Francis Gordon "Skim" Brown Jr. (September 6, 1879 – May 10, 1911) was an American college football guard who played for the Yale Bulldogs. He is one of only four players to have been recognized as a consensus All-American in four separate seasons.
 Brown in a Yale uniform | |
| Yale Bulldogs | |
|---|---|
| Position | Guard |
| Personal information | |
| Born: | September 6, 1879 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died: | May 10, 1911 (aged 31) Glen Head, New York, U.S. |
| Height | 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) |
| Weight | 192 lb (87 kg) |
| Career history | |
| College |
|
| High school | Groton (Groton, Massachusetts) |
| Career highlights and awards | |
| |
| College Football Hall of Fame (1954) | |
Brown captained the 1900 Yale football team, which went 12–0, outscored its opposition 336–10, fielded seven All-Americans, was retroactively awarded the national championship, and was dubbed the "Team of the Century."
Biography
editBrown was born in New York City to Francis Gordon Brown Sr. and Julia Noyes Tracy.[1] His uncle was J. P. Morgan.[2]
Brown is one of four players in history to have been recognized as a consensus College Football All-American in four separate seasons.[3][4] One of the other three players, Truxtun Hare, overlapped exactly with Brown's career; he played at Penn from 1897 to 1900.[3] Ironically, they never played against each other in college; the Ivy League did not exist at the time.[5][6] However, they played each other in high school. In their junior year, Hare's team won 6-0; in their senior year, Brown's team won 46-0.[7]
During his college career, Brown lost only four games in four years, going 37-4-3; the 1897 and 1900 teams were retroactively declared national champions.[8][9][10][11] (Other selectors ranked Hare's 1897 Penn team as that year's national champion.[12]) Brown captained the 1900 Yale football team, which was dubbed the "Team of the Century."[3] It outscored its opposition 336-10 and fielded seven All-Americans.[3] Although it did not play Penn that year, it dismantled Harvard 28-0 three weeks after Harvard handed Penn its only loss of the season.[13] A possibly apocryphal, but often retold, story says that when someone asked Brown for the name of Yale's punter in 1900, Brown responded that he did not know because his team never needed to punt.[14][15][16] (In reality, Yale's fullback Perry Hale, the future Ohio State head coach, took several punts in the Columbia game.[17]) Brown was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.[3]
A powerful interior lineman, Brown played on both sides of the ball; after a particularly dominant showing in the 1900 Harvard-Yale Game, The New York Times wrote that Brown "is a whole team in himself."[18] However, Brown was occasionally accused of dirty play during his Yale career;[19] his high school principal once asked him about reports that he had instructed his team to commit holding penalties "if the umpire didn't see them." (Brown denied this.)[20]
Brown graduated from Yale in 1901. An academic and social leader, he finished in the top three of his graduating class at Yale,[21] was elected to Phi Beta Kappa,[22] and was tapped for Scroll and Key;[23] "he was noted for never missing an afternoon football practice or a 5 o'clock class immediately afterward."[24] In addition to his football exploits, he coached Yale's freshman crew and was on the track team.[1][25]
After graduating, he entered the banking business, working for his uncle at the House of Morgan.[2] He developed an interest in community service and was active in the settlement movement in New York.[26]
Brown died from diabetes at age 31,[2] just ten years before the discovery of insulin.[27] Two years after his death, his friends donated the Gordon Brown Memorial Prize to Yale University in his honor.[28] The prize was initially awarded to the Yale junior who "most closely approach[es] the standards of intellectual ability, high manhood, capacity for leadership and service to the University set by Francis Gordon Brown."[23] (The "high manhood" criterion was belatedly revised to "high personhood" after women's gymnastics captain Mindy Rosenbaum won the award in 1984.[24][29]) In a biography of George H. W. Bush, who won the prize in 1947, one historian is quoted as saying (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that "in practice the prize is awarded to an athlete who has a reasonably good grade point average."[30]
References
edit- ^ a b "Collection: Francis Gordon Brown papers". Yale University Archives. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ a b c "Yale's Famous Captain Dead; Francis Gordon Brown, Football Guard in 1897-1900, Dies of Diabetes". The New York Times. May 11, 1911.
- ^ a b c d e "Gordon Brown (1954) - Hall of Fame". National Football Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ Rubin, Sam (2006). Yale Football. Arcadia. ISBN 9780738545325.
- ^ Brown, Matt. "Best of the 1890s: Penn's dynasty, Sewanee's Iron Men and the growth of a spectacle". The Athletic. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "Ivy League History and Timeline". Ivy League. Archived from the original on April 20, 2016. Retrieved November 13, 2015.
- ^ Benson, Albert Emerson (1925). History of Saint Mark's School. St. Mark's School. p. 134.
- ^ "1897 Yale Bulldogs Schedule and Results". College Football at Sports-Reference.com. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "1898 Yale Bulldogs Schedule and Results". College Football at Sports-Reference.com. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "1899 Yale Bulldogs Schedule and Results". College Football at Sports-Reference.com. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "1900 Yale Bulldogs Schedule and Results". College Football at Sports-Reference.com. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "Penn's 1897 Football Team Last To Win National Title With 15-0 Record; Alabama, Clemson Looking To Join". University of Pennsylvania Athletics. 2019-01-07. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "Details of Harvard Victory: U. of P.'s "Guards Back" Easily Broken, The Result Was Never in Doubt". The Boston Globe. November 4, 1900. p. 24 – via NewspaperARCHIVE.
- ^ Metzger, Sol (November 1931). "When and How to Kick". Boy's Life: 28.
- ^ Reed, Herbert (1911-11-18). "How to Watch a Football Game". Harper's Weekly. 55 (2865): 10.
- ^ Edwards, William Hanford (1916). Football Days: Memories of the Game and of the Men Behind the Ball. Moffat, Yard. p. 139.
- ^ "Columbia's Mighty Stand". New York Daily Tribune. 1900-10-28. p. 9. ISSN 1941-0646. Retrieved 2024-03-19.
- ^ "YALE FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS OF 1900; Harvard Beaten, in the Annual Game at New Haven". The New York Times. 1900-11-25. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "Why Yale Fumbled Its Quarterback's Rhodes Scholarship Pass". HuffPost. 2012-02-06. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ Ashburn, Frank D. (1967). Peabody of Groton (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. p. 119.
- ^ Des Jardins, Julie (2015-09-08). Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man. Oxford University Press. p. 141. ISBN 978-0-19-023125-5.
- ^ "PHI BETA KAPPA ELECTIONS". Yale Daily News Historical Archive. 1900-03-01. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ a b "JUNIORS VOTE BY FRIDAY: BALLOT BY CLASS OF 1915 FOR GORDON BROWN MEMORIAL PRIZE MAN". Yale Daily News Historical Archive. 1914-06-03. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ a b Thomas Jr., Robert Mcg.; Katz, Michael (1984-12-10). "SPORTS WORLD SPECIALS; A Gender Gap". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "NEWS OF THE CREWS". Yale Daily News Historical Archive. 1900-06-14. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ Edwards, William Hanford (1916). Football Days: Memories of the Game and of the Men Behind the Ball. Moffat, Yard. p. 447.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ "Yale Endowments". Yale University. 1917. pp. 77–79.
- ^ Tisch, Joseph (2012-09-19). "McCoy awarded Gordon Brown Prize". Yale Daily News. Retrieved 2024-03-12.
- ^ Kelley, Kitty (2004-09-14). The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-385-51405-7.