In the spring of 1946, our legendary football coach, Don Ping, resigned and accepted the football job at Evansville College. Ping was irreplaceable. He had been the Memorial coach for almost 20 years and had an incredible record. His 1937 team was the undisputed state champion and every member of the starting eleven was named to the All-City team. His teams not only won games easily they did it with a certain razzle dazzle that made Memorial fun to watch for everybody except its victims.
Bernie Witucki, just out of the Navy, was named the new coach at Memorial. Nobody had ever heard of Witucki. But it didn’t matter. We were doomed. Only four lettermen were returning and we were constantly reminded that we would be football door mats in the fall. The players had little experience and now a new coach.
One evening, while attending the school’s spring musical, I walked from the dark auditorium into the bright entry way where a big, smiling, hulk of a man thrust his hand out to me and declared, “Hi, Jeff Hays. I’m Bernie Witucki, your new coach.” Needless to say, I was impressed. Witucki had memorized the pictures of all the players before he came to town.
Spring football practice started a few days later and we got ready for the usual first day warm-ups and sprints when we were told to get into full gear including shoulder pads and helmets. Witucki’s explanation was that you’re going to get sore for few days after you hit, so you might as well hit the first day and get it over with. Things were going to change. After the first pep talk somebody yelled, “This guy sounds like Knute Rockne. Blocking and tackling practice went on for hours but we learned how to hit hard. Helmets in those days didn’t have face guards. Witucki said he would know who was hitting right by the bloody scabs on the top of our noses between the eyes. We all had scabs.
After a short summer vacation, two-a-day practices began in August. To avoid the heat, the first practice was at 6 a.m. and the second at 4 p.m. About three weeks before our opening game an ambitious sophomore hit me at full speed on my left side, driving my arm out of its shoulder socket. Back then, players didn’t get expensive operations for shoulder separations and so a doctor across the street put my arm back in place and into a sling.
Traveling to Gary for our first game, Witucki and I made a side trip to South Bend and the Notre Dame campus. Witucki knew the people at Notre Dame and they agreed to fix a shoulder harness for me. It was an oversized pad with a chain that prevented the arm from going above the shoulder. Notre Dame had a national championship team in 1946 headed by All Americans Leon Hart and Johnny Lujack. I was lying on a training table when a huge player on the next table asked what I was doing there. I told him I had been hurt and was getting a shoulder harness. He looked at all 140 pounds of me and observed, “son, if I were you I would give up this game.” I found out later this sage advice came from the great lineman, Ziggy Zarobski.
We rejoined the team in Gary and I was told that the morning papers were touting Gary Emerson to be one of the best teams in the state with a host of returning lettermen plus five newly discharged Army veterans. This was not encouraging news. We were further daunted by the amber glow of blast furnaces from steel mills not far away. The game was almost anti climactic. We lost by two touchdowns but we were not embarrassed.
We had two weeks to get ready for our next opponent, Horace Mann also of Gary. Witucki put us through rugged practice sessions. He was not going to lose this game, our home opener. We beat Horace Mann by two touchdowns. Next we beat perennial power Central of Muncie by a touchdown and were looking forward to our fourth game against Boys High School of New Orleans. They had a national reputation in football. However, this game and our trip to “The Big Easy” were cancelled because the IHSAA said the trip exceeded their 600 mile limit.
We went on to beat Central, Bosse, Xavier of Louisville, and McKinley of St. Louis, but fell to Washington of South Bend. For a bunch of rookies we got through a pretty tough schedule with a record of six wins and two losses before our final game against undefeated Reitz. The only blemish on the Panther record was a tie with Bosse.
Bernie Witucki had come to Evansville and molded a bunch of inexperienced players into a pretty good football team. He was not only a great coach he was also a crowd pleaser. Fans were amazed when he replaced his first team and substituted a whole new team in the second quarter regardless of the score. He repeated these substitutions in the third and fourth quarters. In those days, players played both offense and defense because substitutions were allowed only once a quarter. He later told me that he could substitute whole teams because, except for the skill players there was not this much difference between the others. He held up his hand showing a small gap between his thumb and fore-finger.
In one of the games before a large home crowd at Bosse Field I was lying on the ground after one of the plays and couldn’t get up because of a leg cramp. Next thing I knew, I saw Witucki coming out on the field. He looked at me, assessed the injury, and said, “You’re coming with me.” With that he threw me on his shoulder, fireman style, and ran off the field much to the delight of the crowd. That was one time my 140 pounds was an asset.
The game with Reitz was the Saturday night after Thanksgiving at Reitz Bowl. The undefeated Panthers were favored. Some 14,000 fans, bolstered by a throng of sports hungry returning veterans, packed the bowl and the outlying grassy areas. Reitz was 8-0-1 and we were 6-2. The city title was at stake since we had beaten both Bosse and Central and Reitz had beaten Central but was tied by Bosse. Charlie Fisher, Don Dezember and the coach’s son George Byers were an all-star cast in the Reitz backfield.
We couldn’t muster much of an offense but each time Reitz would get near the goal we stopped them. This went on all night, back and forth. All year we had been susceptible to the pass but this time our backs played way back some 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage. Short passes would have killed us but Fisher kept throwing long passes which we knocked down. The score was tied 0 to 0 with only about 30 seconds to play. We had the ball at midfield and in the huddle Charlie Stumpf said, “Jeff, now is the time to call our trick play with you passing the ball to me on the right flank.” I said, “No Charlie, they might intercept the pass and score a touchdown. Let’s just ground the ball and run out the clock and claim the city title.” Charlie was stubborn, but this time he agreed.
With the scoreless tie we won the city crown. Our two wins and a tie beat their one win and two ties. The next day Bill Robertson, the flowery sportswriter for the Evansville Press began his story with a poem as he often did. It ended with something like, “Poor Reitz, undefeated and still can’t win.”
