1933 LSU National Track Championship Team
Louisiana State won all dual track meets during the 1933 season, as well as winning the Southeastern Conference and the Southern Amateur Association tournaments. The team, under Coach Bernie Moore, featured five stars, including Nathan “Buddy” Blair, Glenn “Slats” Hardin, Jack Torrance, Al Moreau, and Matt Gordy. Pete Burge ran the 220 and 400 yard dash.
An Invitation to the 1933 NCAA National Track Meet
LSU’s entire 10-man team, including Pete Burge, earned a trip to the NCAA National Track Championship, held on June 17, 1933 at Chicago’s Soldier Field. As described by writer Ruth Laney in her 2016 Country Roads magazine article “1933 LSU Track Team Stuns Nation”, it was a shoe-string operation to transport the team to Chicago during the middle of the Great Depression:
“Just getting his athletes to the meet had been a feat for Moore. President Roosevelt had recently declared a bank holiday, and many Baton Rouge accounts were frozen. Scrip had replaced money on the campus. But supporters had scraped together enough cash for the boys to make the trip.
Moore had squeezed ten athletes—plus coaches, luggage, and equipment—into two cars and headed north. Decorating the spare on his black Plymouth was a tire cover painted with a gaudy Bengal tiger. Vaulting poles and javelins, tied with ropes, rattled against the doors. 'We looked like an advertisement for [the movie] The Grapes of Wrath,' Gordy later recalled."
https://countryroadsmagazine.com/art-and-culture/people-places/1933-lsu-track-team-stuns-nation/
