Tenth Anniversary

On New Year's Day 1929, a confused young man named Roy Riegels picked up a fumbled football, ran 75 yards with it--in the wrong direction. Some 70,000 pairs of eyes saw him do it, and millions of ears at radios heard that Roy Riegels, captain-elect of the University of California football team, had presented the Rose Bowl game to Georgia Tech.*

Kidded on the campus, pointed at in public, Roy Riegels began to brood. He tried to forget those ten tragic seconds, but the world refused to forget. When, after graduation, he got a job as coach at a California high school, spectators heckled him from the stands: "Why don't you teach them to run the right way?'' When introduced to strangers, he was invariably greeted with the same exclamation: "Oh, you're the guy who ran the wrong way!"

Every time the Rose Bowl game came around, sportswriters reminded their readers of his monumental blunder. Even last fall, when Oakland feted Transcontinental Flyer Douglas Corrigan, the local entertainment committee dragged Roy Riegels from the asparagus farm where he had retired to avoid people, to shake hands publicly with the new Wrong-Way Champion.

Last week, on the tenth anniversary of his wrong-way run, Roy Riegels' wife filed suit for divorce. Reason: moroseness.

*A Georgia Tech safety, after Riegels was finally tackled by a teammate one foot from his own goal, proved to be the margin of victory, 8-to-7.

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