The enduring ‘Game of the Century’ turns 50
It was a half century ago that Notre Dame and Michigan State battled … to a tie
Monday brings the 50th anniversary of George Goeddeke getting butterflies in his belly, which is not generally a medical milestone, so why do so many people remember that on Monday, Nov. 14, 1966, the All-American centre for the Notre Dame football team got butterflies and that on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 1966, Goeddecke started to throw up?
“Usually, I didn’t get butterflies until Friday, or, before an NFL game, Saturday,” Goeddeke told me the other day.
It was all because 50 years ago this Saturday, Nov. 19, 1966, a college football game like no other unfolded on a cold day in Michigan, and not just a college football game like no other, a Game of the Century like no other Game of the Century.
The unprecedented national obsession, unremitting brutality, and ageless controversy that detonated from the collision of Notre Dame and Michigan State half a century ago this week had many narrative headwaters, more than a few connected to Pittsburgh. It starts with the grape arbor. At the side of the Penn Hills house where the Azzaro family lived at mid-century, there was a gentle hill topped by a grape arbor. Joe Azzaro, who’d moved there from Wilkinsburg with his family when he was 4, would stand at the bottom of that hill and gash a natural kicking tee into the grass or the mud with the heel of his shoe.
“I’d kick the ball up the hill onto the top of the grape arbor,” Joe was telling me from across a booth at a Homestead Eat’N Park this week. “Just by myself. I got pretty good at it.”
While he was out there, Joe dreamed about playing for Notre Dame, the opponent in the first college game he’d ever seen, at Pitt Stadium.
Thirty-four miles to the north, Terry Hanratty was not much for daydreams. He was a practical young man who just happened to be able to whip a football like nobody’s business at Butler High School. At 17, Hanratty thought he was headed for Michigan State, right up until the phone rang that day. The caller asked Hanratty if he could meet with Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian at the Pittsburgh Hilton.
“We sat down for lunch, the two of us,” Hanratty remembered this week on the phone from Connecticut. “On the menu it says, ‘Steak Sandwich — $3.25.’ I look at this and think, ‘If I get this, will he think I’m gouging him?’ So I went for the club sandwich — $1.75.”
In the course of dismantling his sandwich, Hanratty noticed something about Ara Parseghian. He was tremendous.
“A tremendous, tremendous person,” Hanratty said. “I really wanted to be with him.”
A couple of years later, Hanratty was in his sophomore season at Notre Dame. Azzaro, who’d kicked for Central Catholic, was in his senior year. Tight end Don Gmitter of South Catholic was at Notre Dame. Dan Dickman of North Catholic too. Fullback Mike Kelly of Butler, now Congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania’s 3rd District, was at Notre Dame.
And so was Rocky Bleier, Jim Seymour, Nick Eddy, Larry Conjar, Jim Lynch, Johnstown’s Pete Duranko, and Alan Page. Simultaneously, Michigan State, with compelling narratives of its own, had struck recruiting gold in Texas and across the south, where the civil rights movement had not yet converted many football coaches, let alone admissions offices. The Spartans, at the height of American racial tensions, were awash in talented African American players like Bubba Smith, Jimmy Raye, Gene Washington, George Webster, and Charlie (Mad Dog) Thornhill.
Smith, a 6-foot-7, 270-pound defensive end, became one of four Spartans taken in the first eight picks of the subsequent NFL draft, and he’d play nine pro seasons. Before he died in 2011, Smith described this period 50 years ago as “the most unbelievable week I’ve spent in my life. I lived on the first floor of Wonders Hall and one night there must have been 5,000 students outside my window yelling ‘Kill, Bubba, kill!”
When the teams finally met, they put 25 All-Americans, 10 first-round draft picks, and 31 future pros on the field at East Lansing, minus the one who slipped off the train from South Bend the day before.
“I was three people behind Nick Eddy,” said Azzaro of the Irish’s All-American halfback. “It was cold; there was ice on the steps of the train. His foot slipped and the railing caught him under the arm. It wrenched his shoulder.”
That was no surprise; it seemed the whole country was falling all over itself in anticipation. Hanratty and Seymour, his favourite target, were both on the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated. It was the first time in the history of the AP poll that a No. 1 (Notre Dame) had played a No. 2 (MSU). It was the first time a college football telecast would extend to Hawaii and to U.S. troops in Vietnam, whom Bleier would be among all too soon. The late Pittsburgh PR ace Beano Cook, then a publicist at ABC, said, “We’re producing enough material on this to make ‘Gone With The Wind’ look like a short story.”
Catholic churches coast-tocoast juggled their Saturday confession schedules so as not to conflict with the spectacle of the 8-0 Irish confronting the 9-0 Spartans. Michigan State had outscored opponents 283-89, Notre Dame 301-28. If it were happening today, it would break Twitter into a million pieces. It was practically unbearable.
After a week of near universal anxiety, after the butterflies and the vomiting and the slipping off trains and the chanting and the rallies and the white Cadillac with the Kill Bubba Kill painted on it in black outside the Irish hotel, it was there on ABC, with Chris Schenkel and Bud Wilkinson broadcasting in their professional murmurs, with Notre Dame wearing white jerseys over gold pants, with Michigan State in white pants under green jerseys. And nobody won it. Notre Dame 10, Michigan State 10. Final.
“The hardest hitting game I’ve ever been in, college or pro,” said Goeddeke, who played seven seasons with the Denver Broncos. “I mean serious contact. The pads were crackin’. People told me they could hear it in the upper deck.”
Near the start of the fourth quarter, Azzaro kicked a 28-yard field goal for the team he grew up dreaming about. It was tied. And 50 years later, it is still tied. Notre Dame had been downfield in the middle of the fourth quarter. Azzaro tried a 41-yard field goal in a 20 mile-per-hour crosswind. It sailed right.
Without Hanratty, Bleier, and Goeddeke, Notre Dame throttled USC the next week 51-0 and won the national championship. Michigan State was No. 2.
Notre Dame never travelled by train again.