Vol. 82: Penn’s forgotten man
The Ivy League was unique. So was George Munger.
“Perhaps because of our borderline-insane Eagles love, Philly has never been a college football town,” wrote Sandy Hingston in Philadelphia Magazine less than ten years ago (Oct. 2014).
How soon we forget. Prior to the early 1950s, Philadelphia was America’s ultimate college football town. Back then, the University of Pennsylvania’s awesome teams led the nation in home attendance year after year, routinely drawing crowds of 70,000 and more to Franklin Field at a time when the Philadelphia Eagles rarely attracted more than 12,000.
“Penn played every game but one at home in those years,” a Penn alumnus, my Philadelphia neighbor Howard Magen, recalled of his boyhood in the early ’40s. “They had this big stadium. And Penn had the prestige. So, all these teams— Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame— they all came to Philadelphia. Army and Navy came every year.” On game days, Magen recalled, the walk toward Franklin Field was “just mobs of people. People were dressed nicely. A lot of the men wore ties and jackets.”
Yet midway through the 20th Century, Penn stunned the sports world by scrapping its celebrated big-time football program in order to join the newly organized Ivy League, a consortium of America’s eight oldest and most distinguished universities. Under the Ivy code, intercollegiate athletics would be operated not for the benefit of alumni and fans, but as an educational opportunity for students, much like any other campus activity. In the long run, that astonishing decision helped catapult Penn into the ranks of the world’s great universities. But in the short run, it brought pain and confusion to countless Penn players, coaches, administrators, and fans who were caught in the gears of that transition.
Dumbfounded and embittered
To capture their stories, I spent the past five years interviewing some two dozen survivors of that era, including eight “Mungermen,” the label attached to Penn men who played for George Munger, Penn’s legendary coach from 1938 through 1953. The result, published last month, was my 13th book: The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. More than half of the people I interviewed have since died, including six of the eight Mungermen, as well as the above-mentioned Howard Magen, who passed on last Thursday at the age of 93, scant weeks after receiving his copy of my book.
(You may reproach me for failing to undertake this project years ago. And you’re right. But I say: Better late than never.)
To a man, the Mungermen I interviewed professed themselves at first dumbfounded and embittered by Penn’s decision to abandon its glorious football tradition; but with 70 years’ hindsight, all of them readily conceded that, in retrospect, Penn did the right thing. Penn’s affiliation with the Ivy League enhanced the University’s ability to attract world-class faculty and students. Before the Ivy League was formalized in 1953, Penn never ranked higher than sixth academically among the eight Ivy schools; by 2019, Penn was ranked fourth in the nation by the Wall Street Journal. In other words, Penn in the 21stCentury enjoyed a greater academic reputation than its famous football team had ever enjoyed athletically in the 20th Century.
‘We listen to our players’
Yet ironically, the architect of Penn’s football powerhouses of the ’40s was a shy and humble coach cut very much from the Ivy mold. As a student and teacher at Episcopal Academy on Philadelphia’s Main Line, George Munger had been marinated in the concept of a coach as a teacher and adviser rather than a drill sergeant. He encouraged his players to call him “George” instead of “Coach.” He let the team captains pick the starting lineup each week and call the plays. After practice, he left his players free to run their own lives. He was a poor speechmaker who shrank from giving pre-game pep talks or posting slogans in the locker room. Yet by devoting himself to his players and treating them as adults, Munger generated a loyalty and commitment from them that few other coaches enjoyed anywhere.
In the late ’40s, for example, Penn hired as its backfield coach Paul Bixler, formerly head coach at Ohio State. One day during the Penn team’s pre-season camp in Hershey, Pa., Bixler was describing to some linemen how he wanted them to block for a particular play. One of the players said, “Well, listen, coach, maybe, do you think if we did it this way…?” and he started describing an alternative.
Bixler, I am told, went ballistic. “You don't tell the coaches what to do,” he said. “You do what we tell you.”
Munger, overhearing this exchange, came over and set Bixler straight. “We don't talk to our players like that,” he said, so all around him could hear. “We respect our players. They're great guys and they have good ideas, and we listen to them. I don't want to ever hear something like that again.”
Yom Kippur quandary
Then there was the time in 1940 when the Penn team traveled to Michigan for a game that was touted as a matchup between two potential All-American halfbacks: Frank Reagan of Penn and Tom Harmon of Michigan. The night before the game, Reagan apparently violated one of the team’s rules— breaking curfew or drinking, or both. Munger, who at that point was just 31 and only in his third season as head coach, learned of this transgression and gathered the team the next morning.
“We all know by now that Frank violated one of our team’s rules last night,” he told the players. “A rule is a rule— we all know that. After considerable thought, I have made a decision.” Pause. “If this were a third-string halfback, I’d suspend him to make an example of him. But it’s not. This is Frank. We need him. If Frank doesn’t play, that changes our hopes for the outcome we all want. So, I’m just going to walk by this. But, Frank— please don’t do this again.” By treating his players as intelligent adults, Munger cemented their loyalty to him.
In the early ’40s, one of the stalwarts of Penn’s line was a Jewish tackle from New York named Irv Mendelson. One week, Mendelson informed Munger that he couldn’t play on the following Saturday because the date coincided with Yom Kippur. Munger responded creatively, to put it mildly. He phoned a Jewish friend in New York with this request: “Find me a rabbi who says Irving can play on Yom Kippur.” The friend complied (presumably by contacting a Reform rabbi) and Mendelson played that Saturday.
Halftime motivation
Like most coaches, Munger loved to win. Unlike most coaches, he loved the game and its sheer spectacle even more. An hour before Penn’s 1952 game against Penn State, he walked into his opponents’ locker room to greet his rival coach, Rip Engle. “Hello, Rip,” he said, according to Joe Paterno, then a Penn State assistant coach. “How are you doing today? Isn’t this terrific? What a beautiful day out there. The stands are full. Are we going to have fun?” (Engle replied, “Yeah, of course we are.”)
When Penn played Ohio State in 1953, the score was tied at halftime. Inside the dressing room, as the assistant coaches conferred with the players, Munger was nowhere to be seen. Only about five minutes remained in the halftime intermission when Munger finally appeared. “Boys,” he explained, “I want to tell you, that Ohio State band is the best college football band I've ever seen!” The players broke up in laughter at Munger’s implied message: I’m not worrying, and neither should you.
The question may occur to you: Was this a contrived stunt to instill confidence in his men? Was his greeting to Penn State’s Rip Engle a calculated attempt to kill his opponent with kindness? Or did Munger really mean what he said? His players all believed the latter: Munger was incapable of guile. His sheer genuineness was the ingredient that inspired his players’ devotion.
Suicide schedule
Penn’s effort to join the Ivy League in the early ’50s was at first resisted by other Ivy schools, which Penn had routinely thrashed throughout the ’40s. Those schools generally attributed Penn’s football superiority to its presumed academic or ethical inferiority. Yet in retrospect, George Munger produced superior football teams simply by developing an exemplary football program.
Unfortunately for Penn and Munger, when the Ivy agreement was signed in 1953, Penn still had three years remaining on its big-time football schedule. In effect, Penn had to play by Ivy League rules against such superpowers as Notre Dame, Ohio State, California, Michigan, Army, and Navy.
In protest of this “suicide schedule” (as it was called), Munger and his coaches resigned in the spring of 1953 but were prevailed upon to remain for one last season. At that point, Munger was one of the nation’s most famous football coaches. Yet instead of taking a glamorous coaching offer elsewhere, Munger accepted a low-profile position as Penn’s director of physical education, where he remained until he retired in 1974. Now he found his greatest satisfactions in horseback riding on the Main Line as well as 25 summers spent happily running Camp Tecumseh in New Hampshire.
Munger’s decision to walk away from a celebrated coaching career at age 44 has mystified his players and fans ever since. Having spent the past five years trying to probe Munger’s psyche from afar, I think I’ve found the answer: Munger understood that the game of football is not an end in itself but a stepping-stone toward a meaningful life. He epitomized the Ivy League ideal long before the Ivy League formally existed.
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Michael Harrigan:
Some Ivy schools might not have wanted Penn in the league only because they thought we would continue to dominate them on the football field.... and we might have, if Munger had stayed. Hell, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton always claim to this day that we (and any other Ivy not named HYP) must be "cheating" if we win.
From reader Michael Zuckerman:
I remember it all, vividly. My mom and dad had season tickets, and in 1947 they got another season ticket so I could go too. We went every year until maybe 1952. I remember the crush of people on 33rd Street, the whiff of sex before I had a clue about sex from the coeds and their pompons, my ever-growing collection of pennants, my freezing hands and feet and the warmth of the hot chocolate cans at halftime. I even remember something of the games themselves, Bednarik and Bell and Minisi and Bagnell.
Of course, I didn’t know the wonderful stories you tell of Munger and Bixler and of the Reform rabbi who said it was okay to play on Yom Kippur. I had no idea how young Munger was— he always seemed an oldish man in the pictures, at least to me— and I had no idea how young he still was when he quit coaching.
But I do not write to reminisce so much as to ask you a question. Clearly the Ivy League had to have Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But the rest of the membership was not at all obvious. The eight schools are NOT the eight oldest schools. By any accounting, the eight oldest include William and Mary (the second oldest) and Moravian. By some reckonings the eight would include St. John’s and the University of Delaware. Washington and Lee is older, by its own telling of its history, than Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell. Rutgers is older than Dartmouth and Cornell. And of course Cornell is at best the eight-HUNDREDTH oldest college in the country. Penn was far from an automatic member of that group. It could have been excluded just as William and Mary and Rutgers were. I have heard, more than once, that the condition of Penn’s admission to the Ivy League – tacit or in some versions explicit – was that Penn lose most if not all its Ivy games in the first years of the League (as in fact it did). If anyone would know, you would. Is there any truth to that recurrent story?