December 6, 2003

Fifty college football seasons have been played since Murray Warmath left Mississippi State to become coach of the Minnesota Gophers. This week, Mississippi State hired Sylvester Croom, making him the first black head coach in the 71-year history of the Southeastern Conference.

"I don't know him personally, but what I've been hearing from Mississippi State, he's very highly regarded," Warmath said. "They are very happy to have him.

"After all these years, Mississippi State still makes sure that I get the school paper. I know they had been talking about him for a couple of years as possibly being the next coach."

Warmath had played football at Tennessee. He served as an assistant to Gen. Robert Neyland at his alma mater and then was the line coach for Earl Blaik at Army. He had coached Mississippi State for two seasons.

J.L. Morrill was Minnesota's president and Ike Armstrong was the athletic director in 1953. The M Club was putting heavy pressure on to hire Bud Wilkinson, a Minneapolis native and former Gopher who was having great success at Oklahoma.

The Minnesota job had been open three years earlier. Blaik's recommendation earned Warmath an interview.

"There was snow up to my waist, and it was freezing," Warmath said. "I wasn't sure that was the place for me. [Paul] Giel was on the freshman team then. If I had known how good he was, I would've pushed for the job."

Minnesota wound up hiring Wes Fesler from Ohio State. He quit in December 1953 after a disappointing three-season tenure.

A university connection was much more important in hiring a coach then than in recent decades. Once Wilkinson turned down the job, the Minneapolis Morning Tribune was listing Butch Nash, Phil Bengtson, Milt Bruhn and John Ronning -- all with Minnesota connections -- as the leading contenders.

A story appeared in the Tribune on Jan. 29, 1954, reporting that Morrill and Armstrong had been in Chicago five days earlier to meet with a coaching candidate. The newspaper's best guess was that it was a meeting with Indiana's Bernie Crimmins. It actually was with Warmath, who had accepted the job by phone earlier and was there to work out contract details.

Later on Jan. 29, there was a news conference to announce Warmath as the new coach. Minnesotans knew only that he came from Dixie and had absolutely no Minnesota connection.

Warmath, 91, lives in Bloomington. On Friday, a reporter said to him in a phone conversation: "Reading the newspapers from then, there seem to have been a lot of people not sure they wanted a Southerner as the Gophers' coach."

Warmath chuckled and said: "They were damn sure they didn't want one."

Charles Johnson, the sports editor and columnist for the Minneapolis Star, was the most powerful voice for the skeptics. He wrote that Warmath's two-year record (10-6-3) at Mississippi State was "not good enough to have the man in the street cheering for him as soon as he moves to Minnesota."

Johnson also seemed to feel that Warmath's four-year contract -- calling for $15,000 per year -- was exorbitant for an unproven coach.

"The younger members of the alumni club were fine, but the old-timers . . . they wanted Wilkinson, even if he wouldn't come," Warmath said.

Minnesota's football team was segregated then, as were those in the South when Warmath arrived. By 1958, he had started recruiting black athletes from Pennsylvania, North Carolina and elsewhere.

Warmath was hung in effigy on campus during the 2-7 season of 1959. He survived the attempt to buy out his contract, then took the Gophers to back-to-back Rose Bowls. Murray remained through 1971 -- an 18-year run that took him from Southern outsider to a Minnesota legend.

"Someone very high in the administration came to me in those early years and said, 'Coach, how many black players do you have now?' " Warmath said. "I said, 'I never counted, but if I had two or three more like these young men, we would be really good.'

"He was trying to tell me I had enough black players, and I was saying, 'Take a hike.' "

Warmath came from Mississippi State and wound up showing Minnesotans that being from the deep South didn't necessarily mean what they thought it might. A half-century later, Croom has a chance to use Mississippi State to deliver his bold message to the college football world.