Former Temple QB's great story in Sports Illustrated

By Joe Monninger
When I first saw Temple University's 1986 schedule printed on a glossy magazine page, it brought back memories. Above the list of games was a motto, something to the effect that Temple Is For Real! Of course I understood what the ''for real'' meant. Temple was going big time. Over the past few years the Owls have played an increasingly difficult schedule, one that has included Georgia, West Virginia, Pitt, Syracuse, Boston College, and Florida State. More than once Temple has given top- notch teams a rough time. Though I didn't see the games, friends told me that Temple had even outplayed Penn State several times over the past few seasons. Last year, when Penn State was pushing toward what looked like a national championship, the Owls almost beat them early in the season.
Temple did beat Pitt 13-12 on Sept. 22, 1984, for an important victory -- important partly because Temple recruits in some of the same regions as Pitt and Penn State. The game also marked a new age for Owls football. Temple had at last defeated a major eastern rival, and all of its plans to go big time were finally about to come to fruition.
The ''for real'' slogan made me smile because I was a player for Temple at the very beginning of the surge. The move couldn't have come at a more difficult time. It was the fall of 1972, and football was held in dubious esteem by my dorm mates, my girlfriend and my teachers. I once had to sit in a class and listen to a history professor lecture about the imperialistic overtones of football, which he likened to the Vietnam War. Football was considered too brutal, too violent, too obvious. There were more serious issues at hand. My girlfriend, for example, marched in Washington to protest the war. And she waved peace signs at police cars as they cruised past Temple's Philadelphia campus.
In contrast, the Owls practiced on Geasey Field, in the heart of a tough neighborhood. On my very first day of practice a kid rode by on his bike and, screaming epithets, grabbed a player's chin strap, snapping it off as he sped by. I was more stunned than anything else. Later the same week I learned that students were protesting the presence of football at Temple. They demanded, without success, that football go the way of ROTC: off the campus. It was another expression of American imperialism -- the catchword that semester -- and some students even drew up a statement that claimed football was invented only after the frontiers of the West had been settled. Football, they said, satisfied our national need to conquer new lands.
In the face of this antagonism, head coach Wayne Hardin mounted a campaign to improve Temple's football image. Hardin was a man of some prominence. He had been the coach at Navy when Roger Staubach led the Middies to the Cotton Bowl and had the rare distinction of coaching two Heisman Trophy winners -- Staubach and Joe Bellino. The coach was a smal, blond man with invisible eyebrows and pale white skin. He smoked cigars continually, and they often flaked and floated ash over his cherry-red Owls blazer. His whiteness, his transparency, produced a color almost too elegant for a football coach. He reminded me of a tired bed of barbecue coals.
I was a sophomore on the varsity when I first became aware of the meaning of the ''big time'' campaign. Temple was a school that had spent the last 10 years scrapping with Rhode Island and Xavier, but suddenly, with the arrival of Hardin in 1970, that period was history. ''We're going to Japan to play an exhibition game that will be televised worldwide,'' he told the team. ''We've got Penn State on the schedule, and Pitt is just about signed . . . maybe even Notre Dame. We're going big time.''
We went big time in our locker room first. Our equipment became more extravagant; our training facilities, whirlpools and weight room suddenly had a new, impressive look. Coach Hardin had our uniform redesigned -- I have never seen another uniform quite like it -- adding odd stripes on the shoulder pads and checked stripes up the outside seam of the pants. Without the pads, the Owls looked as though they were distinctively dressed for a round of golf.
Those of us who made the traveling squad were also issued red blazers, just like the coach's, which sported the cursive legend TEMPLE OWLS over the pocket. Since only a football team would have 50 or 60 men dressed in red, I always felt the TEMPLE OWLS over the pocket was redundant. But Coach Hardin and his assistants liked our look and were fond of saying, ''If you look like a team, you'll play like a team.''
We did play like a team that season, but other teams played like bigger, better, more brutal teams. I was a second-string quarterback, so the weight of the losses did not fall as heavily on me as they might have, but it still bothered me to know that not only were we imperialists, we were bad football players as well.
I'm not sure when it happened, but I believe it was near the middle of the season when Coach Hardin introduced his masterstroke of propaganda. Too dignified to do it himself, he called us all to the center of the practice field and motioned for one of the assistants to explain the new drill.
What followed was a demonstration of the Hoot Cheer. The assistant coach, a tall, thin man who coached the defensive linemen, moved in front of the squad and ''balanced up.'' He was in the position a center linebacker might take just before the snap, when suddenly he screamed, ''Hoot!'' and brought his hands up in front of his face. His fingers were shaped in O.K. signs, and they looked like a pair of goggles which he pulled away as soon as he balanced up again.
''Good lord, are they serious?'' a friend of mine asked, and we both looked at one another, astonished. The same look was being exchanged throughout the squad. No one had ever seen anything quite like this on a football field.
The Hoot Cheer was explained, and we were told to spread out as we did for agility drills. I stood in the back of the end zone for my first Hoot Drill. The same assistant coach stood in front of the group, called for us to balance up, then yelled, ''Hoot!'' and brought his fingers up in a pair of goggles. The entire squad followed, though only the most zealous could bring themselves to shout.
''Louder,'' some of the assistants called, and we were told to balance up once more.
We practiced for the next five or 10 minutes. We did an entire series of reaction drills, and each time we responded, we yelled, ''Hoot!'' On calls for rapid reactions we yelled, ''Hoot, hooot, hoot- hoot-hoot!'' The drill climaxed with the team running en masse, hooting at the top of its lungs. We were finally told to hoot it into the showers. We ran through the streets of this rough Philly neighborhood screaming, ''Hoot, hoot, hoot!'' at passersby. I realized even then that there was nothing particularly menacing about hoots. They did not carry with them the aggressiveness one would have liked in a rallying cry. The truth was, hooting was slightly fey.
I wasn't sure, at the end of that practice, whether the Hoot Cheer had been a onetime thing or not. In the showers a few of us speculated about what the finger goggles were supposed to be. Were they Owl eyes? Were they some sort of horns, perhaps for the Horned Owl (Temple's mascot was a generic owl, but maybe we were getting specific)? We also wondered if this would lead to a national fad, with the Penn State Lions roaring in their huddles, the Texas Longhorns lowing through their agility drills.
Unreasonably, the Hoot Cheer gained momentum. Coach Hardin persuaded the school's cheerleaders, men and women, to lead the crowds in Hoot Cheers. Until this point, Temple cheerleaders had been rather cool, dancing to jazz or moving around to a little rhythm, but now they were championing Owl Power. Their voices, amplified by megaphones, shouted, ''Hoot, hoot, hoot!'' while their fingers waved O.K. signs high in the air. More often than not it was difficult to get the crowd to join the cheer. It was almost impossible to hoot in a dignified manner, particularly for couples. Even if one partner in the couple felt the urge, he or she had to be prudent and wait to see if the other was ready to charge in. Enormous embarrassment was a possibility. The strangeness of hooting, the odd shape the mouth was forced to make, coupled with the necessary widening of the eyes, was too much to ask of any crowd.
The Hoot Cheer remained part of our drills, but we did not unveil it in public until our September game against Boston College in Alumni Stadium in Chestnut Hill, Mass., and our entire preparation for the game was focused on going big time. If we beat BC, we were told, people would sit up and take notice. Unhappily, BC was itself making a run for the big time, and it had taken on some similarity to the Irish of Notre Dame. The Eagles' uniforms were white and maroon, and their helmets and pants were classic gold, which made their thigh pads look enormous. Indeed, people were already calling them the Irish of the East, and they looked the part as they took the field.
We came out hooting. As we funneled out of the locker room and past the student bleachers, the assistant coaches hovered near us and began shouting, ''Hoot, hoot, hoot!'' in a rhythmic chant. The Temple mascot, a person dressed as a large brown owl with a white T across his chest, began swooping around in front of us as we pooled together near the goalposts. Finally our captain turned to the team, raised his hoot goggles and began leading us in even louder hoots.
We broke then and jammed through the goalposts, passing through two columns of cheerleaders who were hooting back at our hoots. We spread into our positions around the end zone to take calisthenics, but it was too late. Even before we began our jumping jacks, I heard the BC student section ridiculing us, their hands raised and waving. ''Hoot, hoot, hoot!'' they screamed, laughing so hard they had trouble continuing the cheer.
Boston College killed us 49-27 that night. Had they sent an emissary to our bench at halftime, our team would have voted to give up. BC was bigger, stronger, fiercer. They rarely did anything fancy, instead relying on sweep left, sweep right, dive, off-tackle. The view from the Temple bench was trrifying. Owls came off the field with injuries, real or imagined, and it was not uncommon to see linebackers literally carried downfield on the shoulders of BC's pulling guards. It was a shameful, excruciating game.
To my surprise I was sent in during the second half for one play when the first- string quarterback broke a strap on his shoulder pads. I was extremely cold, my arm long since cooled from warmups, and I barely felt the ball when it was snapped. I dropped back, almost fell, then saw the intended receiver far down the field, completely covered. Above all, I wanted to avoid an interception, so I threw the ball as hard as I could and watched it spiral 10 rows up into the stands. A BC defensive lineman laughed.
The game ended as most one-sided games end. The Eagles kept substituting, putting in weaker and weaker players. As we left the field, hundreds of BC students hung over the rails and shouted, ''Hoot, hoot, hoot!'' Two or three of the more rabid members of our squad screamed hoots back, but the Temple hoots had the plaintive quality of a desperate taunt from a weakling who has been chased off the playground.
We continued hooting the rest of the year, but the spirit of the thing was lost. We finished one game over .500 that season, feasting on weak teams and getting beat by better programs. Campus politics moved from football to new topics, and antiwar rallies became less frequent as the weather grew colder. I tore something in my right knee during winter drills and never played again. Hardin left Temple and retired, successfully turning the Owls into a legitimate Eastern football juggernaut that was admired and respected both in Philadelphia and beyond. I think of him now and then when I see Woodsy the Owl on television, dancing with his wings out and singing, ''Give a hoot, don't pollute.'' I wonder if the coach remembers us. Reprinted with permission from Sports Illustrated