The Late Great Great Lakes Football Program
One thing you hope for when you’re working closely with someone is that they’re into their job as much as you’re into yours.
That’s never been a problem at Wake Forest, where I’ve worked with three of the best media relations directors in John Justus, Dean Buchan and now Steve Shutt that I’ve ever known. Great people all, and guys who knew their job and how to do it.
Just the other day Shutt dug up this nugget, how BB&T Field (capacity 31,500) will be the smallest stadium in which Notre Dame has played since Frank Leahy’s Fighting Irish of 1945 traveled just north of Chicago to Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Hard by the Illinois-Wisconsin border, Great Lakes played in a 23,000-seat stadium.
But that wasn’t enough to satisfy Shutt’s intellectual curoisity. He came grinning into the room where a couple of us scribes were working Tuesday with some research on Great Lakes he had uncovered on the internet. What he found was that in certain seasons Great Lakes wasn’t just good, but actually was as great as the large bodies of water for which it was named.
The Bluejackets played college football from the second decade of the 20th century up through WWII, and in 1919 they played it well enough to beat Mare Island (a naval base just north of San Francisco) in the Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl. In 1943, Great Lakes knocked off an undefeated and top-ranked Notre Dame and ended the season ranked No. 6.
What Shuff discovered was that Great Lakes would have been awesome in horseshoes because it had more than its share of ringers. As some of the more venerable readers obviously know, it was common practice back in the day for one to go to college for a few years and then enter the military. As such, Great Lakes ended up trotting out such Hall-of-Famers as George Halas, Johnny Lujack and Otto Graham. And the Bluejackets didn’t have Chuck Mills coaching them either. Among those drawing up game plans were Paul Brown, Weeb Ewbank and Leahy himself.
These were tough guys. Great Lakes, after all, is the Navy’s only boot camp facility.
Thankfully the field remains, and, in fact, sports FieldTurf these days. Northwestern, located about 20 miles to the south, practiced there this August.
I would love to see film from the 1945 game at Great Lakes when the Bluejackets gave Notre Dame the what-for, 39-7. Maybe it was a case of claustrophobia for the Fighting Irish and if so, Wake can only hope the program hasn’t gotten over it.