Commentary: Carson-Douglas — state’s best rivalry — began 100 years ago

Here at world headquarters for the Nevada News Group, we are fired up about the ’23 football season.

Yeah, 2023, for sure. But we’re pretty excited about 1923, too.

It was 100 years this October that the varsity football teams from Carson and Douglas met for the first time on the football field. A century later, it remains the oldest and most important of the state’s rivalries that is still played on a regular basis.

We have big plans to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the region’s big high school rivalry, including a special section, podcast episodes — starting with Episode 83 of the Behind the Bench podcast — and extra emphasis on the teams this fall.

We’ll be sharing more details on those items soon. For now, let’s get things started with a look back at what was kind of a crazy year, both on the football field and around the region.

Fire up the time machine. It’s early fall, 1923. Calvin Coolidge is the U.S. president, having taken over from Warren G. Harding earlier in the year; the Hollywood sign goes up in L.A. (it originally read, “Hollywoodland”); the first velociraptor fossil has just been found; and Italy’s Mount Etna has finished up a 24-day eruption. Good times.

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So … football in 1923.

Let’s start at the top — your 1923 Nevada state high school champion was Churchill County (which, even 100 years ago, couldn’t escape being shorthanded to “Fallon” at least 75 percent of the time). Despite the loosey-goosey nature of Nevada sports at the time (read on for more), it’s considered an official championship; you can look it up in the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association’s record book.

Here’s the interesting part, though — the Greenwave did not win any playoff games or finish on the top of any polls or play anyone south of Gardnerville (for that matter, they weren’t known as the Greenwave at all).

Rather, it seems Fallon was awarded the title when the arguing stopped.

It helped that the “Churchill County eleven” won a lot. Fallon appears to have gone 6-0-1 on the season while yielding only seven points (in a 7-7 tie with Lovelock, the modern Pershing County High). But as late as the Saturday before Thanksgiving, news reports showed that a Fallon loss would have been enough for Lovelock or even Yerington to lay claim to the title. Bizarrely, Sparks was included in the championship debate throughout October and most of November, despite eventually losing three games.

Fallon won its second-to-last game over Sparks, 14-0 — one gets the sense that the Railroaders’ backers finally gave up the title talk at that point — and then blanked Carson on Thanksgiving Day, 13-0, in what appears to have been the final game of the 1923 high school season.

And, well … that was it. The season appears to have ended with a collective shrug and a feeling of “only one team didn’t lose; give ’em the trophy.”

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Your final 1923 Northern Nevada standings, near as I could put together:

Fallon  6-0-1

Yerington         3-1-1

Lovelock          2-1-1

Sparks 2-3-1

Reno    2-3-2

Carson 2-4-0

Gardnerville    0-5-0

It wasn’t any sort of “league,” though, as we understand the term today. It was closer to a loose consortium of Northern Nevada schools which agreed to play each other fairly regularly. Twice a season, in many cases.

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There’s at least one school missing from the standings — and from any championship debate. The Stewart Indian School, which had a rich sports history, did play some football games against regional opponents in 1923, but the team’s results were poorly reported. It’s also not clear if some, or all, of the games were considered to be exhibitions.

A handful of games can also be found for the “orphans’ school” — curiously, never capitalized — which presumably means the former State Orphans Home. Much like Stewart, though, the team’s games were poorly recorded, if recorded at all.

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Also missing from the 1923 championship talk is anyone south of Yerington. No serious discussion appears to have taken place around any teams in Clark County or elsewhere.

It’s not immediately clear why this is the case. It’s possible not many schools in the south fielded football teams. It’s also possible that a few did, but had no real interest in competing for what must have seemed like a quasi-mythical “championship.”

It could be as simple as travel. This was an era when citizens taking automobile trips from Carson City to California was considered newsworthy enough for a headline and a few paragraphs.

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A year after winning Nevada’s first recognized state football title, Carson won only two of its eight games in 1923 (the nickname-less school also got crushed in a Monday game against Lodi, Calif., and lost to the Nevada freshman team).

The Carson City News remained pretty booster-ish throughout the season, but the rah-rah seemed a little forced late in the season, when it was clear that the team could not move the football. Carson appears to have scored six total points over its final five games.

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For Douglas, then referred to as “Gardnerville,” the 1923 season was its first attempt to play varsity football.

The results went about as expected. The not-yet-Tigers opened their football era with a 102-0 loss to Fallon (also reported as 103-0 … but at some point, does it matter?) and were then crushed the next weekend by Carson in a game for which I’ve found three different final scores. None of them are close. It was, overall, a fairly ridiculous start to a rivalry that is still around 100 years later.

Douglas’ one score in six games was reported to have come in a 34-7 loss to “the Indian school.”

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Some Carson City News headlines from the fall of 1923:

• Zack Wilcox Wills Whiskers To Sacramento Whiskerinos

• Eight Die in Nevada’s Worst Auto-Train Crash

• Attempt Made to Destroy Large Virginia City Building

• When is a Still Not a Still?

• Again, Everybody — Beat Reno!

• Yerington Man’s Radio Call Heard in the Arctic Circle

• Dope is Making Its Appearance in Wells

• Siskiyou Train Robbers Now Believed Hiding in North Washoe County

• Want Governing Body for Nevada High School Athletics

• Leo Tyma, Escaped Convict, Caught by Sacramento Police

A quick word about Leo. He, for whatever reason, was naked when he escaped from the Nevada State Prison in July. He then ran to “the orphans’ home,” where he stole clothes and shoes. A couple of days later, he stole a boat … which he then rowed across Lake Tahoe. At night.

Ah, 1923.