Mickadeit: Pop Warner wouldn't like Pop Warner
By FRANK MICKADEITCOLUMNIST / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Lots of guys can say they played in Pop Warner. Julian Ertz might be the
only guy still around who can say he played for Pop Warner.
In the late 1930s, Ertz was a reserve fullback at Temple University, where
the legendary Glenn "Pop" Warner ended his career.
As such, Ertz, 93, believes he can say without qualification that Pop Warner would be mortified to learn that men who coach kids in the program that bears his name allegedly paid players to injure other players.
As such, Ertz, 93, believes he can say without qualification that Pop Warner would be mortified to learn that men who coach kids in the program that bears his name allegedly paid players to injure other players.
Ertz rang me up after reading the Pop Warner bounty scandal articles by
Keith Sharon and me. Could Ertz actually be the last person alive who played for
Pop Warner?
There's no easy way to know for sure, but he played on Pop Warner's last
team, the 1938 Temple Owls, and he knows of no other living Pop Warner
player.
"I know that from the way he conducted himself, that in no way would he
have wanted one of his players to hurt another player," Ertz told me during my
visit to his home in Laguna Woods last weekend. "A 'gentleman' is the way I
would describe him." A College Football Hall of Fame site quotes a Warner
mantra: "You cannot play two kinds of football at once, dirty and good."
Warner was already a legend by the time he got to Temple in 1933. He had
already led three national championship teams at Pitt, coached Jim Thorpe at
Carlisle, invented the screen pass and, oh, yeah, lent his name to a youth
football program.
He also had invented shoulder pads – U.S. Patent No. 1,887,473 bears his
name – and thigh pads which, ironically, a Tustin Pop Warner team allegedly
altered to get a player in under the weight limit.
Ertz, by contrast, was just a 19-year-old kid from western Pennsylvania
when he matriculated at Temple in Philadelphia in the fall of 1938. Warner had
difficulty walking, Ertz recalls, so he stood on a raised platform on the
sidelines and watched practices.
"On each play, he knew what all 22 players had done. He'd point and say
very softly, 'OK, so-and-so, you didn't do this. And so-and-so, you didn't do
that.' He never gave you hell in front of the other players, he was always
analyzing."
Ertz doesn't overplay his role on the team. He was beaten out for starting
fullback by a guy named Jim Honochick, who later became a Major League Baseball
umpire. Nor does he claim Pop Warner was without vice. "He always had cigarette.
He'd finish one and use it to light the next."
(Ertz had his own vice of sorts at Temple – he sneaked off for music
lessons that he never told his teammates about.)
Warner was big on school. "Pop would softly say, 'Be sure to go to class
and get good grades. ... You're here to get an education.'"
That Ertz did, receiving a degree in business. After serving as a B-24
navigator in World War II, he went to law school at the University of New
Mexico. He practiced in Albuquerque for a while, then moved to Orange County,
where he practiced some 30 years.
The scholarship side of football that Pop Warner embodied was not lost on
Ertz. In O.C., he was a charter member and ultimately president of the local
chapter of the National Football Foundation, which each year honors high school
football scholar-athletes.
What does he think of the bounty allegations besmirching the Pop Warner
name? "Terrible. Awful. If I were a parent and I had any choice, I'd see (the
offending coaches) never got to work with the kids again."
Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.
