No. 10: 1970 whites
The 1970s represented a weird transition period for the Tyrone football team.
The town was shrinking, and with it the larger talent pool that existed before the paper mill shut down half its operations, and before an interstate highway wiped out more than 150 homes to build the bridge that now spans Bald Eagle and Brush Mountains.
But a brutal Central Counties Conference schedule that included big school powerhouses like State College, Hollidaysburg, and Lock Haven remained. So after 1970, the famed Year of the Eagle, there wasn’t much to talk about where Golden Eagles football was concerned. The 70s were a mediocre decade, with the teams of that era wrapping up in 1979 at 48-50-4.
But the 70s certainly impacted the program moving forward. For one, the decade further strengthened the push for a new football conference, which ultimately arrived in 1980 in the form of the Big 8, which laid the foundation for the later Mountain League and the Laurel Highlands West Division that exists today.
The decade also produced some of the top uniforms in program history.
Seventies fashions in general were memorable, as any rewatching of an episode of The Brady Bunch will demonstrate. They were an eclectic blend of hippie culture, vintage wear, and disco stylings that featured outlandish color combinations, bell-bottomed jeans, jump suits and leisure suits, and enough polyester to fill landfills for generations.
Tyrone’s football team would embrace the eclectic trends of the decade, producing the most distinct uniform combinations of any decade in program history. However, the era began with a look that was clean and sharp, and the season it accompanied was memorable.
Tyrone was still considered a championship contender in 1970, under coach Steve Magulick. At that time, there were no District playoffs for high school football, and consequently there were no state playoffs, either. So conference and league titles held supremacy, and in Tyrone the Eagles competed as members of the Western Conference and Central Counties.
The Eagles hadn’t won a Western Conference title since 1948, and their last Central Counties championship by then was in 1964, but they were always in the conversation, always on the doorstep. In both 1968 and 1969, the team had finished 7-3, and with plenty of talent returning in 1970 hopes were high.
With optimism in the air, Tyrone unveiled a new uniform combination and helmet design, in the process becoming the first Golden Eagles team to wear the iconic T on the side of its helmets.
Prior to 1970, the Eagles had worn orange pants for a decade, and their helmets in 1969, while similar to those of 1970, had an eagle on the side. These helmets maintained the black/orange/black racing stripe look (though the stripes were now spaced out), while adding a black T on each side. It was a crisp design, and with the gray facemasks that were ubiquitous in the 70s, the interplay of colors on a white shell popped.
But the switch to white on white completed the look: white jerseys with orange numbers and black ringers on the sleeves combined with white pants with orange/black/orange stripes down the sides.
In their totality, the uniforms foreshadowed those that would be worn in the Franco Era beginning in 1995. Their simplicity belied a decade that would soon turn football fashion trends on their heads in the borough, but they were the perfect outfit for a team that was all business.
Through 9 games that season, the Eagles were 8-0-1, the tie coming in a bizarre 20-20 draw against Central in which longtime team doctor David Kirk died in the stands after suffering a heart attack. The high point came in Week 8 when the Eagles travelled to State College and steamrolled the Little Lions 30-8. With State High focusing its defense on limiting thousand-yard back Bobby Irwin, Tyrone devastated the Lions with a ground game geared around hard-hitting fullback Abe Campbell, who ran for 144 yards and scored 3 touchdowns.
The team was paraded back into town that night and celebrated at an impromptu pep rally on the steps of the post office on Pennsylvania Avenue. All that was left to lay claim to Western Conference and Central Counties championships were garden variety games against Lock Haven and Hollidaysburg.
A 6-0 win over the Bobcats was an unexpected struggle, but everything fell apart the following week in a Friday the 13th game against the Golden Tigers. On a rainy night and a chewed up surface at Gray Field, Tyrone couldn’t get much going offensively, but the Eagle led 8-6 late in the fourth quarter when Rich Shoop, an unheralded sophomore from Hollidaysburg so far off the radar that his name didn’t even appear in the program, kicked a 25-yard field goal that won the game.
Tyrone got two more chances, eventually driving as far as the Tigers’ 12 with just seconds left. But rather than trying a field goal of his own, Magulick opted for a pass, which was picked off to end the game.
With that one play, all of Tyrone’s championship aspirations went down the drain. But the highly successful season served as a starting point for the Year of the Eagle, when nearly all of the boys sports teams at Tyrone found championship-level success. The basketball team finished 23-1 and won the Mountain League, at the time PA’s oldest roundball league. The wrestling team went undefeated, with Gib Fink winning a PIAA title in the 102-pound weight class. The track team went undefeated, as well, as did the golf team.
If 1970-71 wasn’t the best year for Tyrone sports as a collective, it would be interesting to see the argument for a different year.
And it all started with a new uniform combination unveiled in September in a win over Bellwood-Antis at Gray Memorial Field.
There was much more to come in the 70s where uniforms were concerned for the Golden Eagles, and while there were some creative combinations in store that would make even the Oregon Ducks jealous, it would be hard to match the simplicity of 1970’s white-on-whites for sharpness and classic appeal.
ORANGE AND BLACK 