A second-place finisher in the Boston marathon, a future president of the NCAA, a four-time Olympic shot-putter, and the tackler responsible for the career-ending football injury of a future American president - all extraordinary athletes, champions, and leaders in their sports. And all Jumbos.
Nearly seven years after his retirement, former Athletic Director Rocky Carzo has left another legacy in "Jumbo Footprints," a narrative which tells the stories of those standout athletes and coaches who have worn brown and blue.
"If you know Rocky at all, you know he didn't really retire," said Sports Information Director Paul Sweeney, one of the book's co-authors. "He wanted a project, so he wrote a history book. We have such a long and strong history, and it was time that it got written down."
The book, co-authored by Carzo, Sweeney, Associate Director of the Tufts Office of Publication Karen Bailey and editor Linda Hall, was published in January as part of a three-part project aimed at consolidated, organizing, and articulating the history of Tufts athletics.
"It's great just to have a resource where all of our athletics history could be documented in one place," Sweeney said. "It tells the stories of all the people who have played here, with a mind of not only telling the stories of All-Americans, record-setters, and championship teams, but to get a flavor of everything that has occurred here, and the kids who just played for the love of the game."
The project also included a compilation of rosters and records of Tufts teams throughout history and a film, and traces the inception, development, and evolution of Tufts Athletics through the words of those who experienced them.
"There were a ton of important issues that this project deals with," Carzo said. "How can we best remember all the people who participated, regardless of what they achieved? We started recording everything we could about the athletic program so that there would be a frame of reference for [future generations] to come back and identify themselves somewhere here as part of the Tufts family and the Tufts program."
Athletic tradition at Tufts goes beyond the ashes that sit in a peanut butter jar in the Athletic Directors' office. From the 1934 football team that surrendered only a single touchdown all season; to the "one-man track team" of Eddie Dugger, who set an American record in the high hurdles in 1940; to the record three consecutive no-hitters pitched by Jeff Bloom in 1986; to the 71-4 streak of the women's lacrosse team from 1984 to 1990; the roots of Tufts Athletics go way back.
The book starts at the beginning, with the still-disputed first game of American football between Tufts and Harvard in 1875, the Theta Delta Chi-Zeta Psi rowing rivalry, and the early Tufts teams, known as the Medford Hillsiders.
It chronicles the impact of historical events on the course of Tufts athletics, including the four major wars that occurred during the University's lifetime and the passage of Title IX in 1972. It charts the changes in the University itself, including the physical improvements to Tufts facilities, the decision to join the New England Small Colleges Athletic Conference in 1971 and the official incorporation of Jackson College into the University in 1980.
It also chronicles the evolution of the sports themselves - the introduction of the forward pass, the creation of the three-point line, and the breaking of the four-minute mile barrier.
And it recounts the evolution of athletics at Tufts, from a practice rejected by administrators as a distraction from academics to a celebrated component of the Tufts undergraduate experience.
"It tells the stories about the human aspects of athletic participation," Carzo said. "There were a lot of problems, and all the problems the University had were reflected here in the Athletics department. We often had lousy budgets and lousy facilities, and things weren't always going well, but we had a lot of players who were enthusiastic."
In addition to the celebrated legends of Tufts athletics - Jeff Bloom, the pitcher who threw three consecutive no-hitters in 1986, or the women's lacrosse team that won five straight ECAC titles from 1985 to 1989 with a 35-game win streak - Carzo sees the book as an opportunity to draw attention to some of the lesser-known achievements.
"The primary theme of the book is that along with all these superstars and all the All-Americans and Olympians, we have thousands of kids who played sports and who were unrecognized," Carzo said. "This is saying to them, 'your effort is your honor.' That's the key to it, and that's the real substance of athletics. That's what it's all about."
