WILL Headlines, News, & Notes
Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Football legends ... architectural pioneers ... war heroes ... and steadfast Illini spirit. The surprising history of Memorial Stadium.
Visit the Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit Web site
Features:
• Never-before-seen footage of Red Grange discussing his legendary performance
• Defining moments in Illini football and stadium history
• Interviews with Dick Butkus, Jim Grabowski and J.C. Caroline
Steam engines, horses and painstaking labor erected Memorial Stadium. So did the spirited fundraising of Illini students, alumni and other fans who contributed $2 million for construction, and of community members who wanted to honor soldiers who died in World War I. The memories built in the 85 years since the stadium opened — from the Galloping Ghost who emerged on dedication day, to crucial wins and losses, to the feats of players with names like Butkus, Grabowski, and Halas — have made it a place of legend.
Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit, tells the surprising history of the stadium, one of the first of the new magnificent sporting venues built on university campuses in the early 1920s.
The documentary looks at how students raised funds to replace the old wooden bleachers at Illinois Field with a stadium both functional and classically grand that would also be a memorial to the war dead. Designed by the same architects who planned Soldier Field, the structure on a swampy southwest campus site was a great human and engineering achievement.
The Illini spirit that helped build the stadium is still present today, said Marching Illini director Peter Griffin. “When we talk about tradition, it’s not always about remembering the past; we re-create it every Saturday afternoon and part of the re-creation is the stadium itself.” It’s more than a building, he said. “It’s something that lives and breathes every time there’s an event in there, and people who attend bring it back to life.”
The documentary, produced by WILL-TV’s John Paul and Denise La Grassa, includes never-before-seen footage from an interview with Harold “Red” Grange produced by Kemper Peacock Productions for the CBS Sports series “In Their Own Words.”
Grange, named the greatest college football player of all time by ESPN earlier this year, describes in the 1982 interview how his fraternity brothers made him play football as well as track and baseball, and how he achieved the dedication day performance in which he ran the opening kickoff back for a 95-yard touchdown, and scored five more touchdowns as Illinois routed Michigan 39-14.
In another interview done for the documentary, ex-Illini J.C. Caroline describes how he has always felt the stadium was part of him, not just because he played football for the Illini, but because he worked as the stadium’s night watchman while in school. Viewers learn:
• The story of the boy who was born and lived at the stadium, riding his bike up and down the ramps and earning a few extra bucks carrying reporters’ typewriters up the stairs to the press box.
• The tragic story of a 30-year-old Urbana husband and father in whose memory one of the stadium’s massive columns was built.
• New insights into Red Grange’s dedication game performance.
• What the stadium means to former players Dick Butkus and Jim Grabowski, along with athletic director Ron Guenther, sports reporter Loren Tate and others.
The documentary also looks at how George Huff and Robert Zuppke built the Illinois football program with innovative ideas, the big game that produced such a huge crowd that fans clamored for a new stadium, and the architecture that made a steel and concrete athletic facility also appropriate as a monument for fallen soldiers. Historic photos and old film footage are interwoven with interviews to tell the stadium’s story.
Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit is made possible by a grant from the Mid-Central Illinois Regional Council of Carpenters. Additional funding was provided by the King Family in memory of Fred L. King.
