TCU once lost a bowl game 63-7. They made a play about it. But there’s a happy ending
The TCU Horned Frogs were in a bowl game against college football’s “wonder team,” and the Frogs were two-touchdown underdogs.
Nobody outside Fort Worth gave the Frogs a chance. It was a surprise when they scored a touchdown.
Sure enough, the final score was 63-7.
The year was 1921.
TCU lost to the darlings of college football, the Centre Praying Colonels — a small Kentucky school that had recruited star players from North Side High School’s 1915 state championship team.
The game was officially the first and only Fort Worth Classic — the second college football bowl game after the Rose Bowl.
It was played only once: Jan. 1, 1921, before 7,000 fans in Panther Park, a 1920s pro baseball stadium north of downtown at 725 N. Throckmorton St., on the corner at Northwest Seventh Street.
“Centre became ‘the little team that could,’ ” said Robby Henson, artistic director at Pioneer Playhouse, a Kentucky theater. It turned the Colonels’ exploits into a play, “The Wonder Team.”
The TCU victory is mentioned as one of Centre’s greatest. It was also a homecoming for former North Side quarterback Bo McMillin and teammates who followed coach “Chief” Myers to Kentucky.
TCU was coming off a 9-0 season that included victories over Arkansas and Baylor.
The Fort Worth Record, a morning newspaper, headlined: “Greatest Crowd Will Jam Panther Park Today” and advised that all trains to Fort Worth were sold out.
Wagering favored Centre, with former Texas A&M coach “Uncle Charley” Moran at the helm, by a margin of “all the way from two touchdowns to six,” the Record reported. (But TCU’s “optimism is undiminished.”)
The Star-Telegram headline warned: “T.C.U. Defense May Be Surprise.”
The next day’s headline was more modest: “T.C.U. Scored Against Centre.”
TCU’s G.P. “Jack” Jackson picked off a McMillin deep pass and ran it back 90 yards to score.
The Star-Telegram game story mostly describes that play and then says “subsequent touchdowns seem to have been lost in the shuffle. .... Further discussion of what happened would be getting too personal.”
Centre ran for eight touchdowns.
The TCU Skiff, the campus newspaper, led its game story this way: “They came. We saw. They conquered.”
The play, “The Wonder Team,” tells the story of a small underdog’s rise to post-World War I fame based on Myers’ “achieve and believe” philosophy.
“He took these Fort Worth city kids in the era of Hell’s Half Acre,” Henson said, referring to the old lower downtown saloon district known for brothels and gambling halls.
McMillin “was a poker player from the wrong side of the tracks” but Centre adopted him, Henson said.
McMillin starred along with North Side alumni James “Red” Weaver, Bill James, Lee McGregor and Sully Montgomery, later Tarrant County sheriff. Four more Colonels were from Dallas.
From 1917 through 1924, Centre went 58-8-2, including victories over Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Auburn and the darling of New York sportswriters of that day, Harvard.
McMillin was an All-America quarterback and went on to a 26-year pro and college coaching career including a Big Ten Conference championship at Indiana. He recruited and coached the Hoosiers’ George Taliaferro, later a Dallas Texan and the first Black player drafted by the NFL.
For TCU fans, I should mention that there was another future coach on the field that day.
The Horned Frogs’ left tackle was “Dutch” Meyer.
Eighteen years later, he coached the Horned Frogs to the national championship.
This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 12:25 PM.
