SPEAKER_07 0:02

On behalf of the Heisman Trophy Trust, and based off of information provided by Deloitte, we're pleased to announce the four finalists for the 2023 Heisman Trophy in alphabetical order. Our first finalist is LSU quarterback Jaden Daniels. He has the highest QBR in the FBS this season. He's been responsible for 50 touchdowns. He's been absolutely electric all season long. And he's looking to join Joe Burrow as the only LSU quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy. This man was a cheap coat all year. Our second finalist is Marvin Harrison Jr., wide receiver from Ohio State. You're talking about a guy that had 14 touchdown catches, tied for second in the FBS, and is the first wide receiver from Ohio State to be a Heisman finalist. Needless to say, he's been out there playing like he's his daddy's son. Our third finalist is none other than Oregon quarterback Bo Nick. His 40 touchdown passes are tied for the most in the FBS, and he is the first finalist from Oregon since the lovely Marcus Mariota, who won the award in 2014. This guy was absolutely on fire for the majority of the year. And it was only this next finalist that was able to beat him twice. I'm talking about Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. Led the FBS in passing yards and led the Huskies to a perfect 13-0 record. And the moniker that I gave him, last year, Big Penix Energy, he showcased that all season long.

SPEAKER_11 1:39

Welcome to the official Heisman Trophy Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Okay, I am fired up because it is Heisman Week. That was 2011 Heisman Trophy winner, Robert Griffin III, announcing the four finalists for the 2023 Heisman Trophy on ESPN's Monday night countdown. Those finalists will have a very busy week. They're going to be doing a lot of media obligations, and they'll get to New York on Friday. That's when we're going to grab them and talk to them, and we're going to have a very special podcast featuring just the Heisman finalists coming out either late Friday night or early Saturday morning. So with the Heisman Trophy ceremony coming on Saturday night, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, this episode is going to be a little bit different than some previous episodes. We're not going to interview anybody. What we're going to do is kind of give you a Heisman Trophy ceremony primer. We're going to talk about how the vote works, history of the ceremony, some great Heisman speeches, and actually we are going to have a guest contribute to that segment, former presidential speech writer and current Atlantic magazine writer David Frum will be commenting and giving us his expertise on what makes a great speech. But first, with our four Heisman Trophy finalists for 2023 set, and incidentally two of the four finalists, Marvin Harrison Jr. and Jaden Daniels, have both appeared on the official Heisman Trophy podcast this year, and we like to think it brings a little bit of good luck. So let's get the show rolling by asking this question. What exactly is a Heisman finalist? It's a question as old as time. It is a vexed generation. Like the origins of Stonehenge or the Pyramids. We can put a man on the moon, but as a sports nation, we still have trouble defining exactly what is a Heisman finalist. Of course I'm kidding slightly. But I'm also here to help. At its core, a Heisman finalist is an NCAA college football player who receives an invitation to attend the annual Heisman ceremony held in New York City each December. Whether that player shows up or not, he is considered a finalist. When was the first Heisman finalist, you ask? 1982. Yep, our 2022 ceremony year was only the 40th anniversary of our first Heisman finalists, even though the trophy dates back to 1935. Prior to 1982, only the winner of the Heisman was invited to New York, days after the winner was announced. So there was no such thing as a Heisman finalist before 1982. There were countless amazing Heisman runner-ups and third place finishers prior to 1982, guys like Anthony Davis in 1974 and Joe Heisman in 1970, and many winners who also placed in the top three or four in other years, but none are considered finalists. Sorry, Joe. But starting in 1982, multiple candidates were invited to take part in a live TV show that accompanied the announcement of the winner. Herschel Walker, John Elway, and Eric Dickerson were the first Heisman finalists. Now that's a pretty impressive group, even though Elway did not attend the ceremony. Here's the winner's announcement from that year, 1982. Walker, you remember, was third in the voting in 1980 and second in 1981, and would have been a three-time finalist had the tradition started two years earlier. Alas, the number of finalists varied from year to year until just recently, when in 2021 the Heisman announced it would consistently invite four finalists each season. Prior to that, the Heisman Trust would digest the voting and do its best to find a natural cutoff point where there was a sizable drop-off in voting totals, with three being the minimum number of finalists because you can't really have a show with just two. Put another way, they tried to mind the gap. So getting into the weeds a bit, we can dig into some sample years to break it down. In the 2008 Heisman vote, Florida's Tim Tebow finished third with 1,575 points. The fourth place finisher, Graham Harrell of Texas Tech, totaled 213 points. Because of the huge gap between these two totals, Harrell was not invited to the ceremony, which featured just three finalists. In 2010, Kellen Moore's fourth place finish of six hundred and thirty-five points brought him much closer to the Michael James's third place finish of nine hundred and sixteen, so Moore of Boise State was included as one of the four finalists. The fifth place finisher in 2010, Justin Blackman of Oklahoma State, had just 105 points. There was a clear demarcation of support between him and Moore, so the finalists were capped at four. There have been thirteen finalist foursome since 1982, a trio of finalists twelve times, and in eleven years there were five finalists. The Heisman record for finalists ballooned to eight in nineteen eighty-nine when invites to New York City were delivered to Andre Ware, Anthony Thompson, Major Harris, Tony Rice, Darien Hagen, Dee Dowis, Emmett Smith, and Blair Thomas. Eight was definitely enough. Ware, the eventual winner, was among four players who were unable to attend. Ware had a good excuse, of course, as Houston had a game at Rice the same day as the ceremony. Dowas, Smith, and Thomas also did not attend. So which schools have had the most Heisman finalists? Oklahoma and Alabama are tied for the most Heisman finalists with eleven, while Miami and Ohio State have had nine apiece. The Hurricanes had all theirs between 1984 and 2002, while the Buckeyes have had five since 2018. Now that we know how the vote works, let's look into a little history of the vote itself. When Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman in 1935, there was only 65 electors. Like today, a first place vote was worth three points, a second place vote was worth two points, and a third place vote was worth one point. Of course, at this point, the Heisman Trophy wasn't even called the Heisman Trophy. The telegram that Berwanger received for the Downtown Athletic Club invited him to New York City to receive an award for being the most outstanding player east of the Mississippi River. It wasn't until the following year that they renamed the trophy the Heisman Memorial Trophy after John W. Heisman, the downtown athletic club's director who had just died that year. So technically Larry Kelly, the second Heisman Trophy winner, was the first one to receive a trophy that was named after John W. Heisman. Okay, back to the voting. The Heisman caught on fast with the college football world to the point where just four years after it was first awarded, Niall Kinnock of Iowa said in his acceptance speech that, quote, every football player in these United States dreams of winning this trophy. By that point, the number of voters in the Heisman electorate had increased to 700, and they were distributed across five regions the Far West, the South, the East, the Midwest, and the Southwest. By 1948, when Doak Walker won the Heisman, the number of electors increased to 900. Some of the early landslide wins include 1942, when George's Frank Sinkwich beat Paul Cavernali of Columbia by over 800 points. In 1943, Notre Dame's Angelo Bertelli had more points than the eight players who finished behind him. And in 1949, the largest man to ever win the Heisman, Notre Dame's Leon Hart, beat out Charlie Justice of North Carolina by over 500 points. The closest vote prior to 1950 came in 1944, when Ohio State's Les Horvath beat out Glenn Davis of Army by just 125 points. That was the slender margin that prevented Army's Mr. Outside from being the first two-time Heisman trophy winner. He finished second the following year to his teammate, Mr. Inside Doc Blanchard, before finally winning it in his own right in 1946. The number of electors, which had hovered around 900 for several years, ballooned up to 1,222 in 1952. It stayed in that range until 1976 when it dropped to 1,050, and it stayed at 1,050 until 1988, when it dropped to 917. Every vote since has had between 917 and 929 voters contingent upon the number of past winners who were alive. And before those vote totals dropped below 1,000, the year with the biggest landslide was 1968. That's when O.J. Simpson of USC totaled 2,853 points, to Leroy Keyes of Purdue's 1,103 points, a 1,750 point margin. Now that margin of victory held up as a Heisman landslide record until 2019, when Joe Burrow of LSU beat out Jalen Hurts of Oklahoma by 1,846 points. And most impressively, he did it in a Heisman electorate that had 300 fewer voters. Another structural change came to the voting process in 1976 when the number of Heisman regions expanded from five to six, with the addition of the Mid-Atlantic region. So really the way the Heisman has been selected has been pretty steady since that point, with one massive exception. Prior to 2002, every Heisman ballot was returned to the Downtown Athletic Club by Standard Mail. Because the Heisman is awarded in early December, that meant that in order to ensure receipt of the ballots before the deadline, the ballots had to be postmarked before some games were being played. And this resulted, no doubt, in a few instances where some late games might have had an impact on the outcome of the Heisman Trophy vote. The best example of this probably came in 1974, when USC's Anthony Davis had a monster game against Notre Dame on November 30th, but this was after the voting deadline had already passed. So Ohio State's Archie Griffin won his first of two Heismans with 1,920 points to Davis's 819. There's also another interesting example that lives on in Heisman lore that didn't cost a player the Heisman, but rendered a legendary game kind of irrelevant to the vote. I'm talking about Doug Flutie of Boston College when he threw his dramatic Hail Mary to beat Miami at the end of the 1984 season, with it being such a dramatic and amazing play, the story that we often hear is that this won Doug Flutie the Heisman, but the votes were already in. So Doug Flutie didn't need the Hail Mary to win the Heisman, he had already won it. And he won by nearly 1200 points over Keith Byers of Ohio State. It makes you wonder, if that game had happened before the votes were due, would he have won in the greatest landslide in Heisman history? Whatever the case, by 2002, email had become a fact of life in the world, and so Heisman voters had that option to send their ballots in by email. Now there were still some people who didn't use email at that time, so there was still the mail option, but in 2007, email became the only option. And as a result, there's just a tiny percentage of Heisman voters every year who vote before the final games are done. Although technically every Heisman Trophy voter that exists votes before the final games are played because the Army Navy game is always played on the same day that the Heisman is awarded. Okay, let's very quickly go into some Heisman voting records. We've already mentioned Joe Burrow's record landslide in 2019, but Burrow also holds the record for the most points as a percentage of possible points, with 93.8%, and he also has the record for most ballots named as a percentage of total ballots at 95.47%. So basically Joe Burrow in 2019 is the gold standard for Heisman landslides. But what about the closest Heisman votes? In 1961, Ernie Davis of Syracuse won by just 53 points over Bob Ferguson of Ohio State. That mark held for 24 years until 1985, when Bo Jackson of Auburn beat out Chuck Long of Iowa by just 45 points. Now that record also lasted for 24 years until 2009, when Mark Ingram of Alabama beat out Toby Gerhardt of Stanford by remarkable 28 points. So a slight shift in just a handful of ballots would have given Toby Gerhardt the Heisman for Stanford and prevented Alabama from winning its first. So that just about wraps up a little history of the Heisman vote. And I'm kind of curious how this year's vote might wind up in the pantheon of Heisman finishes.

SPEAKER_08 13:50

Hey guys, this is Barry Sanders, the 1988 Heisman Trophy winner, and you are listening to the official Heisman Trophy podcast.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Hey college football fans, tickets to the 2023 Heisman Trophy Dinner Gala are now on sale. The event takes place in New York City on Sunday, December 10th, the day after the Heisman Trophy ceremony. The guest of honor for the gala is the 2023 Heisman Trophy winner, as well as the 50th anniversary winner John Capoletti, the 25th anniversary winner Ricky Williams, and the 10th anniversary winner Jameis Winston. Plus, we'll also be honoring the 2023 Heisman Humanitarian Award winner. Just go to Heisman.com to purchase tickets and witness Heisman history. Take an even deeper dive into Heisman lore by going to Heisman.com, home to all things Heisman, including news, bios, and the latest on all the winners, plus updates on the Heisman Trophy Trust and its charitable mission. It's the A to Z for Everything Heisman, from Alan Amici to Danny Werfel. We really need a Heisman winner whose name begins with Z. That is the Heisman theme song by Will Wells. You of course will hear it on Saturday night when the Heisman ceremony gets underway. You know, it's quite an event, the Heisman Trophy Ceremony. Sometimes it's full of drama, sometimes it's merely a celebration of the winner, a coronation, if you will. But it's always great to see all the finalists there, uh dressed in their best, representing their schools along with their coaches in most cases. In general, this culmination of Heisman Week has become interwoven into the fabric of college football. It's something we do every year, and it's just a great tradition. And you know, like most traditions, it's something that has evolved over time. So let's look at that. Let's look at the history of the Heisman Trophy ceremony. Now, if you're listening to this podcast, you're eagerly anticipating the crowning of the 2023 Heisman Trophy winner this weekend. I'm right there with you. We all have our theories of who will win. We're not here to speculate, and we will wait as patiently as we can for ESPN's live Heisman Trophy broadcast, which originates from jazz at Lincoln Center starting at 8 p.m. Eastern on Saturday night. But what, you may ask, was the genesis for this huge national broadcast, naming the winner of arguably sports's greatest individual award? Well, it all started as a luncheon. As most of you probably know by now, in 1935, the University of Chicago's J. Burwanger became the first winner of the Heisman. Back then it was called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy. A year later, the 13.5 inch statue became known as it is today as the Heisman Memorial Trophy. Berwanger found out he was the winner of this brand new award on November 29th, but he wasn't in New York until December 10th for the midday affair that was to honor him. He later said the biggest thrill of winning the award was getting to fly in an airplane for the first time en route to Manhattan. As thrills go in the 1930s, that was pretty swell. For the next four decades, Heisman winners were pretty much honored in the same way. Their winner was announced in late November or early December, following the annual Army Navy game, with the Heisman Trophy presentation typically 7 to 10 days later. Not until 1977 was the announcement made on the same date as the trophy given, when Texas's Earl Campbell was named the winner at the end of an hour-long CBS special. And it wasn't just your run-of-the-mill special, it was a variety show. And I don't know whose idea it was, but I'm here for it.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

That's the way to do the bossity drag.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yes, that is Farah Fawcett doing a song and dance at the Heisman Trophy ceremony in 1977. The show featured a weird mix of celebrities and sports figures. And in addition to announcing the Heisman Trophy winner, they also announced the winners of the other major awards in college football. Here's 1956 Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornig with Mr. October, Reggie Jackson of the New York Yankees.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

A little fast one. Who could, you know, 36 home runs in a World Series forget it?

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Go on, Reggie. He's a good baseball player.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Jay Brewwanger was on hand to give the Heisman to Earl Campbell.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Now to announce the winner of this year's Heisman, we have someone very special here with us tonight. A man who was the first recipient of the Heisman Trophy 43 years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jay Berwanger.

SPEAKER_12 18:42

Thank you. Thank you, OJ. It is indeed a pleasure and an honor for me to be able to announce the 43rd recipient of the uh Heisman Trophy, and it goes to Earl Campbell of the University of Fiction.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

I just had to share that ceremony as there's never been another Heisman Trophy ceremony quite like that one. Of course, it wasn't a live announcement. It was taped, and Earl Campbell knew he was the winner going in. And of course, there were no other Heisman Trophy finalists present at the show. But they knew how to have fun in the late 70s, didn't they? It wasn't until 1981 that a Heisman Trophy winner was announced live on national television. USC's Marcus Allen was in New York City for the announcement, which took place at the Downtown Athletic Club. And this really set the stage for what was to come the next year, 1982, which was the beginning of the Heisman Trophy ceremony as we know it today. For the first time, there were Heisman Trophy finalists who were invited to New York, and they took part in the ceremony that was shown live on national television. That was the year Herschel Walker won the trophy, and Eric Dickerson and John Elway were also finalists, but only Eric Dickerson showed up to join Walker for the show. It was really a far cry from the way players used to be notified that they had won the Heisman. It used to be telegrams and phone calls. 1940 winner Tom Harmon of Michigan found out about the award during a radio appearance with Eddie Cantor in New York, but he had to come back two weeks later to receive the actual trophy. When Terry Baker of Oregon State learned of winning the award in 1962, he reportedly said, No kidding? That's great. I'm a very lucky boy. Then he added, I've got to get back to class. So the new era of the Heisman Trophy ceremony that started in 1982 just brought a whole different element to it. That doesn't mean there weren't also some interesting ceremonies before that.

SPEAKER_14 20:28

It's probably the biggest sports uh dinner in New York. It's you know, a couple thousand people had it every year, and all the Heisman winners were invited back every year. So it's a great brotherhood. These guys, uh, it's amazing. Guys that played, you know, years and years ago are still famous because of the Heisman Trophy.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

That's Hall of Fame sportscaster Don Cricky, who's been close with the Heisman for decades and served as MC of the awards receptions for about a quarter of a century, starting with the 1973 ceremony that featured John Capoletti's famous speech as well as an introduction from Vice President Gerald Ford.

SPEAKER_14 21:01

Well, the first one I was at was in 1973, and when John Capoletti won, it was a very, very emotional dinner because uh John's younger brother Joey, who was sitting at a table right in front of the Dais, was critically ill with cancer. And John gave a speech uh that was very heart-moving. He dedicated a season to his brother Joey and won the Heisman, and the room was just floored by the emotion of the whole Capoletti family and what uh John was going through in his course what his brother Joey was. And I thought to myself, I was MC in the dinner, who could follow up on this? And uh, and we had some of the good, Bishop Fulton Sheehan, who had a uh nationally syndicated television show, top ten show, and he got up and I don't know what all he said, but he he had some healing remarks, and it was nobody was ever at the highs moon, that night will ever forget it.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Listening to Creaky recall it, the high. Heisman gallows were an almost who's who of mid-century American sports pop culture, with sports celebrities like Yogi Berra, Jim Brown, Bear Bryant, and celebrities like John Wayne in attendance. Since then, and not counting that 1977 interlude, the Heisman Trophy Ceremony has never really recaptured that glimps and glamour of York. Instead, in the post-1982 era of the live ceremony with finalists, the focus has been where it should be, on the players and their accomplishments. So there have only been a handful of changes to the ceremony since 1982. Probably the biggest change came in 2001, following the attacks on 9-11.

SPEAKER_10 22:33

Well, you know, uh Downtown Thought Club is right there. It was gone. I mean, there was not much that you know a lot of uh soot, I guess, or smoke and a lot of damage uh to the building.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

That's 2001 Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch out of Nebraska recalling what it was like to be in Lower Manhattan just a few months after the terror attacks.

SPEAKER_10 22:52

It was you know, I didn't get to experience it like everyone else did that won the Heisman Trophy and get to you know have their family there and the event and the TV show and everything kind of centered around the DAC. Um they brought they brought it up to the uh the Marriott Marquee. And so um that you know, that was different. You know, they re- but they did one heck of a job. I mean, uh you know, seeing pictures of the downtown athletic club and and they they recreated it. I mean, they did a tremendous I I I take my hat off to the people that uh uh worked effortlessly on that. Um they they did a tremendous job on recreating what what the DAC looked like and uh you know what that's a short time uh to be able to put that together uh was was pretty spectacular.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Since the demise of the Downtown Athletic Club, the Heisman Trophy Ceremony has mostly been held at a theater near Times Square. In 1994, ESPN gained exclusive rights to broadcast the ceremony, and over the years their on-air talent has done a fantastic job of presenting the show. The last couple seasons it's been no different with the one exception that the ceremony has moved up to Lincoln Center. And that's your history of the Heisman Trophy ceremony. We hope you tune in on Saturday to ESPN to watch this year's episode. Who will win the Heisman? Who will walk up to that stage and give their speech? Speaking of speeches, there's been some great Heisman acceptance speeches over the years, which if you think about it is kind of amazing because these are football players, very young men, who uh haven't really been trained in the arts of writing speeches, much less giving them. Giving a speech in front of millions of people on live television is a very tough thing to do.

SPEAKER_09 24:34

An effective speech in general projects uh the whole spirit, not just the message, but the spirit of the speech maker from a podium to an audience, uh from one side of a camera lens to another side of a camera lens, you put more into it than just the words. It's it's a whole personality. And this is maybe the hardest thing uh to teach because people think of speeches as text. And uh that's just not true anymore. That hasn't been true since the invention of the microphone and the camera.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

That's David Frum, a former presidential speech writer who is now a writer for The Atlantic magazine. David is a Canadian and doesn't really have much exposure to college football, but I sent him the text and audio of a few standout Heisman speeches so he can tell us why they were so effective. One of those standout speeches was that of 1939 Heisman Trophy winner Nial Kinnock, who, in a time of growing isolationism in America, made a political statement about the war in Europe that had begun just a few months earlier. Here's the speech in its entirety.

SPEAKER_03 25:31

Thank you very, very kindly, Mr. Hope. It seems to me that everyone is letting their superlities run away with them this evening. But nonetheless, I want you to know that I'm mighty, mighty happy to accept this trophy this evening. Every football player in these United States dreams about winning that trophy and of this fine trip to New York. Every player considers that trophy the acne in recognition of this kind. And the fact that I am actually receiving this trophy tonight almost overwhelms me. And I know that all those boys who have gone before me must have felt somewhat the same way. From my own personal viewpoint, I consider my winning this award as indirectly a great tribute to the new coaching staff at the University of Iowa headed by Dr. William. I wish that they might all be with me tonight to receive this trophy. I want to take this grand opportunity to thank collectively all the sports writers and all the sportscasters and all those who have seen Pitt and seen their way clear to cast a ballot in my favor for this trophy. And I also want to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Prince and his committee, the Heisman Award Committee, and all those connected with the Downtown Athletic Club for this trophy and for the fine time that they're showing me. And not only for that, but for making this fine and worthy trophy available to the football players of this country. Finally, if you'll permit me, I'd like to make a comment, which in my mind is indicative perhaps of the greater significance of football and sports emphasis in general in this country. And that is, I think I was born on the gridirons of the Midwest and not on the battlefield of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the players of this country would much more, much greater, struggle in the fight to win the height of an award than the QA beginner. Thank you.

SPEAKER_09 28:21

Well, there's there's always a question of appropriateness because you you need to remember when when you when you're there, and this would be whether it's an Academy Award or a football event, why are people there to listen to you? In what capacity have you taxed their time and patience? And maybe there's something you need to say, but maybe you also need to think um if they're here um to honor me in one capacity, and I tax their time and patience with something different, uh I I better consider that because I I may be alienating half the road um at over at a time and place when it's not appropriate to alienate them. There's a there's a saying um that a gentleman is someone who never gives offense unintentionally. So sometimes you need to shock people, sometimes you need to say this is something they need to hear whether they want to hear it or not. So December 1939, so Poland has been bombed to pieces, you know, Warsaw has been ruined and shattered, and and the Germans are poised to attack. At that time in December 39, no one knows that France is going to fall, but you're expecting a nightmarish World War I like conflict or conflagration on the battlefields of Western Europe. Like is that is that really the point you want to make? And are you quite confident that uh the offense you're giving to some portion of the audience is is worth it? So I guess when when you have this extraneous message, you have to really think hard about people aren't gonna like it. Am I gonna run that risk? Is this a big enough reason uh for me to do something that maybe isn't fitting with the spirit of the event?

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Kinnock without a doubt pulls off this speech in eloquent fashion, even with its potentially uh controversial subject matter at the very end. But just two years later, it was quite the different story when Bruce Smith of Minnesota gave his acceptance speech just a few days after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

SPEAKER_06 30:12

Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, and members of the Downtown Athletic Club, ladies and gentlemen, so much of emotional significance has happened in such a brief space of time that the task of responding on such a case leaves me at a loss to assign.

SPEAKER_09 31:22

Well, so so many people of that generation um ch changed their minds. Well, he's also speaking to something that was very much in the air at that time, because you know, you look back on it, and Pearl Harbor was about the stupidest thing the Japanese could have done. Uh the way the Japanese talked themselves into this crazy um into self-destructive uh attack was by propagandizing to their people that the Americans were soft and decadent and flabby and and who could bomb their fleet and nothing bad too bad would have speaking as a kind of um uh message that Americans had heard from their now enemies in the time leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Arguably the most famous speech in Heisman history came 32 years later, in 1973, when Penn State's John Capaletti won the Heisman Trophy. After being introduced by Vice President Gerald R. Ford, Capaletti gave a somewhat normal speech that finished off with emotional, gut-wrenching words about his younger brother Joey, who had leukemia. Here's the tail end of Ford's introduction of Capaletti, who, by the way, is being celebrated at this year's Heisman Dinner Gala for the 50th anniversary of his Heisman Trophy victory. Following Ford is Capaletti's speech in its entirety.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

The Heisman Trophy symbolizes individual athletic accomplishments in football. And we shouldn't apologize for it, we should be very proud of it. A player wins it, as John Cappelletti won it, and all of these others, through the intense competition with other players, the length and the breadth of our country. And he wins it because he puts a little extra effort into the accomplishments for himself, but primarily for his team. He told how he had been ready to quit the Penn State team in 1972 because he wasn't picking up enough yardage. But he kept trying through the season of 1972, and he finally gained 124 yards against Illinois. And let me quote what John said. I learned a lesson that if you stick with something longer than you think you can, things will work out for you. End book. And I think that's right.

SPEAKER_13 34:31

A week ago or ten days ago when the Heisman Trophy was announced, uh, since then I haven't had too much time to think about what it has meant. Um I think listening to the former Heisman Trophy winners tonight, and seeing everyone here to share in it and congratulate me on it, I think that's that's one of the first steps that uh I've taken in in the meaning of this trophy. Uh I'm sure that the people behind me know much more about it than I do, and uh I'm happy for any advice that that they've given tonight and on what to expect from the future with this trophy. I have had time to think about uh some things that have put me up here tonight, uh things that have happened in my life, and um I'd like to reflect a little bit on them now. I think the first thing that uh happened to me was God blessed me with uh a great deal of talent and um a lot of uh people to compliment that talent. Um my family uh as everyone's met, mostly I think I guess uh they're just great people, and uh I'm very happy to have shared in my lifetime with them. Um my brothers and sisters, it's uh have been wonderful. Uh just being with you the past few years, they've they've always been behind me, and um I can't express that enough. Um my mother and father, there isn't a greater couple around, I don't think. And uh I know my mother always cries at these affairs, so I'm gonna try not to. Um she's a very, very strong woman and very dedicated not only to her children and husband, but also to uh God, and I think this helps her out uh with putting up with us and going through all that she's gone through. Um example, I think one small example of this is uh a personal thing with with me that I think uh a lot of people may have noticed that my my legs are as straight as arrows and that uh I have no trouble walking now or running now. But at one time in my life I I couldn't walk without tripping. And uh my mother uh not only brought me through this, but uh she brought just about every member of our family through something like this. Uh my father is a very quiet man. Uh he's been a great father to all of us. Um he asked me the other day uh when I was home one of a few times uh how he thought I felt of him as a father. And uh I wouldn't say much to him then, because it's it's hard to express things like that, but um there is no greater person and no person I have that more respect for than this man. I think the the next event that uh was most important to me in my life was uh when I went to high school and I was fortunate enough to be coached by a man uh who dedicated himself not only to his players on the field, but uh very much so off the field. Um he was a great lover of football, but he'd sacrifice anything for a teammate or a player when he was playing and when he was coaching. Uh he passed away this summer, uh Jack Godshawk. But I think in the in the 43 years that he was here on Earth, he did more for uh young people and people he was associated with than I think most of us get a chance to do in a lifetime. The next next step, I think, was I was going to Penn State. Uh it was a hard decision making a choice of colleges at the time. I didn't know that much about it. But I think one thing that swayed me uh was the man sitting to my right, and uh that's Coach Paterno. When I was being recruited, he uh came down to my house. I think he was not only on a recruiting trip, but he was looking for a good meal, Italian meal.

SPEAKER_05 39:38

Um when he came in the door, um he he looked over and on the couch.

SPEAKER_13 39:53

My brother, Joseph, was sitting, was lying there. He was very ill at the time, and more so than usual. And uh instead of that's not a joke, but um, Coach Baterno was more concerned and did more talk more about what he could do for my brother than what he could do to get me at Penn State. And uh for this I'm very thankful and I'm glad I had to show had the chance to show some appreciation of this man in the last four years. I think everybody uh here knows uh mostly about his coaching accomplishments at Penn State. The his record is is a great one, probably the greatest in the country. But uh he's carried on a great tradition at Penn State, I think, which started with uh Rip Angle. And uh he's more concerned with young people after they get out of school and while they're in school, what he can do for them to make better lives for them, not only uh on the football field, but uh in life itself. I think uh Vice President Ford said uh you can't compare uh life to a football game, but I think you can compare a football game to life. And uh this is what he's tried to show us in my four years there, and in the years he's been there coaching and teaching. And uh I don't think there's a more dedicated man anywhere uh concerned with young people and a better teacher of life on and off the field. The next group of people I'm going to talk about I've been with for uh four years and I've played with them. They're my teammates this year, the seniors, and the co-captains who you've met down here. I don't think I've been closer to a group of people who I've worked with, sweated with, and have done more with in four years than I've done with anybody in my lifetime. I don't think I could have gotten any closer to the group that I've been with. And I think that um it takes a lot of hard work to do what we've done this year, and I'm just glad that I did my part for my teammates and that we've had the season we've had, and we've had the closeness that we've had, and for them I'm thankful for that. Also, there's a coach here tonight who I'm very proud of. He's our backfield coach at Penn State. His name is Bob Phillips, and I think uh he's mainly responsible for a lot of the attitude that goes on at Penn State among the players. He's uh a very dedicated man uh to his work, but he goes about it with a a healthy and just a bright attitude, and uh he uh can relate this to the players to the point where you want to do things for them, and you take the attitude that you're not out there just to get something finished and go in and take a shower, but you're out there to to accomplish something. And uh people like him are the reason that I think that a lot of the players and um I know myself we're out there this year doing the things we did, and I'd like to thank him for that. The next part, um, I'm very happy to to do something like this. I thought about it since the Heisman was announced ten days ago. And this is dedicated trophy that a lot of people have earned, I've earned, my parents. The people I've mentioned and numerous other people that are here tonight and been with me for a long time. The youngest member of my family, Joseph, is uh very ill. He has leukemia. And if I can dedicate this trophy to him tonight and give him a couple days of happiness. This is worth every day. As most of the athletes do, you get your bumps and bruises, and it's a terrific battle out there in the field. But it's only for me, it's on Saturdays, and it's only in the fall. For Joseph, it's all year round, and it's a battle that's unending with him, and he puts up with much more than I'll ever put up. And I think it just drove me as more of his in his mind because he's been a great inspiration to me. I'd just like to thank everybody here tonight for putting up with me. I don't think I'll ever ever forget this.

SPEAKER_09 46:22

And it makes a kind of sense to me. I I wrote a history of the 1970s, um, it was published about 20 years ago, and one of the themes of that book was that it was a period the people who'd been through the Depression and the Second World War bit back a lot of the emotion. They had so much emotion to discuss. Um and there's a famous quote from uh Ernest Hemingway, um, I guess after the First World War, where he said that the that when you confronted what they had confronted, that words like glory and honor and sacrifice seemed cheap and hollow. And so there was a style, and everyone who's seen the series Mad Men can see people performing in um in this style of bite it back, don't be don't be too religious in public, don't be too emotional in public, don't show grief or joy too much in public, just every everything is kind of wry and restrained and sardonic. And generations shift and then generational styles change. And suddenly in the 1970s, we have this opening, right? It would have been very familiar to people of the 1870s, by the way, uh, but very strange to people of the 1930s and 40s. Um we have this opening where emotion begins to flow again. And the power, I think, of of that uh speech is when you read it, he doesn't say that much. Uh but when you hear it, you can hear how much feeling there is behind what is said. And and that's that's an example of how um the whole person can uh add so much to attacks that maybe on its own face, you wonder why did this have the effect it did.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

I asked Sprom what makes these kinds of speeches so powerful? Why do they stick with us? Why are they ingrained uh in our memory?

SPEAKER_09 48:04

Well, I I confessed to you earlier my my general ignorance of sport, but my impression is that from a very early time Americans formed cults of personality around baseball players. And more recently they formed cults of personality around basketball players. Um and both of those sports are ones where you see the face while the person uh um is on the field or uh in uh uh in action and also at their great, great moments, especially the hitter, uh and especially the basketball um uh scorer, uh they are acting seemingly alone. Um and in fact the hitter is uh the the that most powerful of all scenarios, the man against the the one against the many. There he is, you know, facing a whole field of opponents um and he has his solo act. So that's very uh that's very inspiring. A football player, of course, is all encased, not um face hidden, head hidden, body distorted, and he's part of a line against another line. Um and that that's what gives the sport, I suppose, it's its tactical complexity. Um but it also d robs the player of the individuality and and um makes him a little bit less of a focus of personality than a baseball or basketball player would be. And so these moments where they come out from behind the mask would be correspondingly powerful.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

In all my years of following the Heisman Trophy, one thing I've noticed is that in the days leading up to the Heisman Trophy, many of the winners are shy in front of media or they don't speak well. But when they get up on that stage, they transform, they transform into this new person. And it's really an amazing thing to observe. And I've always wondered how this happens so often at the Heisman Trophy ceremony. Here's Frum's explanation for why this happens.

SPEAKER_09 49:51

But of all people in the world, of all people in the world, pro athletes or athletes should be the best prepared to deal with that situation because uh their job every day is going onto a field with no idea whether they're going to come off a winner or a loser. So um you know, it it it's it's one thing to be a politician who is preparing for two or four years for a competition and maybe the one and only time in their life where they either win or lose. And it's another thing to be uh an athlete. I mean, literally every time you do this, this is what happens, you win or lose. So you you're you should be ready for that. And um so I would think an athlete would be well out of position to have uh one uh the concession speech and the acceptance speech, both prepared, both ready, and be psychologically prepared to meet both contingencies.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

Well, coming up this Saturday night, the 2023 Heisman Trophy winner will deliver his speech in front of millions, and maybe, just maybe, it will be something we remember for a long, long time. Well, that'll do it for this week's show. We hope you enjoyed the deep dive into Heisman history. Special thanks goes out to Don Cricky and David Frum for their contributions to this episode. Be sure to check back on Friday night. We're going to have the four Heisman Trophy finalists on a special podcast. And if you have any questions you'd like me to ask them, you can reach me at pod at Heisman.com. That's pod at Heisman.com. And really, for all your other Heisman needs, be sure to check out Heisman.com so you can be up to date on the latest with Heisman Week. So long, everybody. The official Heisman Trophy podcast streams every Wednesday during the college football season and is hosted, co-produced, edited, and engineered by Chris Houston. Paul Goldberg is the executive producer and editor. Special shout out to Isaac Lohenkron, and big thanks to the Heisman Trophy Trust and its executive director, Rob Whalen, and Associate Director Tim Henning. The official Heisman Trophy podcast can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcast. You can also find clips of our show on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Just go to Heisman Trophy.