Wake Forest Athletics
Longest Bowl Trip Ever
12/14/1999 12:00:00 AM | Football
Dec. 14, 1999
By Jay Reddick
1946. 1949. 1979. 1992.
And now, 1999.
Five times in the long history of Wake Forest football, the team has been rewarded at the end of a fine season with a trip to a postseason bowl game.
This year, the Deacons will make their longest bowl trip ever, to Honolulu, Hawaii, for the Aloha Bowl on Christmas Day.
The Deacs will carry plenty of support staff, coaches and fans with them to Honolulu. But they will also have the support of hundreds of alumni who remember what it was like when they made those special trips. There's plenty of history to be found in the stories told by the players who have been there.
The year was 1945. Coach D.C. "Peahead" Walker had piloted the Deacons to five winning seasons over the previous six years, but this one was different. After losing its first three games, this Wake Forest team had scratched and clawed its way back above .500. A tie game against South Carolina in Charlotte on Thanksgiving Day, followed by a victory over Clemson, and suddenly, the team had a shot at postseason play.
The organizers of a new event called the Gator Bowl asked the team to be one of the first participants. But when the squad heard that the game would be held on New Year's Day, 1946, in Jacksonville, Fla., against the same Gamecocks they had fought to a tie just a couple of weeks earlier, many of them passed.
"Everyone was tired from having two-a-days (practices) almost every day since August 15," said Herb Appenzeller, a backup quarterback on the team. "We knew that a bowl game would mean no Christmas break, and a lot of guys were really banged up. Murray Greason, the athletic director, put it to a vote whether to accept the bid, and the only guy who said yes lived in Florida and figured he could get a couple of days at home out of the deal."
Appenzeller, the former 30-year athletics director at Guilford College who now works as an author, editor and public speaker in Greensboro, said a little persuading was all the team needed to accept the Gator Bowl offer.
"The operator of the student bookstore spoke to us after the vote, and convinced a lot of us that it would be great exposure for the school and for us if we went," Appenzeller said. "Then, they told us we could have $100 in expenses for the trip. By then, a lot of guys were thinking New Year's in Jacksonville sounded pretty good."
Appenzeller also has fond memories of the game itself. Nick Sacrinty scored the first touchdown in the history of the Gator Bowl to give the Deacons a 6-0 lead, and that lead eventually grew to 26-7 before Appenzeller got the call to come in and finish the Gamecocks off.
"I had been on the bench, and when I was put in, I threw a really good pass, but a guy named Dutch Bramson intercepted it and ran it back 90 yards for a touchdown," Appenzeller said. "I had to give the people some excitement, you know? It's still the longest interception return in Gator Bowl history."
And in fact, Appenzeller said that play helped him get the job at Guilford - in a roundabout way.
"I had interviewed at Guilford several times (in 1956), but finally, when all was said and done, Dr. (Clyde) Milner (the college's president), called me back and said that they wanted somebody with more of a name, somebody who had been recognized in the national media. So I told him I had the longest interception in Gator Bowl history, and that day, I was hired.
"It wasn't until years later that somebody found out I had thrown the interception, not caught it."
The 26-14 win over South Carolina would be the Deacs' only bowl win for another 46 years, but there were more successes along the way.
The 1948 squad had a bit of a different feel to it. The team had maintained a high level of consistency, going 6-4 in both seasons after the Gator Bowl win, and the '48 team was one of Walker's most experienced and oldest, thanks to the time some had spent in the military during World War II.
Still, when an invitation to the Dixie Bowl in Birmingham, Ala., came, it was a great honor for the Deacs.
"We had a great time on the train rides to and from Birmingham," said Ed Butler, an end on the team. "It was a much older team than most college teams you see nowadays, and that made it more fun for all of us.
"We had a meeting of both teams, us and Baylor, when we first got to town, and they gave us these little gold football pendants with the American flag on one side and the Confederate flag on the other," Butler said. "I still have mine."
The game ended in a 20-7 victory for the Bears in what was then called the "Battle of the Baptists," but Butler said he doesn't remember much about the game. His memories are more of the season, the trip and the honor of being selected to play in a bowl.
"We had a great time," said Butler, who was a teacher and high school administrator for 41 years before retiring in 1991. "It's one of the greatest things I got out of Wake Forest - that and my wife."
The 1979 Deacons had a likely bowl bid wrapped up earlier in the year than most. A stirring victory over No. 13 Auburn on Oct. 27 gave Wake Forest a 7-1 record. The team had been profiled by Sports Illustrated earlier in the season, and when the team kept winning, the Tangerine Bowl came calling.
"It was a great trip to culminate a great season," said Jay Venuto, the starting quarterback on that squad. "At that time, the Tangerine Bowl was one of the most fun bowls to go to, because the team went to Disney World and the Ringling Brothers Circus after practices. It was kind of nice."
Indeed, the Disney-ificiation of that bowl was everywhere. Bowl organizers sent Goofy to Winston-Salem to pose with football players, and Disney characters joined both mascots on the field for the ceremonial coin toss before the game against LSU on Dec. 22, 1979.
"As a player, it was a very exciting time," said Bill Ard, the starting center. "It's something that so few other teams had done at Wake Forest, and that made it special."
Both Ard and Venuto have received lifetime achievement awards in recent weeks. Venuto was announced as a new inductee into the Wake Forest Hall of Fame, and Ard, already a WFU Hall of Famer, was named to the All-Century Team of the New York Giants, where he played for eight years.
Ard is a senior vice-president for PaineWebber in northern New Jersey, where he has season tickets to Rutgers football and also keeps up with the current Deacons on a regular basis.
"We had a good season this year," Ard said. "I was shocked to beat Georgia Tech, and very glad for the coaches, players and alumni that we'll get to experience another bowl."
Venuto, a high school football coach in Ithaca, N.Y., has nothing but praise for current Deacon coach Jim Caldwell.
"I really admire what Jim Caldwell is doing down there," Venuto said. "He's a first-class man, he represents the university well, and he should make people proud to be a Deacon."
Looking back, Venuto said the 1979 Deacons may have been better than anyone gave them credit for at the time, despite the 34-10 Tangerine Bowl loss to LSU.
"We gained so much confidence through the year," Venuto said. "Everyone looked at Wake Forest and said we were supposed to lose, but when you look at the fact that three of the offensive linemen played at least five years in the NFL, it was a special time and a special team."
The Deacons' chances at a fourth bowl game didn't seem so great early in the 1992 season. A 1-3 record was marked by a trio of ACC losses, to North Carolina, Florida State and Virginia. But Tommy Mordica, an offensive lineman on that team and the current assistant director of the Deacon Club, saw something special even that early.
"We were tied 7-7 with Florida State after one quarter," Mordica said. "We showed a lot of fight that day, and they had to use everything they had to beat us. We were beating Virginia for a while, too, and the one win we had (10-7 over Appalachian State), Keith West threw this floater of a pass to John Henry Mills to win it.
"We just found a way to win somehow, and that's the way it was for the rest of the year."
Six straight wins allowed the Deacs to send retiring coach Bill Dooley out on a winning note, with a trip to the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La., on New Year's Eve. But while it was going on, said Tom Kleinlein, now an academic counselor at Wake Forest, the team didn't know much about what was waiting for them at the end.
"We were just focused on winning each week, but when we got to 6-3, and we knew we had the opportunity to go somewhere, as a player, it made me extremely excited," Kleinlein said.
Everyone who was there or watching on television has their own memories of that game against Oregon, from Todd Dixon's great touchdown catch that helped clinch a 39-35 victory, to the players carrying Dooley off the field, to the temperature at the stadium falling from the upper 60s to near freezing in four hours. For Mordica, though, his memories on the field have faded, but the sweet sense of accomplishment remains.
"In my little world, I never saw our defense on the field," Mordica said. "I was getting water, or discussing strategy, or getting taped up. People will tell me things that happened that day and I have no idea what they are talking about. But there's not a moment of that trip that I would give back. To have that experience with the guys I'd been in school with for as much as four or five years, to finally see everything we'd worked for come together, is something I'll never forget."
Both Mordica and Kleinlein will be in Honolulu for Christmas this year, and they hope the 1999 Deacons have the same triumphant feelings that they did seven years ago. Win or lose, though, they know it'll be a great experience for all involved. "Looking at it from the administration's side, now," Kleinlein said, "I knew the kids were good enough to do this, and they believed they could. To see them succeed the way they have, it feels really good. I'm glad they get to reap the rewards of their success."
