Husky Stadium, Seattle, Washington

 

Husky Stadium holds more than 70,000 screaming Washington football fans every week, but has its origins in a bitter dispute over football.  It was, according to my meticulous research, never meant for the sport at all.  Husky Stadium was built to support "Husky" Zeb Middyons's bear-fighting promotion.  Middyons, who claimed to be a mentalist who could control bears with his mind, barnstormed across the Pacific Northwest throughout the the early 1900s.  He set up a stable of bears calmed by salmon doused in vats of laudanum and, along with his accomplice Mars McMaster,* advertised the bear fighting as a demonstration of what he called "Brains-Combat."

*According to H.U.J. Holman's "Woods Men: The Pacific Northwest's Greatest Hucksters, Gamblers, and Shamanic Grafters 1880-1925, McMcaster was also known as "El Picador" and claimed to be from Spain, but was actually born Stan Oldlocz in Lodz.  He spent years using the name Bradley Morton that he stole from an army buddy who was killed in what official Army records described as a "moose taunting incident."  McMcaster was also known to use the names Brode Hohny, Horus Mangaarten, The Rev. Red Rogers, Stan Van Stan, and Hohnus Gravy, which he assumed while selling a canned gravy with "restorative properties for the man's Vigorous Area."

By 1918, Middyons, who had also profited from a wartime black market zinc operation, had enough money to being construction on what he named Husky Stadium, which he had sold as the "Paradise of Brains-Combat."  But, in the middle of construction, disaster struck.  Middyons was in a small town where he had a planned performance but the day before, a group of locals caught a wild grizzly that was rampaging through town and locked it in the courthouse.  The mayor and other town dignitaries begged Middyons to use his mental powers to convince the bear to leave.  For three hours, Middyons stood outside the courthouse touching his head and squinting (this is my interpretation. Other accounts, such as from Tred Millcox in Bear Court, suggest that he was also mumbling and possibly crying.  I have some serious concerns with Millcox's methodology and I want to just state on the record that his last article on bear attacks was held up in peer review because he kept insisting that the Port McNeil Maniac Grizzly had somehow fashioned what he kept referring as a "salmon nunchuk.")  When some angry residents began to question whether Middyons had the ability to manipulate bears with his own mind, Middyons told them that he the shape of the roof created a "mental curtain" that prevented him from achieving full control of the "ursine cortex."

That is when "Two Strap" Knagston, the leader of a strongman outfit coincidentally barnstorming through the same town who was known for his then-unorthodox two strap unitard, picked up Middyons and flung him into the courthouse.  No one knows what happens next, although his hideous screams echoed through the town within minutes.

Middyons's grisly bear death left his financial backers and the city of Seattle in a serious dilemma; they had no major attraction for their expensive new stadium.  Investors brought in all sorts of acts.  They first tried to recruit men from the lumberjack camps for a series of violent games including "trunk jousts," but the authorities shut them down after deciding that a "beard to beard" fighting event was "obscene on a level The Court has never thought possible."

Football fans demanded that they move the team into the new stadium, which abutted the university, but they made a powerful enemy.  Vice Provost E. Emmett Brudge had wormed his way into a powerful position at the right hand of the university president by mesmerizing him with elaborate conspiracies about plots forming against him among the faculty.  For example, the president's private papers contain an elaborate secret memo that Brudge had written suggesting that a geographer popular among the faculty been attempting to control the university president by putting psychedelic powders in his tea that Brudge described as "the dragon's tendrils."  Brudge, for reasons no one ever has confirmed, despised football, referring to it exclusively as "an Oaf's Holiday" or "the Devil's Pork Wrestling" and calling football players "Bovinous Beefs."

Brudge began planting letters and editorials in local papers, but everyone could tell they were by him because they had headlines like "Beware! Bovine Brawls in your Backyard" and "Ban this Farcical Pork Circus from our Beloved Bears-Wrestling Stadium AT ONCE."

Eventually football gained too much popularity for Brudge to hold it off.  The final straw came when Brudge's automobile, a model T that he painted himself a color called "accounting visor green" and called "Mrs. Plimstin" broke down in front of a field where Washington players were practicing.  They lifted the car with Brudge inside screaming "unhand me, you unseemly hippopotami" and carried him to the main administration building while a crowd of thousands gathered before dispersing into a massive riot.

Brudge had long suspected that his arch-rival Quill Quall had arranged the stunt in a series of "invidious machinations" to humiliate him.*  It worked.  Brudge lost the support of the university president and left Seattle.  He formed the anti-football organization "Manful Society Against Oafery" and toured the country convincing towns to ban football and instead engage youths in what he claimed were more wholesome sports such as "brain pushing" where youths stand forehead to forehead and recite useful facts at each other until exhaustion. Often he was chased from town on a railroad pushcart, scattering his pamphlets as a distraction and to deflect pitchfork blows. G.A. Rimsford's "Lumber Laughs: Touring Vaudeville in the Pacific Northwest 1918-1932" suggests that the popular Rolph and Dolph's Head Sport act was essentially a sarcastic performance of brain pushing, but I am sorry to say that his entire article is also based on Jean-Robert Mitaine's philosophy of "word construction" where it presents as instructions to fold a thin sheet of cardboard into various configurations in order to decipher the words in order as part of the School of Touch Scholarship and it is nearly impossible to determine the citation because my cardboard got too bent up.

*It is difficult to take Brudge's accusations seriously, but some university historians, most notably Katthy Cregg, have noted that Quall was an early automobile enthusiast who could have disabled Brudge's car easily.  Quall also benefited from the ascent of Washington football as he was often selected to tackle the opposing team's bursar before the game, which was a popular tradition at the time until a professor of medieval studies showed up in full armor and had to be subdued with a weighted net.

Within a few years, the stadium became the unquestioned home of Washington Huskies football.  Every few years, a small group of Brudge sympathizers emerges to denounce it a series of leaflets as a "Odorous Pig Sport" and prophesying that one day a mentalist will bring a horde of rampaging bears back to the stadium to reclaim it for its rightful purpose, but it has not happened yet.