Heisman Memories: Billy Vessels Had to Ask, 'What's That?'

Oklahoma's first Heisman Trophy winner won the trophy with one game left to play in the regular season, but didn't know anything about it.

Oklahoma is tied with Ohio State and Notre Dame for the most Heisman Trophy winners in college football history with seven. OU quarterback Spencer Rattler is already the early betting favorite to win the Sooners’ eighth Heisman in 2021. Every Friday this summer, SI Sooners will recap OU’s Heisman seasons. Today: 1952 winner Billy Vessels.

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That it was Oklahoma’s sports information director who told Billy Vessels that he’d won the Heisman Trophy illustrates how times have changed – but not as much as Vessels’ reaction.

“What’s that?” Vessels asked Harold Keith.

It was 1952, and the Oklahoma halfback later said he had no design on winning what is now the most prestigious individual award in American sport. Didn’t even really know what the Heisman was.

Vessels told Sooners Illustrated’s Jim Weeks that he wasn’t just being humble.

Billy Vessels / Heisman Trophy Trust

“People think I’m making this up,” Vessels said. “But I had no dreaming idea what the Heisman was when Mr. Keith told me. Not until I went to New York did I really realize what it meant.”

Vessels was born in tiny Cleveland, OK, and when his parents moved to Oklahoma City, he stayed behind as a 16-year-old star athlete who had to work odd jobs to make ends meet while the community wrapped its arms around him.

When he got to the Oklahoma varsity team in 1950, he made an immediate impact, rushing for 870 yards, scoring 15 touchdowns and, of course, playing both offense and defense. He threw the ball a little, caught the ball a little and ran the with the ball – a lot. Against Nebraska his sophomore season, Vessels rushed for a school record 208 yards and scored three touchdowns in a 49-35 victory.

Billy Vessels / OU Athletics

That 1950 OU team was crowned national champion before losing to Bear Bryant’s Kentucky Wildcats in the Sugar Bowl.

Bud Wilkinson once said Vessels “was the fastest man on the field and also the toughest. Those two things don’t normally go together.”

That played out over the next two seasons, as Vessels went down during his junior year with a knee injury against Texas. The injury didn’t require surgery, but Vessels wore a cast for the remainder of the season and finished the year with just 142 yards rushing. For rehab, he worked out with the OU cross country team and ran in the sand along the Arkansas River back home in Cleveland. Vessels said the injury gave him a renewed mental focus and toughness for his senior year.

Then in 1952, Heisman magic happened.

Vessels had a nice start to the season – 110 yards rushing in the opener against Colorado, 106 yards against Texas, 105 against Kansas, two rushing touchdowns against K-State, 110 yards against Iowa State – but it was his performance in a 27-21 loss at Notre Dame that made Heisman voters stand up and take notice.

Billy Vessels / Oklahoma Historical Society

And the reason they took notice: it was the first season the NCAA allowed college football games to be nationally televised (NBC chose one game a week), and OU at Notre Dame was that season’s premier game.

Vessels was the best player on the field in South Bend that day, rushing for 195 yards on 17 carries.

Then-OU president George Cross later wrote about Vessels’ heroics in his book, “Presidents Can’t Punt.”

“He played with an abandon seldom seen in any athletic contest,” Cross wrote. “Whenever he saw that there was no way of avoiding a tackler, he would throw himself forward to a horizontal position, using his body as a sort of projectile to gain additional yardage.”

Vessels had strong games in easy victories over Missouri and Nebraska, including 95 yards against the Cornhuskers. But the Heisman die had been cast on Nov. 8 under the watchful gaze of Touchdown Jesus, and voters chose Vessels. He found out he was the 18th Heisman winner when Keith burst into the athletic training room with the news that he’d finished first in the voting over Jack Scarbath of Maryland.

“I did not know what the Heisman was until it was over,” Vessels told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1986. “You didn’t know until it was announced who was even being considered.

“People have to understand it's only of late that they've started the preseason voting and speculation about it. No one ever did that in my day. You’re talking to someone who’s in a different time period, in a different mindset.”

Billy Vessels / OU Athletics

Vessels finished his senior year by leading the nation with 151.2 all-purpose yards per game, and finished second in the NCAA rushing race with 1,072 yards – the first Heisman winner to go over 1,000 yards, a mark that held up until USC’s Mike Garrett surpassed it in 1965. He also led the nation with 18 rushing touchdowns.

Vessels was the No. 2 overall pick of the Baltimore Colts in the 1953 NFL Draft, but he didn’t get a reasonable contract, so he played with the Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football League. As a CFL rookie, Vessels won the Schenley Award as Canada’s top pro player, but then Vessels enlisted the Army.

He played football there, too, and after a year, he left the Army and finally joined the Colts. He played for a year in Baltimore – his best game was a three-touchdown effort against the Los Angeles Rams – but he said football wasn’t fun anymore and left the game for a career in real estate and horse breeding.

Vessels was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1974, and died in 2001 at the age of 70 after a brief illness.

Cleveland renamed its football stadium after Vessels, and in 2007, OU put up its first statue in Heisman Park in his image. That statue was later donated to Cleveland High School, and a bigger visage was put in its place.

“Billy’s memory is celebrated by all Sooners and his legacy is affirmed through the efforts of so many who worked to make this recognition possible,” athletic director Joe Castiglione said in 2007. “This is such fitting recognition and a reminder of a man who took so much time for other people.”