The Note
On October 5, 1923, Iowa State’s football team reached Minneapolis to play the University of Minnesota the next afternoon. Jack Trice, the team’s only Black player, spent that night in a separate hotel from his teammates, standard practice then for a Black traveler in the city. Before he slept, he wrote a short note to himself and tucked it into his jacket pocket: a promise to give everything he had, physically and mentally, once he took the field.
He carried that note into Iowa State’s game against Minnesota on October 6, his second varsity start. No one read it that day. It stayed folded in his pocket until it was found among his belongings after he died, a private record of exactly how much he had already decided to give.
How He Got There
John G. “Jack” Trice was born May 12, 1902, in Hiram, Ohio, where most of his neighbors were white. In eighth grade his mother sent him to live with an uncle in Cleveland, a larger, more racially mixed city, and he finished school at East Technical High School, where he led the football team to an undefeated senior season. He stood six feet (1.83 meters) tall and weighed, depending on the source, somewhere between 200 and 215 pounds (91 and 98 kilograms).
No college recruiter came looking for him, even though white teammates from that same undefeated team received offers. In 1922, he enrolled at Iowa State College in Ames anyway, becoming its first Black student-athlete among an estimated twenty Black students on a campus of thousands. He ran track and played football, but the rules of the era kept freshmen off the varsity, so his debut would wait a year.
A Team Opponents Wouldn’t Face
Trice made his varsity debut in 1923 against Simpson College and played well enough that an Iowa newspaper called him one of the best tackles in the Missouri Valley. He should have had more games to build on that. Reportedly, three schools had already refused to schedule Iowa State that season because its roster included a Black player, and Trice sat out at least one game as a result.
That left the Minnesota game, on October 6, 1923, as only his second varsity appearance. Whatever each school’s specific reasons, the fact that an integrated college team struggled simply to find opponents says something about the state of the sport in 1923.
The Game
The game in Minneapolis was brutal from the start. On the second play, Trice broke his collarbone. He insisted he was fine and played on through a rough first half.
In the third quarter, attempting to tackle a Minnesota ball carrier with a roll block (throwing himself low across the runner’s legs), he was run over by three Minnesota players and did not get up. Teammates carried him off on a stretcher while, by some accounts, Minnesota fans in the stands chanted “we’re sorry.” He was taken straight to a hospital in Minneapolis.
Cleared to Travel
Doctors at the Minneapolis hospital judged his injuries not serious enough to keep him there and cleared him to travel home with the team. He reportedly made the trip back to Ames lying on a bed of straw laid out in a train car.
Once home, a local hospital found what Minneapolis had missed: the broken collarbone, already known, and internal abdominal damage too severe to operate on. Sources differ on the exact medical cause that followed, some citing internal bleeding, others adding hemorrhaged lungs, but all agree the damage was already beyond treatment by the time anyone understood how bad it was.
The Bill
Jack Trice died on October 8, 1923, two days after the game, at twenty-one years old. He had played exactly two varsity football games in his life: the one against Simpson College, where he was praised as one of the region’s best tackles, and the one against Minnesota that killed him.
Iowa State dismissed classes after three o’clock on October 9 and held a memorial service that day on the lawn by the campanile. His funeral, held October 16 on the central campus, drew about 4,000 students and faculty. The size of that crowd shows how hard the loss was felt on campus at the time.
What’s Disputed
Why the game turned so violent, and why two sets of doctors reached such different verdicts on the same body, is still argued over. Historians Jaime Schultz and Donald Spivey have studied the same set of facts and reached different conclusions about how much of it turned on Trice’s race.
Some teammates said later that Minnesota players had targeted Trice for his skin color from early in the game; other accounts describe a contest that was simply rough for everyone on the field. Teammate Johnny Behm told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1979 that even eyewitnesses disagreed: “One person told me that nothing out of the ordinary happened. But another who saw it said it was murder.”
Whether the “we’re sorry” chant was sincere or mocking was never settled. A member of the Iowa athletic staff recalled years later being sure Minnesota’s purpose was “to get him out of the game,” a personal memory, not a verified fact. Separately, Missouri’s athletic director wrote to an Iowa State dean on October 8, 1923, the day Trice died, refusing to schedule Iowa State because its team was integrated, one documented sign of the resistance the program already faced.
Seventy-Four Years On
Recognition came slowly and in stages. In 1984, Iowa State named the playing field for Trice, sixty-one years after his death, though the stadium around it still carried its original name, Cyclone Stadium. In 1987, the student government raised money on its own to put up a statue of him on campus, and public figures including Paul Newman and Nikki Giovanni later backed a campaign to rename the stadium itself.
That happened on February 20, 1997, seventy-four years after Trice’s death, when Cyclone Stadium became Jack Trice Stadium, the only major college football stadium in the country named for a Black man as of 2020. Seventy-four years separate the note found in his jacket pocket from the day his name went up over the gate.