The Oct. 16, 1939 issue of “Life” magazine featured a two-page spread on the Rattlers of St. Mary’s and the surprising prediction that the tiny Catholic college was “well on its way to becoming a major football power.”
Those startling words were music to the ears of John Clark “Mose” Simms, the colorful promoter whose publicity stunts had made the team the talk of Texas and the entire nation. But the controversial hustler was fast wearing out his welcome at the San Antonio school.
Simms was eating lunch in a café west of Fort Worth in 1934, when he read a newspaper article about St. Mary’s plan to revive its football program mothballed three years earlier. He hopped in his car and drove straight to San Antonio, where he cut an unusual deal with the Marianist priests in charge of the small university with a mere 412 students.
In exchange for tuition, books and living quarters for the players, Simms offered to provide St. Mary’s with football and basketball teams and pay all expenses of the athletic department to boot. His sole compensation would come from ticket sales.
Simms would insist that most of the gate receipts were spent on food for the ravenous jocks and that he ultimately wound up $40,000 in the red. “They ate us out of business,” a former assistant quipped in a 1965 interview.
Simms specialized in giving other colleges’ rejects a second chance at gridiron glory. One gamble that paid off big-time was a 150-pound running back named Curtis Sandig, who had flunked out of Baylor. Recruited by Simms in a domino parlor in his hometown of Mart, Sandig was the star of the 1940 team rushing for 770 yards and accounting for 121 points, third highest in the land.
Doug Locke was even better. The two-time Associated Press All-American tallied 26 touchdowns and a total of 160 points to lead all college scorers in 1937.
Even though Simms had played ball at four different colleges and spent some time on a high-school sideline, he had the good sense to hire an experienced head coach. Frank Bridges, winner of two Southwest Conference championships at Baylor in the 1920s, soon whipped Simms’ retreads into shape. The Rattlers came within a whisker of upsetting Catholic University, destined for the Orange Bowl, in a 1935 nail-biter.
Simms did not miss a trick, when it came to attracting attention. Ignoring the fact that St. Mary’s official colors were blue and gold, he designed a red, white and blue uniform with a sprinkling of stars. A reporter took one look at the gaudy costumes and wrote, “The uniforms of the Texans are as shocking as the photographs of the Cleveland torso murders.”
Since Simms could not talk most colleges into bringing their squads to the Alamo City, the Rattlers hit the highway in search of games. They traveled in a double-decker bus he bought on credit from Greyhound, painted blue and gold and christened the “Blue Goose.” Stenciled on the side was “St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas. Where the sunshine spends the winter.”
Staying on the road for weeks at a time, the Rattlers put an average of 10,000 miles an autumn on the “Blue Goose.” They played as many as 15 games a season and three in one week in such far flung locales as Montreal, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
After Bridges and the Marianist fathers had a falling-out in January 1939, Simms himself guided the Rattlers to their biggest victory. Later that year, they made the long trip to the West Coast for the season opener with highly ranked San Francisco University.
Beaten by the Dons on three previous occasions, Simms resorted to old-fashioned trickery. “Mose wanted us to look bad in front of the San Francisco press,” Sandig recalled nearly half a century later, “so in the days leading up to the game, we practiced in a public park wearing raggedy old uniforms.” The puzzled players also obeyed his orders to “drop passes and fumble.”
Everyone, including a wire-service reporter, was snookered by the charade. “The Rattlers stumbled over each other’s feet, got tangled in their own legs, tried to catch passes with their heads and ran plays in which nobody packed the ball – the center having snapped it back into space.”
But from the opening kickoff to the final gun, the Rattlers clicked on all cylinders. They dominated the dumbfounded Dons and went home with a one-point triumph.
By 1941, the Marianists had grown tired of Simms’ shenanigans. There was too much truth in his brazen boast that the Rattlers were professionals, and far too many of his players had never seen the inside of a classroom.
The president announced in April that the university had severed all ties with Mose Simms in order to take “full control of the details of its athletic program.” The ousted showman groused, “I’m out but I still own the athletic department and it’s for sale.”
Six games into the 1941 schedule, St. Mary’s did something that would be unthinkable on most college campuses today. They abruptly dropped football altogether.
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