The Colorful Secret Behind the Final Four

quote:

---

Auburn University and University of Virginia, who meet in the NCAA tournament this weekend, share school colors. And a history of petty theft.

Auburn University and the University of Virginia, who meet in the Final Four of the NCAA tournament this weekend, have two more things in common. The first is their school colors: orange and blue. The second is how they came to wear those colors: through petty theft.
One school stole them from the other school. And the other school stole them from an unsuspecting bunch of British rowers.

Their clandestine dispute started on the rivers of England a century ago, traced its way through American history and continues with a national basketball game played in a football stadium with both schools dressed in the same colors.

“It’s going to be hard to tell which fan base is which,” said Mike Jernigan, biographer of George Petrie, the man who founded Auburn’s football program and engineered the color robbery.

The saga can be found by trawling through school archives, 1800s and early-1900s yearbooks, school newspapers, and interviews with biographers, historians and documentarians.

It begins with a University of Virginia student named Allen Potts. He was the Zion Williamson of the 19th century. The best athlete on campus, he won the school’s 100-yard dash, the 3-mile run and the broad jump. He was the second baseman for the baseball team. He was the running back for the football team. And he was the unwitting inspiration for today’s basketball team because of one sport he didn’t play.

Mr. Potts was at Oxford University in the summer of 1888 when he began dabbling in crew and became familiar with the English rowing tradition of trading scarfs after regattas. Historians believe that is how he came to own a scarf from the Grosvenor Rowing Club. It was blue and orange.

Virginia’s colors at the time were silver grey and cardinal red. But this was becoming a problem for the school’s football team. Football was played in mud. The mud had to be washed off. The wash turned the red into a faint shade of pink.

What to do with the pink uniforms became such a hot topic of conversation in the fall of 1888 that school leaders called a meeting to pick new colors. When one of the most popular kids on campus arrived, he happened to be wearing the natty attire of the Grosvenor Rowing Club.

Mr. Potts’s scarf was ripped off his neck as someone pointed to the blue and orange stripes, according to a 1904 account in the school newspaper.

“How will these colors do?”

They would do well enough that Virginia’s colors would soon be orange and blue. As it turned out, so would Auburn’s.

George Petrie was responsible for that larceny. He graduated from Virginia in 1887 and taught at Auburn for one year before leaving to pursue a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under a professor who happened to be obsessed with football. His name was Woodrow Wilson.

After his time learning about the game from the future president of the U.S., Mr. Petrie returned to Auburn and started a football team there. Yet in 1892, as his team was getting ready to play the Georgia Goats, Auburn didn’t even have colors.

Mr. Petrie was busy trying to solve that problem. He knew where to find the solution: his own alma mater.
Virginia had recently adopted the blue and orange of the Grosvenor Rowing Club and Mr. Petrie decided to swipe the colors for Auburn.

There is some dispute about this piece of folklore from the late 1800s. According to another school legend, from school records and historians, the person responsible for Auburn’s colors was a woman known as “Miss Allie,” who made Mr. Petrie a sweater in Virginia’s colors.

But whether the mastermind was Mr. Petrie or Miss Allie, the plan worked. The heist went off without a hitch.
Auburn had stolen Virginia’s stolen colors.
Their blue and orange look almost identical to the untrained eye. But not to someone specifically trained in the complexities of the color palette.

“There are actually some key differences,” said Laurie Pressman, a vice president of the Pantone Color Institute.

Virginia’s blue is “commonly known as Jefferson Blue, a traditional blue steeped in local heritage to Virginia,” she said, even though it isn’t local and has nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson. Auburn’s blue is more of a classic navy, the kind of shade that conveys “credibility, authority and confidence.”

It only became clear that neither was quite what it seemed when Kevin Edds, director of a documentary called “Wahoowa: The History of Virginia Cavalier Football,” read a snippet about Mr. Potts’s famous scarf and decided he needed to do everything in his power to chase it down.
“That,” he thought, “is the Holy Grail.”

Mr. Edds found the scarf hiding in plain sight. The Virginia Historical Society already owned a piece of the scarf, but its origins were so convoluted that even the people who specialize in exactly that sort of thing were perplexed.

“We don’t know how much of the story is historic fact and how much is apocryphal,” said Karen Sherry, curator of exhibitions for the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
They weren’t the only ones scratching their heads. There was one more group that went more than 100 years without knowing its place in history: the Grosvenor Rowing Club.

Dale Coleman, a professor emeritus of animal science at Auburn, took his students on a trip to England years ago when, in his capacity as a self-described armchair historian, he visited the Grosvenor Rowing Club. He told his hosts about their strange place in the history of Auburn and Virginia. They nearly choked on their finger sandwiches.

The Grosvenor Rowing Club had a secret of its own. The colors on the Grosvenor family coat of arms aren’t blue and orange. They’re blue and gold.

“Gold paint was expensive to put on rowing blades,” said Brian Chapman of the Grosvenor Rowing Club. “Orange was as close as they could get.”

Now, thousands of miles from the scene of the original crime, Virginia and Auburn fans will be sitting next to each other and rooting against each other. And both will be wearing orange and blue.

While the schools have played in other sports, they have never met in the NCAA tournament, making this weekend’s matchup by far the biggest game between the color thieves.

“We would be happy to have Mr. Jefferson’s school wear our colors,” said Auburn athletic director emeritus David Housel, referring to Virginia’s founder, “and I would hope they would be proud of us wearing theirs.”

“They’ve owed us for years,” said Mr. Edds, a Virginia graduate. “We’ll gladly take a win on Saturday and we can call it even.”

---