Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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At Yale, Stagg tried to live on 20¢ a day (10¢ for lunch, his main meal), soon wound up on sick call. The diagnosis: malnutrition. Reluctantly the young athlete conceded that he needed more than soda crackers and an occasional bowl of soup. He pitched the Yale baseball team to a record five championships. He played end for two years, making Walter Camp's first All-America squad in 1889. It was for the Elis that he invented the head slide in baseball and the tackling dummy in football.

By 1892 Stagg was installed as the University of Chicago's football coach. It was not that he had turned his back on the ministry. Rather he had decided that he could best influence the nation's youth by setting them an example on the football field. And it was a stern example that he set, for a record-breaking 41 years at this first" school (he won 254 games, lost 104, tied 28). No member of the squad was allowed to smoke or drink or be out after 10 p.m. To violate any of these rules was to break training—and be left off the team, no matter how valuable the delinquent player might be.

Coach of the Year. Chicago ungratefully retired Stagg in 1933. At 71 he blandly declared that he knew too much to be inactive, went to Stockton's College of the Pacific. His 1943 team there won him election as coach of the year and football's man of the year. Not bad for an 81-year-old. But Pacific in its turn retired him; so Lon Stagg joined his son Alonzo as co-coach at Pennsylvania's tiny Susquehanna University. Their 1951 season was the college's first ever with no loss, no tie. In 1953 Stagg became, as he remains, punting and kicking coach for Stockton's Mustangs.

Today Stagg and Stella, his wife of 64 years, live in frugal simplicity on the college side of Stockton. The living room is cluttered with the parchments, trophies and blackening baseballs of Stagg's long career. Stagg is obviously old and somewhat infirm: he suffers from Parkinsonism, which gives his hands a tremor—what doctors call a "pill-rolling motion." His left eye is half closed, following a minor operation. Yet he is incredibly hale. He recalls nothing of childhood diseases. Soon after he was married he had a bout with typhoid—a disease that few modern U.S. doctors ever see, though many oldsters now living had it in the days before water supplies were adequately protected.

In 1904, when he was carrying his five year-old son Alonzo to the gym, Stagg tried to leap a broad puddle. "In a desperate effort to recover my balance, I threw some bones in my lower back out of place." Stagg blames the incident for recurrent back trouble ever since. Doctors are not so sure. They grant that he has had sciatica—intense nerve pain running down the back of the thigh—off and on ever since. There were times at Chicago when it was so bad that he had to coach from a motorcycle sidecar or get around in an electric cart.