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Campus Connection: A Golden Anniversary
October 01, 2015 08:30 PM | Football
The other day, Garrett Ford was walking into the grocery store in the Florida retirement community where he’s now living when a person wearing a West Virginia t-shirt approached him.
“Hey, you’re Garrett Ford! Pitt-West Virginia; 63-48!”
ALL wins over Pitt are memorable, but this particular West Virginia triumph has special meaning to those who were in Morgantown 50 years ago today on October 2, 1965 to witness it; or, more likely, listening to Jack Fleming’s enthusiastic descriptions on the radio.
Unlike recent years when West Virginia had the upper hand in the Backyard Brawl, scheduled to resume in 2022, back in the mid-1960s when Ford was playing, getting any win over Pitt was cause for celebration. The Panthers won every single game against West Virginia during a 17-year period from 1929-46 – and very frequently by lopsided margins.
In fact, the Mountaineers only managed to score in five of their 15 defeats to Pitt during that depressing stretch of time. The Washington Generals were a more competitive opponent playing the Harlem Globetrotters than West Virginia was against Pitt in those days.
Therefore, dropping 63 points on your most hated rival has a way of sticking with you, even if many of the fine details are now becoming a blur to the participants. To rabid Mountaineer supporters still alive, those three hours of ecstasy nearly erased 19 year’s worth of frustration and humiliation against the Panthers … almost.
Even Art Lewis’s great West Virginia teams of the early 1950s couldn’t light up the scoreboard on Pitt the way the Mountaineers did that afternoon. It was a game that turned the WVU record book upside down and one that has been talked about around here ever since.
“I did not understand the Pitt rivalry when I first got here,” admitted Ford, a Washington, D.C., native who grew up not too far from Maryland’s campus. “I never knew about Pitt being such a big rivalry and then when I got here people started feeding me with that stuff that this was the game – beat Pitt, beat Pitt, beat Pitt!”
Ah, but he learned quickly, and when you play against the Panthers the way Ford did in 1965 people will always remember it, even 50 years later in Florida supermarket parking lots. Ford estimates he’s been approached several thousand times since then from people telling him they were right there with him in the old stadium that sunny Saturday afternoon cheering him on while taunting their Panther friends.
“There couldn’t have been that many people in there, what did the place hold, 30,000?” he laughed.
For the record, Ford ran for 192 yards and two touchdowns, caught four passes for 76 yards and another score, and he also returned four kickoffs for 73 yards – almost a full season’s worth of work during the Wing-T, one-platoon football era.
His 341 all-purpose yards produced against the Panthers were a school record that lasted 47 years until it was re-discovered when Tavon Austin established a new one against Oklahoma in 2012.
“Garrett had one of the best performances I’d ever seen from an individual,” marveled teammate John Mallory a couple of years ago. “Guys were bouncing off of him and he was running by people and stuff.”
Ford, by his own admission, was no burner, but he did rip off a couple of long touchdowns that afternoon and at least got into third gear – something he wasn’t able to do during his senior season in 1967 when a debilitating foot injury basically ended his football career.
“Back then a 4.7 or a 4.8 was fast,” he said.
It was obviously fast enough to outrun the slow-moving Panthers that afternoon. And helping Ford along was Pitt’s Eric Crabtree, the Monessen, Pennsylvania, speedster who accounted for 303 yards by all methods: 75 yards and a touchdown on the ground, 76 yards and a touchdown through the air and 152 yards and a touchdown on four kickoff returns.
Ford said he got to know Crabtree a little bit when the two played together for the Denver Broncos in 1968.
“I played with and later coached against people from Pitt who came down here and the stories they would tell about the people here,” said Ford. “It was like (Virginia) Tech. Tech was another big rivalry, but they would say, ‘The people down there – they’ll kill you. You will be scared to go out there, bring on the Mountaineers’ and that’s all you’d hear. But I’ll tell you what, it was great to be there. We had to wear coat and ties to the game when we would walk (to the stadium) from campus. When you hit campus you were right at the stadium, and it was a heck of a thing.”
Pitt coach John Michelosen joked afterward that the turning point in the game came at the outset when the Panthers kicked off to West Virginia, but the game’s climatic moment actually happened with 5:15 left in the fourth quarter after Pitt reduced the Mountaineers’ lead to one, 49-48, on Robert Dyer’s one-yard touchdown plunge.
Instead of kicking the point after to tie it at 49, Michelson rolled the dice and went for two to take the lead. Pitt quarterback Kenny Lucas rolled out to his right and tried to take it in himself, but backside defensive end Bill Sullivan hustled across the field to stop Lucas a full yard in front of the goal line.
That is one of the few plays Sullivan, now living in Houston, can recall from the game. Of course, being a defensive player that afternoon, there is a lot to forget.
“He was either rolling out or running because the play was going away from me,” Sullivan recalled. “He turned to go up the field and basically it was a rotation where you drop off and go into a linebacker position. The best I can remember, I think he tried to jump and I caught him in mid-air.”
Afterward, West Virginia coach Gene Corum joked that it was the only tackle either team made that day.
Right after Sullivan’s stop, the Mountaineers recovered an onside kick and quarterback Allen McCune fired a pass to a wide-open Ford for a 59-yard touchdown.
“I guess they must have thought I was a decoy. I turned up field and I was standing out there all by myself and he threw the ball a long way, but I could not believe I was THAT open,” said Ford.
West Virginia tacked on a late score when Ford bounced in from the five following a Pitt turnover.
Pitt had scored 48 points, produced 18 first downs, 447 total yards and averaged nearly 7½ yards from scrimmage, and still lost by 15 points.
The 48 points the Panthers scored were the most ever by a Division I team in a losing cause at the time, topping the 47 points Bradley scored in an eight-point defeat to Drake in 1955.
“It’s unbelievable that a team could score 48 points and lose,” a befuddled Corum remarked after the game.
Dick Leftridge
Known as “Gentleman Gene,” there were only two instances the players can ever recall Corum using curse words. It once happened when fullback Dick Leftridge pulled a prank on him by telephoning from another room in the stadium to inform the coach that he needed a lot of money and a car to get back to Morgantown after Corum had explicitly told him to be in town no later than 10 a.m. on Monday morning.
“You could hear Coach Corum yelling from one end of the stadium to the other,” chuckled Sullivan.
After Leftridge hung up the phone, the fullback walked into Corum’s office to let him in on the ruse. “Coach, when I found out how mad you were I took a jet,” Leftridge joked.
Corum’s other cursing fit happened 50 years ago against Pitt.
“I can still see Coach Corum stalking the sideline and him saying, ‘John, (expletive), did you see that? What the hell is going on out there? I don’t know what the hell is going on out there?’” Mallory chuckled.
“And Gene wasn’t one to use cuss words.”
Well, he was using them that afternoon.
And so was Pitt’s Michelson.
John Antonik is the author of four books on West Virginia University sports, including The Backyard Brawl: Stories from One of the Weirdest, Wildest, Longest Running and Most Intense Rivalries in College Football History and Saturday Snapshots: West Virginia University Football, both available online through WVU Press.
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