Log in to hear Gator football history presented by Norm Carlson

Author: Unknown Publication Date: Friday September 09, 2011

The year was 1923. It was cold and snowy, and the football field at the University of Alabama was a soggy mess. By halftime Alabama led UF, 6-0, and it’s likely both teams were grateful to reach their locker rooms.

On the Alabama side, the football players followed the usual routine. A few minutes before halftime ended, the cold, wet players traipsed back to the sidelines and waited in the falling snow to resume the game.

They waited alone. In the visiting team locker room, head football coach James Van Fleet — UF’s ROTC instructor and a future four-star general — was having all his bedraggled first-string players swap into the clean, dry uniforms worn by the reserves. He held all of them in the locker room until the last possible moment, allowing them to return to the field warm, refreshed and rejuvenated.

UF scored 16 unanswered points in the second half.

“It was all because of Van Fleet’s strategy,” said Norm Carlson (BSBA ’56), historian for the University Athletic Association. “Wallace Wade, the famed Alabama coach, never spoke to him again because of that game.”

Van Fleet’s quick thinking was just one of the stories Carlson shared with UF alumni recently when he presented “Forsythe to Muschamp: The History of Gator Football” as part of the UF Alumni Association’s Phil Griffin Lecture Series. In about an hour, Carlson took listeners through more than 100 years of football history — a large portion of which the assistant athletics director has witnessed himself.

Carlson, for instance, remembers how a young quarterback named Steve Spurrier (BSPE ’81) — shown above in his No. 11 jersey — used to have the managers sneak a pair of square-toed kicking shoes onto the sideline for him. And how a young wide receiver named Carlos Alvarez (BS ’72) came to be known as “The Cuban Comet.”

Carlson’s talk — and all the stories that came with it — has been preserved on the UF Alumni Association website. To watch it, follow the links below.

Watch Norm Carlson’s “History of Football” online
View other videos in the alumni association’s Outreach Video Library