It's Just a Game

The Drake University Athletic Council was hopping mad. Its members had just finished watching movies of the game with Oklahoma A. & M., and they showed how Drake Halfback Johnny Bright, the nation's leading ground gainer (and the first Negro ever to play at Stillwater, Okla.), was knocked out of the game. "Vicious, malicious and intentional," growled the Drake men. Nonsense, sputtered Oklahoma Coach Jennings Bryan Whit worth. "No boy was coached to slug you." But the play-by-play films showed a slugging that looked deliberate rather than absentminded.

On the first play from scrimmage, Bright took the ball, handed off to his fullback, then faded back to watch the play unfold. Charging out of the Oklahoma line, burly Tackle Wilbanks Smith ignored the ball carrier and headed, fist cocked, for Halfback Bright. His arm came up and his right forearm crashed against Bright's jaw, a blow that knocked Bright dizzy and stopped play for more than two minutes. Eight plays later, with Bright carrying the ball this time, Smith piled in again. Bright picked himself up off the turf, rubbing his jaw. On the next play, Bright circled right end for four yards, banged into Tackle Smith a third time, and was led from the field with a fractured jaw.

Halfback Bright, mumbling through swollen lips and a tightly wired jaw, was sure he had been intentionally fouled. It could not have been an accident, said Bright, because "you never hit a fellow illegally three times unless you do it on purpose." This week, while the Missouri Valley Conference authorities met to decide what action, if any, could be taken, the Bright incident pointed up a rash of win-at-any-cost football that seemed to be breaking out all over the country.

During a rough & tumble first half in Berkeley, Calif., the University of Southern California laid for California's star fullback Johnny Olszewski (pronounced O'Shevsky), sent him to the sidelines with a wrenched knee. After an even rougher game between Marquette and Tulsa, Marquette Coach Lisle Blackbourn complained that Tulsa players were guilty of "flagrantly illegal tactics." Tulsa Coach Buddy Brothers denied the charges, called them "unfair, unsportsmanlike, and onesided." The name-calling finally stopped when the two schools found one answer to the question of dirty football: they canceled the 1952 game.

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