An 1897 issue of Harpers Magazine likely featured The Tigers earliest national press.

It’s entirely possible that while flipping through the June 16, 1897 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Dr. George Petrie, Auburn’s first football coach and the father of the sport in Alabama, had to pinch himself.

Because there, buried in the back but stretched across almost the entire page, was a photo of the 1896 team, including Coach John Heisman – 1,000 words on Auburn football!

It was almost certainly Auburn’s first national press, and likely the result of Petrie’s tireless efforts to earn it.

According to Mike Jernigan’s recent biography of the man, Petrie had actually asked Harper’s to cover Auburn’s first football game against Georgia in 1892. They declined but added “we would be glad to have you send… a line or two regarding your interstate football game” and promised more coverage in the future.

Of course if this quaint little blurb from the same issue represents their attitude toward southern football five years later … it’s no wonder that at the time they were, as Jernigan puts it, less than accommodating:

Southerners: "...opposed to athletics."

Still, the yankees lived up their word, however slightly.

Anyone know anything about the “All-Alabama eleven”?