June 2, 1943: The Death of a Legend

UPDATE
This moment has been replaced. See the new entry here.

GULF OF PARIA, Venezuela - The University of Iowa football team plays at Nile Kinnick Stadium. Before going to the locker room, the players rub a portion of a statue of Kinnick for good luck. A relief of Kinnick's 1939 touchdown against Notre Dame can be found in the stadium, and an excerpt from Kinnick's 1939 Heisman Trophy speech is played before the National Anthem at every Hawkeye game. Every Big Ten football game begins with a coin flip featuring a coin bearing Kinnick's likeness.

To say Nile Kinnick is the most famous and revered player in Hawkeye history is a severe understatement. Perhaps no college football program is more associated with one player than Iowa is with Kinnick. In his senior season of 1939, Kinnick was involved in 107 of Iowa's 130 points, played 402 of a possible 420 minutes, and led Iowa to a 6-1-1 record, including a 7-6 victory over Notre Dame. Kinnick was Iowa's best runner and passer, handled all their kicking and puntind duties, and was one of their top defenders. All this helped him to win most of the postseason Player of the Year awards in college football, including the Heisman Trophy, and to win the AP's Male Athlete of the Year award, beating out the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Joe Louis.

The on-field numbers don't tell the story of Kinnick, however. For instance, they don't say that Kinnick chose to attend Iowa, allegedly, because the Hawkeyes were at the bottom when he was picking schools, and he wanted to help a team at the bottom rather than join a team at the top. The numbers don't show that he was elected student body president, graduated with distinction and a 3.4 grade-point average in economics, and gave the class commencement speech. And they don't show how he passed up a $10,000 a year contract in the NFL to attend law school for a year.

Kinnick was already a legend in Iowa when he won the Heisman Trophy, but he became a national hero after his acceptance speech when, after passing all the credit for the award onto his teammates, he closed with the following line: "I thank God I was warring on the gridirons of the Midwest and not on the battlefields of Europe. I can speak confidently and positively that the players of this country would much more, much rather, struggle and fight to win the Heisman award than the Croix de Guerre."

Two years after that speech, Kinnick enlisted in the Navy, reporting for duty three days before Pearl Harbor. He felt that it was his duty, pointing out that every man he admired had served his country in a time of war. On June 1, 1943, while on a training flight off the coast of Venezuela, Kinnick's plane started leaking oil, forcing him into an emergency landing on the water. His body was never recovered after the crash, sending the entire state of Iowa into emotional shock.

In the years since his sudden and untimely end, Kinnick's legend has only grown in stature at Iowa. He has become the symbol of selflessness in college athletics, the perfect role model for midwestern humility. Perhaps its fitting that it took until 1972 for Iowa Stadium to be renamed in honor of Kinnick; his father voiced his reluctance about the honor, saying that it didn't seem right to single out his son when he was just one of 407,000 Americans who died serving in World War II. It's likely Kinnick would have agreed.