HARDY SOULS
In 1918, Texas teams forged on despite war, deadly flu and, in Houston, buckets of rain
Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about the 1918 football season is that the game survived, even though all its players, sadly, did not. Like 2020, 1918 was a year of pandemic. The disease that became known as Spanish flu killed 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It also was a time of war. The U.S. entered World War I in the spring of 1917, and more than 2 million American soldiers fought in France before the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918. • Travel restrictions were imposed on the handful of colleges that fielded teams in 1918, owing to the participation of many players in the Student Army Training Corps, which threw scheduling into havoc.
Even the elements rebelled. Houston recorded 14½ inches of rain during October and November 1918, more than four inches above normal, at a time when the science of field turf management had yet to emerge.
Mud, accordingly, ensued. Coaches were called away to military service or sidelined by illness, and the Southwest Conference declined to name a champion for the 1918 season because of schedule changes and cancellations.
The SMU-TCU game, for example, was called off after the TCU team bus got stuck in the mud in Grand Prairie en route to Dallas, and the Mustangs were unable to reach Houston to play Rice because of a train track washout in Ennis.
Thus, this dour epitaph on the season from Rice University’s 191819 yearbook, The Campanile:
“Schedules were shattered, squads were broken up, coaching staffs were depleted, and altogether the season was nothing but a sort of hit-or-miss affair, where victories counted but little and championships were for naught.”
Rice makes SWC debut
There was, however, no shortage of football to be seen in Houston or across Texas in the fall of 1918.
While the University of Houston would not be established until 1927 or field its first team until 1946, Rice competed in 1918 for the first time as a member of the Southwest Conference, joining Texas, Texas A&M, SMU, Arkansas, Baylor, Oklahoma and Oklahoma A&M.
The Owls were coming off a 7-1 season in 1917, losing only to the Texas A&M juggernaut of Dana Xenophon Bible, the state’s first great college coach. Their 1917 coach, Phil Arbuckle, was the school’s first athletic director and remained on the job through 1924, when he was succeeded by John W. Heisman, the namesake of the Heisman Trophy.
Arbuckle, however, was otherwise occupied in 1918 as athletic director at Camp Logan, the Army training base located near modern-day Memorial Park. Also fielding a team was the Army’s Second Provisional Wing training site in Park Place, near the current intersection of the Gulf Freeway and South Loop.
Five of Rice’s seven games, in fact, took place against military teams — two each against Camp Logan and Park Place and one against a team from Kelly Field in San Antonio. Similarly, Texas and Texas A&M each played four games against military teams, and a December game in Houston featured teams from Ellington Field and Love Field in Dallas.
Military base football teams were sanctioned, even encouraged. President Woodrow Wilson praised the sport’s value “in developing the aggressiveness, initiative and determination of recruits, and the ability to carry on in spite of bodily hurts or physical discomforts.”
In comparison to today’s unending schedules, which stretch from late August and into early December, schedules in the early days of the Southwest Conference, which was formed in 1915, were more compact, generally beginning in late September and wrapping up in November.
September 1918, however, coincided with a rise in flu cases in addition to an announcement that colleges with military training programs would not be allowed to have teams play off campus during October.
Accordingly, most SWC colleges, with the exception of a TCUTexas game on Sept. 28, began playing games in October against military teams. Rice opened Oct. 5 against Camp Logan, losing 10-0, after a game against Southwestern University was canceled because of the SATC travel ban.
And then the Spanish flu intervened. On Oct. 9, schools, theaters, dance halls and “other public places where people congregate” were ordered to be closed in Houston. Churches also were asked to curtail services.
The ban remained in effect through Oct. 25, but there was at least one exception to the prohibition against public gatherings — an Oct. 19 football game between Rice and the Army Air Corps training team from Ream Field in Park Place.
The Park Place Flyers prevailed 7-0 in a game that began with a squadron of planes flying over Rice Field. One of the planes dropped the game ball, which according to the Chronicle’s coverage, “fell some distance back of the grandstand in a cornfield, where it was recovered and brought to the field.”
Also on hand, the newspaper reported, was a group of about 70 influenza patients who “caused much laughter and comment when they marched to the grandstand in a body, still dressed in pajamas and bath robes.”
A week later, the Owls played a scoreless tie against Camp Logan during a rainstorm that left both teams playing in ankle-deep muck.
“Only about a dozen or so of the most ardent enthusiasts remained to see the finish … but they were rewarded by the game fight that was put up and the unusual sight of 22 men almost unrecognizable from mud and water throwing themselves at each other in the downpouring rain,” the Chronicle reported.
Two losses followed, both to service teams. Shirley Brick, who played for the Owls in 1917 and returned to campus in 1919 to win allconference honors (and, in 1920, became the first Rice player to play in the NFL), led Kelly Field to a 28-0 win over his once and future teammates, and the Park Place Flyers won 3-0 as replacements for the absent SMU Mustangs.
Rice finally began its Southwest Conference season on Nov. 16 against Texas. Naturally, it rained.
So intense was the muck, the Chronicle reported, “that a player could hardly be recognized after freeing himself from its clammy clutches. Real estate in solution trickled down between their jerseys and their necks, into their shoes and then oozed out to make room for more.”
The Longhorns prevailed 14-0. The season came to a merciful conclusion Nov. 30, when SMU finally made it to Houston and the Owls won 13-0. The weather was fine, and the only commotion came when a Texas fan dared to display an orange flag on his parked car.
Rice’s student cadets took umbrage, but order eventually was restored.
With Arbuckle in military service, the 1918 Owls were coached by John Anderson, a pupil of Amos Alonzo Stagg. Anderson had to go it alone much of the year, according to the Campanile, since assistant coach Jack Coombs missed most of the year with the flu.
The flu also sidelined from two to 12 players each week during the troubled season of 1918. Still, football was played.
“Much material for discouragement, one might say, but the indisputable fact is that no discouragement resulted,” the Campanile wrote. “From first to last the Owl eleven played with the same old spirit.”
Horns, Ags do selves proud
As for the Longhorns, even an 8-0 season was a letdown for the editors of the Cactus yearbook, who wrote that 1918 “was one of the most successful and at the same time disappointing seasons ever experienced by a Longhorn team. The war and the influenza epidemic upset all dope, knocked out much of the customary practice and wrecked the schedule.”
After the opening win over TCU, the flu epidemic forced the cancellation of an Oct. 5 game against SMU. The next week, the university was closed down for almost a month, according to the book “Here Come the Texas Longhorns” by Lou Maysel.
Texas’ next six games were either canceled or postponed, including its game with Texas A&M, which was moved for the first time to Thanksgiving Day, where it would remain for decades to come.
Texas won 7-0 to remain unbeaten in four conference games, but the Longhorns’ game against Oklahoma, originally set for October and rescheduled for Dec. 7, was again canceled as the flu epidemic shut down the campus from Dec. 4 until after the Christmas holidays.
A&M, meanwhile, played without Bible, who was dispatched to coach an Army team in France. The Aggies’ entire senior class enlisted in the Army, but a young team still finished 6-1 with shutout wins over Baylor, 19-0, and Southwestern, 7-0, and the narrow loss to Texas.
Games against Howard Payne, LSU, TCU and Mississippi were canceled, according to the Bryan Eagle, and only the Aggies’ game against Baylor was played on its regularly scheduled date.
“A remarkable season was 1918 in many ways,” wrote the editors of the 1919 Long Horn, the university yearbook. “A&M had the lightest team in years but her fight and her ability to take untold punishment at the hands of heavier teams were wonders not to be forgot. The Farmers suffered defeat only once — defeated but not conquered.”
Elsewhere across Texas, Baylor was winless in four games, while SMU was 4-2 with a conference win over the Bears. Southwestern, coached by future Texas Tech coach Pete Cawthon, was 2-2.
High schools play on
As for Texas high school football, historian Joe Lee Smith’s website texashighschoolfootballhistory.com lists 216 schools as having played football in 1918. Won-lost records are available for 122 schools, and another 19 are listed as having canceled their season.
While there was no recognized state champion in 1918, Roy Bedichick, the University Interscholastic League’’s longtime executive director, says in his book “Educational Competition” that Sam
Houston High School, then known as Central High, claimed a state title in 1918.
Smith’s website lists the school that year with a 3-1 record that includes a 7-6 win over Austin High in a mid-December game that the Chronicle described as being for the South Texas championship.
Heights High School is listed on the Smith site with a 3-0-2 record in 1918, outscoring opponents 160-6, and Harrisburg High School, which became today’s Milby High School, was 0-2.
Outside of Houston, among the most active 1918 teams listed on Smith’s website are Abilene (8-0), Austin (4-1-1), Bryan (5-3-1), Dallas (5-0), Dallas Forest (5-2), Fort Worth Central (Paschal) (5-0), Greenville (4-2-1), McKinney (5-1-1) and San Antonio Brackenridge (50-2).
Restoration, remembrance
Texas football, as an institution, proved to be none the worse for wear despite the disruptions of war, plague and weather.
Texas A&M, with Bible back at work after the war, outscored opponents 276-0, including a 7-0 Thanksgiving Day win over Texas, to win the 1919 Southwest Conference title. The Aggies were among several schools declared by ratings services in the 1950s and ’60s as unofficial 1919 national champions.
Texas and Oklahoma resumed their series in 1919, parted ways for two years after the Sooners left the Southwest Conference, and played only twice within the next decade before beginning their series in 1929 at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas.
With Arbuckle back as its coach, Rice was 8-1 and 3-1 in the SWC in 1919, losing only to Texas (but with no game against the Aggies).
On the high school front, Central High School was 7-1-1 while students attended classes in temporary quarters after the school building burned on March 18, 1919. Two years later, it was rebuilt and rechristened as Sam Houston High School.
Heights High School was 7-3 in 1919 and in 1920 played to a scoreless tie against Cleburne for the first state football championship presented by the University Interscholastic League.
While the game survived, one player did not.
Texas lineman Joseph Gilbert Spence of Dallas fell victim to the Spanish flu a few days after playing in the Longhorns’ Thanksgiving Day game against A&M. He died Dec. 9, 1918, one month and one day removed from his 18th birthday, at an Austin hospital.
“He was a quiet but aggressive player and was never known to lose his head in a game or practice,” read his eulogy in the university yearbook. “No player did more than he toward bringing the state championship to the Longhorns.
“His memory will be immortalized in Longhorn history as that of a true gentleman and an (athlete) who well exemplified that spirit of fair play and clean athletics which has been crystalized in the words ‘Texas spirit.’ ”
Spence’s survivors included a brother, Alexander W. Spence, an Army veteran who served in France and later became president of the school board in Dallas, where he introduced the concept of junior high schools. Alex W. Spence Middle School and Talented and Gifted Academy in Dallas is named in his honor.
Joe Spence was buried at Oakland Cemetery in Dallas. The headstone of his grave reads:
Joseph Gilbert Spence
Nov. 8 1900
Dec. 9 1918
“A beautiful manly boy.”