SEC Games played outside the United States

WAOM

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Florida not only left the Sunshine State, but the US too? WOW!

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Well, sort of. Pre-Castro Cuba was basically South Florida

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La Tropical Stadium

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Looks like Legion Field

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1921 Bacardi Bowl : Cuban Athletic Club 13 - Ole Miss 0

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Bowl win % was the one thing we could hang our hats on. I guess that's out the window.

Baws probably got too liquored up on the Bacardi

The Bacardi Bowl

A team that had scored just 34 points in six games in 1906 scored 28 points in its season opener in 1907. After some midseason struggles, the Tigers finished up their campaign with a 48-0 blowout win over Baylor and an invitation to play the University of Havana in the Bacardi Bowl, becoming the first American college team to play on foreign soil. It was a bold trip, given that nerves in Cuba were still raw over the Spanish-American War.

Fearing the game would be a financial disaster, the promoter tried to back out of the game, but the Havana locals ensured the game would be played. Speculators sold tickets for as high as $10, and nearly 10,000 fans, including Cuban high society and local American servicemen, witnessed Fenton and LSU whip the hometown team 56-0.



Hooked on baseball since the 1870s, Cuba was also "football mad" by 1907.

The Havana U. team had easily defeated every U.S. service team in the area. That's why Cuban officials turned to the U.S. for a more worthy opponent.

While very few could attend the game, Tiger fans in Baton Rouge raised $2,000 for Wingard to bring to Havana to bet on the game.

So, who attended the game? A preview of the clash from Diario de la Marina notes that sailors from two U.S. Navy gunboats and soldiers from Camp Columbia attended the game in support of the Tigers, and that invitations were extended to all state, province, city, and military officials in Cuba. It also hints that even the U.S. governor of Cuba, Charles Magoon, might attend the contest. A description of the game from the Daily Picayune observes that, “the event attracted the elite of Cuban society.” Similarly, the L.S.U. student newspaper quotes a report from the New York Herald by stating, “A crowd larger than any other ever seen before here at any public entertainment, from the highest American and Cuban officials to representatives of all classes of Cubans, were present” and that, “Society turned out in force to see the Louisiana heroes, and on every side could be seen the ‘swellest kinds’ of rigs occupied by the cream of southern beauty.” That U.S. military personnel and administrators attended the game in support of L.S.U. hints at the heavy U.S. presence in Havana during the second occupation of the island from 1906-1909, but most sources emphasize the presence of the “elite” of Cuban society at the game, including women. Overall, the contest and the composition of the crowd replicate the “big-game” atmosphere from college football played across the United States. Again, a Cuban school staging this athletic and social event with a team from the U.S. South signifies participation within modern North American sport culture.



Upon arriving in Havana, the LSU contingent learned that Havana officials were recruiting the biggest physical specimens available on the island to supplementary the hometown college squad. However, the contract that LSU signed stipulated that Havana could not use American players not already on their team or players of African descent.

A Cuban newspaper reported: "There will be plenty of college spirit shown, and the Havana University students are practicing their yells, their college songs, and various institutions of noise making which will convey enthusiasm to the players, while the colors of the colleges will be seen on all sides."

Havana had recruited a mammoth 300-pounder to play, but Fenton observed the player drinking more than his share of wine before the game. He instructed a teammate to hit him in the stomach on the game’s first play, and according to Fenton, “the big guy spouted wine like an artesian well. We nearly had to swim out of there.” LSU dominated from this point on, and Cuban fans lauded Fenton as “El Rubio Vaselino,” the “Vaselined Redhead” for his amazing play and slippery moves in the open field.



Peter Finney, longtime New Orleans sportswriter and author of numerous books on Louisiana sport history, gives another example of how race and ethnicity played a role in this game. He frames his account of the encounter as in the shadow of the War of 1898, and questions how it “failed to touch off a second war with Spain.” With the wreckage of the U.S.S. Maine still visible in Havana’s harbor, Finney notices the presence of U.S. servicemen in Cuba and the tensions between the U.S. military and the local population. As mentioned above, a large number of sailors and soldiers attended the L.S.U.-University of Havana game, but Finney adds that as the sailors supported their fellow Americans, they shouted a provocative cheer:

“Lick the Spicks, Kill the Spicks!

Rah! Rah! Rah! Louisiana!"

Additionally, W. F. “Pat” Ryan, a player on the 1907 team recalls, “Every time we made a touchdown you’d have thought there was a flock of blackbirds flying across the field. Those sailors from the Paducah and the Dubuque would toss their blue hats in the air and chant their ‘lick the spicks’ battle cry.” The L.S.U. student newspaper mentions the servicemen’s behavior, but omits details of the cheer: “Sailors, too, there were from the American vessels at Havana, and to such an extent did they indulge in that good old American custom of ‘rooting’ that when the game began to grow monotonous on account of it being so one-sided, they attracted as much attention as if they had been a special attraction.” Besides the somewhat historical confusion regarding the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War from Finney’s account, the use of racial slurs in the cheer again casts Cubans as “others,” and while the sailors’ behavior could be dismissed as mere exuberance, when coupled with language from the Daily Picayune, they reflect the general racial and ethnic attitudes of white North Americans toward Cubans in the early twentieth century.