In 1953 and 1954 there were plenty of sports for fans to read about, listen to, and watch. The NFL was conquered by the Detroit Lions, who beat the Cleveland Browns at Briggs Stadium, in Detroit. If you had a TV, you might have tuned in to the DuMont Network to listen to Harry Wismer and the great Red Grange give you the game. It was the Lions second championship in a row.
The Yankees won the World Series in 1953, four games to two over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Also in baseball, the Braves were settling in to their new home in Milwaukee, having left Boston, as the first MLB franchise to relocate in 50 years. The Minneapolis Lakers remained the kings of the hardwood, winning the 1954 NBA Championship Series over the Syracuse Nationals (the future Philadelphia 76ers). It was the Lakers third consecutive championship, their fifth in seven years.
Rocky Marciano was the heavyweight boxing champion, having won the title in 1952. He held it until he retired in 1956, age 32, an undefeated champion. Tony Trabert and Maureen Connolly were the national champions in tennis.
The Detroit Red Wings were Stanley Cup champions. The 1954 NHL finals saw the Red Wings and Montreal Canadians meet in the finals for the second time in the 1950s. Defending champions Montreal blew a 3-1 series, and Detroit won their second Stanley Cup in four years and sixth overall.
In Europe, Fausto Coppi, on his way to becoming a legend, was the winner of the Giro d’Italia. The great Louison Bobet won the Tour de France.
There was a lot to see on campus, too.
So let’s look at some sports photos!
This is the 10th installment of our glance through the Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight and part nine.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.
We remember, at considerable length, the 1953 football team last week. So we’ve met all three of these men, but I include this photo just because of these amazing Senior Bowl uniforms.
Ed Baker, left, became a highly successful high school and semi-pro football coach, and ran a school for two decades. Vince Dooley, center, became a Hall of Fame coach at Georgia, where he won six SEC championships and one national championship. All Bobby Duke did was letter for three years at Auburn, coached high school football, joined the Air Force, retired as the director of fraud investigations, then almost two more decades as a paper company executive. All of these men lived long, successful lives, raising families and probably never forgetting those incredible jerseys.
Here are two quick shots from the same football game. Auburn hosting Georgia. And you can’t see this view from the field anymore. That’s Samford Hall peering out from over the trees in the background. If you were standing on the sideline today where this photographer was, the background would be a wall of fans.
That’s Bobby “Goose” Freeman, #24, running with the ball. He’d play for three different clubs in the NFL, as a defensive back, then coached at Auburn for a decade, and raised a huge family.
Same game, this is Duke collecting a pass from Dooley.
Auburn won that game, 16-7. Auburn led the series 16-12-2 after this game. The series is just as close today (43-39-2, Auburn.)
The Glom says this game had the largest crowd ever in attendance, 25,500 people. The stadium capacity today is 88,043.
Here’s the head man, and the famous pose. Ralph “Shug” Jordan. This was his third year at the helm, and on the foundation of this team they were building a championship and a powerful program. He won his first of four SEC Coach of the Year award for the 1953 season. In 1957 he’d win a national championship. Pretty impressive considering the ’53 team made the school’s first major bowl. (They don’t count the 1937 Bacardi Bowl for some reason.) This team went 7-3-1, and in his long career, which ended in 1975, Jordan went finished with a record of 176–83–6 in football, including a Heisman Trophy winner in the great Pat Sullivan, and all of that overshadows his respectable basketball coaching career, where he amassed a 136–103 record.
One of the O.G. members of the good ol’ boy network, Jordan served on the university’s board of trustees, in retirement. He helped expand the seating capacity of the stadium with his name on it to seat 72,000. He died of leukemia in 1980. Six of his former football players were his pallbearers.
Posthumously inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1982, he is remembered as a coach today, but he was also a father of three, and a World War II veteran. Ralph Jordan saw action in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in the shoulder and arm in Normandy as a part of the D-Day invasion. After recovering from his wounds, he was shipped to the Pacific theater, serving at Okinawa.
Leah Rawls Atkins, who we met a few weeks ago, wrote a nice piece on Jordan, the man who coached her boyfriend, and then hired her husband, in 2016.
Auburn basketball was 16-8 in the 1953 season. Here, they’re playing Kentucky. It’s a fine photo, but it was a bad game. The Tigers lost 79-109 in Montgomery. And no matter where the games were played back then, they all had these cool compositions, those old flashbulbs making it look like they were playing in the dark.
At the time Auburn was a middling basketball team, but Kentucky was already a basketball blue blood, having collected three national championships since 1948.
Here’s the wrestling team. The guy on the far right of the back row is Swede Umbach. He coached high school sports in Oklahoma, joined the staff at Auburn and then, from 1946 until the early 1970s, he was the head man of the wrestling team, producing 25 Southeastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championship teams and winning four SEC tournaments. He was 249-28-5 in dual meets, coaching 127 conference champions and four national champions and had Auburn hosting hosting the 1971 NCAA Wrestling Championship. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1991.
In the 1953 season one of his wrestlers, Dan McNair, one of the great southern wrestlers (in a time when you didn’t have a lot of those) had a legendary run. He’d started wrestling in his junior year of high school and didn’t win a match. He was a “skinny 185-pounder” when he got to college, but grew into a 6’2″ 210-pound heavyweight who was undefeated his junior and senior year. He out-wrestled a defending heavyweight champ at the 1953 NCAA finals.
They canceled the wrestling program in the early 1980s.
Yes, the students dressed well up for football games. Yes, they still do.
Helen Langley, in the center, met her husband when she was in school. They were married for 68 years, until her death in 2021. For 35 years, she ran a 2-year-old Sunday school class.
Sylvia Couey is the woman on the right. Born in Colorado, raised in Connecticut, she graduated from high school in Alabama, studied art and English and then spent more than three decades working at the Huntsville Senior Center. She died in 2010.
Here’s the track and field team, and those simple, clean uniforms.
On the back row, left, is athletic director James Beard. The old coliseum is named after him. Honestly, one of the reasons that building is still standing is because his name is above the door, but the university is once again pondering it’s future. On the far right is the legendary coach Wilbur Hutsell. The track is named after him today. In 1921, he was hired as the first track & field coach and retired from the job in 1963. He amassed a 140-25 dual meet record and won three SEC team titles, coached four Olympians, was a trainer on the 1924 Olympic and an assistant track coach at the 1928 Olympic Games. He served as president of the National Track Coaches Association, the university’s athletic director twice, and is in the Helms Track & Field Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame and the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame.
And, finally, here’s the tennis team. If you’ll have noticed in most of the photos above, shots most assuredly submitted to the yearbook from the athletic department, most of these games seemed very serious. But the tennis team, in their t-shirt uniforms, they seem like a jolly lot.
All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.
