HYDE PARK — Amos Alonzo Stagg was an innovator in football at the beginning of the 20th century and Chicago sports legend. Despite his success, someone apparently didn't care to remember the bad times — video of one of his worst seasons has been found in a trash can.
Stagg was the coach of the University of Chicago Maroons from 1896-1932, when the team was an unrivaled force in college ball, taking home six conference championships. The university’s field and a Chicago elementary school still bear his name because of it.
But for all those loss-less seasons, Stagg also had low points with the original “Monsters of the Midway.”
The Chicago Film Archives has digitized a rare 1926 home movie of a game from one of Stagg’s and the Maroons’ worst seasons when the team won its first two games and then lost the remaining six games of the season.
It was not Stagg's worst season, but it marked a period after the conference championship in 1924 when the Maroons consistently finished near the bottom of the Big Ten before Stagg left the university at the end of the 1932 season.
It’s not the best moment to have been captured and then immortalized online for the legendary coach. But the filmmaker may have realized that.
The film was found in a trash can in Indianapolis by Henry "Fritz" Frommeyer, according to Amy Belotti, collections manager and digital archivist at the archive.
She said there was little more known about the film besides that.
Frommeyer said it was actually found in the trash way back in the late 1950s when he was still a teenager and his family used to play it relatively frequently trying to suss out exactly who the family was in the film.
“It was like the ‘Great Gatsby’ almost, with women driving around in their pajamas,” Frommeyer said of one scene of a group of women. “It’s too bad when it ends because you just want more.”
The 10-minute film opens with a happy and clearly very rich family playing golf at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in the spring, piling into some expensive automobiles and vacationing at a cottage on a lake in the summer and dancing on rooftops in the fall.
Frommeyer said he’s still curious about a scene of a woman with a pet monkey and what happened to family in the film.
“I don’t know why they would have thrown it away or who that family was,” Frommeyer said.
The final three minutes are shot on a snowy day from the bleachers at Stagg Field, which was demolished in 1957 to make way for the Regenstein Library.
It’s difficult to tell who the opposing team was from the distance the film was shot from, but there is snow on the ground and it didn’t snow in Chicago until November that year, according to meteorological records.
So it’s likely the game was against the University of Illinois or the University of Wisconsin, both of whom beat the Maroons badly.
It is possibly some of the best footage available of the Maroons during their heyday of innovation under Stagg though.
A keen eye might be able to catch one of the many innovations Stagg brought to the game, from the “Statue of Liberty play” to things now taken for granted in the game like lateral and forward passes and players huddling before a play.
But most of Stagg's breakthroughs came earlier in career when even the wealthy didn’t have much access to a handheld movie camera.
So far, that period of Stagg at the height of his career seems to remain shrouded from view.
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