Historic Yellowjacket game footage is a fountain of youth
Vince Russo ’61 was watching football on television two years ago when he recalled a fleeting moment of glory he had on the gridiron as a member of the University of Rochester Yellowjackets.
“I was watching these guys get knocked all over and I said to myself, ‘Darn it, I used to be able to do that,’” says Russo, now 84 years old. “And then I remembered that play.”
That play unfolded during the third quarter of a game against Hobart College at Fauver Stadium in 1961. He was on the defensive line when the ball slipped from the grasp of a Statesmen running back and arced backwards through the air into the waiting hands of Russo, who ran 40 yards for a touchdown en route to a 27–6 Rochester victory.
“I kept telling anyone, if a defensive lineman caught a fumble like that and ran 40 yards for a touchdown, it would make ESPN’s ‘Top Ten’ nowadays,” he says.
For 60 years Russo recounted his version of that play to family and friends with no visual evidence of its ever happening outside of the moving pictures in his mind’s eye. But he knew, too, that there once was proof in the form of footage captured on 16-millimeter film in the early days of what is now routine in college athletics—the post-game video session.
On a lark, he emailed the Department of Athletics and Recreation inquiring whether the footage might still exist. He heard back that it did indeed.
The footage sat on a shelf in a Goergen Athletic Center storage room amid hundreds of tin canisters of 16-millimeter film and VHS tapes. To aging Yellowjackets yearning for a glimpse of their glory days, the storage room’s contents amount to a treasure trove of game footage from decades past.
The keeper of the treasure is Terry Gurnett, the former longtime women’s soccer coach who is now the associate director of athletics for Advancement. Gurnett, who has been with the University for 50 years, recalls finding the films in closets, desk drawers, and storage rooms around campus. When he happened upon one, he put it on the shelf.
“I’ve just amassed all this,” Gurnett says with a sweep of his arm, gesturing at an assemblage of Yellowjacket paraphernalia, budget books, and fitness equipment in the storage room. “I figured if I didn’t save them, who the heck would?”
The collection is meticulously inventoried and consists of film footage of more than 1,000 athletic contests, mainly of football and men’s and women’s basketball games. The majority of the footage spans the 1950s through the early 2000s, but the earliest date to the 1920s. The oldest is a 1927 football game between Rochester and Hobart.
Of course, most of it can’t be easily viewed or shared. Reel-to-reel projectors are largely limited to movie theaters nowadays and video cassette machines are yard sale fodder.
“In a perfect world, I would take each one of these, digitize them, and make them available to everyone online,” Gurnett says.
But that’s a daunting task. Digitizing the entire archive could cost as much as $152,000, according to an estimate Gurnett received for the work.
Still, the athletics department has made inroads in digitizing the footage. To date, 70 games have been added to one of the department’s YouTube channel, @uofrathletics1850. Dozens more await uploading.
Some of that effort has been financed with the help of alumni, like Russo, who sent Gurnett a check that covered the cost of digitizing the game featuring his moment in the sun and several other games.
“I told them if you find that film, I’ll get in my car and drive to Rochester just to watch it,” says Russo, who makes his home in Dayton, Ohio. “Seeing that again was on my bucket list.”
Russo didn’t have to make the trip. Gurnett sent him the digitized footage, in which Russo scrambles into the end zone and tosses the football into the air in jubilation.
As artifacts important to the annals of the University go, footage from a forgettable midseason athletic contest is a far cry from, say, the University’s founding charter.
Yet there is historical value in some of the footage, says University archivist Melissa Mead. She notes how film of the 1927 football game shows a Rochester marching band, providing evidence that the band was formed years earlier than previously thought.
“They have different value to different people,” Mead says of the footage. “Mostly the value is to alumni athletes, but to the archives and to me the value is what it shows about the University and athletics and the people who attended the games.”
For former athletes in their golden years, the prospect of seeing moving pictures of themselves in their glory days is a chance to dip a toe in a fountain of youth.
Michael Cohen ’61, who captained the basketball team, recalls riding the bench in the last game of the regular season against Hamilton College in 1961 as his Yellowjackets neared the 100-point mark—an extraordinary feat in those days.
As Cohen tells it, the coach, Lyle Brown, summoned him to take the court so he could score the 100th point of the game. He missed shot after shot until his teammates set a pick for him and he let the ball fly to its mark.
“It was very important to me,” Cohen, 84, says of having footage from that game.
“There are probably still people alive who remember that game. I sure as hell do. It’s stuck on my brain.”
