Gil Dobie was through, finished, done with coaching football at the University of Washington.
Never mind that he hadn’t lost a game in eight seasons, that he was just 37 or that he still had a year remaining on his contract. Cigar in mouth, Dobie gathered his mud-worn charges after a 46-0 rout of Colorado in UW’s 1915 season finale at Denny Field, and told them, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, “I have coached my last Washington football team.” Confirming prior reports and rumors, he had handed in his resignation before the game.
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Dobie refused to discuss his future plans, so speculation reigned. Some reports indicated he was tired, just wanted a break and that he would attempt rejuvenation during an upcoming trip to Berkeley, Calif., to visit his sisters. Others, like P-I writer Royal Brougham, cited Dobie’s displeasure with what he considered student apathy toward the football program. “He thinks that the eight years of successive victories have dulled the spirit at the purple and gold institution,” Brougham wrote. Others had him as the leading candidate to become coach at Wisconsin or Nebraska. Or, maybe, one of the vaunted East Coast programs would tempt him with an offer.
Seattle newspapers, in turn, speculated about Dobie’s replacement (Enoch Bagshaw? Will “Wee” Coyle?). Could UW afford to pay another coach the whopping annual salary of $3,100 it paid to Dobie? Life, it seemed, was moving on. But when UW’s athletic board met to settle on a new hire … well, they couldn’t. Or at least they didn’t. The expected announcement of a new coach kept being pushed back, again and again and again.
Then, on Feb. 7, 1916, a bombshell from the Seattle Daily Times: Dobie had returned from his trip to California, intending only to pass through Seattle on his way elsewhere. Alumni and university officials spent a week leaning on him, trying to convince him to coach another season. He had received a grand send-off, after all, “banqueted until he nearly had the gout,” the Times wrote. UW students gifted him a gold watch. It was this post-resignation feting that made Dobie realize just how many supporters he had on UW’s campus, and it surely played a role in his ultimate decision.
He would return for another year, after all. It was the modern-day equivalent of Dabo Swinney stepping down after winning a national title, only to change his mind. This was a major coup for UW, and new president Henry Suzzallo publicly lauded Dobie’s decision.
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“The campus is more fortunate than I can say in retaining Dobie, whom I think unqualifiedly is the best football coach in the United States,” Suzzallo told the P-I. “I believe he feels that he can work in accord with the new regime on the campus, and the campus is certainly glad to have him back.”
It’s hard to fathom Suzzallo ever speaking those words, knowing how this story ends.
If you know anything at all about Gil Dobie, you likely know one or both of the following: He didn’t lose a game at Washington in nine seasons. And he could be a real jerk to his players.
The first is indisputably, objectively true; the second is probably a little more nuanced.
Dobie’s nine seasons at Washington included a 40-game winning streak and a 100-0 win. (Courtesy of Washington Athletics)Dobie’s official record at UW: 59-0-3. College football still was a fledgling enterprise back then, with little organization or uniformity among participating programs (Washington, for example, played against high school or club teams every season), though Dobie’s tenure included a 40-game winning streak that is officially acknowledged as the second-longest in NCAA history. UW never has laid claim to any kind of national championship for those years. Were the Huskies ever the best team in the country? Was Dobie ever the country’s best coach? We have no way of knowing. But it is a fact that the Huskies — or the team that later became the Huskies, anyway — never lost a game with Robert Gilmour Dobie standing on the sideline.
And, yes, he so often forecast defeat that he became known as “Gloomy Gil,” and he, ah, challenged his players in ways that some might find controversial. As quarterback Will “Wee” Coyle remembered in a 1948 story for the Times, Dobie once told his team they were “the dumbest, clumsiest, rankest collection of so-called football excuses I have ever seen.” In 1908, his first season as coach, Dobie referred to a team captain as a “great big yellow-haired bum,” with a “yellow streak up your back as yellow as your dirty yellow hair.”
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The thing is, Coyle related these stories in endearing terms. “At the end of four weeks of the hardest kind of practice,” he wrote, “we were eating out of his hand.” He described Dobie as “a student of psychology” who “understood men” and “would go right up to the breaking point and then leave you out on a limb.” During his initial farewell speech at the team’s annual banquet in December 1915, Dobie nodded toward his harsh approach. “His language, he admitted, at times was not in the president’s English,” the P-I wrote, “but for his purpose he considered it most effective.”
Described as tall and thin, Dobie smoked cigars, wore trench coats and, if you can believe it, barred students from practices unless they turned out in large numbers. His teams decimated opponents — a 72-0 bludgeoning of California in 1915 stands as Dobie’s crowning achievement as UW’s coach, though there also were 100-0 (Whitworth), 99-0 (Fort Worden) and 81-0 (Rainier Valley A.C.) wins — but Dobie rarely praised his players publicly for their efforts.
As Coyle wrote, though, and as author Lynn Borland detailed in a 2010 story for The Seattle Times — he also wrote a 2010 biography of Dobie, titled “Pursuit of Perfection” — Dobie’s strict, authoritarian style could be attributed to his upbringing as an orphan. Both parents died by the time he was 8, and while Dobie didn’t graduate from high school until age 21, he played quarterback at Minnesota, finished a law degree and already had coached two undefeated seasons, at North Dakota Agricultural College (it’s now North Dakota State) before arriving at UW in 1908.
Much as long-held narratives about Dobie’s personality have pervaded popular thought, Borland’s writings offer something of a counterpoint — that Dobie wasn’t just some mean old cuss, but a “master of psychology” who simply knew which buttons to push to keep his football machine humming. As the Times wrote in November 1916: “His pessimism is not voiced for the assimilation of the public … but it is for the members of his football squad, alone.” And as published reports support, he was as respected in his time as any UW coach since.
The 1916 season did nothing to diminish that reputation. UW surely regretted its 0-0 tie against Oregon, but otherwise cleaned up, allowing only nine points through its first six games, all victories aside from the tie. Entering a Thanksgiving rematch against California in Seattle — the season finale, and at that time one of the most anticipated games in Pacific Northwest football history — UW seemed primed to polish off Dobie’s ninth consecutive undefeated season. Who knows? Maybe they’d even make a run at keeping him for a 10th year.
Bill Grimm was a UW football legacy; his older brothers, Huber (nicknamed Polly) and Warren, had starred earlier in Dobie’s tenure. Bill was a freshman in 1915 and wasn’t eligible to play for the varsity, and while he was not considered as big or as fast as his brothers, the papers saw him as a promising tackle prospect. “With the experience he picked up last year,” the Times wrote that August, “he should show something next fall.”
It was a big deal that Grimm was even available for the 1916 season. It was a tumultuous time. Grimm was one of a handful of UW players whom the National Guard had called up and then stationed at American Lake, near Tacoma, after he had served at Calexico, on the U.S.-Mexican border, during the summer. An order allowed the men to return to school, even if their practice participation was inconsistent. They shuttled between the base and training camp that September, “a back-and-forth trip they will make daily until the final disposition of the troops at American Lake has been decided upon,” the Times wrote. Sometimes they didn’t make it back for practice. Their car broke down twice. One of the men spent time in the guard house for failing to shine his shoes.
Dobie (in hat) went on to coach at Navy, Cornell and Boston College after he left UW; he is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. (Courtesy of Cornell Athletics)Not that Dobie cut them any slack. On Sept. 25, five days before the season opener against the Ballard Meteors, the Times reported that Dobie had told Grimm to turn in his equipment and leave the team. The reason? “Bill had not been burning enough midnight oil studying upon the 1916 Rules of Football to suit the Scotchman,” the Times wrote. But by Oct. 3, Grimm was back in Dobie’s good graces, practicing at tackle with the first string. By Oct. 9, the guardsmen were able to re-join the team full time.
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It seemed, though, as if the chaotic start to the academic year had taken its toll: Grimm was caught cheating on a test — “alleged irregularities in examination” was the language of the day — and eight days before the big game, a faculty board ruled him ineligible.
A student board originally recommended Grimm be suspended for a year, with that suspension beginning Dec. 1 — the day after the Cal game. But the faculty board rejected that proposal and suspended Grimm effective immediately. His teammates were dismayed by this decision. The team had only three players Dobie deemed worthy of playing tackle on the first team, and one of them already was injured. They had beaten Cal in Berkeley 13-3 on Nov. 18, and Dobie had credited the line for leading the charge. Losing Grimm would make the rematch far more difficult. “There is not another man on the squad physically able to play the position,” team captain Louis Seagrave said. “The faculty can verify this by coming to the field and looking over the men.”
Their contention was a little like that of modern-day players who must bear the burden of sanctions wrought by previous actors. “Our objection is, that after we’ve overcome everything and have a fighting chance to finish the season as champions, that the faculty should wreak its wrath on the entire team for the supposed irregularity of one of its members,” Seagrave told the P-I.
So the team went on strike — for two days, anyway. Only seven men turned out for practice the first day, but after many lengthy conferences, all 24 players eventually signed a letter announcing their intent to play against California. Even Grimm turned out for practice to help train his replacement. “Though resolute in our conviction that the team has been done great injustice by faculty action,” the letter read, in part, “we are unanimously agreed that our action threatened the honor and good of the University of Washington. We consider our duty to the students, alumni and public to be above that for which we had chosen to stand.”
They would play, they said, but maintained their protest of the faculty’s decision. Also, they wrote that the protest was “the uncoerced action of the individuals of the squad and to which Coach Dobie was not a party.”
Dobie supported the protest publicly, telling the P-I that “I’ve stood back of the faculty for eight years, but in this instance I am back of the men thoroughly. These men have worked too hard to have one man’s indiscretion beat them out of a championship that is so rightfully theirs.”
This ultimately would prove Dobie’s undoing. Even without Grimm — and following a rare prediction of victory by Dobie, who perhaps sensed that in this instance, his players might actually need a shot of confidence — UW dispatched of the visiting Cal squad 14-7, finishing yet another unbeaten season. An estimated crowd of 9,000 showed for the game — “the greatest throng which ever witnessed a game in Seattle football history,” the P-I declared. Dobie hadn’t lost a game in 11 years of coaching. Yet the end was near for him at Washington, even as prominent alumni lobbied for the school to retain him.
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Is it accurate to say he was “fired”? Perhaps not, considering Dobie’s statement to the P-I on Dec. 9, when the coach and school both announced their decision. “I have fought for Washington for nine years on the field, but have met with too much opposition in my own university to consider another year of it,” Dobie said. “I’m through for good.”
Suzzallo, though, made it clear Dobie was not welcome back.
“The chief function of this university is to train character,” Suzzallo told the paper. “Mr. Dobie failed to perform his full share of this service on the football field. Therefore we do not wish him to return next year.”
The Seattle P-I announces the news of Dobie’s departure.Dobie was quick to note that he chose to return for the 1916 season “very largely through the urgent request of Dr. Suzzallo and against my own judgment.” Those close to him, he later said, knew he intended the 1915 season to be his last in Seattle. He disagreed with the president’s assertion that he failed in his duties, saying Suzzallo “does me wrong” with his statement.
Regardless, Dobie was done. The students weren’t happy about it. They gathered outside his home near campus on two occasions — about 300 of them in the early morning hours of Saturday, Dec. 9, and, more famously, another 1,000 on the evening of Monday, Dec. 11. A steady rain couldn’t keep them from crowding Dobie’s porch, and they roared their approval as he addressed the adoring masses. They chanted his name and yelled, “Fight ’em, Dobie!” Even some faculty showed up.
“In my nine years of work for you people, I have tried to give you the very best football team that your resources would allow,” Dobie told the students, according to the P-I. “If I have had to offend people who brought pressure to bear that I thought was detrimental, I offended them. I have made some enemies. I think this demonstration tonight shows that I have made some friends.” By all accounts, Dobie truly was touched by the display.
Though Dobie indicated he wouldn’t coach football again, he wound up coaching another 22 seasons at Navy, Cornell and Boston College, with unbeaten Cornell teams winning national titles in 1921, ’22 and ’23. He did eventually lose 45 games, though his career winning percentage of .781 (180-45-15) was more than enough to merit induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951.
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It’s fair to wonder how long he might have stretched his unbeaten streak at Washington, if he and the administration could have worked it out. UW finished 1-2-1 in 1917 under new coach Claude Hunt and scored only 14 points.
“Everybody wanted Dobie back,” Seagrave, the team captain, said at a banquet shortly after Dobie’s departure, at which Dobie and Suzzallo made a show of shaking hands. “Everybody knows he is the master coach, and we who have played under him know him for the man he is. But we who have wanted him back the most must capitulate to condition.
“Let it never be said of Washington football players that they are not good losers.”
Note: All information and quotes in this story came from archives, including those of The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Star and the Spokane Chronicle.
(Top photo of Dobie: Courtesy of Washington Athletics)
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