Johnny “Blood”
Shake Down The Thunder, The Creation of Notre Dame Football is a book chronicling the beginnings of college football, football history and the mecca that has evolved on the South Bend, Indiana campus. On a smaller scale but in a parallel enviroment another catholic university was planting it’s own seed of college football immortality. It was the beginnings of the MIAC that brought football back to campus. But even then, it almost didn’t happen.
One of the early problems in intercollegiate athletics was the establishment of a “level playing field” for competition. Some colleges found players from picking up local journeymen athletes, former professionals, or “borrowed” players from nearby schools. To remedy these practices, the colleges in Minnesota and the Dakotas banded together to form the Tri-States Conference (sometimes called the Minnesota-Dakotas Conference) in the fall of 1914.
However, this arrangement only addressed eligibility issues, and not scheduling. There was still no consistent plan to the coordination of games, and the Tri-States conference, consisting of schools ranging from Northfield, St. Peter, to Grand Forks, Fargo, Yankton, Sioux Falls, and Huron, was not eager to develop one. St. John’s, given its location, had difficulty getting games with other colleges. Travel to road games was expensive as it required a rail trip from Collegeville to St. Paul or up the line to Fargo, then a transfer to the end destination.
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By 1919, the Minnesota colleges approached the conference convention with a list of proposals to improve play in the conference. However, the Dakota members, wary of the increased travel costs that such regular scheduling would require, struck down all the proposals. In 1920, the Minnesota members decided to form their own conference as the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference with those proposals they had sought to enact. Those initial members were Carleton College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Hamline University, Macalester College, St. John’s University, St. Olaf College and the University of St. Thomas. So in celebrating the joining of the new conference, St. John’s would once again sponsor football.
But the eligibility rules of the MIAC posed a problem for St. John’s. In the old Tri-State Conference, St. John’s, having the problem of a lack of students other than freshman and sophomores who were on campus and able to play, had used prep school students to fill out their teams. But under the MIAC rules, athletes actually had to be students at St. John’s in order to participate. So the monastics determined that the Prep School would join its own conference of high schools in the area, giving the Prep athletes the opportunity to compete amongst their peers. They entered local competition that first fall and had immediate success—unsurprising, given the level of competition the Preps had faced the year before.
Meanwhile, St. John’s was re-launching its football program, and once again, it was late to the party, as the other schools like St. Olaf and Concordia who had cancelled their football programs had restarted it years earlier. So, despite playing a JV schedule in 1920, they launched a full varsity schedule in 1921, and promptly got trounced by a combined score of 45-7 in its first three MIAC games. Of course, the Johnnies could take solace in their victory over St. Cloud Normal 28-0 that year. Best about the season was the Johnnies’ star sophomore by the name of John McNally. He wasn’t a star when he arrived in Collegeville-in fact, he had never played a game in high school- but he would later be considered as one of the most recognizable names ever to come through Indianbush.
McNally quite literally came into his own at St. John’s, and by many accounts, should be considered the quintessential Johnnie. He came to St. John’s in 1920 as a quiet, intelligent, unassuming son of a lumber and newspaper magnate who had graduated high school at the young age of 14. He left as a outspoken rabble-rouser unafraid of whatever the world would throw at him. He grew bored of the quiet life at St. John’s by fall of his junior year and began taking weekend trips to Minneapolis with his friend Ralph Hanson so that he could play professional football with the East 26th Street Liberties. In that day and age, it wasn’t uncommon for college players to dabble in pro ball by using fake names, but most used “Johnson” or “Jones” to preserve their college eligibility. When they showed up that first day and their names were inquired about, McNally saw a theater marquee for the movie starring Rudolph Valentino, “Blood and Sand.” So he introduced himself as Blood and Hanson as Sand, and played that entire season with the Liberties as “Johnny Blood”—the name he would use on all his documents from that day forward.
McNally left campus that next fall and headed to South Bend, Indiana, where “The Vagabond Halfback” joined Knute Rockne and the Notre Dame football team. He then started a “real” professional football career with the Milwaukee Badgers, the Duluth Eskimos and the Pottsville Maroons, and finally ended up with the Green Bay Packers, where he became one of the best receivers in the game and won four championships with the Packers, which led to his induction as a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963. He played both offense and defense for the Packers, and was well known for his off the field antics (read: nocturnal escapades) as well, which drove the legendary Curly Lambeau crazy. On one occasion, Lambeau locked him in his hotel room the night before a game against the Bears in Chicago so he wouldn’t break curfew and go out on the town. McNally had other ideas and reportedly tied bed sheets together and climbed down through the hotel window. It has been said that McNally once missed the team train, but drove ahead and caught the train by stopping it with his car!
Before the 1929 season, Lambeau offered McNally $100 per game to play in Green Bay via a letter, with a P.S. that if he stopped drinking by Wednesday night of each game week he’d pay him $110 per game. McNally wrote back to Lambeau: ‘I’ll take the $100.’ As his wife Marguerite said, “Even when Johnny does the expected, he does it in an unexpected way.”
His career ended with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1939, as he took on the coaching duties of that team. When World War II started he joined military service and was sent to India as a cryptographer, where he worked code-breaking and -making for the Allied forces. After the war, McNally returned to St. John’s to write a textbook on the cryptography and was hired to coach the Johnnies between 1950-1952. His career coaching record at St. John’s was a mediocre 13-9, and he blamed his lack of success on the monks’ unwillingness to allow scholarships for football. He famously predicted as he left Collegeville in 1952, then turning over the reigns to John Gagliardi, “No football coach will ever win at St. John’s.”
Back to 1922, however, McNally’s presence on campus wasn’t the cure-all for the football team. While McNally stood out by being responsible for kicking, running, and passing duties for the entire team, the lack of an offensive line meant that McNally couldn’t carry the Jays. St. John’s went 0-5 in the MIAC with McNally on the field, losing by a combined score of 122-17. The student body was so defeated by the losses that the Editorial in The Record noted “Old King Football is dead”. But the following year, while starting out with a whimper and winless, the Johnnies finished by upsetting mighty Gustavus 14-12 to win their first conference game ever.
By the following fall, things would change in Collegeville—the triumph over the Gusties encouraged the powers on campus to fully clear a new football field in recognition of their newfound success, and Johnnie football came into its home– and began to take the form recognizable today.
Compiled from Scoreboard; also from The Record, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Additional contributions from DustySJU
