GATORS AT 100

In The Beginning There Was Football

By ANDY STAPLES

Published: Jul 10, 2006

GAINESVILLE - If Dan Jenkins would give up covering golf for a weekend and come to Florida Field in September, maybe he would amend his words.

Maybe the legendary sportswriter would listen to the jet-engine roar that immediately follows "Here come the Gators" and change his mind. Maybe he would take into account all the victories since he put fingers to typewriter so many years ago.

Maybe, after 100 years of University of Florida football, Jenkins wouldn't be so quick to compare the Gators to Wake Forest.

It was in the 1960s when Jenkins famously wrote that Florida fans combined "the arrogance of Notre Dame" with the tradition of a certain private, basketball-centric institution in Winston-Salem, N.C. At the time, Florida hadn't even won a Southeastern Conference title.

Florida's tradition has grown richer since, but it would be wrong to focus on the flowering of the program without acknowledging its roots. So for 10 days, The Tampa Tribune will examine the history of Florida's football program as it turns 100.

From turn-of-the-20th-century star halfback Earle "Dummy" Taylor to turn-of-the-21st-century coach Ron Zook - who some Gators fans called a dummy - Florida football has had its share of characters. The Gators had a coach who went on to judge Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg (Tom Sebring), a player who became one of Hollywood's pioneering stuntmen (Dale Van Sickel), a player who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism on the beaches at Normandy (Fergie Ferguson), a back who broke the NFL rushing record (Emmitt Smith) and a player-turned-coach who reinvented the passing game in college football and brought the program its only national title (Steve Spurrier).

And from the mud bowl at Tennessee in 1928 to the Sugar Bowl in 1997, the Gators have played their share of unforgettable games. So unforgettable, in fact, that only a few words or numbers - Spurrier's field goal, the Gator Flop, Fourth-and-Dumb, Buck Belue-to-Lindsay Scott, Choke at Doak, 52-20 - can make a Florida fan shed tears of sorrow or joy at the memories.

We'll hit the highlights, going back to 1906. Or maybe we'll start a few years before, because even the year of the program's birth is up for debate.

The Early Years

The folks who keep the football record book at Georgia insist that Florida fielded a team in 1904, and they claim the Bulldogs whipped that team, 52-0, on Oct. 15, 1904, in Macon, Ga. They would be correct.

The Lake City-based men's university that preceded UF did field a team in 1904, but Florida officials have chosen not to recognize the teams that played before the state Legislature passed the Buckman Act in 1905. The act established one state-supported school for white men (UF), one for white women (Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee), one for black students (Florida A&M) and one school for the blind and deaf.

Gainesville outbid Lake City to be the site of the newly consolidated university, but UF operated in Lake City in 1905. UF historian Carl Van Ness said the school would have played a football season, too, had university president Andrew Sledd not disbanded the team because of players' falling grades. Van Ness said several players quit school in protest.

The new university opened in Gainesville on Sept. 24, 1906. The following month, the first "official" Florida football team took the field against the Gainesville town team.

A Rich History

The team didn't have a nickname until 1911, when press reports of Florida's road trip to face South Carolina and Clemson dubbed Florida the Alligators.

Some say the name is derived from a store near campus that sold school pennants emblazoned with Alligators. Others argue that the name took hold because Neil Storter, the captain of the 1911 team, was the leader of a popular student group called the Bo Gators. According to several sources, Storter credited newspaper writers, not his own popularity, as the source of the nickname.

Hundreds of men since have called themselves Gators. They have kindled rivalries with Georgia, Florida State and Tennessee. Some weathered losing, mediocrity and scandal to pave the way for champions to come, and those who followed the champions have struggled to emerge from their predecessors' shadows.

If Jenkins covered Florida's season opener against Southern Mississippi on Sept. 2, he might feel the same about the arrogance, but not about the tradition. The Gators were born as a ragtag bunch playing against the town team on a chewed-up field. They have grown into a national power.

Take that, Wake Forest.

Reporter Andy Staples can be reached at (352) 262-3719 or astaples@tampatrib.com.