The first Heisman Trophy winner, Jay Berwanger, was by all accounts a gentlemanly Iowa farm boy, so humble he used to employ the 25-pound bronze homage to the stiff-arm as a doorstop.
An 80th winner will be announced Saturday night. The favorite is a Hawaiian-born quarterback of Samoan blood said to be a portrait of class and quiet leadership. Marcus Mariota does not make showy gestures after he scores nor he does he make off with crab legs. He just makes plays.
His coach at Oregon, Mark Helfrich, recently declared: “If this guy isn’t what the Heisman Trophy is all about, then I’m in the wrong profession.
“On the field and off the field, our team is made up of a bunch of guys who are in his mold, and a lot of that is due to leadership. Obviously, that speaks for itself. But if you want your son or daughter to have a role model, pick this guy.”
That begs certain questions: Just what is the Heisman all about these days? Is character still a central component to deciding a winner? Are there still players out there in the cynical, commercial world of college football around whom we can construct a decent myth?
We wonder because the trophy’s two previous winners were far from wholesome, the incomplete and immature products of the culture of entitlement.
At Texas A&M, Johnny Manziel partied like a rock star. His signature celebratory move was a crass show-me-the-money pantomime in an allegedly amateur sport. He served a token suspension over an autograph-for-money issue.
Then there was FSU’s Jameis Winston. He could avoid almost any rush, but couldn’t stay out of his own way. He was the scourge of the seafood department at Publix. He felt it necessary to fish some words from the gutter and shout them at the top of his lungs near the student union. He was caught up in a disputed sexual encounter, the fallout extending to both this season and last. There is so much accumulated clutter at Winston’s feet that this quarterback of the only unbeaten major team in the land did not even make the cut as a Heisman finalist this year.
Role models? Not hardly, unless the role you were thinking of was as the next Bond villain.
Coming behind this line of tarnished college champions, Mariota might be received like a cleansing rain.
In his book, “The Heisman, Great American Stories of the Men Who Won,” Bill Pennington made the point that the trophy winners often were perfect reflections of their times.
The early winners were representative of the war years (1939 winner Nile Kinnick died in a training flight, 1940 winner Tom Harmon was a pilot shot down over China, Doc Blanchard — 1945 — and Glenn Davis — 1946 — were Army cadets).
Golden Boy and playboy Paul Hornung, 1956, was right in step with the Elvis Era.
No black player won the Heisman until Ernie Davis in 1961, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the winners really began reflecting real inclusion. Seven of the 10 winners that decade were black, and one, Jim Plunkett, was of Mexican and Native American heritage.
What might Manziel and Winston say about these times? “I don’t know. I’m fortunate that I don’t have to guess what they reflect,” said Pennington, a New York Times sportswriter whose book predated both.
Character definitely was a component in the original design of the award, Pennington said. It mattered greatly to the founders.
And back before the pandemic spread of college football on television, back before every play of note went straight to YouTube, it was so much easier to create a mythical aura around the best players of the day. “People read about them, saw them on newsreels, they hardly ever saw them play live,” Pennington said. “Reading accounts of their games in the newspaper made them seem bigger than life. OK, this is the kind of guy we want to give this — and I use the word sparingly — iconic trophy to.”
True, there might have been a layer of primitive marketing applied to some of the early winners. But the trophy certainly has had its exemplars of decency — Pete Dawkins (1958) went on to be a Rhodes scholar and brigadier general, and the trail-blazer Davis (’61) was renowned for his refusal to drink, smoke or swear. And such traits are not limited to a bygone age — Danny Wuerffel (1996) labors today with his transformational ministries around the south.
Just as surely, certifiable scalawags have grasped the trophy’s base. Billy Cannon (1959) was convicted of counterfeiting; Reggie Bush (2005) returned his copy of the trophy following sanctions against USC that implicated him and his family. O.J. Simpson (1968) deserves a special wing in the hall of fallen Heisman winners.
Factors beyond the natural gifts of speed and reflex are decreasingly entered into the Heisman-voting formula, the trophy-historian Pennington concedes. “It’s changed, America has changed,” he said. “(The Heisman) is viewed more as a football award than an all-encompassing award. Obviously character still matters — I don’t think anyone convicted of a serious crime in college would have a chance of winning the Heisman. I just think it mattered even more so 25 years ago.”
The Heisman has been on a bit of bad-boy bender lately. It has been kind of a shaky run for the grand old trophy. Mariota will be called upon to reverse the trend.
It’s not like we’re not ordaining saints, here. We’re not auditioning choir boys.
It simply would be nice to have a winner that the audience doesn’t have to hold its nose and pretend to like.
