, you may not realize this, is Dante Lino Amici. Lino Dante Amici, excuse me. And he didn't like that name, and he Americanized it to Alan when he was about 16 years old. Ameche played football at Kenosha High School and is the greatest player, not only in Kenosha, but maybe in the state He might be the greatest athlete that Wisconsin's every produced. I think it's almost safe to say that. Don't tell me about Brett Favre and Henry Aaron and Robin Yount and those types of people because they weren't born in Wisconsin. He was. He was born and raised in Wisconsin. 

He won the Heisman Trophy at Wisconsin in 1954. He transformed the Kenosha High School, it was the doormat of the Big Eight, which some of you may remember from Madison here that it was the premier football conference in the state in Wisconsin. Kenosha was the doormat when Ameche was a sophomore. They scored one touchdown the entire year. He was brought up as a sophomore to the varsity, and he took a beating. Junior year the team was five and three, I believe, and things started to turn around. By his senior season, they were, arguably, the best team that's ever been seen in Wisconsin. They were undefeated. The only team that gave them a game was Madison East. We have an alumni of Madison East here tonight, and he played in that game as a matter of fact. 

He could tell you more about that game than I could. That team was so great, the Kenosha team was so great that Ameche's coach, Chuck Jaskwhich, only played his starters for two periods except for that game because Kenosha trailed at halftime by two touchdowns. But Jaskwhich was such a nice man that he would, in the seven other games of Ameche's senior season, Ameche and the other starters would only play the first quarter and the third quarter. He'd play his bench players in the second and fourth quarters. I'm going to read to you a chapter here, eventually I'll get to it, about Ameche's recruitment to Wisconsin because I think this is a Madison crowd here tonight, and I think it might be very interesting for you. And, believe it or not, we actually have a gentleman here who I want to introduce, Bobby Hinds, who, thanks, Bobby. He's one of Madison's leading citizens, by the way. He grew up with Alan Ameche, played high school football with him, and they were best friends growing up, right? He was in Alan Ameche's wedding. He came out here to Wisconsin and played football, but he was a better boxer than he was football player, so he branched out into boxing when it was still and intercollegiate sport. And I tell you, a biography when you write about a person that's been dead for a while is only as good as your sources, as your stories. 

Obviously, Ameche's widow, Yvonne, was my best source by far, but a close second was this man right here. There are some stories in here that he tells which are very entertaining. I'll leave it at that. If you want to read the stories except for the one about him being recruited to Notre Dame, we'll leave it at that. Ameche comes to Wisconsin. He just hopes to get his letter the first season here. Turns out, he sets and NCAA rushing record. His second season, same thing. He sets another NCAA rushing record. He's on his way to becoming Wisconsin's all-time leading rusher. 

Junior year the NCAA institutes a rule which, to this day, nobody can figure out. Players could only go one way. I'm sorry, players, if they came out of the game, they had to stay out of the game. If you left in the first quarter, you couldn't return till the second half. If you left in the third quarter, you were done for the day. What that meant was the players had to go both ways. So Ameche, who hadn't played defense, he was a safety in high school, I believe, right? He had to learn how to play linebacker position so they could keep him on the field for four quarters at Wisconsin. And his stats went down his junior and senior year. I think the reason NCAA instituted that rule was because they wanted to keep the number of scholarships down for some of the smaller schools that football wasn't that profitable. So they wanted to kind of even the playing field a little bit. 

So they limited the scholarships that each Division I school could have to 33. It was a mistake. That rule lasted about 10 years. And, like I said, Ameche's statistics plummeted his last two years, but it was because he was on the field for every play. They couldn't make him play linebacker and keep handing him the ball 33 times a game. So, his statistics went down, but based on his performance, his career at Wisconsin, he was awarded the Heisman Trophy in 1954. He had some stiff competition, but they felt he had earned it. Not necessarily from what he did his last year, but from what he did his four years at Wisconsin. And he was the number three player drafted in the NFL draft in 1955 by the Baltimore Colts, who were, at that time, honestly a terrible team. In his first year for the Colts, he led the NFL in rushing. 

The first time he touched the ball, I mean literally, the first time he touched the ball, he ran for a 79-yard touchdown against the Chicago Bears. His production went down in his final five years, but he was All-Pro five times. His production went down because the Colts found a quarterback by the name of Johnny Unitas, and they went from being a running team to a passing team which I don't think anybody can argue with. Johnny Unitas is arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, if not the greatest. In later years, Alan was a very successful businessman which might explain why, again, he didn't want to do the rehab to resurrect his career in 1960. He and Gino Marchetti were partners in Gino's Hamburgers, which was the east coast equivalent of McDonald's. They sold it after about, I think it was in the early '80s for, correct me if I'm wrong, $150 million. There were four partners. So Alan retired a very wealthy man, a man of leisure. He took an active part in his kid's career. 

And I think some of the most interesting chapters in the book have to deal with Ameche and his family and the friends that he kept for life, like Bobby Hinds. And I think the most interesting chapter in the book is the chapter about how Alan Ameche was recruited to go to Wisconsin. And if you've never heard it, I hope you enjoy this. And you can thank this man right here for supplying me with the story because it's all him. He was in the room. [INAUDIBLE] He lived with Alan at the time. Bobby had a rough childhood and he bounced around a few places, and the Ameche family was nice enough to take you in, I guess, when you were, what, a senior in high school? [INAUDIBLE] Uh-huh. There have been bitterly contested college football recruiting wars. There have been recruiting battles that have divided families, cities, and even states. There have been recruitments that have ended in NCAA investigations and even in courts of law. 

But the recruitment of Alan Ameche had something probably no other college football recruiting battle has ever had. Since the fight was for the greatest player Wisconsin has ever produced, Ameche's recruitment could be said to have been a beer war. Although practically every major college program in the Midwest and others like Kentucky and North Carolina offered scholarships to Ameche, the end game came down to two schools: Wisconsin and Notre Dame. The University of Wisconsin, 90 miles northwest of Kenosha in Madison, had plenty going for it in Ameche's eyes. It was the school where his brother, Lin, had preceded him. Six of his high school teammates, including this gentleman here, were heading there to play football. There was the state pride, there was proximity, and there was "On, Wisconsin!" "I remember when we were in high school, Alan went out to Madison to visit Lin," Yvonne said. Yvonne is his widow. "When he came back, he was wearing this cute little red tie and he was singing 'On, Wisconsin!'" Lin introduced Alan to classical music at that point and took him to the music library on campus. Alan couldn't stop talking about it. 

I think he just liked everything Wisconsin had to offer. Yvonne had plenty more to say about Ameche's college choice in Booton Herndon's Sports Illustrated piece. This is referred to earlier in the book. She denied that his reason for picking Wisconsin was because six of his Kenosha teammates had received scholarships from the Badgers. She elaborated on her husband's high school visit to Madison. When we were sophomores in high school, Lino spent a weekend in Madison visiting his brother. He came straight to my house as soon as he got back to Kenosha. He had on a white shirt and a red tie and he looked awful cute. He told me that the Wisconsin campus was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, and the Wisconsin song was the most beautiful he'd ever heard. He sang it for me from beginning to end. 

But what really got him was the music room at Wisconsin. He said they had every phonograph record in the world there, and you could play them as loud as you wanted to. Lino was sold on Wisconsin from that day on. Ironically, Yvonne leaves no doubt where she hoped Alan would go. I wanted him to go to Notre Dame, she recalled. There were no girls there. [LAUGHTER] Yvonne had plenty of allies in high places, and Notre Dame had not shortage of selling points either. There was the whole Notre Dame aura. Initiated by Knute Rockne and, at the time, in the very competent hands of Frank Leahy. There was a religious aspect. 

Ameche was a man of strong faith and belief in the Catholic church. And there was Chuck Jaskwhich. Chuck Jaskwhich was his coach at Kenosha High School. A man who Ameche respected greatly and who happened to be a Notre Dame alumnus. And finally, Notre Dame had some very rich, important and persistent alumni who had made it their mission in life to adorn Ameche's head with a golden helmet. One in particular, Fred Miller, the owner of Miller Brewing Company, may have even crossed the line into that dreaded gray area that separates legal from illegal. Miller was not only a Notre Dame alumnus, but he had been an All-American offensive tackle there under the legendary Rockne. He also was a man who was used to getting his way and didn't take no for an answer, didn't easily take no for an answer. His dogged pursuit of Ameche became a statewide issue in the spring of 1951. That's Ameche's senior year. 

It pitted Miller against the University of Wisconsin alumni, and since there were more than a few beer drinkers in that crowd, it became a spirited battle. It was even written about in a later University of Wisconsin football media guide under the heading Facts, Figures, and Legends of Badger Football which stated: during his college recruitment, Ameche was being heavily recruited to attend Notre Dame by Fred Miller, philanthropic owner of Milwaukee's Miller Brewing Company. Wisconsin patrons, however, threatened to boycott against the buying and consumption of Miller beer if Ameche attended Notre Dame. Under the threat of boycott, Miller backed off and Ameche signed with Wisconsin. John Steadman, a Baltimore Sun sports writer, went into more detail on Ameche's recruitment by Notre Dame in his newspaper's coverage of Ameche's untimely death in 1988. This is part of that article. The death of Ameche at 55, following heart surgery, recalls the intriguing and amusing scenario of how he was recruited from Kenosha High School in 1951. He laughed about it, but it was the only time in history that a major brewery was going to face a boycott against its product if the player that was pursued, Ameche, went to Notre Dame instead of Wisconsin. Notre Dame was so determined to have Ameche enroll that Coach Frank Leahy suggested he "go home and make a novena," believing that nine days of prayer and reflection would change his mind. Pulling out all stops, Notre Dame had a distant cousin of Ameche's, actor Don Ameche, call on his behalf. 

But I still wanted to go to Wisconsin, Ameche later explained. I respected Notre Dame, but I figured it would be better if I stayed home and went to my state university with a lot of the boys I played with at Kenosha High School. When he was in the throes of arriving at a decision, added pressure was put on him to attend Notre Dame by Fred Miller, the Irish captain of 1928 who was the philanthropic owner of the Miller Brewing Company. Finally, Wisconsin partisans organized a committee to keep Ameche on home turf. The threat was made that if the promising fullback went to Notre Dame, as had previously happened with another running back, Neil Worden from Milwaukee, that a statewide demonstration would be made against buying and consumption of Miller beer. The game plan worked, Miller backed off, and Ameche went to Wisconsin and became a Heisman Trophy winner after gaining 3,212 yards in his four years, an NCAA record at the time. That's not exactly the way Bobby Hinds, our friend here in the third row remembers it, though. And he claims to have been in the living room at the Ameche home on 16 Avenue that spring day in 1951 when Miller, Leahy, and the Mount Carmel Parish priest came to visit. Mount Carmel was the local Italian parish in Ameche's old neighborhood. The Ameche family had taken Hinds in because he had no other place to live at the time. 

Hinds agrees that Miller was certainly applying a full court press on Ameche to commit to Notre Dame, but the beer baron didn't exactly back off voluntarily. Fred Miller, Frank Leahy, the great Notre Dame coach, and the parish priest all came over to the house, Hinds recalled. They even had Don Ameche, who was a friend of Leahy's, call Alan to tell him to consider Notre Dame and everything would be taken care of. Don Ameche, who was a famous movie star, was Ameche's second cousin, but according to Yvonne, that's his widow, that's Alan Ameche's widow, that was the first time the two had ever spoken. Apparently, Don Ameche's father and Augusto were first cousins. Don Ameche was from Kenosha, of course, this is Yvonne, a quote from Yvonne, "but Alan didn't even know him," she said. "I think they were, like, second cousins, but Alan never spoke to him before or after that. Don Ameche didn't even like Kenosha, and he really wanted nothing to do with it." The call from Don Ameche didn't impress Alan, and neither did what happened next, according to Hinds. "Fred Miller," this is a quote from Bobby Hinds, "wrote out a check for $1500 which, of course, was totally illegal," Hinds said. Remember, $1500 was a lot of money back then. 

It was about what Al's dad made at Simmons in one year. So Miller hands the check to Mrs. Ameche and said, this is for you Mrs. Ameche. All I'm asking for Al to say verbally that he's going to go to Notre Dame. Just to show you, this is again Bobby talking, just to show you how sophisticated Alan was, he walked over to Fred Miller and said, "Don't you ever do that again." He was genuinely pissed that Fred Miller had used that sort of bribery on his mother. Bobby quotes again, "Obviously she didn't take the check and Al went to Wisconsin. I was there when it happened. Wisconsin was so fortunate to get a man like Alan Ameche." It was not the first time Hinds has related this story. In 1988, days after Ameche's death, he was interviewed by Dave Zweifel of the Madison Capital Times. Alan was furious, this is a quote from the story, "Alan was furious that someone would put his mother, who was extremely poor, under that kind of pressure," Zweifel quoted Hinds as saying. You got to remember, this was 1951, and $1500 was an awful lot of money. 

So he said to hell with Notre Dame. Yvonne won't confirm Hinds' story, but she wouldn't deny them either. She hints there might have been Wisconsin boosters who were also willing to provide Ameche with illegal perks for his services. I'm not aware of that story at all, she said referring to Hinds' Miller tale. I do know that Notre Dame wanted him to go there and there was somebody pulling strings. They even offered to send me to St. Mary's which was in the sister school of Notre Dame. But, she said, there were no cars offered; it was a scholarship. They offered his dad something; it was a pittance every month, but I don't remember how much. It's like this kid, and she's referring to, when I interviewed her Cam Newton had just won the Heisman, last year with people saying that his father wanted money. I think there should be money for the kids to play for a college, but at this point, I'm not going to say somebody said they would give Alan's dad a hundred dollars a month. 

I just don't want to go there. I had heard that there were people who wanted him to go to Wisconsin that made monetary offers. What they were, I don't know. What they said or who said they would help, I don't know And I don't want to go there. I think it's controversial. She continues, I was at a party not too long ago and there was a man there who played for Notre Dame. He said, what about that guy Cam Newton who's dad was trying to get all that money? I said, well, you know, Alan got a little help too. He said, I don't think you should tell anybody that, but I said, why not? It wasn't a lot. We never got a car. We had a little place to live in in Madison when we were married. 

They didn't give us a lot. Yvonne said that the most they ever got was dinner and a small stipend from Bob Leske's Supper Club, a popular Madison restaurant at that time, when they lived there. We would go there after the games and Bob would pay him to shake hands and greet people. It was no big deal. After he greeted people, we would have big steak dinners. It wasn't like here's a big car or something like that. According to a story written by Tom Flaherty of the Milwaukee Journal prior to the 1989 Heisman Trophy Award, the year after Ameche's death, many considered Wisconsin's victory over Notre Dame in the recruiting sweepstakes an upset. Flaherty's assumption was based on his interview with Milt Bruhn, who was Williamson's top assistant and later his successor as coach with Wisconsin. This is from the story. When Ameche was drawing attention as the star running back at Kenosha Bradford High School, a lot of people didn't expect Alan to become a legend at Wisconsin. 

His high school coach, Chuck Jaskwhich, had played quarterback at Notre Dame. Everyone expected Ameche to end up at Notre Dame. Badgers coach Ivy Williamson pulled a recruiting coup. "We knew that his coach was a Notre Dame graduate," Bruhn said, "We felt he was probably leaning toward Notre Dame." When Ivy recruited him, he brought in four or five of his high school teammates. If it hadn't been for that, he probably would have gone to Notre Dame. He wanted to stick with his buddies. Whether it was wanted or not by Ameche, both Notre Dame and Wisconsin sought to curry favor with him by bundling offers to his high school teammates. Notre Dame made offers to Mario Bonofiglio and Ed Ronzia, while Wisconsin made Bonofiglio, Ronzia, Dick Nicolazzi, Dick --, McMullen, Bobby Hinds, and Tom Braatz. All except Braatz, who went to Marquette, accepted the Wisconsin offers. I want to skip ahead here a little bit. 

I think this might be...  Let's see. After the blowup with Miller at the Ameche home, it was pretty much a fait accompli that the recruiting war was over and Ameche would take his game to Madison. But it wasn't official until the news appeared in the Kenosha Evening News on June 2nd, 1951, under the byline of Jim Barnhill, who had taken over as sports editor after Eddie McKenna's sudden death. There was no letter of intent signing event like there is now. Barnhill simply reported the Ameche and Bonofiglio had announced they would be attending the University of Wisconsin in the fall. Notre Dame, Northwestern, Michigan, Tennessee, Drake, Kentucky, Marquette, Wyoming, North Carolina, and "many others" were mentioned as having been possible suitors of Ameche. The South Bend School was particularly interested in the talents of Ameche, a 200-pound halfback, this is part of the story, excuse me, the story that was in the Kenosha News, who's broken field and power running established a Big Eight Conference mark last fall with 18 touchdowns, Barnhill wrote. Frankly, he watched him perform workouts and spoke with Ameche Tuesday. Ameche celebrated his 18th birthday yesterday. 

Williamson didn't talk much to the media, let alone about incoming freshman, but it was reported that he didn't expect Ameche to contribute much as a freshman. Perhaps that is because the Western Conference, which is the original name of the Big Ten Conference, had just voted to waive the rule banning freshman from varsity competition. But according to one report, a scout for the Chicago Bears declared that Ameche was good enough to transition from high school directly to the NFL. A story in Sport Magazine is a bit fuzzy on details but concludes with this statement about Ameche: one headhunter for the Chicago Bears had reported that he thought Ameche was "the only boy I've ever seen who could step right from high school up to the Bears." Nobody seems to know who this anonymous Bears scout was, but Ronzia has a theory. He thought the source might have been the former Kenosha and Drake University star Tom Bienemann, who played from 1951 through 1956 for the Chicago Cardinals. That's about the only one I can think of, Ronzia said. I remember Tom coming to our workouts in the summer and helping out. He wasn't a scout but he certainly knew a good player when he saw one. Maybe it was because of his stocky, muscular build, but when Alan got to Madison, Williamson decided that the 6-foot 200-pound Ameche was a fullback, not a halfback. He had played halfback in high school. 

Much has been made of Ameche's running style, however, because it was anything but that of a classic fullback. He ran erect, his head up, and the ball tucked under his right arm. His left arm flailed in the wind as he used it for balance, not unlike how a tightrope walker uses a long rod. Ameche ran with his knees high, even in short yard situations. The only time he would lower his upper torso in classic fullback style was in the case of eminent collision with a would-be tackler. Perhaps a flowery description in Sport Magazine captures Ameche's running style the best. He has been known to accumulate tacklers like a bikini-clad bathing beauty attracting stares, then shuck them off like a puppy quivering and shaking water from his body after a bath. That he is able to canter through the line with several human barnacles attached to his shell is a tribute to his extraordinary power. For Ameche runs with his head up and his back straight instead of crunched over like a plunging fullback. It is the most vulnerable of running back positions, one which gives a tackler an opportunity to perform a subtle bit of mayhem in the normal course of duty. 

He'll get killed if he tries to do that in pro ball, one professional player has commented. Obviously he didn't. Indisputably, the technique is as hazardous for the ball carrier as it is for the tackler. Alan is too hard to tackle low, observed Jim Barnhill, the sports editor of the Kenosha News, so most guys go after him high, usually with necktie tackles. Despite the dangers involved in Ameche's standup style of running, Ivy Williamson has prudently refrained from changing it. Apparently he knows what he's doing, Williamson was quoted at the time, and wants to see everything on the way. Williamson is not greatly upset by Ameche's style, this is still part of that Sport Magazine story. He's a halfback/fullback type of runner, explains the lean coach of the Badgers. In high school, he played left half rather than full. Undoubtedly, Ameche's dual assets, his ability to sweep the ends like a buck deer in flight, and then erupt through the line like a live charge from a bazooka have provided the foundation for his success. 

Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> I've got a few questions. Does anybody have any questions or comments for the authors?