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July 26, 2024 That's my right shoulder in the shot as I interview
Lt. Col. John Mosley in his Aurora home for a Fox Sports Rocky Mountain profile of the former Tuskegee Airman.
Colorado State made a classy move Thursday, when Director of Athletics John Weber announced
the Rams will retire Lt. Col. John Mosley's No. 14 across all sports.
It included a grandfather clause, so to speak, saying current CSU athletes wearing the number can continue
to do so until their elilgibility is up. However. it seems if those wearing the number now will switch immediately to join
in the tribute. My profile of Mosley, an omnibus recrafting of the many pieces I did on him over the
years, is here. For several years, I have been advocating
the renaming of a street outside Canvas Stadium after Mosley. This move certainly works, as long as there is visual evidence
of the gesture, at least in the stadium and Moby Arena. Mosley was a trailblazing football player, wrestler and class officer, and it's significant
that A&M/CSU's football program was integrated long before the program at Colorado. Depending on definition of terms,
that gap was 15 years. Mosley showed up in 1939, told iconic coach Harry Hughes he wanted to play football, and Hughes essentially
said: "Give this guy some equipment." I first came across Mosley as I was
doing my book, Third Down and a War to Go, about my father's 1942 Wisconsin Badgers, who won one version of the national
title -- from the Helms Foundation -- and then went off to war in the various services, both in the Pacific theater and in
Europe.
I realized
I could have done a similar book on virtually any team of that era, and I kept coming across mentions of CU and CSU
players in my research. I ended up doing several
newspaper stories on the Aggies and Rams of that period. One of the pieces was a look at the 1942 CSU-CU game and the men
who played in it. (Later, I expanded that story into a "Fourth Down
and a War to Go" chapter in my book Playing Piano in a Brothel.) I interviewed Mosley for
that story and eventually circled back to focus solely on him. Actually, I circled back several times for print and for Fox
Sports Rocky Mountain. CSU's multi-sports
star Walter "Bus" Bergman and CU's Bob Spicer served in
the Sixth Marine Division with three of my father's Wisconsin teammates -- Dave Schreiner, Bob Baumann and Bud Seelinger --
leading up to and in the Battle of Okinawa. All five played in the
Division's Christmas Eve 1944 touch football game, the Mosquito Bowl, on Guadalcanal. I did a major piece on that game, with
Bergman in the spotlight, in 2003. That's here. I realize that's getting away from Mosley,
but the point is, when I wtote pieces on athletes' contributions in World War II, well, one thing led to another. Links to some of my WWII stories are here. Also, with
the aid of Tony Phifer, a senior writer for CSU's University's Division of External Relations, I also came across and wrote in the Denver Post and
on ESPN.com about CSU's 1936 Olympic decathlon gold medalist Glenn Morris, and eventually adapted the material into my fact-based
novel Olympic Affair. His gold medal from Berlin is displayed in the Iris and Michael Smith Alumni Center at the northwest corner
of the new stadium, and the oak tree that got my research started is planted outside.
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