Bonita High School Sits on a Hunk of Cash

 
Bonita High School owns an asset worth thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet it sits frozen and motionless in a case collecting dust. One of the 74 made sold for $230,000 in 1999. Another the same year sold for $328,110. The highest price fetched $395,240.

Bonita came to own one when West Point’s Glenn Davis, winner of the Heisman in 1946 and a Bearcat multi-sport star, pulled up in front of the high school about a dozen years ago and handed off the trophy to the school, without so much as a pep rally.

Dan Harden, then Bonita’s athletic director, told The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Dwyre, exactly how the play unfolded:

“He had called to say he was going to give us the Heisman,” Harden said, “but he wouldn’t say exactly when he was coming. He was very clear. Do not call the newspapers or TV stations.

“I just happened to be walking outside the day he brought it. I saw a little old man and a little old woman walking along. I thought they were lost. Then I saw it. He was walking with his wife and just carrying it along, under his arm.

“We got him inside and he made sure we didn’t have a big ceremony or anything. So we went to the principal’s office and he gave it to us. And then, the most interesting thing happened. We were passing the school trophy case and he stopped and pointed to a baseball on a little stand. There were no markings on the ball. A group of community businessmen had given it to him for his baseball achievements. He knew exactly what it was.

“He asked if he could have it.”

That was a no-brainer. A baseball for a Heisman! Percentage-wise, it was a better bargain than the $15 million the United States paid for the Louisiana Purchase or the $7.2 million it paid the Russians for Alaska. 

In the case of the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska, the buyer was at least getting land, but the Heisman is simply a 25-pound lump of polished bronze, although the Bonita Heisman is just one of three owned by high schools in the United States. Therefore, its value must be contained in its mystique, a quality the trophy first started burnishing in 1935. After the fall football season, members of the Downtown Athletic Club in New York City appointed a Club Trophy Committee to conduct an award presentation honoring the best college football player in the nation. A crystal bowl or cup seem too common, so the members commissioned Frank Eliscu, a well-known sculptor, to create a replica of a muscular football player driving for yardage. From clay, to plaster cast, to bronze, Eliscu molded his sinewy football player sidestepping and straight-arming his way downfield, all 14 inches and 25 pounds, to a mythical touchdown.

When the first trophy was awarded on Dec. 9, 1935 to Jay Berwanger, a triple-threat running back from the University of Chicago, the trophy was simply called the DAC Trophy. The committee renamed it the Heisman Memorial Trophy after the passing in 1936 of John W. Heisman, a prominent football player and coach from the sports’ pioneering era.

Its winners, however, have not been guaranteed success. In fact, several of them have been stiff-armed. First-winner Berwanger, although drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles, never played a down of professional football. Syracuse’s Ernie Davis, the first African-American player to win the Heisman, never took a snap in the National Football League, as he was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after winning the award and died in 1963. The calamities of USC’s O.J. Simpson, whose margin of victory in the voting remains the largest in the award’s history, are well known. Another USC alum Charles White sold his 1979 Heisman to help pay his back taxes. Even Bonita’s Davis had trouble shaking the Heisman curse. He inured his knee while filming a story about his winning the Heisman and never regained the form that made “Mr. Outside” one of the nation’s most electrifying runners.

A couple of years after Davis’s death, Bonita welcomed the addition of a $1.2 million artificual turf at the stadium that bears his name. It all makes you wonder in these cash-strapped times if Davis, a child of The Depression and so magnanimous in his life, wouldn’t suggest selling Mr. Heisman to benefit the future athletic program at Bonita.

One thing is certain. The Heisman Memorial Trophy has vast influence that goes far beyond its powerful pose.

Tags: football