Norfolk Division nearly pulls off upset in 1932 game against U. of Miami This fall when the air turns cool and football fans in Hampton Roads head off for games in Charlottesville, Blacksburg and Williamsburg, the earliest Old Dominion University alumni may recall their alma mater’s most legendary gridiron moment. Seventy years ago, the school – known at the time as the Norfolk Division of William and Mary – faced off against the mighty University of Miami Hurricanes in a case of mistaken identity that nearly resulted in an improbable win for what would later become Old Dominion. That year, a contract proposing a football game between Miami and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg was misaddressed and wound up at the college’s division in Norfolk, then a two-year school. Coincidentally, the Norfolk Division fielded its own football team, albeit one that competed mostly against high school, service and freshman teams; the contract never made it to Williamsburg. With a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity staring them in the face, officials at the Norfolk campus signed and returned the contract before the mistake was caught, and the lowly but determined Braves traveled by train to Florida – just two years after the Norfolk Division was founded – to play Miami on Oct. 14, 1932. The Hurricanes won the hard-fought contest by a score of 6-2. For many of the Norfolk Division players, like Samuel Norfleet Etheredge, a reserve on the 1932 squad, it was their first trip outside of Virginia. “When the train stopped at places in Florida, the team always made me run out to the groves by the side of the track and throw oranges and grapefruits back to them because I was the fastest guy on the team,” Etheredge, a retired vascular surgeon who lives near San Francisco, recalled in the December 1984 edition of Old Dominion University Alumnews. Proud of their performance in the tough defensive struggle against the powerful ’Canes, the players had a rollicking good time on their way home. “One of the guys had bought a baby alligator while we were in Florida and was going to take it home. But then we found out that coach [Tommy] Scott was afraid of alligators. So, we put it in his bed,” Etheredge added. In Old Dominion’s brief football history – the sport was dropped in 1941 after 11 years – the Miami game will forever be a permanent chapter in university athletic lore. “Tradition has it that that game was the forerunner of the first Orange Bowl game played the next year. Actually, it was a regular season game, but it gave those involved memories to last a lifetime,” wrote James R. Sweeney, associate professor of history, in his 1980 book, “Old Dominion University: A Half Century of Service.” – James J. Lidington