U-M great Bob Chappuis passed away Thursday at the age of 89. The former All-American is considered one of the greatest to ever wear the winged helmet. In 2009, The Wolverine caught up with Chappuis for a feature in our Football Preview. Here is that story ...

By John Borton

By the time the 1948 Rose Bowl rolled around, nothing the University of Southern California fired at Michigan football star Bob Chappuis had any chance of rattling him. He had already been fired upon, in earnest, by the German army.

On Feb. 13, 1945, the B-25 in which he served as a radioman and gunner went down in a burst of enemy fire. Chappuis and others bailed out in time, drifting to earth just north of Italy's Po River, some 160 miles behind German lines.

Chappuis and the plane's top turret gunner landed yards apart, and quickly buried their parachutes in the snow. They encountered an Italian peasant, a member of the local underground, who guided them into hiding that lasted several months before their eventual liberation.

All of that gets recounted in riveting detail in the Nov. 3, 1947 issue of Time magazine. Chappuis graced the cover of that issue, one that put his football adventures into perspective. At the same time, Michigan's Mad Magicians of '47 weren't lightly regarded by anyone, including Chappuis himself.

The standout halfback played for Michigan in 1942, before going off to war. Upon his return and that of several comrades, the Wolverines became a force that roared through the '47 campaign like few teams in college football history.

They manhandled Michigan State in the season opener, 55-0. Two weeks later, they tore apart Pittsburgh, 69-0. They posted two other regular-season shutouts, including a 21-0 whitewashing of Ohio State to cap a perfect 9-0 campaign.

But it wasn't a very capable defense that commanded the most attention. That focus went to the wizardry of Fritz Crisler's "Mad Magicians," the slight-of-hand artists in the offensive backfield who kept opponents guessing at all times, and mostly guessing incorrectly.

"According to the press, the Mad Magicians were the offensive unit," Chappuis noted. "We did all kinds of funny things. It was fun to play.

"But there were Mad Magicians that played defense, too. We played 10 games, including the Rose Bowl, and our opponents scored an average of five points per game. We had five shutouts, including the Southern California win. That was a pretty significant part of that team. The defense didn't get the credit they had coming."

USC couldn't have known what was coming in the Granddaddy of Them All. The Trojans certainly figured to fare better in the Rose Bowl than Pac-10 sibling Stanford, which got crushed by Fielding H. Yost's 1901 Michigan squad, 49-0, in the inaugural football offering in Pasadena.

The '47 Wolverines took three and a half days by train to even reach the sun-soaked city, stopping along the way to pose for pictures with Native Americans in Colorado, while hitting other points of interest. The stern Crisler wasn't interested in a vacation, but even he posed with a famous ventriloquist and a halfback of some renown.

"Another picture that was taken was of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy," Chappuis recalled. "Bergen is sitting there with Charlie on his knee, and Fritz is sitting over here with me on his knee. The string was pulled over here for Charlie, and the string was pulled over here for me. That was kind of fun."

Chappuis and the Elliott brothers, Pete and Bump, enjoyed a round of golf - not to mention a serenade - with Hollywood legend Bing Crosby, on the road to the Rose Bowl.

"We were riding down Sunset Boulevard in Crosby's convertible," Chappuis noted. "All of a sudden, Crosby breaks out into song. 'Buckle down Winsocki, buckle down.' I said to Pete, 'Here's a guy that gets millions of dollars for singing, and we're getting it for nothing.

"It was fun. Those are things you don't forget. Bump and I had our picture taken with [famed actress and singer] Marlene Dietrich. Of course, the most fun came in the game."

Chappuis almost didn't make it there. He wondered whether he would, after hitting the deck two days before the game. The Wolverines were running through plays, and the star halfback suddenly dropped to the turf like he'd been shot.

"I happened to be running with the ball around the end, and all of a sudden, I had this terrible pain in my thigh," Chappuis said. "It really hurt, and I'm down on the ground.

"Jim Hunt, who was the trainer, was working on me, trying to figure out what it was. Crisler came over and I thought, well, maybe I'll get some sympathy.

"He looked down at me and looked up and said, 'What happened here, Jim?' Jim said, 'Well, I think Bob pulled a hamstring.' And I'm thinking now I am really going to get some sympathy.

"He looked down at me and said, 'Good thing it didn't happen to somebody that could run.' You never saw me move so fast in all my life in getting up off that ground. He's not going to get away with that. I started the game. I wasn't going to let him get away with that."

Crisler, described by Chappuis as "austere" and regarded by his players as above human emotion for the most part, wasn't finished motivating. The trainer tightly wrapped the senior's leg for the Rose Bowl game, but Chappuis still sweated out the lineup introductions delivered in Crisler's deliberate monotone.

One by one, Crisler ticked off the names of the magicians ... Bump Elliott, Howard Yerges, Jack Weisenburger. Crisler then sucked in air through his teeth, as he often did when facing a difficult decision.

At last, he called out Chappuis as the starter at left halfback, but pronounced it with a long "A," rather than the well-known "Chap" version.

"You couldn't even recognize my name," Chappuis said, laughing and shaking his head. "That was his way of motivating somebody. He was just good at it - at least he got to me."

Chappuis described Crisler's pre-game speech as a "talk," rather than a "pep talk." The coach delivered the requisite dire warnings about what the Wolverines faced that day, although not everyone reacted with the desired solemnity.

Certainly, no one challenged Crisler's words directly. But one of the Wolverines' standouts revealed some of the confidence Michigan carried into the contest.

"I'm sitting on a bench, and Bennie Oosterbaan was standing behind me," Chappuis recalled. "He was everybody's buddy. He's standing behind me and Crisler is going through this talk, and he said: 'Now, if you're going to win the game today, you've got to play better than you know how. And you're going to be up against a team that will probably score three or four touchdowns. So you really are going to have to perform.'

"And Bennie bends over and says, 'Oh ... we'll beat them 50 points.' I kidded Bennie after the game [which Michigan won, 49-0] and said, 'Well, you missed that one.'"

The Wolverines didn't miss much of anything once the game began. Dom Tomasi, a 180-pound offensive lineman, set the tone for USC's long afternoon by taking it to All-American defender John Ferraro.

"Tomasi had that guy on his back all day," Chappuis recalled. "We'd go this way, and then we'd come back this way."

Trojans coach Jeff Cravath and his defensive staff didn't do their squad any favors, either. Michigan's ball-handling wizardry often confused opponents to the point that nobody knew who had the football initially. The Trojans countered with an ill-fated plan requiring defenders to take one step forward upon the snap, then stand up and look for the ball.

"I could not believe that," Chappuis marveled. "As a result, we just ran whatever we wanted to run. We did dominate them."

Bum leg or not, Chappuis stood at the heart of the domination.

"I was a little fragile at the time. They couldn't slow me down, because I wasn't very fast to begin with," he quipped. "I was taped up from my knee down to here [calf], and all the way up to my hip."

With Crisler's challenges ringing in his ears, Chappuis disregarded the discomfort and looked like a man among boys versus the Trojans. The U-M senior had the tape ripped off of him at halftime, and just kept on going.

"I went around the end on one play, and I was approaching this would-be tackler, and it wasn't like me to dodge, because I wasn't that quick," Chappuis pointed out. "I usually ran over people, or tried to, anyway. They couldn't believe it when I dodged this guy and went around him. I couldn't believe it either."

The senior wound up with 91 yards rushing on only 13 carries. He also connected on 12 of 22 passes for 139 yards and two touchdowns, sparking Michigan's 49-0 runaway win.

Chappuis also noted the numbers could have been bigger, but insisted Crisler was never one to run up the score. The final tally got out of hand not because the Wolverines were pouring it on, but because they were that good.

"If I'm a third-string player, and I get a chance to play, I'm not going to go in there and lay down," Chappuis said. "I'm going to do something, and that's what they did. It's like they changed the horses, but the horses all did the same thing."

One horse galloped through the Trojans enough to earn Rose Bowl MVP honors. Michigan's All-American and future College Football Hall of Fame inductee had capped his career on top.

Notre Dame also pounded USC that year, 38-7, and the Associated Press voted the Irish No. 1 and Michigan No. 2 in the final regular-season poll. But Michigan's Rose Bowl performance prompted the AP to take an unprecedented step - polling its members again following the bowl games.

The tally for No. 1 - Michigan 226, Notre Dame 119, and 12 calling it a draw.

"The Rose Bowl was significant, as it turned out, in a number of ways," Chappuis said. "When the season ended, which was before the Rose Bowl, Notre Dame was voted No. 1 and Michigan was No. 2. And for the first time since they'd been taking a poll of the best team in the nation, they had a post-bowl vote, and Michigan was picked No. 1, simply because we beat Southern Cal worse than Notre Dame did.

"The Rose Bowl had to be pretty significant, because it made us the national champions."

Chappuis enjoyed bigger numbers in other games of his illustrious career, to be sure. But the game of his life featured an effort through adversity with perfection on the line.