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Photo courtesy of University Archives and Special Collections, The University of the South.
Former Florida State University head football coach Bobby Bowden stands beside Norman Jetmundsen. Photo courtesy of Shakerag Hollow Productions. Right: A portrait of the Sewanee 1899 football team featured in Norman Jetmundson’s film “Unrivaled: Sewanee 1899,” which was recently nominated for a 2023 Southeast EMMY Award. Photo courtesy of University Archives and Special Collections, The University of the South.
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Photo courtesy of University Archives and Special Collections, The University of the South.
A portrait of the Sewanee 1899 football team featured in Norman Jetmundson’s film “Unrivaled: Sewanee 1899,” which was recently nominated for a 2023 Southeast EMMY Award.
Norman Jetmundsen said you can’t be at Sewanee: The University of the South for long before you hear about the school’s 1899 football team.
“It was something I’d heard about for many, many years,” said Jetmundsen, a Mountain Brook resident and a 1976 Sewanee graduate.
He said it’s a story worth passing on, and not just from one Sewanee class to the next. The football team did something extraordinary that year, something that will never be matched — they played and won five road games in six days, on a 2,500-mile train journey between the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss.
That feat was part of a 12-game undefeated season, at a time when most teams only played three or four games a year.
“One of my classmates, David Crews, had done a documentary on Gov. William Winter of Mississippi, and I said, ‘David, you ought to do a film on this team,’” said Jetmundsen, an attorney. “He said, ‘Great — you help me.’”
That started the pair on a five-year project to create “Unrivaled: Sewanee 1899,” which was recently nominated for a Southeast EMMY Award.
“We had a lot of fun doing it,” Jetmundsen said. “We thought we knew the story and realized quickly we didn’t.”
He said when they started the project, they thought there might not be much historical record available, but they planned to explore the lore around the team.
“We found out the truth was better than the lore,” Jetmundsen said.
In those days, team members played both offense and defense, and if they came off the field, they couldn’t go back in. They also played with very little protective gear, Jetmundsen said.
“It was a very different and very violent game,” he said. “There were around 18 or 19 deaths a year. Football came very close to being banned.”
That makes the accomplishments of the Sewanee Iron Men even more extraordinary, Jetmundsen said.
And he and Crews realized after they finished the film that if they hadn’t done the project now, the story “would’ve been lost forever,” he said.
“We found a number of descendants in their 50s to 90s, who knew a lot of the stories that had been passed down about their grandfathers on the team. They still had their family stories intact,” Jetmundsen said. “We interviewed one woman in her mid-90s who was the daughter-in-law of the captain of the team.”
But many of the children of those who were interviewed didn’t know the stories, he said.
“We were glad we did it before the people who really knew and loved the story were gone,” he said.
The documentary includes commentary from Bobby Bowden, the former Florida State University football coach, and former University of Tennessee head coach Johnny Majors, both of whom have passed away since filming.
The film also includes interviews with University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban and a musical score written by Bobby Horton of Birmingham, a frequent collaborator on Ken Burns’ films for PBS.
Homewood artist Ernie Eldredge also created 14 original paintings for the film.
“Bobby’s music and Ernie’s paintings made the film more unique and more special,” Jetmundsen said.
The paintings and other memorabilia will be published in a coffee table book available next year.
Jetmundsen said it’s been “quite a journey, but we’ve loved it now that we’ve reached the goal line, so to speak.”
The film is available to stream at pbs.org. For more information about “Unrivaled: Sewanee 1899,” visit sewanee1899.org.
