Blue White Illustrated

the teams. Betts will captain the Blue team and Shephard will lead the Whites.��� Offensive assistant coach Al Michaels and freshman coach Earl Bruce were in charge of the teams, 35 for the Blue team and 36 for the White. Michaels jokingly complained that Bruce ���took the best players��� for the White team. ���My team has a lot of injuries,��� Bruce retorted, ���but if I can muster my forces the Whites should win.��� Alas, Engle���s prediction was accurate, but the game wasn���t exactly a financial bonanza. Perhaps the weather wasn���t just right, with the skies cloudy and temperatures in the mid- to upper 50s. Or maybe a student���s budget in 1951 couldn���t handle 50 cents, which is equal to about $4.33 today. Perhaps the all-day second annual horse show sponsored by the Riding Club featuring the Pennsylvania State Police Mounted Drill team at 3 p.m. was more enticing, and it was free, too. Regardless, most students at Penn State, which had an enrollment of a little over 11,100 at the time, found something else to do. Even the water bucket trophy was not good enough to warrant a frontpage story in the Collegian. Coverage of the horse show made page 1, with big two-column headline at the top of the page on May 8. The Blue-White game was on page 6. ���Blues Triumph In Water Bucket Bowl, 7-0,��� read the headline. ���The small crowd which gathered to witness the alumni-sponsored intrasquad game saw new sophomore Paul Anders go 15 yards off left tackle for the (only) touchdown,��� Bob Vosburg reported, ���climaxing a drive which started on the Blue eight-yard line and carried 92 yards in eight plays. Bill Hockersmith kicked the extra point. ���The White team wasted no time after the Blue score in making their strongest bid of the day. On third down quarterback Bob Szajna let go a long pass [of 40 yards] intended for [Chan] Johnson, streaking down the sideline. The pass was true and it appeared Johnson would take it inside the ten, but the ball bounded from his arms and the threat was ended.��� One day earlier, the Centre Daily Times��� three-line headline on the sports page read, ���Blues Eleven Defeats Whites, 7-0; Anders Tallies Touchdown.��� ���Al Michaels was carried off the field Saturday at the conclusion of Penn State���s spring football drills in which Michael���s [sic] Blues took the first annual Blue-White grid fracas, 7-0,��� Ed Watson wrote. ���Paul Anders, a whirling dervish of a fullback, scored the game���s only touchdown midway through the second period on a 15-yard smash over left tackle. He went over standing up. Bill Hockersmith added the extra point.��� The article went on to tell how the touchdown came on the Blue team���s third possession following an interception by Jack Sherry at its own 8yard line. On the first play, Anders gained 17 yards, halfback Ted Shattuck picked up 30, and Tony Rados threw a 28-yard pass to Betts for a first down on the White 35-yard line. ���Anders hit to the 30,��� the story continued, ���and Shattuck bulled for ten more yards, but White Captain Len Shephard caught Rados for a five-yard loss. Shattuck churned to the 15, and then Anders tallied the TD.��� There was no mention of the game before or after in The Pittsburgh Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or The Harrisburg Patriot-News. The Harrisburg paper did have a story on the University of Pennsylvania���s spring practice game, in which an alumni team beat the varsity, 14-0, while The Pittsburgh Press reported on Pitt winning a ���spring grid test��� against St. Bonaventure, 60-17, in Olean, N.Y. Anders went on to be one of Engle���s best running backs in the 1951 season, when the team finished 5-4, and, incidentally, lost to Villanova, 20-14, in the second game of the season. Interestingly, three of the next four games after Villanova were against teams that are now part of the Big Ten. The Lions defeated Nebraska, 15-7, in Lincoln, and lost to Michigan State, 32-21, on Homecoming. Then after defeating West Virginia at Beaver Field, 13-7, Penn State was shut out at Purdue, 28-0. Anders left school before his junior year and went into the Marines. He never returned to Penn State. He became a builder in California and passed away a few years ago. There are at least five members of that 1951 squad still alive, including halfback Buddy Rowell, who later served on the Penn State board of trustees, and Jack Sherry, who in 1954 became the captain of the only Penn State basketball team to go to the Final Four. Three others are nose guard Don Barney, a three-year starter and longtime football season-ticket holder who continues to attend Penn State football, basketball and women���s volleyball games; center Jim Dooley, who became a second-team All-American in 1952 and later married one of the daughters of former coach Bob Higgins; and Joe Yukica, who went on to serve as head coach at New Hampshire and Boston College. Rowe and Sherry were sophomores in an era when freshmen were ineligible and lettered in each of their three varsity seasons. Barney, Dooley and Yukica were all juniors in 1951 and members of Penn State���s first scholarship class in 1949 when financial aid was reinstated after being eliminated 20 years earlier. For the record, Sherry, Dooley and Yukica were on the winning Blue team in 1951, while Rowe and Barney were on the White team. That 1951 Blue-White Game might have been the last, at least for many years, because the NCAA almost banned spring practice. That summer, Penn State took the lead in proposing the elimination of spring practice, primarily because of its financial cost and the amount of time it took away from the academic lives of the players. This seems so quaint 50 years later. The sport now requires a year-round commitment, with strength training and conditioning drills taking place in the winter, spring practice, informal practices over the summer, preseason drills and then the season itself. There also was a fear at many schools that a recent gambling scandal in college basketball, in which players at big-name colleges were found to have shaved points, could spread to football unless some action was taken. In January 1952, the proposal to SEE GAME PAGE 60

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