i have to ask...why do you care so deeply about this? why do you care so deeply about another team that you'd spend (what seems like) hours on end researching in an effort to cast doubt on something they do?
where does all of this passion come from? given the amount of time that you've spent on researching it almost seems like you're more of a die hard fan than i am
just curious.
I started out believing the aggy version of the story and wondered why there seemed to be no first hand accounts of the lone substitute story from the 1922 newspapers or pictures of him standing there. An underdog team about to upset the number one team in the nation with the game in the balance seemed to be one of the most incredible stories in the history of American sports. I went to the library to pull the microfilm of the newspapers and absolutely nothing was said about the lone substitute. That was bizarre. Then an aggy showed me the 1921 Battalion that referred to the "12th Man" and I knew there were problems with the TAMU version of the story. While discussing it on either BON or Barking Carnival, someone told be to search google books and I would find the Univ of Iowa use of the term from a decade before the aggys claimed to have originated it. From there, my curiosity was up.
I searched the Dallas Morning News database and found nothing about E. King Gill until 1942. That absolutely made no sense. Gill was supposed to be enormously famous, but no mention of him at all for two decades after he was the central figure in the most incredible sports story I had ever heard. I thought Jinx Tucker's article would tell the story because Gill was spotting for Tucker before he came down to the field. Tucker had a ringside seat to a truly amazing story, but Tucker didn't even make a note of the sole substitute. Then I found a reference to Gill's 1964 speech. When I got a copy of that, it all made sense when I read about the radio play.
The research really only took about 10 hours and I learned a lot of practical things while I was doing it. Researching old newspapers has really come a long way with searchable original text. I had no idea how much is now available. One of my projects I want to do in my lifetime is to read the old editorials from the newspapers from around 1858-1861 to get a better understanding of just what did cause the Civil War (and possibly write a book on the subject). The version of history I was taught was that the Northern power brokers didn't give a crap whether the South wanted to secceed or stay in the Union and they surely didn't care about slavery. Supposedly, it was when the Southern businessmen expressed plans to charge far lower tariffs than the North, businessmen in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, etc realized their fortunes would be lost to Southern ports they decided the South could not be allowed to secceed and they pushed for Lincoln who was committed to preserving the Union.
So, researching old newspapers isn't something I find difficult or boring. The "12th Man" stuff just came together so easily, I just stayed with it until I put the story together. I crossed paths with the Horn Sports guys because I was working to lock down the "Randolph Duke" name at a number of sites and just stumbled upon Horn Sports. I started a conversation with bbdude back in 2012 and he offered me the opportunity to do some writing for the site. I knew UT was established by the legislature before TAMU was, and I read Jim Nicar's story that debunked the myth that the ag's branding of Bevo lead to the naming of our mascot. I wanted to make sure the documents were available for anyone who wanted to "talk smack" and set the record straight about the three big myths (that the ags originated the 12th Man, that TAMU is the oldest public university in Texas and that the ags were responsible for Bevo's name). All three stories and the related documents are on the Horn Sports server (I think there is even a library of all my pictures and documents, just as there is a single link to all my stories).
And there you have the story. I have a really fun piece on the UT/OU rivalry that will be coming out this season. I am working on a story about Freddie Steinmark (a Longhorn football player who deserves to have his story remembered). I also have a few other story ideas I am toying around with, one of which is to set the record straight about the contributions of UT, its students and alumni during WWI and WWII. UT sports history is a lot of fun to write about and learn about. Not many people really write about it in detail, so I took it up as a hobby. And, of course, rattling the ags is always a lot of fun. It has come to amaze me just how much of the school's history is embellished.
