Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football

by Jim Dent

What happened during the 1932 season was mind-boggling. The orphans stung seven local teams by the combined score of 145 to 33. Polytechnic High, with its sprawling new campus and an enrollment of more than a thousand students, fell 18–0. The first opponent in the playoffs was Woodrow Wilson High of Dallas, and the Wildcats, upon hearing about the ragtag orphans, laughed loud enough to be heard thirty miles away. Woodrow Wilson, with its fifteen hundred students, flaunted its status as one of the elite football schools in Texas. Some said the 1932 team was the best ever. The Wildcats boasted a plucky, strong-armed kid named Davey O’Brien, the same little quarterback who would win the Heisman Trophy at TCU in 1938. But against the grinding, hustling, scrappy, sack-happy little Mites, O’Brien completed only one of eighteen passes. The 40–7 defeat was especially embarrassing, since the game was played before twenty thousand fans at TCU Stadium. In round two, the Mites were a ten-point underdog against the powerful Sherman Bearcats, the same team they had lost to 97–13 just five years earlier. It did not help that a blizzard had blasted Fort Worth forty-eight hours before kickoff. If the Mighty Mites could not pass, they could not win. At least that was the opinion of the sporting press. The Bearcats would outweigh the Mites by an average of thirty-five pounds in the line. Over the years, the remarkable mind of Rusty Russell had concocted a passing strategy like none other. It...