Once again, I’ll be pulling entirely from the Kansas City Times, but this time it will be the from the next day’s edition from Friday, Nov. 26.
Whenever I put in quote marks, it’s direct. There are some very fun differences for newspaper style writing from 1909, so I’m leaving in what would today be considered mistakes.
Coming into the season’s final game in 1909, both sides of the 19th annual Border War were undefeated. The Tigers did have a tie though, putting them in second in the Missouri Valley Conference coming in.
The rivals to the west had been dominant throughout the season, beating Kansas State Normal 54-0, St. Mary’s (KS.) 29-0, Oklahoma 11-0, Kansas State 5-3, Washington (MO.) 23-0, Washburn 17-0, Nebraska 6-0 and Iowa 20-7.
The Tigers had tied Iowa State (6-6), but beaten Monmouth (12-6), Kansas State (3-0), Missouri School of Mines (13-0), Iowa (13-12), Washington (MO.) (5-0) and Drake (22-6) leading up to the game.
So the rivalry matchup would determine the Missouri Valley Conference championship.
The article I’ll be running through is titled “A TIGER TRIUMPH AT LAST” with two sub-heads.
The first reads “A 12 TO 6 GAME WITH MISSOURI ON THE WINNING END” and the second “The Jayhawkers Fought Hard, but Were Outplayed by Their Lighter Opponents-Hackney’s Great Kicking a Brilliant Feature.”
There’s an added “Facts about Yesterday’s Game” section which lists the estimated attendance at 15,000, the estimated receipts at $30,000, and the previous year’s receipts at $18,300, so a big gain for this year’s matchup at Association Park in Kansas City, which was the home of the Kansas City Blues of the American Association from 1903-1923 and the Kansas City Monarchs from 1920-1923.
The ballpark was demolished in 1925.
Now, onto the game.
The Tigers entered without a win in the series since 1901 and only one win since 1894 as the teams matched up for the 19th time.
“The Missouri Tiger, proud beast of the football jungle, has come into his own. At last the Kansas Jayhawk has been put to flight. For nineteen years this Tiger animal has been emerging from his retreat and for thirteen of these years he has been sorely wounded as he slunk away to the denseness of his lair. Twice has the Tiger kept the Jayhawk at bay, and only four times has he tasted the sweetness of victory–four times in all these nineteen years–but yesterday was the fourth, and now the Tiger, Missouri’s fighting Tiger, is mounted high on the pedestal of triumph, and the Jayhawk, wounded unto death, has flown back to Kansas. It was a great battle. The Tiger won, 12 to 6.”
What a lead, that’s incredible.
We jump into a paragraph about Missouri’s men of (coach Bill) Roper scoring one touchdown and repelling another, as did the opposing men of Mosse.
But then came the difference maker.
“The hefty right leg of Hackney, the Coy of Missouri, gave the Tiger team the first six points of the game by toeing drop kicks, the first of which sailed over the Kansas cross bar scarcely three minutes after the game started. All the scoring was done in the first half, which saw the Roper machine playing better ball than the Kennedy-Mosse eleven, with Hackney’s great kicking giving a still greater advantage to the Missourians.”
That paragraph was split by a drawing of a dog pile with a player reaching a decidedly round ball over a depiction of a goalline.
The caption of the drawing reads “When Alexander made Missouri’s touchdown, it was the first time they had crossed the Kansans’ goal line since 1901.”
By this point in football’s history, a touchdown was worth five points and a field goal had been trimmed to three with an extra point kick now worth one.
Lots of rules changed on the football field in the first decade of the 1900s, largely because of an increasing number of deaths on the field that were leading to colleges banning football. That’s largely why the forward pass was legalized, why rugby-style scrums and formations were outlawed and rules about excessive roughness started to be included.
By 1909, most of those changes had been implemented, and the next year, the NCAA would be formed.
There was no scoring in the second half, so the Tigers won with one touchdown and two field goals to one touchdown.
But don’t worry, I’ve only gotten through three paragraphs of this full-page story that includes what appears to be a play-by-play diagram across three columns in the middle.
Let’s get into the second part of the story titled “THE FIRST VICTORY IN EIGHT YEARS.”
“The Kansas eleven was far heavier than the Missouri machine and it looked it on the gridiron, but the Tiger forwards outcharged their heavier opponents. It was this speedy charging of the Missourians that caused the many Jayhawker fumbles in the first half.”
Those fumbles were what the rival coaches credited for their loss.
There’s a lot of talk in the next few paragraphs about Roper’s spirit and how when the Tigers needed a defensive stop, he screamed to the “yell leaders” to get the crowd back involved. Which they obliged by yelling into megaphones, “Roper says you’re quitters, Roper says you’re quitters. Come on, let’s show him.”
Which led to an increase in the energy and a defensive stop.
Also, I guess the Tiger fans hung a black hen in effigy on the goal post after the win because it was the closest thing they could find to a Jayhawk.
That feels a bit dark, but it was 1909.
The win ended a 17-game winning streak for Kansas.
And now we’re onto a portion of the story about the teams getting to the field. I guess in the 16 years since the last paper I looked at, they figured out that the story didn’t need to go completely chronologically.
There wasn’t a lot to be had in that section, mostly just talk about the cheering back and forth being energetic.
Now we’ve moved back into the game to talk about fumbles.
“On the second play from scrimmage came the first of the several disastrous Kansas fumbles. Missouri recovered the ball. Twice Missouri tried the Kansas line, then Hackney, the man Roper had been keeping under cover, stepped back to the 40-yard line and dropped the oval prettily across the Kansas bar. The score came almost before the game was well started. Missouri sympathizers wildly raged–the Kansas rooters seemed stunned. It showed that Missouri’s team would be quick to take advantage of any mistakes of the enemy.”
It seems like that initial mistake and capitalization from the Tigers shocked their opponents who are then described as “stale” and “overcome with surprise at the hurryup scoring of their ancient foemen.”
Hackney added another drop kick for a field goal to put Missouri up 6-0, then a field goal was missed the other way before Kansas reached the end zone for its lone score of the day following what sounds like a muffed punt from the description, “Then Kansas uncorked one of the famous Kennedy kicks and the kick advanced Kansas twenty-five yards on their way to their only score. Pleasant recovered the ball which went out of bounds after being touched by a Tiger.”
A touchdown tied the game at 6.
But the Tigers responded quickly, recovering another fumble then driving and getting across the goal line.
Both teams attempted exactly one forward pass, both in the second half.
“Late in the second half, Missouri pulled off their only forward pass and it was a beauty. It was from a place kick formation. Bluck, the Missouri tackle who was a potent factor in Missouri’s victory, dropped back as though to try a place kick. But it was a fake formation. Alexander caught the ball and hurled it to Saunders who has replaced Klein. The pass netted Missouri twenty yards and bewildered the Kansas eleven.”
And it sounds like the game was pretty cleanly played, Missouri was penalized once for 15 yards on a kick-catch interference and gained 55 yards on penalties.
There were nine (nine!) onside kicks, one that worked.
This is going to be one long quote to finish up.
“William Roper, the Missouri coach, was all smiles last night. He was proud of the victorious Tigers and made no effort to conceal his pleasure over their victory.
‘I’m proud of every man on the team,’ Roper said. ‘They played like demons–magnificent football–and they deserve all the credit’
‘Lots of people think you deserve the credit,’ someone interrupted.
‘No,’ the coach replied. ‘The boys played the game and won. It was the new Eastern-Western football.’
‘Have you made any plans for next year?’ Roper was asked.
‘Not yet,’ he replied. ‘But if I coach any team in the West next year it will be at Missouri. They’re great people.’”
I ended the quote there to say, Bill Roper did not coach at Missouri the next year. He spent just one year in Columbia then Bill Hollenback came in for one season. Roper was the 13th coach in Tiger history in just 29 years. The Tigers would not have a coach last more than four seasons until Gwinn Henry from 1923-31. Roper went back east to coach at Princeton, then Swarthmore, then Princeton again.
Let’s get back to the quote.
“Roper’s attitude last night in praising the team was a remarkable change from what he had been saying about them prior to this game. He has roasted the team, according to reports from Columbia, because they didn’t grasp the idea. But the never defeated Tigers of 1909 received many kind words last night. When accused by a friend of sending out bear stories to influence the betting, Roper smiled and said, ‘There’s nothing to that story.’”
And that’s it. There’s a little notebook tacked onto the end called “Sideline Pickups” with stuff like “Two long banners of white cloth, with large black letters, bearing the inscription ‘Missouri Tigers,’ were tacked above the bleachers occupied by the Missouri rooters.”
But the game is over.
Missouri went undefeated in 1909, ending 7-0-1, winning the Missouri Valley Conference after taking the Border War for the fourth time.
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