They were there – copied, printed and inserted – at the beginning of each 2009 SU football playbook: letters from three men who once played for Syracuse and won it all.

The team needed those letters, said Orange head coach Doug Marrone. They needed reminders of what it meant to win, a message placed before gridiron strategy. They needed voices from the past, from the team that laid the foundation for the school’s heritage, 50 years ago.

The 1959 team had never lost, after all. They were national champions.

‘I always thought my job, as head coach, was to make sure that our players knew the history of this school,’ Marrone said five days before the first game.

It was necessary, he said, because the recent past had been so brutal. In four years under Greg Robinson, the team won 10 games. They were mocked on television. They were routed on the field. They were lambasted from the stands.

Could his players remember a time when that was not so? Could his players remember when its offense was studied and replicated? When its defense allowed fewer than 100 yards per game over an entire season?

Could they learn from a group who understood winning? Marrone believed so.

So Marrone drew motivation from this legacy. On the first week of summer practice, he distributed books about the 1959 team to his players. He made it required reading. Instead of reciting the letters written by three members of the ’59 team – halfback Ger Schwedes, defensive end Maury Youmans and lineman John Brown – he put them in each playbook.

But three days before the start of the new season, before the kickoff to the 50th anniversary, center Jim McKenzie felt a burden.

‘We have to keep the great legacy,’ said McKenzie, a junior. ‘Fifty years ago, we were national champions. That’s not something that’s out of our reach, if we can perform 100 percent for every play, and for every game.’

The team could see from its past where Marrone wanted his team to be in the future.

McKenzie: ‘We started seeing what it takes to be a winner.’

The team’s clairvoyance came with knowledge of its legacy, which was delivered to Manley Field House in late June, before the players arrived for training camp.

They were in a box, shifting in the backseat of a Buick. They were 85 copies of the book about the 1959 season, written by brothers Maury and Gary Youmans in 2001.

Gary Youmans drove them down himself.

The title is self-evident: ”59: The Story of the 1959 Syracuse University National Championship Football Team.’ To give that history to the new coach and his team, would be the brothers’ gift.

‘The books weren’t enough,’ Maury Youmans said. He felt the team needed more.

So he called two former teammates, and together, they wrote letters to the 2009 team.

Maury wrote there would always be adversity before success. Schwedes, captain of the 1959 team, told the 2009 squad about pride. Brown, running back Ernie Davis’ roommate and best friend, began, ‘If you go back from that 50 years…’

The history and the letters could motivate Marrone’s team, Gary Youmans said. He knew why he was driving south toward Syracuse, on a summer morning. It had to do with tradition, he recalled; it had to do with winning.

It was May when Marrone first told Gary Youmans that he wanted his players to read the book. It was then that Gary Youmans recognized the strategy of a former SU coach who used to remind his players of teams in the past.

‘You’re kind of doing what Ben did,’ Gary told Marrone, speaking of ’59 head coach, Floyd ‘Ben’ Schwartzwalder. ‘And he kind of smiled.’

Senior tight end Mike Owen had not expected this. Why letters in the front of his playbook?

‘It was wild,’ Owen said. ‘We never expected to see the letters, just plays, then all of a sudden…’

Marrone had his reason: He would educate his team.

‘If you had asked a player about some of our history, and if you’ve played here, you may get offended,’ Marrone said. ‘They might not know it.’

‘The Ernie Davis’ story,’ Owen mumbled. ‘The national championship.’ He recited memories of the 1959 season he knew before reading the book.

‘I guess I didn’t really know the specifics,’ Owen said. ‘Now you’ve got a book, letters from firsthand experience.’

But did they learn from a team that understood winning?

Last Saturday afternoon, Marrone stood with a hand on his hip, eyes on the goal post, lower jaw pumping the gum in his mouth. He watched as a field goal sank SU’s season opener, a 23-20 overtime loss to Minnesota.

The three men who wrote letters saw it too.

Maury Youmans watched with a friend in a rental home along the St. Louis River. He saw a team that wouldn’t give up, he said.

Brown sat alone in his living room in suburban Pittsburgh, tuned into the television. ‘I hope people wouldn’t be disappointed,’ Brown said.

Schwedes sat beside his wife near the 10-yard line of the Carrier Dome, opposite the Syracuse bench. He felt pride for the program, something he hadn’t felt in a while. Then reality.

‘It takes five years to turn a team into a Top 20 football team,’ Schwedes said. ‘I think the way Doug thinks and operates, he’ll do it in less than that’

But could they reach a bowl game, perhaps win a national championship, now?

‘It may not be obtainable,’ Schwedes said.

That was the dream, McKenzie recalled, inspired by the three men who wrote letters and motivated by their legacy.

‘The goal was to reach a bowl game this year,’ McKenzie said. ‘That’s what coach said.’

McKenzie’s time is expiring. The junior captain knows. He’s still not positive what he will say to the letter-writers – the 1959 team returns to the Carrier Dome on Oct. 3 for commemoration – when he meets them.

‘I would just say thank you,’ he said. ‘I guess I would ask what it was like to hold up that trophy.’

McKenzie flipped his palms and laid them flat on his white padded pants, as if he held a newborn.

He wondered if the trophy was heavy.

edpaik@syr.edu

Published on September 8, 2009 at 12:00 pm