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Photo from Southern Oregon Historical Society Ashland players line up at practice in this 1899 photo. Notice the inordinately large size of the football. MT file photo North Medford and Ashland are shown in their most important matchup: the 1993 state championship game. Tornado won, 27-24. A century-old rivalry Medford, Ashland first met in 1899 By GREG STILES We know precious little about the early football contests in the Rogue Valley. What we do know is that they were loosely organized affairs, more between community groups rather than school groups and that football was played in at least four Southern Oregon communities before the turn of the century. The days, the contests and the performers have disappeared over time's horizon. Unlike a skirmish involving the U.S. Army or the building of a railroad, there are no government or corporate records. There are no personal recollections and only a few scant newspaper accounts that bear no resemblance to modern sports writing -- good or bad. In the past 100 years, rules and even the time of year the games were played has changed. The gridiron pioneers wore virtually no pads or protective gear. Today's players wear literally hundreds of dollars worth of equipment. Today, football is synonymous with fall. It arrives along with the harvesting of pears, deer hunting and Thanksgiving. Some of the earliest recorded football in the Rogue Valley was played in February and March. When North Medford and Ashland square off at Walter A. Phillips Field on the Ashland campus Friday night, a halftime ceremony will commemorate the 100th anniversary of football between the two communities. The first game on Thanksgiving Day of 1899 was more akin to a modern sandlot game than the one played between the defending Class 4A state champion Grizzlies and the Black Tornado, who have combined for seven state titles and 13 trips to the championship game. The Nov. 27, 1899 edition of the Ashland Tidings stated: "A football game has been arranged to take place at Medford on Thanksgiving which promises to be much more evenly contested and therefore more interesting than last Tuesday's game. It will be a struggle between the crack players of Ashland and Medford, and also for the championship of Southern Oregon. The successful team will challenge any eleven in this part of the state of a corresponding average weight, which is 145 pounds. "Thursday afternoon the Ashland boys elected Lewis Stanley manager and coach, and Fred Robley captain. The team is organized and is practicing daily and the boys hope to give a good account of themselves at Medford." The Ashland boys indeed gave a good account of themselves, defeating Medford, 96-0. There weren't a lot of details, but a Dec. 4, 1899 Tidings article shed some light. (Pardon the reporter's poor use of grammar.) "The Normal football team (predecessor to Southern Oregon University) has challenged the Ashland eleven to play next Saturday, which challenge has been accepted by the town boys. In view of the drubbing the latter gave Medford on Thanksgiving, the Ashland team are sanguine of success, while the Normals, who learned a trick or two in their game with Eugene feel pretty confident of a favorable result." No account of that contest apparently survives. However, a second, somewhat more brief meeting between Ashland and Medford occurred on Dec. 9. Not much is known about that game, but tempers flared both on and off the field in a game played north of East Main Street and opposite of Alida Street. According to the 1984 publication A History of Ashland High School Football by Ron Davis, a ruckus broke out on and off the field that ended the contest prematurely. Inbetween paragraphs on a Christmas bazaar at the Congregational church and an upcoming Choral Union concert, the Tidings reported: "A match game of football was attempted between kid teams of Medford and Ashland here Saturday afternoon, but the attempt was unsuccessful. The scrimmage on the gridiron pretty nearly resulted in a general one outside of the grounds. The game ended by mutual disagreement, the score standing 9 to 0, in favor of Ashland." Thus was born a rivalry? Not exactly. It took another eight years for Medford football to re-emerge -- at least anything recorded for posterity's sake. 75 Years of Medford Football, published by the Medford Linebackers in 1987, lists 1907 as the genesis of Medford football with two games against Grants Pass. It wasn't until 1909 that Medford and Ashland met again. This time, Medford won 11-6. Football fans accustomed to seeing finely manicured turf and artificial surfaces might have a hard time imagining the field where Medford played its games until moving to the present site of Spiegelberg Stadium during Bill Bowerman's regime in the second half of the 1930s. Van Scoy Field, on the present McLoughlin Middle School campus, was nothing more than a muddy mass covered with sawdust. "They didn't even try to plant grass," recalls Russ Brown, who watched games on Van Scoy Field during coach Prink Callison's era and then played for Darwin Burgher from 1932-34. "We played Saturday afternoons. They'd just put down sawdust and then bring in a street sprinkler to wet the sawdust down. The only time we played on (sod) turf was when we played at (Hayward Field) in Eugene." When the Oakdale Avenue campus was opened in the early 1930s, Brown says boys went out every day on the field behind the school picking up rocks. Ashland began playing at Walter A. Phillips, named for a graduate who died in World War I, in 1928. After 109 meetings, the Tornado has won 70 times, Ashland 36 and there have been three ties. Ashland play-by-play broadcaster Pete Belcastro divides the century-long series into three epochs: The early days dominated by Ashland, 60 years of Medford supremacy, followed by Ashland's resurgence in the past 15 seasons. Of the first 25 meetings through 1921, Ashland notched 16 wins, Medford eight with one tie. A major shift in Southern Oregon football fortunes occurred in 1922. Medford physician Edwin R. Durno, who later served in the U.S. Congress, coached Medford to an 8-1 season, outscoring high school foes 345-10. The squad's lone loss was a 20-14 setback against the Oregon Agriculture College (Oregon State) Rooks at Corvallis. Medford rolled up 74-0 and 80-6 wins over Grants Pass and crushed Roseburg 101-0. University of Oregon coach Shy Huntington was reported to have called Medford's team one of the strongest on the Pacific Coast. That was just the start of an amazing streak in which Medford went 53-3-2 over a seven-year period. It was during that period that Medford chalked up its largest margin of victory, defeating Ashland, 67-0, in 1925. Callison left to coach the University of Oregon after 1929. Burgher soon followed, posting a 37-5-3 record in five seasons. He went unbeaten in 1933-34. Bill Bowerman, who later coached the 1972 U.S. Olympic track and field team, had two highly successful stints. In between, Al Simpson posted a 19-1 record during 1944-45. (The winter before coaching Medford to the 1944 state title, Simpson coached Ashland to the 1944 state basketball championship, with the Grizzlies compiling a 21-8 record.) Lee Ragsdale continued Medford's success in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hiring a young World War II veteran named Fred Spiegelberg to coach his line. Spiegelberg coached 31 seasons, compiling a 253-61-10 record and was named national coach of the year in 1971 and was inducted into the National High School Coaches Association Football Hall of Fame in 1980. From 1943 to 1981 Times were lean for Ashland in the years after World War II as the Grizzlies beat Medford only twice -- in 1947 and 1969. The 20-0 win in 1969 was significant because Medford went on to win the state championship that year. In that span Ashland had one campaign of particular note. Coach Gene Allison's 1952 team went 7-4, advancing to the equivalent of the Class 3A semifinals. Ashland's resurgence followed soon after Jim Nagel's arrival in 1983. Two years later, the Grizzlies made the state playoffs and have been there every year since, winning state championships in 1989, 1991 and 1998, while finishing second in 1992 and 1993. The teams played twice through 1929. It wasn't until 1993 that the Tornado and Grizzlies again played a second time in a season. That game carried more weight than any before or since. It was a year in which the Southern Oregon Conference dominated the state. Ashland defeated North Medford, 36-33, to win the SOC championship at Spiegelberg Stadium. The two teams won four straight playoff games to reach the finals. In the semifinals, the Tornado defeated SOC runner-up Grants Pass 27-21 in overtime. North Medford went on to hand Ashland its lone loss of the season, 27-24. Two coaches stood on both sidelines during their careers. Simpson coached Ashland to a 7-2 record in 1943 with the Grizzlies, winning 19-7. The next two seasons, his Medford teams won 42-13 and 52-0. After a stint at Southern Oregon, Simpson returned to Ashland where his teams went 9-18 from 1955 through 1957. Craig Hastin coached the Grizzlies in 1981 and 1982, coming up on the short end and then coached Medford in 1983. Grizzlies, Tigers and Black Tornado were still to come. Turn-of-the-century accounts referred to Ashland players as "Granite City boys." In the early 1920s they were called the Lithians -- a sobriquet that would have set Ashland apart from all others. Various newspaper articles through the 1950s referred to Medford teams as the Pear Pickers -- because of the region's chief cash crop. By the early 1920s, Medford's teams were known as the Tigers. It was during Callison's glory days in the late 1920s that the late Oregonian sports editor L.H. Gregory penned the line that eventually led to Medford's teams becoming the Black Tornado. "From out of the south, Medford swept over the field like a Black Tornado," wrote Gregory. The name stuck, but it wasn't until 1953 that the student body officially adopted the Black Tornado moniker. Today's Sports Index Mail Tribune Copyright� The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, OR U.S.A.