Training for the Big Game

During World War I the Great Lakes Naval Training Station had the best football team in the U.S. This year a new generation of Great Lakes footballers, recruited from recent All-Americas, may go to the Rose Bowl again. But if physical fitness, mental discipline and the will-to-win cut any swath on a football field, the steam rollers that should blitz this year's college elevens will come from the Navy's four preflight training centers: St. Mary's, University of Iowa, University of Georgia, University of North Carolina.

These preflight schools, organized two months ago to make U.S. naval aviators the world's toughest fighters, have attracted 600 of the country's ablest athletic coaches and have launched the most intensive three-month sport program ever undertaken in the U.S. In their curriculum, devised and supervised by onetime Annapolis Football Coach Tom Hamilton, are ten compulsory sports: football, basketball, soccer, wrestling, boxing, tumbling, swimming, track, hand-to-hand, engineering (which means ditch-digging, wood-chopping and other manual labor).

Each sport has its relevance to war: the body contact of boxing and football, the sustained muscular strain of wrestling, the teamwork of basketball and soccer, the know-how of tumbling, the muscle-building of labor. But the sports considered most valuable for Navy fledglings are swimming, track and hand-to-hand.

Chin Up. The Battle of the Pacific has demonstrated the need for flyers who can handle themselves in water. Preflight cadets are taught to swim in waterlogged uniforms, to master the chin-up breast stroke instead of the crawl, to swim under water, to strive for endurance rather than speed. At the end of the three-month course, each man should be able to stay afloat for five hours.

Chest Out. Preflight's track is not the track of the Olympic Games but a specialty called military track. Its main event, the 60-yd. obstacle run, is the most grueling thing in the preflight program. Its 25 obstacles include: a ten-foot wall, a wide trap of knee-deep sand, a maze, a ditch that must be jumped and another (hedge-bound) that cannot be jumped, a long wooden tube through which cadets must crawl, a towering pile of loose logs that shift underfoot, a timber "jungle trap" arranged in a 20-ft. cube. By the time a cadet is ready to graduate, he must be able to finish this course in four minutes flat. At North Carolina one fledgling has already done it in 2:40.

Hit Hard. Hand-to-hand is not only rough & tumble but it defies the basic principle of sport: obey the rules. A combination of dirty boxing, dirty wrestling and dirty jujitsu, it teaches a fighter how to whip the other fellow, rules or no. If a cadet plays too fair, is ready to shake hands or even admits that his opponent is better, he may "bilge" (flunk) the course.

With this basic training, the Navy's seahawks should be the answer to a football coach's dream. But the Navy's Tex Oliver (St. Mary's), Bernie Bierman (Iowa), Ray Wolf (Georgia) and Jim Crowley (North Carolina) were not crowing last week. Reason: most of the 3,500 cadets now in training will have graduated by the eve of the football season. Cadets will then be arriving and leaving every two weeks. Barring this slight difficulty with personnel, by mid-October the Navy's preflight football teams should be rolling like Army M-4s.

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