Stagg Had Life Worthy of ‘Grand Old Man’ Tag

A 1930s Newport Harbor High football star, Al Irwin, recalled what it was like to play for college football’s Grand Old Man, Amos Alonzo Stagg, at College of the Pacific, now called University of the Pacific.

“If he was upset with you, he’d call you a jackass,” Irwin said.

“If he was really upset, he’d call you a double jackass. And about once a season, when he was really hot, he’d call somebody a triple jackass.”

Stagg was 102 when he died 34 years ago today.

He was born before football had been invented, four months before the battle of Fredericksburg in the Civil War. He could remember standing on a street corner in West Orange, N.J., as a 4-year-old, waving a Union flag to welcome home returning Civil War soldiers.

He was an All-American end at Yale. He began a 41-year span as coach at the University of Chicago in 1892. There, he invented the backfield shift when Knute Rockne was still a tyke in Norway, the shift Rockne would make famous at Notre Dame.

At 70, just before the 1932 season, Chicago administrators asked Stagg to retire and take an $8,000 desk job with the university.

He refused and moved on to Stockton to begin a 14-year term at Pacific.

Sweet revenge: His 1939 Pacific team, when Stagg was 77, beat Chicago, 39-0.

In 1943, Stagg, 81, nearly coached an upset of heavily favored USC before his team lost, 6-0.

He finally stepped down in 1946, at 84, to occasionally help his son coach at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. He was also a part-time coach at Stockton Junior College.

At 99, in 1962, he entered a Stockton convalescent home.

“He just slipped away,” a nurse said of his death.

More than 400 of his players and former assistant coaches attended his funeral at Central Methodist Church in Stockton.

Also on this date: In 1981, Larry Farmer was named UCLA’s basketball coach. . . . In 1970, New York’s Willis Reed was named the NBA’s most valuable player, and Laker coach Joe Mullaney called it a bad call, that the award should have gone to his player, Jerry West. . . . In 1910, black boxer Sam Langford badly beat Los Angeles favorite Jim Flynn at Vernon, but one learns more of racist attitudes of the times than of boxing in reading the Los Angeles Times account. Langford is called a “skilled black jungle man,” a “cave man,” and “a shaven gorilla.”. . .In 1963, former featherweight champion Davey Moore, 29, died five days after losing his title to Sugar Ramos before 26,142 at Dodger Stadium.