1939

A TEAM OF DESTINY AND ONE GLORIOUS YEAR
For less than $21, football enthusiasts could see every Iowa game in 1939, the golden year in Hawkeye sports history. Though Iowa would fail to win the conference championship, fans barely noticed. The Iowa Hawkeyes seemed indomitable.

Against South Dakota in the season opener, Nile Kinnick earned his nickname, the “Cornbelt Comet.” He scored three touchdowns, passed for two more, and dropkicked five extra points. It was just the beginning of a glorious season.

When Iowa beat Indiana the following week, it was the first time since 1933 that the Hawkeyes had won a Big Ten football game at home.

Something went wrong when the team traveled to Michigan in mid-October. Forest Evashevski, one of the great blockers of the time, helped flatten the Hawkeyes so that all-American Tom Harmon could score. He tallied every point Michigan earned that day and caused Iowa its only defeat of the year.

It was during the game at Wisconsin that the Hawkeyes were first dubbed the Ironmen. Five men—Max Hawkins, Mike Enich, Charlie Tollefson, Nile Kinnick, and Wally Bergstrom—played all 60 minutes of the game. And Bergstrom had not played football before the season started. As Kinnick said after the game, “He finished a college football course in one afternoon.” Filling in for injured tackle Jim Walker, Bergstrom would go on to play the next three and one-half games without substitution.

At Indiana the next week, a game won by two safeties, eight of Iowa’s starters played the full 60 minutes.

Then came Notre Dame. As one writer put it, “Iowa out-Notre Damed the famous Notre Dame itself. It was Iowa which had the poise, the tenacity, the raw courage, the smart tactics—everything which a great football team should posses.” Nile Kinnick scored both the touchdown and the extra point that won the game. Watch highlights from this unforgettable game.

By the time Minnesota came up on the schedule, there was no holding back the Iowa fans. Even the “sensible” ones, well-schooled by the alumni bulletin at the beginning of the season, were among the 50,000 Homecomers who “screamed themselves hoarse in the final quarter of a thrill-packed Iowa-Minnesota gridiron battle.” The celebration was so great it shook the administration. President Gilmore and the Board of Deans suspended all classes Monday, declaring it an official holiday.

The writers for the alumni bulletin were beginning to believe in the magic of 1939. “Toss your thoughtful analyses into the wastebasket,” the bulletin advised. “Tear up the form sheets. Laugh at the experts and their solemn predictions. For this is the story of a football squad whose feats so far don’t make known method. It is the story of a football squad which refuses to run true to any predictions. It is the story of a football squad whose feats so far don’t make sense because they don’t seem possible….

“These boys think they are good. Not in a swaggering or boastful way, of course, but just with a deep-set conviction that they are just as good—and probably better—than any set of opponents. They are team players, they are poised and alert, and they know that their coaches expect them to win.

“There you have it. A versatile precisely-executed offense. An indomitable defense. A team which gets better as the games get tougher. A team of real athletes, real men, with an abundance of ‘heart.’

“Think up your own adjectives. These Iowans of 1939 deserve every one of them.

“You won’t soon forget these Hawkeyes, and those bright memories some time may rank with the best in Hawkeye football, as the second half of the century of that sport begins.”

Only one game remained. Battered unmercifully, “Iowa’s team of destiny” ended the season in a 7-7 deadlock with Northwestern. Kinnick was taken out of the game early in the second half, his shoulder battered and torn. He had played 402 consecutive minutes in a season that still makes Hawkeye fans beam with pride.

As Tait Cummins recalled many years ago, “To win was heady wine; to win time after time when every measuring stick said defeat was inevitable, was almost more than even the faithful could believe.”

Within days after the season ended, Nile Clarke Kinnick, Jr. was chosen on fourteen major All-American teams. On December 6, he was awarded the John Heisman Memorial Trophy. Even sophisticated and idol-weary New Yorkers were moved by Kinnick’s extemporaneous acceptance speech at the Downtown Athletic Club. “I thank God I was born to the gridirons of the middle west and not to the battlefields of Europe,” he said.

Three days later, Dr. Eddie Anderson received the New York World-Telegram award as coach of the year. Praised for lifting a football nonentity to a place among the top teams in the country in just one year, Anderson was credited with one of the greatest feats in the history of football. “He sold the boys on themselves,” the Alumni Bulletin noted. “He made football fun and something to be played for the sheer joy of it.”

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