Year Of The Horse

Sports Illustrated OCTOBER 25, 1954

BACK WHEN EVERYBODY IN THE Big Ten was kicking us around," recalls Uncle Ed Schmitz, a Madison merchant who attended the University of Wisconsin for over a month in 1911 and who is now chief fund-raiser for the football team, "what few people as came to the game at all would pack their lunch at home, get there in time for the game and leave right after it. Now they come in the night before, and they don't go home till Sunday."

With 12 straight sellouts and more to come, with a team undefeated in four starts for the first time since 1927, Wisconsin is succeeding because of a winning combination of two incongruous elements. One is the tall, agonizingly shy coach, Ivan B. Williamson, a living contradiction to Dale Carnegie. The other is a likable kid, born Lino Dante Amici, who now receives mail addressed: The Horse, Wisconsin.

Al Ameche, as he is known to most people, is a 6-foot, 210-pound fullback, 21 years old. Red Danders, the UCLA coach, says that Ameche is a stronger runner than Bronko Nagurski. Esco Sarkkinen, the Ohio State scout who has studied Ameche for four years says, "Ameche is the greatest fullback on the North American continent today. He is powerful, he's shifty and he's fast, and he's all of them all of the time. He's big, too, but he doesn't need to be. Not with that heart."

Against Rice a fortnight ago Ameche was the real old-time, line-smashing fullback. Against Purdue last Saturday he showed his shiftiness and speed. The Badgers had a skinny one-point lead with the ball deep in their own territory. Ameche got it on a pitchout and took off around end. Now shifting, now turning, knees flailing, he skirted the end and turned on the speed. He made 26 yards. And now Wisconsin sparkled, and down the field the red team went. Ameche plunged five yards for the score. Purdue began throwing the ball around in desperation, and defensive back Billy Lowe intercepted and ran 98 yards for a touchdown. It was Wisconsin again, 20-6.

Off the field, slopping around the campus on his slew feet, Ameche is a big, amiable, intelligent, hardworking young man of good character and surprising sensitivity. He is married to his childhood sweetheart, and they have two children. He is living in a fog these days, because the demands on the nation's No. 1 Football Hero are constant and harassing—"The only time we're together is when somebody's taking our picture," his wife, Yvonne, says.

AMECHE TRIES HARD TO BE A LEVEL-HEADED, normal citizen. On Yvonne's birthday, two days before the Purdue game, he got up early and gave the baby his bottle. He was going to write something sweet on a birthday card, too, only the phone rang. Yvonne found her card, together with Al's pen, in the bathroom after he had rushed off late to class. She cried a little bit because he had tried.

Ameche has been on top of the world for six years. He got more publicity as an all-state high school halfback than any other member of the Wisconsin varsity gets now. As a freshman he used to come in at night to find coeds sitting on his doorstep.

He takes his publicity in stride. He has spent hours on the weights, developing those big shoulders, hours running in soft sand to add power to those speedy legs, hours on the practice field working on blocking, on defense. "After all that I should get a swelled head and kill my own self off?" he asked. "You think I'm nuts?"

Ameche's Wisconsin teammates do not resent the fullback's stardom. "Al is the most popular man on the team," says Gary Messner, the Badgers' captain. "He makes our own jobs easier. You can block a man a lot better when he's looking at somebody else."