The Daily Orange

They were there - copied, printed and inserted - at the beginning of each 2009 SU football playbook: letters from three men who once played for Syracuse and won it all.

The team needed those letters, said Orange head coach Doug Marrone. They needed reminders of what it meant to win, a message placed before gridiron strategy. They needed voices from the past, from the team that laid the foundation for the school's heritage, 50 years ago.

The 1959 team had never lost, after all. They were national champions.

"I always thought my job, as head coach, was to make sure that our players knew the history of this school," Marrone said five days before the first game.

It was necessary, he said, because the recent past had been so brutal. In four years under Greg Robinson, the team won 10 games. They were mocked on television. They were routed on the field. They were lambasted from the stands.

Could his players remember a time when that was not so? Could his players remember when its offense was studied and replicated? When its defense allowed fewer than 100 yards per game over an entire season?

Could they learn from a group who understood winning? Marrone believed so.

So Marrone drew motivation from this legacy. On the first week of summer practice, he distributed books about the 1959 team to his players. He made it required reading. Instead of reciting the letters written by three members of the '59 team - halfback Ger Schwedes, defensive end Maury Youmans and lineman John Brown - he put them in each playbook.

But three days before the start of the new season, before the kickoff to the 50th anniversary, center Jim McKenzie felt a burden.

"We have to keep the great legacy," said McKenzie, a junior. "Fifty years ago, we were national champions. That's not something that's out of our reach, if we can perform 100 percent for every play, and for every game."

The team could see from its past where Marrone wanted his team to be in the future.

McKenzie: "We started seeing what it takes to be a winner."

The team's clairvoyance came with knowledge of its legacy, which was delivered to Manley Field House in late June, before the players arrived for training camp.

They were in a box, shifting in the backseat of a Buick. They were 85 copies of the book about the 1959 season, written by brothers Maury and Gary Youmans in 2001.

Gary Youmans drove them down himself.

Continued...

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