58 Friday, December 10, 1982
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Benny Friedman's Football Career Aided Immigrant Generation
By VICTOR BIENSTOCK
that and more to a genera-
Fielding "Hurry Up" tion of young American
Yost, the great University Jews whose families had
of Michigan football coach, newly emerged from the
called Benny Friedman ghetto and were desperately
"one of the greatest passers trying to become an integral
and smartest quarterbacks part of American life. He
in history." Benny was all of was a symbol and a promise
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The first Jew to be named
to Walter Camp's All-
American football team —
and that for three years in a
row — and the first Jew in
the football Hall of Fame,
his achievement nearly 60
years ago was to many of u
a major step in what th e
The Jewish fighters were
widely known and had their
fierce adherents. Most
young Jews knew their ring
records and discussed them,
as did many of their elders.
The bearded," kaftan-
wearing elders didn't go to
the fights but they gravely
sociologists ponderousl.
discussed the outcome and
term the acculturation c f its impact on the Jewish
American Jewry.
problem.
Benny Friedman died b
(Years later, they did go
his own hands just befog to the Polo Grounds to see
Thanksgiving. A note h
the Vienna Hakoah play
left in his New York apart
and reacted anxiously to
ment indicated that he ha i each roar of the crowd by
been "severely depressed.
tugging the sleeves of their
The obituary notices erre l neighbors and asking anx-
in describing him. as age iously — in Yiddish— "Is it
76; he must have been a t good for the Jews?")
least five years older tha]
But Benny Friedman was
that.
the first Jewish athlete to
There had been Jewisl achieve national stardom in
sports heroes in Americl
amateur collegiate sports.
long
before
Benny Professional fighting was
Friedman. The sport: all very well but it was an
columnists in what WI area regarded as belonging
used to call the Anglo
to immigrants and the sons
Jewish weeklies woulc of immigrants — Irish, Ita-
have been hard put i: lian, Slav and Jewish. It
they hadn't had Benny wasn't the homespun,
Leonard, the idol of the native-grown sport of heart-
ghetto, Lou Tendler land America.
Battling Kid Levinsk3
and other luminaries of f
It / the ring to brag about
Professional boxing wat
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and there were no con-
venient time-outs for
commercials.
There weren't offensive
and defensive squads. A
man played his position on
offense and on defense and
played until the coach
thought he had to be pulled
out. Benny Friedman led
the Michigan offense and
when the opponents had the
ball, backed up the line and
directed the defense.
If memory, doesn't betray
me, some of the college
Benny Friedman made us
part of that scene; he gave
the non-Jewish world in
which we lived a new pic-
ture of the American Jewish
student — tall, strong and
manly; no longer the thin,
narrow-chested, bespecta-
cled student of the
caricaturist's vision,
struggling beneath a moun-
tainous pile of text-books,
no longer the spectator re-
legated to the bleachers or
the scrawny assistant man-
ager dashing out on the field
with his' bucket of water
when a player lay prone on
the turf.
Friedman wasn't our first
collegiate idol but he was
the first whom the non-
Jewish world shared with
us. There were other Jewish
athletes — year after year,
Nat Holman turned out
championship basketball
fives at New York's City
College, most of them al-
most entirely Jewish.
But basketball was, in
those days, a minor sport,
and while we young Jews
gloried in the regularity
with which the City College
quintet humbled its mighty
neighbors, it just wasn't the
same thing as bigtime foot-
ball.
Apwermtrofiatc.t.ifik-a****,
'...***4•1.141§.
games were given play-by-
play coverage on radio, but
more often we had to wait'
for the news broadcasts to
get the final scores and for
the Sunday morning papers ,
to get a real description of HI
(Continued on Page 59)
LARRY FREEDMAN
Orchestra and Entertainment
647-2367
MARTIN AND SUE
WEISS
STEVE & LORI
OF
College football and its
autumnal Saturday af-
ternoons were the es-
sence of America and the
teenage Jew did not feel
he really belonged until
he became part of that
picture.
College football, in
those halycon, pre-
television days, was a
game by all-around
athletes, not specialists in
one phase of the game
like drop-kicking. The
coach outlined the main
strategy for his team but,
on the field, the quarter-
back called the shots
with little override from
the sidelines. The game
was played for the spec-
tators in the stands, not
for millions watching on
nationwide television
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