Shenanigans

In 1934 Moose played in the first All-Star game at Chicago's Soldier Field: a group of college all-Americans took on the great Chicago Bears, led by Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski. Moose, who was the captain of his team, broke his jaw on the first down from scrimmage but played fifty-six minutes of the game, which ended in a scoreless tie. After the final gun, he was rushed to a hospital, where he spent the night recuperating and sipping scotch through a straw.

"I tackled Red Grange once, but Nagurski kept running over me," he recalls. "I'd never seen anyone that strong. Everybody was afraid of him, even his own teammates. The guy playing across from me was George Musso, a two-hundred-and-fifty pound lineman, big and tough and mean.

After a while he started telling me when Bronko was coming through. 'What do you want me to do about it?' I    asked him. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but I'm gettin' the hell out of his way.'

Moose chose jersey number 69 and for a good reason. "If I got knocked upside down," he explains, "my number was still the same so people would know it was me."

Legend has it that Moose won a basketball game with a buzzer-beater. The ball deflected to him after he had been knocked to the floor. While lying flat on his back, he flipped in the winning basket. The team was leaving for South Bend the next morning and a paperboy, standing near the front of the parked team bus, yelled Morning Star!" Moose replied "Morning, son."

On May 2, 1981, Notre Dame honored him at a dinner at the Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center. The master of ceremonies was ABC-TV sportscaster Keith Jackson, and the invocation was given by Father Edward Krause, C.S.C. The assembled "roasters" included Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Bill Gleason, Johnny Lujack, De Paul basketball coach Ray Meyer, Ara Parseghian, NBC-TV sportscaster Don Criqui, former Air Force football coach Ben Martin, and the president of the university, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C.

After Moose was praised by a number of nationally recognized figures, it was time for Colonel Stephens to present him with a bust of himself. Walking across the stage in front of the hushed, expectant crowd and carrying the sculpted head of his longtime companion, the Colonel tripped and dropped the work of art, smashing it into countless   pieces. Two thousand  people gasped, and under his breath Moose called the Colonel an SOB. Father Hesburgh, sitting near the disaster, rose slightly from his chair, stared at the broken likeness, and cried, "Oh, my God!"

Things became very quiet, and then the Colonel disappeared from the stage laughing to himself, returning a few moments later with the real bust.

Old friend Colonel Stephens feels that Krause deserved everything that came with his retirement. "Ed could have made a lot more money by leaving Notre Dame and taking a job in pro football," he says, "but he was always loyal to the school. At Notre Dame we like to say that the priests take a vow of poverty but the university employees practice it."

To read previous versions of Shenanigans click below:

September 1998
November 1998
January 1999
March 1999
May 1999
July 1999
August 1999
October 1999