Before there was Ron Dayne in 1999, the Wisconsin Badgers gained their first Heisman Trophy winner in 1954. Alan Ameche made history for the Badgers, en route to the College Football Hall of Fame and a significant piece of NFL immortality.
When you mention Alan Ameche to a sports fan on the street (and that sports fan is at least 50 years old), you will almost always get one answer among people who actually remember the running back: “Oh yeah, right, he was the guy who scored the winning touchdown in overtime of the 1958 NFL Championship Game.” Ameche won one of the most important and consequential football games ever played, a game widely credited with giving professional football the publicity and the sizzle needed to emerge into America’s most popular sport in the coming decades.
The process by which the NFL grew into a commercial juggernaut — amplified by NFL Films, aided by Commissioner Pete Rozelle, fueled by Vince Lombardi, enhanced by Joe Namath’s victory in Super Bowl III, strengthened by the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, catapulted by the runaway success of the emergent Super Bowl concept — began in many ways with a game in which Alan Ameche played, a game which ended on a touchdown Ameche scored. That is no small place in history for the man nicknamed “The Horse.”
Here is how the 1954 Heisman vote went down:
Ameche won a close vote with 1,068 points. He gained 214 first-place votes, which was 34 more than runner-up Kurt Burris of Oklahoma, who collected 180 such votes. Burris had 838 points. Ameche might have lost the Heisman had Burris won more second- and third-place votes, but Ameche exceeded Burris in those categories as well, with 46 more seconds (157-111) and 36 more thirds (112-76).
The 46 more seconds provided 92 points. The 36 thirds added 36 points, meaning that Ameche outdistanced Burris by 128 points on votes other than first-place tallies. Given that Ameche won the first-place category by 102 points over Burris (34 more first-place votes at three points per vote), a complete flip of 128 points to Burris would have given the Sooner lineman the victory. This was not a runaway created by first-place votes, but a case of Ameche being slightly better in first, second, and third-place results.
Howard “Hopalong” Cassady of Ohio State finished third with 810 points, right behind Burris’s 838. Instructively, Cassady collected 139 second-place votes. Fourth-place finisher Ralph Guglielmi of Notre Dame — who had 691 points and was also competitive in the top tier of the 1954 Heisman race — hauled in 128 second-place votes as well. Cassady and Guglielmi split the vote with Burris, which contributed to Ameche’s victory.
Four Heisman contenders — Ameche, Burris, Cassady, and Guglielmi — all gained more than 110 first- and second-place votes, making the 1954 Heisman one of the more deeply competitive and balanced Heisman races of all time.
A Wisconsin Badger and future Baltimore Colt came out on top, just as he did four years later in the 1958 NFL season.
One immortal and iconic moment in New York on a football field was preceded by four years in the very same city, when Alan Ameche lifted the Heisman Trophy at the Downtown Athletic Club.