The Football Game Gerald Ford Never Forgot: Pigskins, Racism, and a Moment of Defiance in 1934

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star, and the American people.

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Speaker 2: We search for The Our American Stories podcast.

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Speaker 1: Go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 2: Gerald Ford is often overlooked as a president. He was the thirty-eighth.

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Speaker 1: However, Gerald Ford made an incredible impact on civil rights during his time in Congress and as president, and all because of his friendship with

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Speaker 2: a man named Willis Ward.

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Speaker 1: Buddy Moorhouse tells the story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and a football game which forever changed both men’s lives.

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Speaker 3: Gerald Ford and Willis Ward in the early nineteen thirties were two of the best high school football players in the state of Michigan.

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Speaker 4: Gerald Ford was going to Grand

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Speaker 3: Rapids South High School, and Willis Ward was attending Detroit Northwestern High School, so they were on opposite sides of the state. They were two of the best high school football players in the state. So in the fall of nineteen thirty-one, they both came to the University of Michigan. They met actually on their very first day of freshman orientation. It was held in Waterman Gymnasium on the Michigan campus, and they met that first day, and they had known of each other by reputation because they had read the newspaper clippings and knew how good the other guy was. So immediately they introduced themselves to each other and really became great friends. From that very first day at the University of Michigan in the fall in nineteen thirty-one, they realized they had a lot in common beyond just football. They both had an interest in the law; they kind of had similar career goals, so they just—they became fast friends in Kyle and decided that they were going to room together when they went on road trips. They had formed this friendship that was outside of football, and then it just kind of got strengthened on the football field.

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Speaker 4: And then every time the Michigan

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Speaker 3: football team would go on a road trip, the two of them were roomed together, and then they basically remained great friends, obviously throughout college and then through the

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Speaker 4: rest of their lives as well.

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Speaker 3: The athletic director at the time was a guy named Fielding Yost, who had been Michigan’s football coach for twenty-five years starting in the early nineteen hundreds, and he became really one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, certainly one of the most influential coaches of all time. But in nineteen twenty-five, he stepped down from being a coach and he became the athletic director, and then he burned through a couple of coaches after that, and he eventually hired a guy named Harry Kipke to be his head coach. And Harry Kipkey had been an All-American football player for him; he was one of the greatest athletes that Michigan ever had. And when Harry Kipke became the—the coach, he wanted to kind of beef up the roster, beef up recruiting. And everybody at that time knew about Willis Ward. He was this phenomenal athlete, not just in football, but especially in track in Detroit. He was one of the fastest people in the country. He knew he was an incredible athlete, and he really wanted him to come to Michigan not just to run track, but also to play football. The problem with that is that Fielding Yost was dead set against having any African American football player on the football team. He didn’t mind if there were African Americans on other teams. There were some that played on the baseball team, but the football team was kind of his baby, and Fielding Yost was a fairly unrelenting racist. He’d grown up in West Virginia. He was the son of a Confederate soldier, and he was really dead set on keeping his football team all white. So when Harry Kipke came to him and said that he wanted Willis Ward to play on his team, it caused a huge rift between the two of them. Yost was against it, Kipke really wanted it. There were even some rumors that the two of them actually came to blows when they were discussing whether or

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Speaker 4: not Willis Ward would be allowed to join the team. But eventually Kipke went out.

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Speaker 3: And Yost was—yos—back down, and Willis Ward was able to join the team.

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Speaker 4: And then Willis Ward, when he joined the team, he became the

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Speaker 3: first African American football player in about forty years to play at the University of Michigan. The way things worked back in college football back then, the schedules were not set many years in advance.

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Speaker 4: They were really only set like a year or so in advance.

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Speaker 3: Only today, you know, right now, Michigan knows five years from now who they’re going to be playing. But back in those days, they set the schedule like the year before, and Michigan had always only ever played teams from the North, teams from either the Midwest or maybe the East. They’d never played a team from the South. For whatever reason, Fielding Yost wanted to get a Southern team on the schedule. His brother-in-law was a guy named Dan McGogan, who had worked in—he’d been an athlete at Michigan, and then he was working at Vanderbilt in Tennessee at the time. And Dan Macgogan was really good friends with the people at Georgia Tech. So Yost worked through Dan Macgogan to contact the people at Georgia Tech. In nineteen thirty-three, he started contacting them to see if they would be interested in coming up to Ann Arbor to play a game. In nineteen thirty-four, Soost and the people at Georgia Tech started trading telegrams back then, saying, “Would you be interested in coming up to play a football game that season?” Now, Yost knew very well that the policy—the Jim Crow policy—among the Southern States at that time was that they would refuse to play again against any team that had an African American player. So when he scheduled the Georgia Tech game, he knew for a fact that Georgia Tech was going to refuse to play the game if Willis Ward played. So he knew it was going to be a problem, but he still went ahead and scheduled the game. So in nineteen thirty-three, he scheduled this game, and once everybody started to get the news that this was coming out, they quickly started to realize that

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Speaker 4: you know, “Oh boy, we’re going to have a problem here.”

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Speaker 3: Because they’re not going to play the game if we have Willis Ward on our team. And it didn’t really become an issue until nineteen thirty-four, when the schedule was officially announced, and then everybody started asking Yost, “What are you going to do? Are you going to bench Willis Ward for this game?”

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Speaker 4: “Are you going to play it? Or what are you going to do?”

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Buddy Moorhouse, who happens to teach at Hillsdale College, and who was also a documentarian who made a documentary on this very story. And by the way, this goes to show that racism was not a Southern phenomenon, but a national one and a national play. An athletic director at a top Big Ten school—and it probably wasn’t the Big Ten, man—was vehemently against having an African American athlete, and a terrific one, play on his team for no other

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Speaker 2: reason than he was black.

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Speaker 1: When we come back, more of this remarkable story, a love story of sorts.

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Speaker 2: Here on Our American Stories.

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Speaker 1: Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts.

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Speaker 2: Any story you missed or want

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Speaker 1: to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to The Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming. And we returned to Our American Stories. We were just listening to the story of Gerald Ford and Willis Ward becoming fast friends at the University of Michigan. By the way, when two guys decide to room on the road, this is

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Speaker 2: more than a friendship.

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Speaker 1: We rejoin events as word spreads of the approaching Michigan-Georgia Tech football game, and the crisis was impending. Crisis of will Willis Ward e bench. Buddy Moorhouse continues as a story.

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Speaker 3: The way it worked back in college football then is that freshmen weren’t allowed to play in the varsity, so Willis Ward and Gerald Ford could play all. When they were freshmen, they were just on the practice squad. When they were sophomores, they

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Speaker 4: were able to play.

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Speaker 3: And because Willis Ward was pretty much—he was definitely the fastest player on the team and one of the best players on the team—he moved into the starting lineup right away. He was one of the best players starting when he was a sophomore, and Michigan won the national championship both his sophomore and junior years. So Willis Ward is one of the best players on the best team in the country. Gerald Ford was—he was—he played center and linebacker, and he was backing up a guy named Chuck Bernard, who was an All-American center. So Gerald Ford didn’t play much at all when he was a sophomore and junior, but when he was a senior, Chuck Bernard was graduating. So for the first time,

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Speaker 4: both of these

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Speaker 3: guys—that these best friends, Gerald Ford and Willis Ward—were both going to be moving into the starting lineup. And they were so excited heading into that season, going into the nineteen thirty-four season, because they were both going to be starters for the first time, they were coming off two national championships, and the excitement was just sky-high. But all that kind of came crashing down in, starting in the late summer and then the early fall of nineteen thirty-four, when this Georgia Tech situation came up, and everybody started asking them, “You know what?” It started asking Fielding Yost and Harry Kipke, you know, “What are you going to do about this game? You know, Georgia Tech is not going to play the game

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Speaker 4: if Willis Ward plays in the game. What are you going to do about it?”

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Speaker 3: And it caused this incredibly contentious situation once word got out, both on the team and in the Michigan community and then really nationally, and it became a firestorm in the Michigan campus. College football back then didn’t start in late August or early September like it does now. The games didn’t start until early October. That

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Speaker 4: was the one.

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Speaker 3: The first game of the season was the Georgia Tech game. It was going to be the third game of the season, and it wasn’t until October 20th that the game was played. So this really started to explode in late September and early October of nineteen thirty-four. And when we’re got out—when Georgia Tech said, “No, we’re not going to play the game”—if Willis Ward plays, Fielding the house wouldn’t

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Speaker 4: say anything publicly. He would not come out and say it publicly.

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Speaker 3: He was definitely speaking in the meetings that they had, but he wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t make any press announcements, wouldn’t answer any of their questions about it.

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Speaker 4: Leading up to the game.

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Speaker 3: As I said, it was creating this firestorm on the campus, and there were really two sides that were forming. On the one side, you had most all of the faculty and almost all the students at Michigan who were saying, “There’s no way that we should play this game. If Willis Ward’s not allowed to play, either he plays the game or we cancel it, but we should not play the game and bench Willis Ward. That’s just not an option.” On the other side were some of the more bluebloods, some of the fraternity boys on Michigan’s campus, who were taking the approach that, “You know what? These are our guests from the South. We need to be considered of what their feelings are, and we need to give in and bench Willis Ward because that’s what they want us to do, and there are guests.” So it created a huge rift on the Michigan campus. The night before the game, there was this huge rally that had about fifteen hundred or two thousand people attending it, where it was everybody came to the microphone and they were giving angry speeches on both sides of it. There were also hundreds of telegrams that were received by the Michigan

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Speaker 4: Athletic office, most all of them

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Speaker 3: saying that it’s a disgrace that a school like Michigan would even be thinking of benching Willis Ward in a situation like this, and, you know, demanding that they cancel the game if they’re insisting that Willis Ward be benched. Really, the people in the middle of this were not only Willis Ward but also Gerald Ford. He was, for the first time in his life, as I said, a starter on the Michigan football team, but he was watching what was happening his best friend. So Gerald Ford felt so strongly about it that he actually wrote to his father and then got the word to Harry Kipke that he wanted to quit the team if they were going to do this to his friend Willis Ward. He didn’t want to have any part of that. So he told his father that he was going to quit the team. And if you think about it, that’s an extraordinary thing for a twenty-year-old college kid

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Speaker 4: to be doing. He was living his dream of being

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Speaker 3: a Michigan football player, and on the eve of the only season where he was going to be a starter—his senior year—he was willing to quit the team as a show of support for his best friend, Willis Ward. That’s how strongly he felt about it. And that’s a test of character that a lot of people don’t know about Gerald Ford. That really stayed with him for the rest of his life. But after he said that and he told Willis Ward what he wanted to do, Willis Ward went to Gerald Ford, and he told him. He said, “No, I don’t want you to quit the team.”

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Speaker 4: “I want you to play. I want you to go out to play, and I want you to pound them.” So that’s what Ford did. He said, “If you want me to play, I’ll play.”

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Speaker 3: “If you want me to pound him, I’ll pound them.” The weather was miserable. It was October 20th. The weather was—it was cold and rainy. Michigan had started this season terribly, and it was all because of the Willis Ward incident. This was just ripping the team up inside. They just came off two back-to-back national championships, and then they started the nineteen thirty-four season with two losses.

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Speaker 4: So coming in, the Georgia

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Speaker 3: Tech game, they already lost two games, and the morale of the team was destroyed.

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Speaker 4: But they had

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Speaker 3: a special mission, I think, in their hearts for the Georgia Tech game, that they needed to go out there and they needed to stand up for their friend Willis Ward. So the game was played in these terrible conditions, but Michigan actually won the game nine to two.

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Speaker 4: Georgia Tech’s only points came out of a safety.

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Speaker 3: Michigan scored; also scored a safety, and they scored a touchdown in the game.

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Speaker 4: And Gerald Ford had probably the best game of his life that year.

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Speaker 3: He was absolutely devastating the players on the Georgia Tech team. And the one play that really illustrates that is there was a player on the Georgia Tech team, a sophomore named Charlie Preston, who was from Atlanta, and there was trash talk throughout the entire game, but Charlie Preston was just really, really going

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Speaker 4: over the top with it.

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Speaker 3: He was—he kept talking about Willis Ward in the game and using the worst racial slurs that you can imagine to—to describe him, and he was directing that at the Michigan players. When Gerald Ford heard that, he snapped. And there was this one play where Gerald Ford and another player named Bill Borgman, they went after Charlie Preston during that play, and they put them on devastating block on him that ended up breaking some of Charlie Preston’s ribs.

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Speaker 4: They had to haul

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Speaker 3: him out of the game after that. That’s how hard they hit Charlie Preston. And that got in the newspaper, that, you know, he’d been knocked out of the game. And on Monday morning, after the game, Gerald Ford and Bill Borkman, they came to Willis Ward, and they said, “That was for you.” That ended up being the only game that Michigan won that season. Record-wise, it was the worst season in Michigan history. And it was all because their morale had been totally destroyed because of the Willis Ward situation. So this was not a team that was historically in trouble. They just came off two had come off two national championship seasons, and then they end up having a one and seven season,

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Speaker 4: which is the worst season in Michigan football history.

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Speaker 1: Now, what a story you’re hearing about how racism drove the great University of Michigan championship team to a tragic and terrible season. And all over one single claim that from an athletic director who deliberately did this.

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Speaker 2: There’s almost no question he did.

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Speaker 1: Just listening to the story, why schedule a Southern team but for this kind of conflict and showdown?

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Speaker 2: Why else would a man do it? And that’s how deep the roots of racism can go in a human being. But what a thing young Gerald Ford did. He doesn’t play

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Speaker 1: if my pal doesn’t.