FRECKLED AND BROAD-CHESTED, with fading white-blond hair and a robust mustache, "in first-rate health" from years of navigating the austere conditions of the desert Southwest, Dr. Leonard Wood rode in, quite literally, to save the day for Georgia Tech football.
The 33-year-old first lieutenant, newly settled in as a post surgeon at nearby Fort McPherson, arrived on horseback to the Georgia Tech campus in the fall of 1893. He registered as a "sub-apprentice" in a woodworking course -- essentially learning cabinet and furniture making -- so he could qualify as a student.
Any aspirations of becoming a master craftsman, though, were secondary. Unbeknownst to the students at that eight-year-old technical school on the northern edge of Atlanta, the man atop that steed would become their first sports star.
Wood's story has all the elements you've come to expect from today's college football melodrama. An experienced transfer, several years older than his teammates. Accusations of roster tampering. Questions of eligibility and flimsy classes. A fast turnaround to glory, followed by hot-blooded allegations from rival fans.
College football history may not repeat itself, but to paraphrase an old saying, it does rhyme. For all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about the issues threatening the supposed sanctity of the modern game, it's nothing that hadn't happened 130 years earlier. And it happened to ensnare someone who would become Army Chief of Staff and one of the more notable U.S. political and military figures of the 20th century.
Wood competed at Georgia Tech for only one season, but he made quite an impact. Amid fistfights, thrown rocks and a drawn knife, he was the star of the first win in school history, against rival Georgia no less.
The United States observes Veterans Day on Tuesday. On Saturday, some 70 miles from where Wood grew up, his former school faces Boston College at Alumni Stadium in Chestnut Hill.
Haynes King may be Georgia Tech's latest hard-nosed transfer hero, but he was hardly the first. Before NIL, tampering or the transfer portal, there was Wood's spectacular, short-lived football season at Georgia Tech. His exploits during college football's rowdy early days have resonance today.
LEONARD WOOD ORIGINALLY sought a life at sea. Born in New Hampshire and raised in Pocasset, Massachusetts, on the south of Cape Cod, he first tried for an appointment to the United States Naval Academy. When that failed, he considered working on an Arctic expedition or a mackerel boat. A philanthropist instead funded his education at Harvard Medical School, where he enrolled as a 20-year-old in October of 1880.
Wood earned his MD in 1884, then stayed in Boston to intern at Boston City Hospital in the city's South End. His time there lasted only a few months; he was fired for conducting a skin graft on a young patient without supervision. A short-lived stint in private practice followed.
Adrift and low on funds, Wood decided to explore a career in the Army Medical Corps, drawn to its sense of adventure and promise of a stable salary. In June of 1885 -- four months before the state of Georgia chartered a small engineering institute named the Georgia School of Technology -- he accepted a contract for $100 per month from the U.S. Army to serve as an assistant surgeon without rank for the Department of Arizona.
Wood reported to Fort Huachuca in the Arizona Territory, where he participated in the campaign to capture Geronimo in the summer of 1886 -- one of the final military operations of the Apache Wars. Though he was a surgeon and not an army officer, he eventually commanded his own infantry detachment, riding up to 18 hours a day through the rugged terrain and blistering heat of Arizona and northern Mexico. His role in the Apache Wars later earned him a Congressional Medal of Honor.
"No soldier could outwalk him, could live with greater indifference on hard and scanty fare, could endure hardship better, or do better without sleep," Theodore Roosevelt once said of him.
Wood spent the next several years assigned to army bases throughout Arizona, New Mexico and California, treating soldiers and earning the rank of first lieutenant (rising in the rankings, transferring multiple times -- clearly Wood was destined for a career in college football). He met his wife Louise and had their first child, Leonard Wood Jr., while stationed in San Francisco in October of 1892.
Fatherhood wasn't the only life-changing event for Dr. Wood that fall. A week after his son was born, he played in his first competitive football game. Suiting up at left guard for the Olympic Club, an athletic and private social club in San Francisco, Wood's team beat the University of California 20-10.
"Rough game, 3 men laid out," he noted in his diary.
The entry for his son's birth took 14 words. His recap of the Cal game took 20.
Wood quickly became hooked on the sport, finding it a worthy replacement for the strain and exertion of the Apache Wars. Wood played in several more football games over the next four months, either with the Olympic Club or teams he organized on base, including a 14-14 tie against a Stanford team coached by the legendary Walter Camp.
The following summer, in August of 1893, Wood was transferred again, this time to Fort McPherson outside Atlanta. He didn't take the news well.
"Was never more disgusted with a post... a dull, stupid post, absolutely without interest," he wrote in his diary.
He did, however, try to find an outlet for his boredom.
"Found a few interesting people here, and am trying to get up a little enthusiasm in football," he added.
Wood couldn't drum up enough interest to field a team. But 6 miles north of Fort McPherson, a football team at the nascent Georgia School of Technology was coming off a winless inaugural season. And Leonard Wood's restlessness would soon become the team's gain.
IN THE LINGUA franca of higher education, Wood may have charitably been described as a "nontraditional student" when he signed up for a sub-apprentice woodworking course at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1893. Georgia Tech billed its sub-apprentice class as a pathway for students whose schooling opportunities had been limited.
"No formal examinations will be held as the condition of admission," Tech's handbook described at the time, "although the applicant must have such knowledge of the elementary matters that will satisfy the Faculty."
As a graduate of Harvard Medical School, surely Wood met those qualifications, though records are spotty that Wood actually attended his woodworking course.
"Using some part of occasional afternoons for that detail," W.G. Mealor recalled of his classmate's wood shop work in a letter to the 1933 Georgia Tech Alumnus magazine.
Besides, the woodworking class was a means to an end. Like a proto-Cardale Jones, Leonard Wood ostensibly wasn't there to play school. He wanted to play football, and Georgia Tech had a team.
Well, not much of one. Tech's first season in 1892, coached by professor Ernest E. West, was long on enthusiasm but low on results. The "Techs" finished with an 0-3 record, with losses to Mercer, Vanderbilt and Auburn. It would be West's only season as head coach.
Wood offered to become a player-coach and went about organizing the "'93 Football Association." Drawing on his experience with the Olympic Club, he quickly whipped the Techs into form. Will Hunter, a holdover from the 1892 squad, was named captain, though Wood was undeniably the star, playing left guard, halfback and kicker.
He cemented his toughness to his teammates when he opened a cut over his eye during a practice. Wood bandaged it and kept playing; according to his biographer Jack McCallum, after practice, the team found the army surgeon in front of a mirror, suturing his own laceration.
Though he started coaching and practicing earlier in the fall, Georgia Tech's registrar's book showed Wood wasn't officially enrolled until Nov. 2. Coincidence or not, the team's season opener took place two days later.
It would be an historic one -- Tech had its first-ever matchup with the University of Georgia scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 4, in Athens. Though both schools started their football programs the year before, Georgia figured to have little problem with its neighbors from Atlanta. In its 1892 season opener, Georgia trounced Mercer by a score of 50-0. Months later, Georgia Tech lost to Mercer 12-6.
Yet as game day approached, Georgia fans and players began lobbing a series of cheating accusations at Tech. Amateurism was still a murky concept in late-19th-century college football -- without a national governing body, schools and conferences often set their own rules on who was eligible to play -- but Georgia players alleged that less than a third of Tech's players were regular students of the school.
Wood drew the greatest scrutiny. George Butler, Georgia's team captain, made the exaggerated claim that Wood "was said to have participated in fifty intercollegiate football games." Adding to the controversy, the umpire for the game was the brother of Georgia Tech's right guard Charles Nourse.
The groundwork for the rivalry that would become known as "Clean, Old Fashioned Hate" had been laid before a snap was even taken.
The game began at 3:15 p.m. at Georgia's Alumni Athletic Field and consisted of two 30-minute halves. In a sign of things to come, it quickly devolved into a hostile affair. A Georgia fan drew a knife on a Tech player in an effort to intimidate him. Wood received a "cruel blow in the head" from a rock thrown by a spectator. Incensed Georgia students, convinced the umpire was rigging the game in Tech's favor, expressed their indignation through song. Wrote the Atlanta Constitution:
"About 140 students bunched and gave the following cry whenever his decisions struck them as being unfair:
'Well, well, well, Who can tell, The Tech's umpire has cheated like Hell.'"
They saved their greatest vitriol for Wood.
"The people stoned, hissed, and abused Wood in a manner to call a blush to the cheek of every gentleman present," Tech's manager told the Atlanta Journal.
Not surprisingly, a 33-year-old Army surgeon and veteran of the Apache Wars was unfazed by the environment. Wood physically dominated Georgia's players, with Tech consistently running the ball through the center of the line.
"Dr. Wood... could handle his opponent guard, a much lighter man, almost as if he were a child," the Atlanta Constitution noted.
"My guard was so humiliated at his failure to stop Wood that I could never get him to don a uniform again," Butler, the Georgia captain, later wrote. "He quit football thereafter and declined to have his picture taken with the squad or his name appear in the list of the players."
Georgia Tech raced out to an 18-0 halftime lead. Georgia fans grew more riotous as the game slipped out of reach, slinging rocks and mud at Tech players. (The forward pass wouldn't be legalized for another decade, so it was the closest Georgia would come to a throwing game that day.) Wood, who also carried the ball, accounted for three touchdowns, delivering his own version of a Wood working class. And on that autumn afternoon in Athens, Georgia Tech recorded its first win in program history, a decisive 28-6 victory over Georgia.
The scene turned even more chaotic afterward. Fistfights broke out across the field. Georgia fans, still seething from the loss, chased Tech's players down the streets of Athens, shouting and throwing stones at them. Several buckled from exhaustion as they tried to outrun the mob.
Georgia fans ignored the stragglers; the target of their rage was Tech's star player and supposed ringer, Wood. Just like in Arizona, the first lieutenant found himself leading a party through hostile territory.
As they scrambled for safety, Wood found a freight train that was departing for Atlanta. The train's crew members, sensing the danger Wood and his men were in, slowed down and helped the exhausted players aboard. As the train slipped away, Wood reportedly turned and grinned to the angry horde of Georgia fans, his team safe, victory in hand.
The controversy didn't subside after Georgia Tech returned to Atlanta.
"The Varsity Boys Claim Fraud, Asserting That the Technological Team Is Not Composed of Students of That School," blared the headline of the next day's Atlanta Constitution.
"Their running in men to play football who have been out of school for years and matriculating them for the sole purpose of playing and calling them bona fide students is unprecedented in college sport," the article claimed.
Tech called out Georgia's hypocrisy, alleging that Georgia used a paid professional trainer at halfback.
"We regret that Athens played a professional and the Techs played only regular matriculated students," Tech's manager said in a rebuttal to the Atlanta Journal, ending with this fin de siècle flourish:
"The talk from the Athens correspondent about college students only being legitimate members of the football eleven is the quintessence of bosh."
And yet, despite the outrage, Georgia still tried to engage in some early roster tampering. According to Tech's manager, Georgia players allegedly approached Wood after the game, trying to convince him and right guard Charles Nourse -- brother of the umpire in question -- to join them for their game against Vanderbilt the following week.
The first lieutenant, ever a man of integrity, rebuffed the offer.
Georgia Tech played two more games that season, a 6-0 Thanksgiving loss to St. Albans of Virginia followed by a 10-6 win over Mercer in mid-December. Wood didn't play in the Mercer game, though -- the registrar's book showed that he left school by the end of November.
His academic and athletic careers at Georgia Tech lasted less than a month.
Then, in an all-too-familiar scenario for college football fans, Leonard Wood suited up for another team the following year -- and helped blow out a suddenly talent-deficient Georgia Tech team.
BACK ON POST -- and freed from the rigors of woodworking class -- Wood organized a football team at Fort McPherson for the fall of 1894. They occasionally practiced with Tech and beat them 4-0 in a midseason scrimmage. When Georgia declined an invitation for a rematch of their 1893 game, Tech scheduled a game against Wood's Fort McPherson squad in late November.
With only two returning players from the 1893 team, one of whom suffered a broken leg in the season opener, Georgia Tech was no match for the officers from Fort McPherson. According to the Atlanta Constitution, on one play Wood ran the ball 12 yards while a Tech player chewed on his ankle "like a snapping turtle," a tactic that drew a 25-yard penalty. Wood, who played left halfback for Fort McPherson, rushed for a touchdown in a 34-0 win.
Without Wood's playing and coaching acumen, Georgia Tech's performance fell off dramatically. The 1894 team finished with a record of 0-3, getting outscored by a combined 136-0. A 94-0 loss to Auburn remains the most lopsided defeat in school history. Georgia Tech wouldn't field a team for another two years.
Wood's time in Atlanta ended in the fall of 1895, when he accepted an appointment as a military physician in Washington, D.C. His football career ended too, though he did go on to a career of considerable military and political acclaim. He served as the personal physician to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. He commanded the U.S. Army Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War in 1898, when his second-in-command was close friend and fellow college football enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt.
Wood was named the Military Governor of Cuba and Governor-General of the Philippines. By 1910 he was named Army Chief of Staff, the only medical officer ever to hold that position. He was in the running to command the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I before the honor went to Gen. John Pershing.
Wood later turned to politics, unsuccessfully challenging Warren G. Harding for the Republican nomination for president in 1920. He retired with the rank of Major General before passing away from a brain tumor at the age of 66 in 1927.
Wood outranked Tennessee's Robert Neyland, making him the highest-ranking military member to coach in college football. Neyland, a Brigadier General during World War II, is the all-time winningest coach in Tennessee history.
The Army base Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri is named after him. So, too, was the naval transport ship USS Leonard Wood, which earned eight battle stars for its service in World War II. The bronze, 13.5-inch-tall trophy named for another Tech coach, John Heisman, seems like a quaint honor by comparison. But to Georgia Tech fans, those achievements may pale compared to Major Gen. Leonard Wood's greatest legacy: Leading Tech not only to its first win in school history, but a win in the first-ever edition of Clean, Old Fashioned Hate.
Controversy may have shrouded Wood's lone month as head coach and star of the Georgia Tech football team. The only person, it seems, who had nothing to say about his career was Wood himself. There doesn't appear to be a single quote from him about his time at Tech, either in his biography or in newspaper accounts of the day.
The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., houses a collection of Wood's diaries, which includes his time at Fort McPherson in 1893. However, as the library grimly notes in its transcriptions, "Pages 247-248 of the diary are missing." Those pages covered October and November, the exact months Wood attended Tech. If he wrote anything about his playing career at Georgia Tech, it has been lost to the dustbin of history.
Even so, Leonard Wood still occupies a colorful place in college football history.
Andy Demetra is the play-by-play voice of Georgia Tech football and men's basketball. He writes a feature column, "Inside The Chart," on ramblinwreck.com.