My Favorite College Football Games: Game 6 redux

October 19, 1985: Iowa - 12 Michigan - 10

In the 1920s when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team would come to New York for its annual neutral site game with Army, scores of the city’s Irish Americans jammed the train to go see their de facto team, acquiring the nickname subway alumni. Like a great deal of Notre Dame football, it’s hard to know how much of this backstory is mere mythology. Murray Sperber, who has written extensively on the history of the Fighting Irish, once noted it was unlikely many of the first-and second-generation immigrants could afford tickets to the game. But the moniker was evocative, and it stuck, and as the program’s prominence and publicity machine grew, subway alumni became a catch-all for Notre Dame’s national following. Few of these fans were actual alums, mind you, epitomizing former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander’s observation that college football is “an entertainment vehicle for people who have nothing to do with the university.” That’s not wrong, per se, but it also strikes me as ungenerous. Even Sperber, no less cynical than Telander, would concede there was something real in the Notre Dame “fan identification of ethnicity and religion.” The esteemed Charlie Pierce pinpointed this sensation to the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American” which did much to solidify the Fighting Irish folklore while also demonstrating how the place and the football team represented the purchase on their life in a new country in a real way.

In Iowa, where I’m from, a state with no professional sports teams, people tend from a young age to become supporters of either the University of Iowa football team in Iowa City or the University of Iowa State gridiron squad in Ames. And while some may grow up to attend one of these schools, just as many will not. It’s a Midwestern version of subway alumni, in other words, sometimes referred to as T-Shirt Fans, or Walmart Fans, as in, no, I didn’t attend Iowa, but I bought this t-shirt at Walmart. This, too, strikes me as ungenerous. In my experience, the people wearing these shirts are rarely trying to pass themselves off as graduates, and if the Notre Dame football team stood for a sense of belonging to so many newly minted Irish Americans then the Iowa and Iowa State football teams give form to a state pride for many native Iowans. It’s a state pride, though, that winds up split down the middle, two tribalist subsects, though that fierce sense of loyalty also evokes individual expression. Like any Cubs or White Sox hat resting atop a Chicagoan’s head comes a whole personal history attached, so, too, does every Iowan’s Cyclone or Hawkeye t-shirt. I have my own backstory.  

If you’re a person like me in conformity-minded small town central Iowa, you seek to individuate from your peers wherever possible. And so, when it came to college football, like a contrarian ten-year-old northside Chicagoan rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals, I eschewed Iowa and Iowa State and hitched my wagon to the ostensible enemies to our west, the University of Nebraska, and their famed Cornhusker football team. Yoked to educational institutions and extolling the mythical student athlete, college football has always been divided against itself, and in becoming a Nebraska fan in Iowa, I learned a lot about living in the sport’s contradictions. My devotion to the Big Red became so inextricable from my identity that even when I applied to, was accepted at, and briefly attended Iowa, I maintained it. I have even maintained it into middle age, which can admittedly feel peculiar, like I’m a punk at 48 still sporting liberty spikes. I have become good friends with a pair of Nebraskans, and have met more Nebraska fans through them, all of whom come across accepting of my affiliation if a bit perplexed. But what I don’t tell them is that while Nebraska has come to define by college football fandom, it’s not where my fandom started.

Iowa head football coach Hayden Fry confers with his most exalted quarterbacking charge, Chuck Long.

My first college football season as a full-time fan was 1985 and if you were an Iowan just becoming a college football fan in the 85th year of the 20th century, and if you didn’t have family or geographical history with Iowa State, it would have been practically impossible not to be captivated by the Hawks. Were the ’85 Hawkeyes the best Iowa football team of all time? It’s debatable. Several of Kirk Ferentz’s 21st century teams have finished higher in the polls. The 1958 team coached by Forest Evashevski was voted #1 at season’s end by the Football Writers Association of America. The 1985 squad finished 10-2, losing to Ohio State, and to UCLA in the Rose Bowl, but they were also the last Iowa team to win the Big 10 outright. And anyway, whether they were the best is immaterial in the face of what they indisputably were: the coolest Iowa football team of all time. That might sound strange to a modern college football fan who only knows the latter-day Hawks as an offense-challenged joke with a Punting is Winning punchline. But I am here to tell you, kids, that it was not ever thus. In 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered, Marty McFly became the first time-traveler, and the Iowa Hawkeyes averaged 36.7 points per game, second most of all teams in Division I Football.

For much of its football-playing existence, the Big 10 Conference existed in black and white, even after the advent of color television. It was dominated for decades by Ohio State coach Woody Hayes and his dyed-in-the-wool three yards and a cloud of dust approach and his equally atavist protégé Bo Schembechler at Michigan. Through that lens, Hayden Fry, who took the reins of Iowa in 1979, was a breath of fresh air. Unlike Woody and Bo, who stuck to what they knew, Fry was an innovator with a predilection for exotic plays. But it wasn’t just strategy; it was aesthetic. The eponymous character of ABC’s “Coach” was based on Fry, but the real Fry was far more a character than Craig T. Nelson’s sitcom archetype Hayden Fox. Fry wore white pants, snakeskin boots, sunglasses, sported a moustache that seemed plucked from the face of Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, and had his team dance the hokey pokey after big wins. He was a born and bred Texan, coaching for a spell at SMU in Dallas, and with “Dallas” the hit TV show of the 80s, Fry brought some of that Big D swagger to the stoic Hawkeye state. Not that he didn’t understand his new place. In 1985, with Iowa mired in the Farm Crisis, Fry commissioned stickers for his team’s helmets bearing the acronym ANF: America Needs Farmers. And if we all agree that the Farm Crisis was at least in part a result of political policy, then we can agree that the ’85 Hawkeyes weren’t sticking to sports, and that Iowa Football hasn’t been sticking to sports right there on their helmets for the last 40 years all thanks to Coach Fry.

In his introductory press conference, after the mandatory pledge of fielding a “competitive” and “tough” football team, Fry also promised they would be “colorful,” a guarantee kept by the 1985 team. They were an eclectic intermingling of Iowans and out-of-state players, a defensive lineman from Dyersville, Iowa and a defensive back born in Kingston, Jamaica, white and black, so much so that wide receiver Robert Smith from Dallas, Texas would cite playing for Fry as his “introduction to” - look out! - “diversity, equity and inclusion.” (For all he did at Iowa, Fry’s greatest career achievement was integrating the Southwest Conference.) Consensus All-American Larry Station not only had the exemplar of a linebacker’s name but his own poster, one tacked to my best friend’s basement wall for years. Quarterback Chuck Long sported a regal era-appropriate perm, finished second in Heisman Trophy voting, and gave the whole season a tinge of the hero’s journey by eschewing the NFL draft to return for his senior season which is why he took out a $100 million insurance policy on his body. The latter offended Schembechler and his ostensible tough guy values so much that he openly groused about it in the run-up to Michigan’s epic duel with Iowa that year. But wait, before we get there, we have one more ’85 Hawkeye to discuss. 

If Hayden Fry brought Texas with him to Iowa, then running back Ronnie Harmon brought New York, Queens, to be precise, off the field wearing wraparound sunglasses along with lots of leather and chains, like those other heroes of the same borough, Hollis’s Run-D.M.C. He came to work like a professional, which he effectively was, eventually revealed to have accepted money from agents during the 1985 season with an essentially non-existent academic workload. This complicated (some would say tarnished) Harmon’s legacy, but I found it invaluable, innately impressing upon me the myth of the student-athlete well before I intellectually grasped it, how Harmon’s body was his briefcase, to quote 80s college basketball player Daren Queenan, which is to say he was physically laying himself on the line for his work and deserved compensation. In a 1985 New York Times interview, without even reading between the lines, Harmon was already revealing that truth for anyone who wanted to hear it. Harmon, though, not only impressed upon me the sport’s realities but its subjective beauty. He mixed patience with lateral quickness, a unique running form so that you could see him virtually shifting between gears, like someone in a manual transmission Camaro with a lot of hills and nothing but time; he might have dressed like Run and D.M.C., but he ran like Rakim rapped. In the twenty-tens when football writers would cite Pittsburgh Steeler Le’Veon Bell’s fast-in-slow-motion running style as singular, I always thought, well I’ve seen someone who ran like that before: Ronnie Harmon. For me, he’s the answer to the question, who was your first favorite football player?

Iowa began the 1985 season ranked fifth, swiftly moved to #3, and upon demolishing their in-state Cyclone rival 57-3 at the end of September, ascended to #1, where they remained three weeks later when #2 Michigan and Schembechler rolled into town. Michigan had hosted plenty of big games over the years, but the spotlight was new for Iowa, evoked in how Iowa City’s Kinnick Stadium did not even have lights, forcing them to truck in massive portable ones to accommodate CBS’s primo mid-afternoon kickoff. It might have been 1 v 2, but the showdown failed to merit the sport’s colloquial Game of the Century designation, likely because the Hawks were not considered bluebloods. Whatever. In Iowa, it felt like the Game of the Century. In the week before, it was all I thought about, and all anyone seemed to talk about, even at school, where my 2nd grade student teacher Miss Long, a fellow Midwestern college football fan, and I made a wager: if Iowa won, she would have to draw me a picture, and if Michigan won, I would have to draw her a picture. In retrospect, this was a bad bet. I can’t draw now, so you know I couldn’t draw then. What would I have drawn? A shrugging stick figure? It speaks to my nascent fandom and how I did not yet grasp the brutal reality that my team could lose a big game.

Light cast from the Kinnick Stadium parking lot.

Between the explosive Hawkeye offense and stout Wolverine defense, the game proved a real unstoppable force meets immovable object situation. Points were precious, but Iowa dominated time of possession and did so because of Harmon. He might have contributed mightily to the eventual Rose Bowl debacle, infamously fumbling four times, but he did as much as anyone to help beat Michigan, between running and receiving accounting for nearly half of Iowa’s yards on his own, including several crucial carries on the final, fateful drive in the middle west autumn twilight. Because if the Hawkeyes were robbed, as any Hawkeye fan advise, of a touchdown in the 2nd quarter on a missed call, that was mere cosmic intervention to allow Rob Houghtlin to kick the field goal as time expired to win 12-10 and send the stadium into stratospheric jubilation, the crowd storming the field, semi-illuminated by the eerie glow of those makeshift lights, not strutting and their fretting their hour on the stage but flourishing.

Miss Long made good on our bet and drew me a block I with the team’s Tigerhawk logo in the foreground. I tacked it to the wall of my first bedroom, I remember that clearly, but what happened to it after we eventually moved, I cannot recall. After turning traitor, I probably had to destroy the evidence. I regret it. I wish I still had it, tucked into my keepsake box with my copy of the Des Moines Register the day after Nebraska won the 1995 Orange Bowl and the mythical National Championship, and the Tommie Frazier jersey I have worn so rarely that it smells as fresh as the day I bought it from the Big Red Shop in Lincoln, this one seemingly out-of-place Tigerhawk, the emblem of my college football origin story.