By Ben Bolch
Coming up Roses
Legendary Northwestern coach Bob Voigts took the Purple to Pasadena in 1949.
Hours after winning the first Rose Bowl in Northwestern history, Wildcat coach Bob Voigts stood in his Pasadena hotel room shower, scrubbing away the sweat that resulted from his historic afternoon on the sideline. Without warning, the shower curtain was whisked back. A stranger stood on the other side of the shower with a small boy next to him, presumably his son. "Here's a piece of the goalpost," said the man, extending a piece of wood and a pen toward Voigts. "Would you sign it for me?" Voigts scribbled his name on the wood and returned to his shower as if he had never been interrupted.
The intrusion, after all, was understandable. Voigts had just accomplished the ultimate coaching feat: He had taken Northwestern to the Rose Bowl.
He did it with a group of guys mostly in their mid-20s, whose college careers were put on hold by a six-year interruption called World War II.
Nobody picked the 1948 Northwestern squad to do much. The Wildcats had won only three games the year before, and their coach, in only his second year but already balding heavily at the tender age of 31, was still unproven.
"They figured we were a team that was improving," Voigts said, "but nobody picked us to go to the Rose Bowl." That didn't matter. Voigts and his players didn't read the papers. And Voigts inspired his men to believe in themselves. "This was the philosophy that Bob Voigts prescribed," explains Alex Sarkisian, captain of the 1948 team. "If you go out and do your best, when you go to sleep that night you don't have to worry about 'What if I had done this?' or 'Would things be different if I had done that?' Voigts got you to the point where there were no regrets because you went out and did your best."
His best took Northwestern to the Rose Bowl, and 47 years later, Voigts is still a man people respect tremendously. "Do you know what Bob Voigts told me?" asks Gary Barnett, whose 1995 team is making its own run for the roses. "He said, 'Get yourself 40 World War II vets who are 26 years old and then you ought to be able to win the league.' " Winning the league, oddly enough, was something Voigts' Rose Bowl team did not accomplish. That team finished second in the Big Ten but went to Pasadena because Michigan, which finished first and beat NU 28-0, had gone to the Rose Bowl the season before and there was a rule that no team could go two years in a row. While NU made the trip to Pasadena that year, Michigan finished undefeated and settled for the national championship.
Voigts, 79, still lives in the same two-story Wilmette home he has occupied since 1947. And everywhere he goes, people want to know about the Rose Bowl. When Voigts takes walks in the morning in his neighborhood, people stop himand ask, "How was the Rose Bowl?"
"I get a big kick out of it," says Voigts, who goes to most NU home games with his wife Charlotte. As he sits in his living room, Voigts exhibits a muted form of the fierceness that earned him the nickname "Mutiny" as a player. He speaks slowly, quietly and respectfully about the experiences that made him a coaching legend. And rather than rambling on about his coaching tactics, Voigts likes to talk more about the players who made the season so memorable.
The Cats, behind a strong defense and the running of halfback Frank Aschenbrenner and All-American fullback Art Murakowski, breezed to a pair of shutout wins in their first two games of the 1948 season. NU proved it belonged among the Big Ten's best with a hard-fought comeback in its next game. Before a capacity Dyche Stadium crowd, Minnesota went ahead 16-0 less than eight minutes into the game when Sarkisian called his teammates into a huddle. "If there's anybody in this group who doesn't think we're going to win this game," Sarkisian barked, "get off the field." Nobody left thefield. NU scored on the kickoff return and came back to win, 19-16.
Sarkisian, playing center, was quite literally the nucleus of the Rose Bowl team. Voigts called him the "best player in the country for leadership." And on the heels of his inspirational message during the Minnesota game, the Cats finished the regular season 5-2 with losses to Michigan and Notre Dame.
On the Monday after NU's regular-season finale, a 20-7 win over Illinois, the campus learned the Cats had received a Rose Bowl berth. Team leaders, including Sarkisian, met with Athletic Director Ted Payseur and University President Franklin Snyder to discuss the players' holiday schedule. Since the players would miss a large chunk of their Christmas vacation while in Pasadena preparing for the Rose Bowl, officials decided to cancel the players' classes for the remainder of the week to give them a break. But the players said if they didn't have to go to class, then the rest of the student body shouldn't either. Nobody went to another class that week. "I'm sure some people in academia thought the school was going to hell in a handcard because football had taken over," recalls Bill Jauss, who played for Voigts from 1948-51.
"All hell broke loose," added Voigts. "School was out. There were no classes the rest of the week and everything was great."
The team took a train to Pasadena so it could bring the band. As the train prepared to depart westward, Voigts was so engrossed in the fanfare that he almost forgot to return his 1-year-old son Richard to his wife. "I ran down the platform after him," recalls Charlotte, who joined her husband later in Pasadena. "I just barely caught him." Once the Cats arrived, they were housed in the luxurious Huntington Hotel and were entertained by Bob Hope. NU was not favored to win its Rose Bowl matchup with Cal, though. "I was kind of doubtful when we went out there that we would win it," Voigts said. Cal was coached by Voigts' former mentor, ex-NU coach Lynn "Pappy" Waldorf. Waldorf was (and still is) the winningest coach in school history, going 49-45 in 12 seasons before departing for the University of California in 1946.
The game was nip-and-tuck all the way until late in the fourth quarter, when NU, trailing 14-13, unveiled a trick play. The Cats sent their left halfback in motion to the right so that he shielded the defensive left end from seeing the snap. The ball was snapped directly to Ed Tunnicliff, the right halfback, who was able to run around the end and race 45 yards downfield untouched for the game-winning touchdown. Immediately after the final seconds ticked off the clock, an NU player picked up Voigts, hoisting him onto his shoulders. "It kind of embarrassed me," Voigts admits today.
That Voigts and Waldorf would stand in opposition so soon seemed unlikely. The Cats finished a dismal 3-6 in Voigts' first season. No game typified that campaign more than NU's 7-6 loss to Ohio State. The Cats were winning 6-0 near the end of the game and so in control that members of the Buckeye band started to walk onto the field. But on the game's final play, NU was flagged because an extra player was standing on the field two yards out from the sideline. Although the player had no bearing on the play, NU was penalized and, after another penalty against the Cats, the Buckeyes scored to tie the game. The Cats blocked two extra-point attempts but were penalized both times for being offsides. On the next play, Ohio State booted the game-winning point. In the locker room afterward Voigts punched a set of lockers, sending them crashing to the floor. "It's a good thing it ended when it did," he said to the team, "or we'd still be out there."
Voigts, who had been a Lt. Cmdr. in the Navy, had a special way of relating to his war-weary players. "It was none of this 'yes sir, no sir,' it was on a first-name basis," Jauss said. "He was Bob to us. It didn't mean there was any less respect."
"Bob Voigts was the type of coach that could get the most out of his ballplayers, and every individual who ever came in contact with him was a better person for having done so," said Sarkisian, an All-American center who was an assistant coach under Voigts for five years after graduating. Sarkisian said in the 10 years he worked with him as a player and an assistant coach, he never heard Voigts use profanity.
Voigts is not the winningest football coach in school history, nor is he the most recent to win a Big Ten Championship (that happened in 1936). But Voigts, who compiled a 33-39-1 record in eight seasons, is the last - and, to date, the only - NU coach to take his troops to the Rose Bowl. Eight NU coaches have tried unsuccessfully to duplicate that feat, winning roughly 28 percent of their games since Voigts left in 1954. The 1962 Wildcats, ranked No. 1 in the nation after starting the season 6-0, lost two of their last three games and didn't even make it to a bowl.
Voigts, who grew up on Elmwood Street in Evanston, was certainly no stranger to athletic success when he took the NU job in 1947. He had been a three-sport star at NU, lettering in basketball, baseball and football. He was an All-American tackle his senior year and graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1939. After he graduated, Voigts had coaching stints at Illinois-Wesleyan and Yale before enlisting in the Navy after the start of World War II. Following the war, Voigts coached at Great Lakes, where he met
Paul Brown, then head coach of the Cleveland Browns. Brown took Voigts on as a line coach before Payseur, on the advice of the departing Waldorf, asked Voigts if he would like to fill the vacancy.
Voigts had difficulty replenishing his depleted ranks after the Rose Bowl season. He never recruited another player the caliber of Sarkisian or Murakowski over the next six seasons. Voigts' 1952 and 1953 teams won a combined five games. "It was hard to get outstanding players to come for the simple reason that we weren't good enough, we weren't winning," said Voigts, who felt he was essentially forced out after the 1954 season. "I guess they figured I wasn't winning enough so they thought, 'Get him out of there.' "
Voigts went into real estate for more than 20 years, operating out of an office directly across the street from Dyche Stadium. He sold Jauss a Wilmette home in 1961 for just $31,000. Jauss still lives there today.
Voigts takes tremendous pride in being the only coach ever to take the Purple to Pasadena. "Nobody else has done it, except they've got one who's awful close," Voigts said, referring to Barnett's team, which is 3-0 in the Big Ten. Voigts says if NU goes to Pasadena this year, he'll make the trip - if Barnett invites him. Voigts wouldn't mind leaving the goalpost-signing to Gary this time around.
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