On December 5 1939 1939 Heisman winner Nile Kinnick
Given the opportunity to trade on his reputation as a Heisman Trophy winner, Iowa back Nile Kinnick decided he could better serve his country as a pilot. When Kinnick gave his acceptance speech for the 1939 Heisman, he had pretty much decided his playing career had ended. He would go to law school at Iowa, and then join the Naval Air Corps a month before Pearl Harbor. The following quotes come from “A Hero Perished: The Diary and Selected Letters of Nile Kinnick” (University of Iowa Press, 1991). “Finally, if you’ll permit me,” Kinnick said at the end of his extemporaneous acceptance speech, “I’d like to make a comment which in my mind is indicative perhaps of the greater significance of football and sports emphasis in general in this country, and that is, 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. Thank you.” Yet that’s exactly what Kinnick decided to do. He served as an assistant coach at Iowa for the two seasons before he entered the service. Once he got to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, the head coach of the base team “wanted to know how I would like to stay around here as an instructor and play football,” Kinnick wrote in his diary on March 11, 1942. “As politely, and yet as firmly, as I knew how I told him I never again wanted to play any football, and that I would really rather go to the fleet than remain as an instructor.” On June 2, 1943, Kinnick flew a training mission off the U.S.S. Lexington in the Gulf of Paria between Venezuela and Trinidad. His plane developed an oil leak and he executed a water landing near the ship. By the time rescue boats and planes got to the wreckage site, his body could not be found.– Ivan Maisel
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