Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 11, 1994 TAG: 9411110049
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IT MAY NOT BE a game between national powers, but Randolph-Macon and Hampden-Sydney have plenty of tradition and history in a rivalry that is more than a century old.
The visitor is 4-4; the home team is 3-6. It's the end of another football season Saturday afternoon for both schools. No title is at stake. Besides, it's Division III. Who's paying attention? It's just another game.
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Well, it would be, except it's Randolph-Macon vs. Hampden-Sydney. That's not a game, it's THE GAME. And it's the 100th game of The Game. It's a rivalry that began 101 years ago and has sent three players to the NFL.
It's a rivalry that has included kidnapping, vandalism, conspiracy, real honest-to-goodness blood-letting, skullduggery and even Vaseline - between the 10th-oldest college in the nation, founded by the Presbyterian Church (Hampden-Sydney), and the oldest Methodist college in the nation.
The major difference between the schools - besides taking sides for The Game - is that Randolph-Macon went co-educational in 1971. At Hampden-Sydney, men are men and women are visitors.
When someone called Brian Crist, a Virginia Tech graduate assistant coach, this week and left a message that he wanted to talk about ``the game,'' Crist immediately knew the caller didn't mean Tech-Rutgers.
``The feeling for this game really is different,'' said Crist, a Blacksburg native who was the starting quarterback for Hampden-Sydney in the 1992 and '93 meetings with Randolph-Macon. ``It's very, very physical. It's the alumni, too. The other games are social. Against Macon, they actually pay attention to the game.''
About 10,000 spectators will overflow Hundley Stadium on the Hampden-Sydney campus for Saturday's 1:30 p.m. kickoff. Joe Bush, the Tigers' athletic director and coach, said the usual crowd for a game at H-SC is less than 2,000. Then, this series is unusual, although somewhat tamer these days.
Roanoke's Travis Overstreet will play on Fulton Field one more time for the visiting Yellow Jackets. The offensive tackle and Northside High School graduate is one of the R-MC captains. His last college game may be his biggest.
``It's different this week,'' Overstreet said. ``Even practice is different. It's different during the game. There's more going on on campus, more people taking about football. For the last three weeks, people have been asking me if we're going to beat `Sydney.' It's the only game a lot of people at both schools really care about.''
A long history
Yes, the only thing hyphenated about this rivalry is the school names. It's the oldest between two Virginia schools. Richmond and William and Mary will meet for the 104th time Nov.19, but they didn't first play until 1898. Only 16 college football rivalries have been played more times than the one that easily is the keenest in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference.
The series has been played every year since 1930, with the exception of 1943 and '44, when neither school fielded a team during World War II. In '45, it literally was The Game for the Tigers. In their return from the war and their only game that season, the Tigers tied R-MC 7-7.
It was just before then that Roanoke's William ``Ham'' Flannagan might have been the youngest football player in Hampden-Sydney history.
He was 15 when he started practice for the Tigers in 1936. He was a wingback who was converted to running guard. ``No face masks, cardboard helmets,'' said the retired Roanoke Memorial Hospital administrator, now 74. ``They call the stadium at Clemson `Death Valley.' We had the original Death Valley at Hampden-Sydney. That's our field.''
The Tigers' biggest rival then was Richmond. They played Tech, Virginia and William and Mary. ``Randolph-Macon and Guilford were the only little schools we played,'' Flannagan said.
He played in three games - all losses - against Macon, but was injured his senior year. It was the '38 game that produced his fondest memory of the rivalry.
``We sent a boy over to Macon and he either burned or painted an `H-S' on the Macon campus somewhere,'' Flannagan said. ``So, a Randolph-Macon guy naturally raided our campus. They caught him with paint and kept him in a closet in Cushing Hall for about three days. Then they painted him garnet and gray [the Tigers' colors] and sent him out onto the field at halftime in nothing but his undershorts.''
To this day, tradition says anything can happen the week of the game. The limestone Weinman Eagle, transplanted from New York City's Penn Station to one end of Fulton Field, has been painted yellow so many times by Macon men that no official count is available. This, despite Sydney's perennial coating of the bird with Vaseline.
A security guard is sitting sentry near the eagle again this week, lest anyone get any ideas - as Gary Pilgreen did his freshman year at the Ashland school.
Former H-SC end David Shelor still chides Pilgreen about an incident before the 1970 game. Shelor, the president of Roanoke Restaurant Service, and Pilgreen, the assistant manager of White's Truck Stop in Raphine, do business around similar memories of the rivalry with different endings.
``We sent guys over and dumped soap in the Macon fountain,'' said Shelor, the Andrew Lewis High School graduate who was captain of the '72 Tigers, who had the only unbeaten regular season in school history. ``Gary was part of a group of guys who came over and painted the eagle and then painted `Go to Hell Tigers' on the side of our gym. Except the guy misspelled `Tigers,' which is typical of a graduate of Randolph-Macon.''
A rich tradition
Mark Harman, a four-year Macon starter and an all-conference defensive back from Roanoke in the late '70s, said the importance of the rivalry was reflected very early the week of the game.
``We usually had Sundays off,'' Harman said. ``That week, the coaches had us in there early Sunday morning already watching film of Hampden-Sydney. It was a very intense week. They always built it up. One year we were 4-5 going into the game and we won. Coach [Ted] Keller came in and said, `Well, you had a good season.'
``It was the big game from Day One every season. The goals were, No.1, win the [NCAA Division III] national championship; No.2, be undefeated; and No.3, beat Hampden-Sydney.''
The late Stokeley Fulton coached 25 games (1960-84) against Randolph-Macon, and perhaps his attitude reflected what the series had become. Shelor played for Fulton, whom he described as ``very emotional about the game, to the point where we almost needed [assistant] Lou Wacker [now Emory & Henry's head coach] to be our head coach that week, because it seemed Stokeley didn't always have all of his faculties together.''
In Shelor's sophomore year, it snowed a couple of days before the game. The Tigers figured there was no way they could practice outdoors.
``We used to practice three hours a day the week of the Macon game,'' Shelor said. ``That day it snowed, Stokeley actually got out there and shoveled about a 20- by 20-yard square on the field, and for the next hour-and-a-half we took turns going one on one. At least it wasn't three hours.''
Does Bush practice the Tigers three hours now?
``Shoot, with the time change, it gets dark too soon,'' said a laughing Bush, a Roanoke Valley native who first learned of the fervor in the small-college rivalry when he was an assistant to coach Bob Thalman at VMI, Bush's alma mater. Thalman preceded Fulton as the Tigers' coach.
``Coach Thalman said you could talk about Georgia-Georgia Tech, or Virginia-Virginia Tech, or VMI-Tech back then, or whatever,'' said Bush, who is 4-4 at H-SC against the Yellow Jackets. ``He said nothing matches Hampden-Sydney against Randolph-Macon. I've seen what he meant. Both schools really dislike each other a whole lot, not in a mean way, but in a very competitive way.''
It's in the blood
It's obvious the rivalry has become more than a football game. This year, the two schools and their alumni are conducting their 22nd blood drive in conjunction with The Game. More than 7,250 units of blood have been donated in past years. Crist said the phone companies also profit, thanks to prank calls that burn the lines between the two campuses this week.
``On this side of the state, it's not as intense,'' said Crist, who passed for 207 yards for the Tigers in last year's game, when Randolph-Macon won 17-10 and clinched the ODAC title. ``The people up around the area of the two schools, some of them really do hate the other school. They don't want anything to do with each other.''
It's a close rivalry in other ways. In 99 games, 55 have been decided by a touchdown or less. Hampden-Sydney, thanks mostly to victories in seven of the first eight meetings and a 12-0-3 run from 1915-26, leads 50-38 with 11 ties.
The Tigers (3-6) are finishing their worst season since 1981. The Yellow Jackets (4-4) have won three in a row after a 1-3 start.
``It's always a close game and the best team doesn't always win,'' said Joe Riccio, Macon's coach.
``It's not a big game,'' Bush said. ``It's an enormous game.''
Gentlemen, start your hyphens.
by CNB