Southern rule, 1899 model

Bama? Clemson? No, standard set by Sewanee.

Long before Alabama and Clemson rose as football powers, the 1899 University of the South team, familiarly known as the Sewanee Tigers, provided a blueprint for Southern college football domination.

Alabama and Clemson would surely crush the Tigers, but the copyright for how to dominate an era would probably belong to Sewanee. The idealization of the football player in the South? The idea of tying a Southern university’s identity to football? They go back at least as far as Sewanee. The pursuit of money to keep a program greased for greatness? That is another trademark at least 119 years old.

Sewanee, Tenn., created the template for the flush, modern, Southern football powerhouse, and it has been used time and again.

Sewanee was led by one of the first forward thinkers of Southern football, Luke Lea (pronounced LEE), its 22-year-old team manager. The equivalent of an athletic director today, Lea put together a five-game, sixday, 2,300-mile trip by train through the South because he needed money to finance the 1899 team, and barnstorming was how to get it.

While most college teams were playing four or five games a season, Sewanee played 12. Lea scheduled moneymaking games against Texas and Texas A&M at the front end of the trip and games with Tulane, Louisiana State and Mississippi on the back end.

“Luke Lea’s canniness and caginess is what made that program possible,” said Woody Register, a history professor at the University of the South who has researched the 1899 team. “It connects him to generations of program designers.”

Lea, who became a United States senator at age 32, is considered the first to come up with the idea of having trainers on road trips to take care of the players and massage their weary legs. He created a team that was a merciless bully: The Tigers were 12-0 and outscored opponents 322-10.

Sewanee could not pass the football, as per the rules of the day. The team was also entirely white. The first African-American student to graduate from Sewanee, Nathaniel Owens, entered in 1966 and graduated in 1970. He was an outstanding football player.

Nonetheless, Norman Jetmundsen Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who is putting together a documentary on the Sewanee team, is certain today’s elite teams would be impressed with the Tigers.

“They played 35 consecutive minutes a half on both sides of the ball with no substitution, and they played with serious injuries,” Jetmundsen said. “They played five games in six days on that train trip and won them all by shutout. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that?”

In a chapter of a book on the history of Sewanee, Register wrote that the 1899 team “formed part of the university’s heritage.” The professor said that Benjamin Lawton Wiggins, the university’s vice chancellor at the time, in particular, rallied students around the notion that football should be a part of the Southern male’s identity.

At the time, the South was desperate for cheer, and Sewanee’s success was seen as a response to the aristocratic Northerners of the day, who thought they owned the game. Football was something Southerners could excel at, especially in the aftermath of defeat in the Civil War and economic depression, said historian George Rable.

“The 1890s were a rough time for the nation economically, but especially for the South,” Rable said. “Football provided some comfort and sense of achievement.”

The Tigers lived by the notion that football players required a roughneck quality and a deep resolve.

Jetmundsen said halfback Henry Seibels, who was known as Diddy, suffered a gash on his head in the game with Texas, but continued playing when the wound was covered with quick-setting plaster. Lineman Wild Bill Claiborne played with an eye patch, ostensibly to protect an injury. He would look across at his opponent, gesture to the patch, and declare: “This is what happened in the last game. Let’s see what happens today.”

Fullback Ormond Simkins wore heavy knee braces as he battered into the line. His legs were eventually amputated below the knee because of football injuries.

When the Southeastern Conference was created in 1932, Sewanee was a charter member, even though its days of being a powerhouse were long over. Inclusion was a tribute to the 1899 Tigers, a team for which Alabama is a worthy descendant.

Nick Saban was the first coach in the SEC to consistently adopt an opening game in a neutral, big city for money and exposure when Alabama played Clemson in Atlanta in 2008. Now, marquee matchups at the start of the season are a regular occurrence. Saban is also the primary fund-raiser for facilities on campus. He knows what Lea did — success requires money.

Saban has been a catalyst for football programs, Clemson among them, to add layers and layers of support staff, more than a century after Sewanee added trainers.

Alabama and college football, in general, have become symbols of pride in the New South. As in 1899, Rable said, “there is still a sectional quality to the football” that has its roots in the sentiments created by the Civil War.

If a team from the Southeastern Conference is throttling a team from another conference, he added, “you can hear chants of ‘SEC, SEC, SEC.’”

The ghosts of the Sewanee Tigers, nicknamed the Ironmen, would surely approve.

PHOTOS FROM UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS: THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH The 1899 Sewanee Tigers of Tennessee were dominant — going 12-0 and outscoring opponents 322-10 — and in many ways set the template for Southern success in later decades.

Wild Bill Claiborne (with Richard Bolling) wore an eye patch and was part of a team that prided itself on its toughness, often playing despite brutal injuries.