Riegels' Run

Roy Riegels, the 175 lb. centre and captain-elect of the California football team, sat last week in the warm sun on the sidelines, with 70,000 people staring down at him and shouting. Not one of them would have changed places with him. The Rose Bowl Tournament has come to be in a sense the most significant football event of the year. At the end of each season, the best of the Eastern teams is invited to play the best team beyond the Rockies, in the Rose Bowl, at Arroyo Seco just outside of Pasadena.* This year, after the Army and N. Y. U. had been smashed by Stanford and Oregon Aggies, Georgia Tech was asked to come out West. It seemed at first that a lion was asking a rabbit to come inside his den; when a picked Eastern team last fortnight beat a picked Western team, people thought that perhaps the analogy was that of a bear entertaining a wasp and the odds on the game approached even money.

The West Coast grew excited; big powerful cars rolled up the white roads that run above the California shore. A moving picture actress with a white Pekingese dog and one other companion rode to the game in her black Rolls-Royce. Graham MacNamee, anxious to start talking, came on from the East. On New Year's Day the sun rode over the Rockies in a mist and swung down over the Pacific, a huge bulb set in a reflector that might have been made out of blue tin. Billy Mundy of the Atlanta Journal sent the game over the radio: "They're huddlin' down there . . . it looks like a crapshooters' formation and Lumpkin is wavin' his arms like he wanted a seven, a touchdown . . . there he goes . . . he's clear . . . he's clear ... no, six men got him. . . ."

The thing happened quickly. Thomason of Georgia Tech fumbled on his 25-yard line and Riegels picked up the ball, collided with someone, spun around, and began to run toward his own goalline. No one ran after him except photographers who, quicker than Riegels' teammates, saw their chance not to prevent but to immortalize a tragic event (see cut). At last. Lorn started after Riegels but he did not catch the lumbering centre until they reached the four-yard line. He tried to tell Riegels what had happened but though he shouted the words into his ear, Riegels could not hear him in the roar of the crowd. Lorn grabbed his shoulder and pointed back up the field. On the two-yard line, two Georgia Tech tacklers knocked Riegels across his own goal-line but the referee put the ball six inches ahead of it. On the next play Tech scored a safety, two points, and soon afterwards Roy Riegels ran off the field to the players' bench.

The final score was Georgia Tech 8, California 7. ^

*Not, as erroneously stated in TIME, Dec. 10, in Los Angeles.