This group of Fort Worth football players helped put a small Kentucky college on the map

Tis the season – for football! Here in Fort Worth, dreams of championships, not sugarplums, dance in our heads. It’s a good time to remember past athletic glories.

Fort Worth has produced plenty of star athletes: Ben Hogan, Rogers Hornsby, Davey O’Brien, and Yale Lary, to name a few. Somehow when lists are compiled, the North Side High School stars who put Centre College in national headlines are left off.

In 1916, North Side had a graduating class of 34. Six members of that class, Madison “Matty” Bell, Reuben McMillin, Bob Mathias, James Ralph “Sully” Montgomery, Bill Boswell, and Bill James followed their departing coach, Robert L. Myers, to the tiny Presbyterian school known then as Central College (Danville, Kentucky). Three other students, Alvin Nugent “Bo” McMillin (Reuben’s brother), James “Red” Weaver, and Thad McDonald would follow in 1917 because they didn’t have enough high school credits in 1916 to enroll.

Central was an all-male school and would remain that way until 1962. It became Centre College in 1918. When the Fort Worth players arrived, it had fewer than 270 students. All of the young men on the football team played both ways because there were only 16 of them. Coach Myers was a graduate of Central College himself, returning to his alma mater to take on a rebuilding job. The school had fielded a football team since 1880, but they had never done much except serve as punching bags for larger schools.

The school’s teams were “The Colonels.” In 1917, before playing the University of Kentucky, Coach Myers suggested the team pray before taking the field. They won the game 3-0, and after that, a pregame prayer became part of their routine for every game. Their amused rivals began calling them the “Praying Colonels.” Legend has it they were the first football team ever to say a prayer before taking the field, a claim that got them as much press as their victories.

Myers got them started on the road to gridiron success then moved up to athletic director and brought in 39-year-old Charles B. “Uncle Charley” Moran, who had been a legendary coach at Texas A&M (1909-1915) before being fired. From College Station, he went to Carlisle Indian School to work as assistant coach under the legendary Pop Warner. Moran’s son was playing football for the woeful team at Central in 1916. When Moran came to see his son play, Myers recruited Moran to help turn the team around. Moran remained with the Praying Colonels until 1924, when he moved on to Bucknell College (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.). Moran was also well-known to Fort Worthers, having had spent several summers umpiring Texas League baseball here.

It was Moran who built the history-making teams at Centre College. His quarterback was Bo McMillin, one of two Centre College All-Americans on Walter Camp’s first All-American team in 1919. Though only 5-foot 9.5-inches tall and 175 pounds, McMillan was a superb athlete who could pass, run, punt, and call his own plays. He also played on defense. Moran said having him was better than two assistant coaches. McMillan’s physical and intellectual skills were matched by an inspiring personality that made teammates and later his own players willing to storm the gates of hell for him. He told them all, football was the “greatest game of all, but a boy has to love it to play well. It’s just too rough and tough for anyone to play, or anyone to coach, unless he loves it more than anything else.”

The Colonels knew they had something special with that 1917 team. Red Weaver, at 158 pounds, was their center, 168-pound Matty Bell played end, 210-pound Sully Montgomery was one tackle, and 169-pound Bill James was the other. They beat the University of Kentucky Wildcats 3-0 on a McMillan drop kick. The 1918 season was cut short by the World War I, but the young men were all back in 1919. They drubbed West Virginia 14-6 at Charleston and also beat Indiana, Kentucky State, and DePauw on the way to an undefeated season. The following year, Moran’s team continued its winning ways, knocking off Indiana and West Virginia again, losing only to powerhouse Harvard, 31-14, and Georgia Tech, 24-0 on the way to an 8-2 season.

That 1920 team also made history by inflicting the biggest defeat to date on Texas Christian University. It happened on Jan. 2, 1921, in a post-season bowl game dubbed the “Fort Worth Classic.” TCU at the time was the champion of the Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association, and Centre was the first football team from east of the Mississippi “to invade Texas.” The Praying Colonels humiliated the Horned Frogs 63-7. It was the first and the last “Fort Worth Classic.”

Bo McMillin played five years for the Colonels (1917-21) because he enlisted in the Navy in 1918. His best game was the 1921 contest against Harvard, at the time one of the powerhouse teams in the country, going undefeated in five seasons. He broke through the line and raced 30 yards to the end zone to seal the victory. He was the last of the original North Side boys to graduate from Centre College.

After they went undefeated in the regular season, the 1921 Colonels were invited to play Texas A&M in Dallas in the “Dixie Classic,” forerunner of the Cotton Bowl. They lost 22-14 in Bo McMillin’s final game. Still, the 1922 season saw them win eight of 10 without Bo. One of those losses was to Harvard, completing the best-of-three series that started in 1920.

During five years as coach, Charley Moran compiled a 87 percent winning record. He took the Colonels to three bowl games, winning two, the East-West Christmas Classic and the Fort Worth Classic. They went from playing before crowds of a few hundred to playing before crowds of 35,000 and more. For most of that time, Moran was the team’s sole coach and a walking endorsement for Texas football. He said he always “favored Texans on his teams believing the best of gridiron talent hails from the state.”

After graduating in the spring of 1922, Bo McMillin went to work that fall as football coach at Centenary College (Shreveport, Louisiana). Several other coaching stops followed before he landed at Indiana. He took the Hoosiers to an undefeated, Big Ten championship season in 1945. He left Indiana in 1948 for the professional ranks, coaching the Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles. He ended his coaching career with a 146-77-13 record, but his greatest accomplishment was that he took teams that were average-to-poor on paper and turned them into winners.

Bo’s teammates also had distinguished careers. Madison Bell coached at TCU (1923-28) then SMU, taking the Mustangs to the Rose Bowl and a national title in 1935. Bill James became coach at Texas A&M. James Ralph “Sully” Montgomery married his North Side high school sweetheart while still in college. After graduating, he played professional football with the Chicago Cardinals and Philadelphia Eagles then spent a few years as a boxer, rising to seventh in line for a heavyweight title match. After leaving sports, he was elected Tarrant County sheriff four times (1946-1953).

Coach Charlie Moran went on to be a longtime National League umpire, noted for his famous quip to anyone questioning his calls behind the plate: “It ain’t nothing until I call it.”

Four North Side members of those great Centre College teams returned to Fort Worth in December 1927 for an event billed as the “North Side High School Homecoming.” This was the first homecoming held by any Fort Worth high school, and it made North Side one of the first schools in the nation to adopt an event historically practiced only by colleges. Led by Bo McMillin, the old-timers played this first “homecoming game” against the current North Side team. Both teams played for keeps with the old-timers winning 12-9.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.