The Gray Lions of the 1946 Utah State football team gathered perhaps for the last time to talk about old times, compare the latest indignities of age and get an update on their lives. There were eight of them, plus their wives, most of them stooped or slowed with the accumulation of their 75 to 80 years.
You think today's football players are tougher than that generation of old-timers? Sit down and shut up. This was a special group of men from a special generation. They survived the Depression. They beat the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. Three of these Aggies fought in the Battle of the Bulge. They came home, they married, they played football, they took up careers as doctors, coaches, businessmen, administrators; they raised families and they got wonderfully old.
There they were, a slice of America gathered last month in Logan — Ralph Maughan, the all-American center who went on to play in the NFL and coach at USU; halfback John Worley, who became a surgeon and operated on old teammates; halfback Evan Sorensen, who became an administrator at his alma mater; Jay Van Noy, who went on to play baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals; lineman Art Keeley, a future seminary teacher; fullback Billy Ryan and lineman Les Dunn, future coaches; and halfback Sid Garrett, a hospital administrator.
Nearly 60 years ago, they put together a 7-1-1 football season, their only regular-season loss being a controversial 6-0 decision to Colorado in which a long touchdown run by Van Noy was called back because the official claimed he stepped out of bounds. They went on to lose to San Jose State in the Raisin Bowl and then began the rest of their lives.
For years, there was talk of a reunion, but it didn't happen.
Finally, one day, one of the old players, Nog Hansen, told the wife of another former teammate while they were standing in the grocery store, "If we don't do it soon, there's not going to be any of us left."
A few weeks later, Hansen was dead.
A reunion was arranged. About half of the 48-man squad is alive.
Some weren't healthy enough to travel or lived too far away to attend. They came with their collection of ailments, limps, heart attacks, bad backs, bypasses. "If you live to be 70 or 80, you're going to have some health problems," says Worley. Nevertheless, it pained the old doctor to see his teammates, once the epitome of manhood, withered by age.
Theirs was a different generation of student-athletes in 1946.
They were older and wiser. They had seen the Great War and the Great Depression. Most of them were married while playing football. They were mostly boyhood friends and acquaintances. College athletics still enjoyed an innocent age. There was little recruiting. Nearly the entire Aggie roster was made up of men who grew up in Cache Valley, with a few mercenaries from other parts of Utah and Southern Idaho. They played both ways, offense and defense, and traveled to games by train, often accompanied by their wives.
The Aggies were a juggernaut and remained so until other instate schools formed a league and conspired to keep the Aggies out of it, a crime for which the Aggies have never forgiven them. In '46, they whipped Idaho State and Colorado State by a combined score of 95-0. They beat Montana State, Wyoming and Denver. They tied BYU 0-0. They beat Utah 22-14 on Thanksgiving Day in Salt Lake City. They won the conference championship.
Nearly six decades later they gathered again and talked and ate and watched film of their games from that '46 season. After watching Van Noy gallop past the Colorado defenders, they were still claiming, some 60 years after the game, that he didn't step out of bounds.
"Nobody thought he went out except the ref on the far side of the field," says Worley, who trailed Van Noy on his ill-fated run. After watching the film, he says, "We all say, yeah, he didn't step out, but really you can't tell from the film."
On film, they were young men again in a black, white and gray gridiron world. "We tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses," said Worley. "We thought we were pretty good, but when you see those films, compared to the game now, we weren't very good."
Then again, today's generation didn't interrupt their careers to fight a World War and suffer through a Depression; they have the luxury of leisure time to lift weights and develop training regimens and grow bigger and stronger and faster. The men of '46 paved the way for all of that and more.
"To play with that group of guys on that team was one of the great memories of my life," says Worley.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com