Dennis McCann: John Heisman's own trophy is a simple cemetery stone

Originally published Dec. 8, 2008

There may be more bowls in college football than in a bowery soup kitchen, but we now know who will be playing who, where and when during the Christmas and New Year’s college football orgy. Thankfully, the Rose Bowl will again feature the Big Ten vs. the Pac-10, the way God meant it to be, instead of some untraditional interloper like Texas, and Wisconsin will head to Florida once again to take on the second oldest coach in college football in Bobby Bowden’s Florida State. The only unanswered question in college football, then, is who will win the Heisman Trophy.

And, might this year’s winner finally be the one to make it to quiet Forest Home Cemetery in Rhinelander, where the remains of John Heisman himself, the man who gave his name to the iconic trophy, have been buried for more than 70 years? Yes, the man so closely associated with the New York Athletic Club and the nascent days of a game he likely would not recognize today rests in a northern Wisconsin cemetery under a simple flush-to-the-ground marker, so unostentatious I had to have help to find it when I stopped earlier this fall.

“I wonder how many people,” said Marv Schumacher as he led me to the grave, “know he’s got a simple gravestone in Rhinelander, Wis? This famous man and just a ground-level stone.”

Some do know, of course, because Heisman’s Rhinelander burial comes up some years about award time, and it got a lot of attention the year Wisconsin running back Ron “The Great” Dane won the trophy. It’s “kind of a novelty” story, said Dick Winquist, who was sexton at the cemetery for 32 years and knows the story about as well as anyone. Each year a few football fans in the know seek out the grave to show their kids or take photos, he said.

“My dad was there for 20 years before me and he used to say that’s our one claim to fame,” he said.

It’s not a bad claim. Heisman, who was born two weeks before the first American football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, is widely viewed as a pioneering coach in college football. As the New York Times wrote two years ago, “Without John Heisman there might not be a forward pass in football, and without a forward pass the game would probably have died from disinterest or been abolished because of its fatal brutality.” In addition to pushing to have the forward pass made legal, Heisman pushed to have the game divided into four quarters and created the center snap. He introduced the “hike” vocal signal and was a creative play designer.

Heisman was said to have introduced the ball to his players and, after a pause, add, “Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”

Heisman was in New York at the time of is death but was buried in Rhinelander, the hometown of his second wife, Edith. Winquist said to his knowledge no trophy winner has ever come to visit.

One curious story occurred in the 1980s when a visitor who was never identified glued a jar to the stone. In the jar, for some inexplicable reason, were four tickets to a Minnesota Gophers football game. Winquist still has them. Heisman, after all, is his claim to fame.