Auburn football

To Philip Lutzenkirchen

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First published in The War Eagle Reader. You can link to it here.

My first memory of Philip Lutzenkirchen was when he had scheduled an appointment with our Communication and Journalism department chair during his official recruiting visit in 2008.

The chair at the time, Dr. Mary Helen Brown, referred me to his highlight video on YouTube.  Plenty of high-high-highlights.  My favorite was of him blocking a punt and running it in for a touchdown.  He didn’t exactly run it in.  He stood head and shoulders over everyone on the field, so he basically jogged in, swatted the ball away from the punter’s foot, picked it up and carried it into the end zone.  Opposing players jumped around him like Jack Russells leaping at a man holding up a Frisbee.  Lutzie made it to the end zone no problem.

Now, with his tweet Saturday that he will miss the rest of the season, it’s fitting to remember what he brought to Auburn.  I always called him “the mayor of Auburn University,” with his popularity and influence on campus.  It is sad to see it come to an end.

Of course, Lutzenkirchen signed with Auburn, even in the midst of the Tuberville turmoil.  In one of his tweets, he said he never regretted his decision to come to Auburn.  Nor did his fans.

Philip actually enrolled as a major in the department (good job, MHB), so we remained in cordial contact throughout.  At one time, I think he was a radio-TV-film major, though he ended up majoring in communication.  RTVF seemed a natural major, particularly after his ESPN fame for a highlight where he tipped an end-zone pass to a teammate as he leaped out of bounds.

The clip earned some studio time on ESPN – an appearance that, he admitted, he was not pleased with.  He was too rough on himself.  It wasn’t worse than 90 percent of the interviews you see on ESPN (and better than almost all of Skip Bayless’s and Stephen A. Smith’s rants).

The summer after his freshman year (which included touchdown receptions against LSU and Mississippi State), I requested that he serve as press conference guest for our 2010 Summer Journalism Workshop for high school students, noting that he was after all a major and that would help us recruit.

He and Morgan Toles, a women’s basketball player who was also a major (and who sadly also had to stop playing for injury reasons) did a great job.  Lutzie had a good sense of humor, even when one young lady’s press conference question was, “Are you dating anyone? Kidding!”  From an instructional perspective, that gave me a great opportunity to warn the students about asking creepy questions.

Trivia buffs: At that conference, we learned the meaning of his name: “light” (lutz) “of” (en) “the church” (kirchen).  I’ll leave further comment on that to the ode-sters.

The press conference, obviously, was the impetus of Philip’s contributions to Auburn’s dream season.  Big TD passes against South Carolina, Georgia (twice) and, of course, Alabama – the catch that gave birth to his TD dance deemed “the Lutzie.”  A somersault-capped catch in the national championship game.

Even in 2011, as Auburn struggled on many fronts to an 8-5 season, Lutzenkirchen had his moments – the best being a one-handed grab against Ole Miss that made the Top 10 for several of ESPN’s endless array of Top 10 segments.  Unfortunately, the catch also led to the first of many injuries that Philip would endure – a torn labrum that required shoulder surgery.

But as he remained at Auburn, his favor among the students increased – enhanced by a decision to return for his senior year.  Whether in person or on his popular Twitter account (a weird stretch of letters – oh wait, it’s his last name), Lutzie became something of a campus icon.

So as this year descended into something of a disaster, fans felt a particular heart tug for the tight end who had given a lot to his school.  When the second half against Arkansas opened with an illegal procedure by #43, it seemed a fitting indication of how bad things had gotten.

Then, as fans processed another disappointing loss, this time to Vanderbilt, word that a hip injury would end Lutzenkirchen’s career at Auburn deepened the sadness.

Lutzenkirchen’s tweet – “Sad to say it is over at Auburn. Thanks for the opportunity to play in O&B on Saturdays. It was the best decision of my life to be a Tiger.” – was an appropriately classy handoff by the popular player and sparked hundreds of replies.

Philip is a frequent presence in Tichenor Hall, as one of our majors.  He is friendly to all of the professors he encounters.  It’s one of the qualities that makes college football so special.  These are not just players who score touchdowns to make fans’ lives better.  They are our students and classmates, and we appreciate them in that regard.

He had decided to time his academic progress so that he graduated after his final season – no cursory graduate studies.  I usually represent the department at fall graduation (it’s the coolest weather, so the most comfortable for those bulky caps and gowns), and I look forward to the moment when Ric Smith announces his name as a student one last time.

I will remember another moment as well.  Soon after the semester began, as I walked from my car parked at Comer toward the Science Center, I heard a voice call: “How’s it going?”  I turned.  Philip was waving to me as he called over his shoulders.  Like I told my students, that doesn’t say as much about me as it does about Philip Lutzenkirchen.

 

When God Hated SEC Football

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oldfootballThese days, Southern football and evangelical Christianity have forged a strong bond.  But it hasn’t always been that way.

At least, so wrote Andrew Doyle of Winthrop University, in an article he wrote titled, “Foolish and Useless Sport: The Southern Evangelical Crusade Against Intercollegiate Football.”

In fact, the article was published about 15 years ago, in the Fall 1997 issue of theJournal of Sport History.  I came across it while doing some other research, and the topic naturally interested me (as did the mentions of Auburn University).  But keep in mind that basically all of this stuff is his.

The Auburn-Georgia game in February 1892 is considered the first intercollegiate football game in the Deep South.  But the arrival of football did not impress the local clergy.

The Rev. C.L. Chilton, pastor of the First Methodist Church in Auburn, declared that this “foolish and useless sport [was] more properly called a fight.”  He gave an injury report for both teams, but the sprains and broken bones listed were a denunciation of the spectacle.

Chilton, like many church leaders, was concerned that football would overwhelm the academic mission of the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, as it was known as the time.  “Here in Auburn, football is the one engrossing theme during the season.  The whole thing is a travesty upon higher education,” he complained.  Even the daily practices were popular: “Learned professors hasten to the scene of the fray,” he said.

Some might argue that football provided exercise to build strong young men, but Chilton was unimpressed: “Any young man can acquire that at home in the useful emoluments of cutting his mother’s yard or driving his father’s plow.”

The Wesleyan Christian Advocate in Georgia joined the criticism that immediately followed the game: “And so the sacred altars, whose incense has been so inspiring to our people in the past, are broken down, and these gods of the sensual and material man have set up their altars instead.”  To the WCA, the game represented “a swing back to Olympic Greece and her barbarian ideals.”

So how could such an outrage happen?  The WCA blamed it on the South’s defeat in the Civil War.  Social degeneration allowed football to find its way onto Southern campuses.  “This new outbreak in the South, in contrast with the sturdy integrity of our past history, is but a natural result of lowering the standard of citizenship and manhood.”

To others, it was another cultural evil brought down from the North whose effects would be felt deeply on the college campuses.  W.P. Fleming, a teacher and Methodist church member writing in the WCA, urged Southerners to resist “the athletic craze [that] is just beginning to take southern colleges … before our higher education will be degraded into what it has already become in some institutions of the North.”

Alabama and Auburn played for the first time the year after Auburn and Georgia.  By 1900, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montgomery said the behavior of fans who attended that years game in the state capitol “is such as to startle and shock the community.”  Indeed, the Alabama Christian Advocate described football’s ability to “convert a crowd of students, inflamed with liquor and excited by loyalty to their institution, into a howling mob of toughs, gamblers, and drunkards.”

Even after Auburn stopped playing Alabama, the Tigers continued to travel to Birmingham to play games.  Seeing the students flock to the city’s saloons, the president of the state Women’s Christian Temperance Union asked the Auburn president to stop scheduling games in Birmingham.  Unfortunately for the WCTU, the bigger cities provided bigger ticket sales, so the request was ignored.

As part of the greater debate on the usefulness of sports like football, many pointed to its role in building strong young men imbued with a commitment to teamwork and sacrifice toward a common goal.

But these Southern writers were not buying the “manhood” argument.  The WCA exhorted the universities to “hold the standard of scholarship high, so as to require true manhood to reach after it, and when it is attained, we could feel that we have real men as our sons and not mere prize fighters.”

The ACA complained that the mind was subordinated to the body on campuses that embraced football: “The ideal man is the one that can kick, rather than the one that can think.”

It’s amazing to think that because of the pressure, the University of Georgia trustees banned football shortly after the first Auburn-Georgia game, though they caved to pressure from students and the media a year later.  The University of Alabama restricted the Alabama team to home games.  That restricted football so much that Alabama played only four games overall in 1896 and 1897, and did not field a team at all in 1898.

Eventually, of course, all of this changed.  The evangelical church has come around, and institutionally speaking is one of football’s biggest supporters.  And the University of Alabama even allows its team to play away games (though getting them to the Auburn campus would take a few more decades).