Couch: Why 1966 MSU-Notre Dame game stands test of time

I'm guaranteeing that young people won't read this column. All I had to do was write about what's arguably the most important game in Michigan State football history.

It’s not that folks of all ages don’t respect the 1966 MSU-Notre Dame game. It’s that they’ve grown tired of it. It’s the MSU football fan’s version of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” Great song. You’d just rather listen to something else.

But if we can get beyond those eyelid-drooping numbers, “1966,” and those overplayed words, “Game of the Century,” it’s easy to remember why we still talk about this game and why, 50 years later, it still holds water as a seminal moment in college football and in the legacy of Michigan State University. And, also, why it is important to embrace and consume and share.

I was No. 1 vs. No. 2, late in the season, a national telecast, racial integration pushing forward.

I love talking to the men who played in that game and that era. In some cases, I know I’d better carve out an hour. In many cases, I’ve heard the stories before. Yet I always learn something new, find myself captivated by their perspective, leave the conversation reminded that they are treasures of MSU history, treasures that won’t be around forever.

They didn’t know their 10-10 tie with the Irish would be so lasting in MSU football lore and remembered for its societal significance. They weren’t thinking about segregation or being pioneers. Not when they played.

“Oh, hell no,” said Clinton Jones, the Spartans’ starting tailback in the mid-1960s and recent inductee into the College Football Hall of Fame. “Socially significant, that was the furthest thing from my mind. What was significant was winning, beating Notre Dame. I wasn’t thinking about change.

“Twenty-five or 30 years later I realized it. What makes you realize it is living. Living long enough to see. The longer you live, the longer you learn.”

This is the golden anniversary season, Saturday night the 46th meeting of MSU and Notre Dame since that Nov. 19, 1966 day at Spartan Stadium.

Jones and his cohorts are proud of their time at MSU and the game that defined and capped their two-year run of dominance. The Spartans were an integrated college football team at a time when college football wasn’t integrated, several of the most notable players players — Bubba Smith, George Webster, Gene Washington, for example — coming from the segregated South, brought to East Lansing by coach Duffy Daugherty. Even Notre Dame, well above the Mason-Dixon line, had only one black player, defensive end Alan Page.

“What happened on that Nov. 19 day was a precursor to what's going on,” Jones said. “When you look at the political and social situation in this country, it’s the same old things. Some of it is worse. In other cases, it’s better.”

MSU was not the perfect racially progressive cocoon it’s sometimes made out to be.

“No, and it doesn’t have to be,” Jones said. “What is perfection? Perfection is not a standing point that you reach. It’s always something in progress.”

And, comparatively, this was progress.

The civil rights component to those MSU teams — to that game — helps to preserve its place. We remember several games and teams from this era for that reason. Among them: The 1966 Texas Western (UTEP) basketball team, which, with five black starters, defeated an all-white Kentucky squad for the NCAA championship; and the 1963 Loyola-Chicago basketball team, which, with four black starters, won the NCAA title after a tournament path that included a famed game against Mississippi State in East Lansing.

There have been books written about MSU’s football teams of that era and documentaries made (or being made), most of them produced by the men who played in 1965 and ’66, and in the Game of the Century, or people with direct ties to them. These works should be required viewing and reading in a freshman seminar.

It is fortunate that the MSU-Notre Dame game 50 years ago ended in a tie. Had either side won, it wouldn’t be remembered as such a titanic clash — one that couldn’t be decided on the field. Both teams became national champions in different polls.

“As time goes on, the intangibility of something, you see it at a deeper, deeper level,” Jones said. “I don’t remember any other national championship team, but I’ll never forget the 10-10 tie.”

Jones can still feel three separate hits in that game, as if they were present day, including a collision with Page.

“I hit him with everything I had,” said Jones, a blocker on the player. “I purposely tried to spear him and knock him down. I wound up...being on all fours shaking my head, ‘What the hell happened?’ It didn’t knock him down. I was pulling my head out of my shoulders.

“I remember after the game having no regrets. I left it all on the field.”

Jones tells a story of cooking goat ribs given to him by a friend that night in his new East Lansing apartment

“I saw these goats before they died. I could not eat those goat ribs. I remember that. I remember taking a hot bath in my little apartment, and I just got drunk (in the tub). Because there was nothing else I could do. It was over.”

Jones and others are remembered by us for that game, for what they became after — some celebrities or prominent members of society — and because they kept coming back. They keep coming back.

They’ll be honored during homecoming week in mid-October, a 50th anniversary celebration. MSU has done a good job of preserving that connection to the team that made it a relevant program historically. And the players from that era have done a good job of embracing and appreciating the present-day program, sometimes coming back because it’s the right thing to do.

Gene Washington, for example, flew in for former punter Mike Sadler’s memorial service at Spartan Stadium in late July, a distinguished man of a previous era there to honor a player two generations behind him.

“I had to come back to that,” Washington said this week. “Because Mike, he embodied the whole idea of college athletics and being a student-athlete and giving back to the community. It was remarkable what he was able to accomplish and what he was able to do in a short time. It was very moving to me.”

Some of the most recognizable names from the Game of the Century are already gone — Bubba, Webster, Charlie Thornhill.

“Since May, we’ve lost five or six more,” Jones said.

By now, we might think we know the 1966 game through and through. MSU’s program, in its current form, is making new history. The Game of the Century, though, is still just that. The men who played made an enormous contribution to MSU and college football. Reading about it, learning about it, listening to them — it’s our gain.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

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