Skip to main content

Got $4,000 Just Lying Around?

I am a huge nerd for Lehigh football history - and somebody just put something very intriguing up on Ebay that is a part of that storied history: a scorecard from the 1896 Michigan/Lehigh game.

And for only $4,000, it can be yours.

112 years ago, the "Lehigh XI" made the trip to the midwest to play Michigan's fearsome football team in a classic David-versus-Goliath match at the Detroit Athletic Club field in Detroit, MI (which is still around today and once hosted amateur fields in the late 1800's). It would be the only time Lehigh would play Michigan - and quite unlike Appalachian State last year, Lehigh would get throttled 40-0 from this reprint of the game summary.

Special thanks to the Michigan Victors blog for all the images from this unbelievably rare item - and an extensive description of the item, including scans of every page inside (including this picture of Lehigh's 1896 team). One of the pages features a list of the players on Lehigh's 1896 travel roster - and none of them are over 200 lbs (Becara, the right guard, weighs in at a "whopping" 196 lbs)!

Another gem inside the program include the "hype" for Lehigh in the program, where they do their best to dress up Lehigh's 1-2 record at that time ("More ground was made in this game against Pennsylvania than had been made against her the entire season" - a polite way of describing a 32-0 shellacking). Lehigh's only win was against Rutgers - the Engineers prevailed 44-0. The 1896, a young, inexperienced squad that would take their lumps and end the season 2-5, refused to play Lafayette at the end of the year - the only year in "The Rivalry" from 1884 to the present day when Lehigh and Lafayette didn't face each other. The reason? Lehigh thought that members the 1896 team - filled with early-century superstars Charles "Babe" Reinhart and George "Rose" Barclay - were not real amateur athletes. With Reinhart and Barclay leading the way, Lafayette would be "paper" co-national champions with Princeton in 1896.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Glad you enjoyed the post and photos, and nice to see the Lehigh nation recovered from this game.

G MVictors.com
6:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W
40 comments
Read more

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.
20 comments
Read more

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who
1 comment
Read more