Before We Were Redhawks. (November 1973.)

Nestled down among the rills, farmland and covered bridges of tiny Oxford (pop. 6,500), Miami of Ohio does not seem like a campus with an athletic reputation. You might guess that it would be hard to recruit for anything more formidable than a field-hockey team, so snug and secure is the atmosphere. Watergate is but a distant annoyance; good, black coal cools the energy crisis as it heats the dorms; and unless you leave town the biggest trip of the weekend is 3.2 beer. Miami is just that well insulated. The campus is pure Currier & Ives. Annoyances tend to be minor: the name of the place and its geography, for instance. People keep getting the former mixed up with Florida. Of the latter, Miami's president, Dr. Phillip R. Shriver, will tell you, "As we say about Oxford, all roads don't lead to it. You've got to want to come here."

It is a fact, however, that football players and kindred coveted athletic types gravitate to Miami in quantity envied by its Mid-America Conference rivals and in quality that irritates such Ohio State fans as Woody Hayes, who has coveted not a few of them himself. It is a fact, too, that the Redskins enjoy smashing success. For Miami has a tradition as proud as its locale is rustic, a succession of graduates now in coaching that reads like the first chapter of Matthew. It also has the enviable custom of winning 75% of all its athletic contests.

In football Miami has now defied the axioms of recruiting through 31 consecutive winning seasons, the most recent and finest of which was perfected in Oxford last Saturday before 13,058 fans who did want to get there for the Cincinnati game, a neighborhood war billed as the oldest rivalry west of the Alleghenies.

Pity those who arrived late, for the turning point came on the opening kick-off. Larry Harper, a 5'9" wingback, first hobbled it, then returned it 95 yards for the only score of the afternoon. In the tedious 59 minutes and 45 seconds that followed, the teams combined for 140 offensive plays, most of them blunted, fitful maneuvers.

The rest of the storied tale.

- sent in by "Flagrant"