Football Champion
A halfback, Shell was the captain of the 1939 championship USC football team, which played twice in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, having defeated the previously powerhouses Duke University in 1939 and the University of Tennessee in 1940. Among his teammates were quarterback and Most Valuable Player Ambrose Schindler, with whom Shell maintained a lifelong friendship, and All-American blocking back Bob Hoffman. The "Thundering Herd", as the team was known, was coached by the legendary Howard Jones. It was not until the 2000s that USC finally acknowledged the national championship which had been won by the team, because newspaper rankings of the period – which over the years had come to be a more widely recognized standard – had been divided between two other teams.
Read more about this topic: Joe Shell
Famous quotes containing the words football and/or champion:
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“What a terrible thing has happened to us all! To you there, to us here, to all everywhere. Peace who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed as he walked by her very side. Her gallant boy is dead. What a cruel, foul, and most unnatural murder! We mourn here with you, poor, sad American people.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)