[Husker] We can be Big Red again

[DUXANDLOXY at aol.com]

At five minutes past three they hoisted him up
on their  well-padded shoulders and carried him off
the field.
The paunchy man  pulled his little suede hat
down tightly on his head. He looked at the sea  of
scarlet-clad gladiators surrounding him. Then he 
ventured a glance at the scoreboard. There it 
was Nebraska 21, Oklahoma 9.
A grin slanted out of the  right corner of his
mouth and twinkled across his face.
More than 52,000  people assembled in the 
University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium  stood and
cheered. Their voices saluted a great football team,
perhaps the  greatest in the university's 76 years of
gridiron competition. And they paid  vocal tribute to
a great coach.
For at five minutes past three on that  bright,
rather cold Thanksgiving afternoon, November 25,
1965, the  tomorrow that the legion of Nebraska 
football faithful had promised themselves for 50 
seasons had suddenly become today. For the first time
since  1915 a Cornhusker football team had garnered
 for itself that rarest and most treasured of
gridiron  prizes -a perfect season.
And the man most responsible for the  transmutation
of that hope into glorious reality was Robert S.  Devaney.
They stood in Memorial Stadium. They shouted.
They pounded each  other. They kissed wives, 
sweethearts and children. They gloried in their 
Cornhuskers.
They were on a campus wealthy in football 
tradition -a campus which had thrilled to  the feats
of Guy Chamberlin and Ed Weir, and to George
Sauer and Lloyd  Cardwell; a campus which had
shared the agonizing frustrations of Tom Novak  and
which had dazzled in the exploits of Bobby Reynolds.
They were on a  campus which had seen the Corn-
huskers hobble the Four Horsemen of Notre  Dame
and send them back to South Bend beaten; which
had witnessed great  Minnesota elevens bow in de-
feat, and which had seen Oklahoma  vanquished,
25-21, in 1959 to end the greatest success era in
college  football. They were on a campus from which
Nebraska footballers had sallied  forth to imprison
Red Grange in a wall of red and conquer his  Illini,
14-0, in 1925, his senior year, and to upset Pop
Warner's "Wonder  Team" at Pittsburgh in 1921.
But never had there been a prouder moment  for
the Cornhuskers than on that Thanksgiving after-
noon when they  stormed from behind to conquer
Oklahoma and end the 1965 regular season with  10
victories and no defeats.
Bob Devaney rode the shoulders of his  champ-
ions toward the dressing room.
And behind him the mighty crowd  bellowed the
triumph of Nebraska. It thundered over the plains
of Lincoln.  It was carried across the length and
breadth of North American into the homes  of more
than 50 million television viewers. And it echoed
around the world  on the radio sets of American 
military men.
It was a roar that carried with it the  richness of
yesterday, the glory of today and the fertile promise
of a  victorious tomorrow. It sounded loudly, clearly,
triumphantly that  Thanksgiving afternoon:
GO BIG RED!

The Devaney era began soon after the end of
the 1961  football season and the departure from
the Lincoln campus of Bill Jennings,  one of a parade
of coaches who had failed in their efforts to lead
the  Cornhuskers back to the glories of the teams
of Walter (Bummy) Booth, Jumbo  Stiehm, D. X.
Bible and Biff Jones.




************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com