The 1961 Game vs KU

Posted on: June 7, 2025 at 08:15:34 CT

Everyone knows about the 1960 game. What came next is pretty interesting. From another site:

Arguably, there has been no game in the rivalry history with more drama around it than the 1961 game that was to be played in Lawrence. According to longtime MU basketball coach and rivalry expert Norm Stewart, the 1960 football game had “riled up everything again.”

Anger over the 1960 game and the subsequent forfeit resulted in the darkest period in the KU-MU sports rivalry. Bill Mayer, a Lawrence sports editor, stirred up sentiment by blaming MU athletic director Don Faurot, “long a hateful anti-Jayhawk,” for KU’s troubles in the Coan case.

When the Missouri basketball team traveled to Lawrence the following February, the crowd in Allen Field house booed so loudly that the visiting players could not be introduced. When Kansas came to Missouri’s Brewer Fieldhouse in March, the atmosphere was charged. In the second half, Jayhawk star forward Wayne Hightower powered past Tiger Charlie Henke for a score, then turned and punched Henke between the eyes. The benches cleared, perhaps one hundred Tiger fans spilled onto the court, and the “Brawl at Brewer” was under way. Play resumed after ten minutes, but a much longer delay was contemplated by the schools. “If this extreme bitterness continues,” Kansas athletic director Arthur “Dutch” Lonborg told the Associated Press days after the game, “we will have to discontinue playing each other, at least for a while.”

Although the rivalry games continued, it is perhaps not coincidental that a long-standing rivalry tradition was suspended. The rivalry game had served as the host school’s Homecoming game ever since the inaugural Homecoming game in 1911. However, Missouri fans that ventured into Lawrence for the 1961 football game were treated not to the traditional homecoming festivities, but to a cordon of patrolmen and police dogs around the KU goal posts. Twenty years passed before the rivalry game was again featured by either school in its homecoming celebration.

Looking back on the bad blood between the two schools going into the 1961 game, there is one aspect that in retrospect is at least a little bit funny, the “button controversy” on the MU and KU campuses. KU students handed out “ATAP” buttons, which the students claimed stood for “All Tigers Are Pushovers.” MU students produced buttons emblazoned with “AHAMF” which was described as meaning “All Hawks Are My Friends.” However, authorities at both schools somehow came to the outlandish conclusion the acronyms on the buttons had more vulgar meanings, and moved to outlaw and collect the buttons with the objective of preventing unpleasantness between Missouri and Kansas fans. Student button activists bravely resisted. In response to the KU Dean of Students’ role in opposing their ATAP button initiative, KU students hung him in effigy.

And to truly appreciate the significance of the 1961 rivalry game, one has to also understand the expectations that the Jayhawkers had for the 1961 season. KU’s 1960 team had been very good, and indeed would have been Big 8 champions if they had abided by conference rules after the NCAA ruling and had then been able to beat Colorado and Missouri without the services of Bert Coan. Regarding expectations for 1961, KU was returning most of the talent from that team, including the backfield of future NFL players in Hadl, Coan and McClinton. Furthermore, those around the program felt the team would be motivated and on a mission. As described by a Lawrence sport-writer: “That mission? To win a clear-cut Big Eight Conference title that nobody, not even faculty representatives, can dispute…Mitchell and his KU squad would enjoy immensely a high national ranking long about the end of November. But they’ll readily surrender national orchids to win the league championship that was snatched from their grasp at the conference meeting table in Kansas City last December.”

The high expectations were not limited to the Jayhawker team and their KU fan base. Nationally, Kansas was ranked at #8 in the AP preseason poll and at #2 in the Street and Smith season preview. Topping it off, Playboy magazine predicted the Jayhawkers would be 1961 national champions.

KU lost a couple of close ones early in the 1961 season, but then ran off six consecutive wins by the collective score of 188-28, and surged back into the national rankings at No. 10 in the AP.

Missouri’s 1961 team was also very good. Led by their defense, the Tigers had given up an average of less than six points a game going into the conference finale. However, in MU’s most recent game, a 27-9 victory over Kansas State, the Tigers lost four starters due to injury. Conrad Hichtler, the Tigers all-conference two-way right end, suffered a leg fracture. Right end Don Wainwright and quarterback Ron Taylor were carried off the field with ankle injuries, and halfback Norm Beal was hospitalized with bruised ribs.

The Tigers and Jayhawks entered the rivalry game with identical 6-2-1 records, but with KU the home team and considering the Tiger injuries, the Jayhawkers were a two-touchdown favorite to win, and the pre-game buzz was that, "Word from the Orange Bowl has it that the Kansas Jayhawks will get the New Years Day bid if they knock off Missouri’s crippled Tigers in Lawrence.."

On game day in Lawrence, a capacity crowd of 42,500 poured into the KU’s Memorial Stadium. The crowd expected a win, and believed they were on their way after a 1st quarter touchdown and a 7-0 lead. However, the words of Jayhawker coach Jack Mitchell earlier in the week proved prophetic. “I’m scared to death of their (MU’s) defense. A field goal could win it, and I don’t think we’ll score but once.” As the game went on, the MU defense dominated. One observed commented that the Tigers charged through KU’s offensive line “like flies through an open screen door”.

Ron Taylor came off the bench and began to substitute for the Tigers’ backup quarterback that started the game. “Entering the game early in the second period, the gritty little field general, still obviously bothered by a sprained ankle, revved up Missouri’s sputtering attack and directed the Tigers in near flawless fashion the rest of the way.” The Tigers won 10-7.

Over the course of the game, KU’s All-American John Hadl was limited to 12 yards on 10 rushes and completed only 2 of 8 passes for 28 yards. A hometown sportswriter observed, “Undoubtedly the most frustrated young man in the KU locker room was quarterback John Hadl. John had just played his third Varsity game against the Tigers and was broken up because not once has he been able to muster a great performance against the Tigers. Normally stoic, Hadl was in tears and could hardly talk.”

In a season that had started with such lofty expectations, the loss dropped KU to a record of 6-3-1. But despite the absence of Coan, the focus of the big controversy in 1960, who had been lost to injury for the entire year, KU had come oh, so close – only five points from an undefeated season. As fate would have it, those three close losses were at the hands of TCU, the school that Coan had been illegally recruited from, and Colorado and Missouri, the two schools that KU elected to play Coan against in 1960 despite the prior NCAA finding that had rendered him ineligible by conference rules.

In 1961, KU found out that karma can be a real B-I-T-C-H.