Revisiting Defeat, Eight Decades Later

In October 1921, a crisis shook Harvard’s campus.

“The situation demands the whole-souled cooperation of every man,” R.B. Wigglesworth ’12 wrote in The Crimson. The mighty Crimson, coming off the previous year’s Rose Bowl victory, were soundly defeated by the “Praying” Colonels of Kentucky’s Centre College in one of the biggest upsets in college football history.

Although the University has long since forgotten the game, it may be forced to remember the loss when it hits the silver screen.

Eight decades later, a Hollywood actor is now planning to turn this landmark event into a major motion picture.

The game began slowly, but in the third quarter a spectacular series of Centre plays drove the Crimson back from the Colonels’ 17-yard line to Harvard’s 11-yard mark.

The Colonels brought the Crimson to a 6-0 defeat, its first since 1916, led by quarterback Alvin “Bo” McMillin, who singlehandedly carried the ball on a 32-yard dash.

“They outrushed, outpassed, and out-maneuvered their Crimson opponents,” wrote Wigglesworth. “In short...they played better football.”

Even today, the small Kentucky school prominently references its victory on its website. The game’s score, “C6H0,” is painted across one of the main buildings on campus, and McMillin became a hero in Kentucky and much of the rest of the country.

The quarterback’s heroics were made myth when he served as the model for the 1922 football novel First Down Kentucky. To many, Centre College and McMillin examplified the American Dream on the grid-iron by shutting out Harvard.

Inspired by the story, actor Matt Battaglia now says he plans to turn the story of Harvard’s defeat to Centre into a major-league movie.

Although not originally from Kentucky, Battaglia was a linebacker for the University of Louisville, where he earned an Honorable Mention on the 1985 All-American team, and had a brief career in the NFL.

Battaglia came upon the Centre-Harvard game when he read about it in a Hollywood script by three obscure writers.

Impressed, he dropped plans for his own football movie, convinced that the 1921 game would instead make the perfect film.

Although he has not yet found funding, Battaglia says he is confident.

“We should have a $2 million line of credit locked up by the end of the month,” he says.

He says he thinks the project can acquire high-profile talent.

Battaglia says he has been told that Kevin Costner and Billy Bob Thornton “reacted favorably” to the script.

“We will be approaching talent at that level,” he says.

For the uninitiated, a movie about a football game that happened 80 years ago might seem unappealing. Yet Battaglia says the success of Remember The Titans and The Rookie prove that this sort of movie can be successful.

—Staff writer Doug G. Mulliken can be reached at mulliken@fas.harvard.edu.