Blue White Illustrated

H I S T O R Y WHOLE NEW BALLGAME Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but Penn State���s annual Blue-White Game changed spring practice forever | O n a cool and windy Saturday afternoon in May 1951, an estimated 500 people made their way into State College���s Memorial Field for a benefit football game billed by Penn State���s student newspaper as the ���Bucket Bowl.��� Tickets were $1 each, with half off for students. Neither the spectators nor players realized it that day ��� May 5, to be precise ��� but they were making history. Sixty-two years later, the traditional intrasquad Penn State football game marking the end of spring practice is known as the Blue-White Game, and over the years it has attracted up to 75,650 annually. Just who came up with the idea to turn a glorified scrimmage into an actual game that would delight the team���s fans five months before the season is lost somewhere in the Penn State sports archives. Rip Engle had been the head coach for just one year, and the only new assistant on his staff since he was hired in April 1950 was his quarterback at Brown University, Joe Paterno. Engle or Paterno or one of the holdover assistants may have suggested it. Or, since the game was benefiting the Penn State Alumni Association, it may have been someone connected with the alumni or the school���s administratve staff in Old Main. At the time, Ridge Riley was the executive director of the Alumni Association, and Jim Coogan was the sports publicity director. They had been friends since their undergraduate days on the semi-weekly student newspaper in the late 1920s, and one or both of them together may have come up with the idea. Or, perhaps someone on the football staff or in Old Main knew that another school or two had such a game and proposed it for Penn State. What may be hard to believe nowadays is that back in the late 1930s and 1940s, collegiate teams scrimmaged against other teams during spring practice. In fact, it was an injury suffered against Navy in the spring of 1942 that was eventually deemed the cause of the shocking death of Penn State���s first African-American player, Dave Alston. Alston was a triple-threat running back, and after an outstanding year on Penn State���s 1941 freshman team, two national magazines predicted he would be college football���s sophomore of the year in 1942. But he died a few hours after a routine tonsillectomy operation in mid-August, and the cause was later traced to internal injuries from the beating he took against a segregated Naval Academy team. Ironically, Navy was one of two teams that Engle���s 1951 squad had already scrimmaged before the Bucket Bowl. That occurred two and a half weeks through spring practice, as a two-column headline in the April 14, 1951,

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