University of North Carolina Athletics
Extra Points Archive: The Athlete, The Artist
September 23, 2009 | Football, Featured Writers, Lee Pace
Sept. 23, 2009
by Lee Pace
A new era of Tar Heel football was dawning in August 1946 when coach Carl Snavely welcomed some 65 football players to Chapel Hill for training camp. Many were war veterans in their mid-20s, married and making the transition from carrying a rifle through France or Okinawa to taking chemistry classes and eating cheeseburgers at the Goody Shop on Franklin Street.
One of the first official team functions was photo day, with the players dressing in their game uniforms and granting interviews and posing for photos for the local news media. After an hour or so in the hot August sun, Snavely told his players they could be excused. As the Tar Heels were leaving the field, sports information director Jake Wade approached one player, a brand new halfback named Charlie Justice, and introduced him to a young photographer from Wilmington.
"Charlie, I'd like for you to meet Hugh Morton," Wade said. "He's a great friend of the university. He'd like to take a few more shots."
A few more shots turned into 90 more minutes of Morton snapping Justice in every angle and pose imaginable. When it was over and the sun was going down behind the trees in the west end zone, Justice walked to the field house at the east end, muttering to himself, "I hope I never see that guy again."
Fifty-five years later, Justice and Morton were rehashing old times sitting in Justice's living room in Cherryville, N.C., when that first encounter was brought up. Justice would, in fact, see Morton again--hundreds of times actually with the fanatic shutterbug clicking off thousands of images of Justice and teammates as they won 32 games over four years and went to three bowls.
"We didn't have ESPN or the Internet back then," Justice said. "But we didn't need 'em. We had ole Hugh Morton. What a great friend he was to our team and to Carolina over many years."
From the copious reservoir of Morton-Justice Era photos is this one, taken in New York's Yankee Stadium on Nov. 12, 1949. Carolina and Notre Dame had set a neutral field venue for an intersectional clash that would showcase Justice, the Heisman Trophy runner-up for two years running, against the Fighting Irish, a school located in Indiana that nonetheless had bedrock support in the Irish-Catholic communities of New York. The Irish had never lost under coach Frank Leahy, winning 26 games from 1946-48 and being tied twice, and they were 6-0 in 1949 and ranked No. 1 in the nation when they collided with the Tar Heels, 5-2 with losses to LSU and Tennessee.
Justice is clearly miserable as he sits alone on the bench, wrapped in a heavy wool parka with another cameraman getting a close-up on film. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes vacant, his hair tousled by the wind. The single-wing tailback, kick-return specialist and skilled punter had sprained his ankle the previous week against William & Mary. With Snavely wanting to insure his star would be available the following week against arch-rival Duke, Justice watched from the bench for the entire Notre Dame game except to hold on one point-after attempt. The game was knotted at 6-6 at the half, but the Irish were too strong and deep and pulled away in the second half for a 42-6 win. Another memorable shot from that game showed Justice balled into the fetal position on the sideline; "Choo Choo's Prayer" was used in Extra Points following Justice's death in 2003.
"That game cost me the Heisman Trophy," Justice said in a 2001 interview. "We were in front of the New York media and I didn't play. One goal I set was to win the Heisman Trophy. I was runner-up three years in a row."
Justice is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and held the UNC career total offense record for 45 years before being passed in 1994 by Jason Stanicek. He was a consensus All-America as a junior and senior and was featured on the covers of Life and the Saturday Evening Post. Justice constantly sloughed off the attention and tried to direct it toward his teammates, but inevitably the focus of this grand era of Tar Heel football came back to the kid who was described by an early coach as having the ability to "run like a choo-choo." The Tennessee Volunteers would have termed him a runaway train when he scampered 74 yards in 1946, the Vols laying hands on him no fewer than 13 times as Justice weaved his way across the field at Neyland Stadium.
"The funniest thing was when one of our players blocked a guy as Charlie went past and kept after him and kept after him," Tar Heel Ed Bilpuch said. "The other guy said, `Hey, the play's gone.' Our guy said. `Just wait, Charlie'll be back.'"
So aggressive was Wake Forest's defense one year in swarming the squirrely Justice that the Deacons roughed him out-of-bounds, eliciting cries for a penalty flag from irate Tar Heel fans. A reporter queried Deacon coach Peahead Walker about the play afterward and he sloughed the question off. "This is war," Walker declared, "and Justice has got most of the ammunition."
Though he never wore cleats or a chin strap, Morton was part-and-parcel of the Justice era and was a regular attendee at the group's semi-annual reunions that continue today. No matter his business, personal, civic, environmental or political interests--and they were voluminous--Morton found time to get to Chapel Hill for most every football and basketball game until his death in 2006. He was most noticeable at basketball games, where he wore a pale blue V-neck sweater and sat at the same courtside location year after year.
"I can close my eyes and still see him with that camera around his neck," says Bob Cox, an end and place-kicker from the late 1940s. "Hugh was always around the team, around the program. He gave meaning to what we were doing. If anyone ever stood for the Carolina tradition, it was Hugh Morton. He helped build the pride and spirit and love for Carolina as much as anyone on the team."
Morton spent three years as a student at Carolina in the early 1940s, then left to join the Army, returning to his hometown of Wilmington following the war. In the late 1940s and early '50s, Morton made the drive from the coast to Chapel Hill regularly to photograph Tar Heel games, sometimes carrying a high school recruit in the days of liberal NCAA recruiting restrictions. Morton would arrive at his Wilmington home mid-evening after a Saturday afternoon football game, process film in his darkroom and then deliver packages of pictures to the bus station, where they would be dispatched to newspapers around the state. He knew the photos would arrive too late for use in the Sunday paper, so he took time to shoot the "color and pageantry" component in addition to game action to give editors a broader selection for the coming week.
After inheriting thousands of acres near Linville in 1952 from his grandfather, Hugh MacRae, Morton conceived and built the Grandfather Mountain tourist attraction and moved to Linville to manage the operation, so now for nearly 50 years his trips to Chapel would come from the west. If he made the return trip that night, he would inevitably stop at the K&W Cafeteria in Greensboro on the way home. If he spent the night, he'd stay in the same room at the University Motor Inn.
Twice Morton tried to watch a football game from the stands. The first time was in 1945 in the company of Julia Taylor of Greensboro, a nice gesture given that Morton had just presented his sweetheart with an engagement ring. The second was in 1984 when the Naval Academy came to Chapel Hill, and Navy officials invited the Mortons to their guest box in Kenan Stadium to say thanks for his work spearheading the establishment of the USS North Carolina battleship memorial in Wilmington.
"The first time, he drove Julia crazy," says Harris Prevost, a long-time friend and aide of Morton's at Grandfather Mountain. "The second time, he lasted the first half in the guest box. Then he had to go to the field. He had to be close to the action with a camera in his hands."
Following Morton's death in 2006, his massive photographic and film archives were donated to the N.C. Carolina Collection Photo Archives at the Wilson Library in Chapel Hill. Four vans made two trips to Linville to retrieve boxes ad infinitum of prints, negatives, color slides, film cans and assorted other formats. For all of his considerable strengths, organizing his life's work was not one of them, leaving archivists Stephen Fletcher and Elizabeth Hull quite a challenge to make sense of what has been estimated at 500,000 images.
"I would categorize Mr. Morton as being `forward thinking,'" Prevost says. "He dealt with the future, not the past. My office was beside his for 30 years, so I think I knew him as well as anyone from a business sense. He was two steps ahead of everyone. He had no time to deal with the past, so once he took a roll of film, he wasn't going to be bothered with cataloging it."
Hull was hired specifically to work the Morton Collection and now, two years into the project, there are components of the collection available for public view.
"Hugh Morton crammed more into a given month than most of us do in a lifetime," Hull says. "Every day, you find something really interesting or some new treasure. He was an obsessive documenter. He was involved in so many different things, and he took a complete record of everything with his cameras. Usually you have a newsmaker or you have an artist. Hugh Morton was both."
Lee Pace writes "Extra Points" twice weekly on Tarheelblue.com. He and the broadcast crew for the Tar Heel Sports Network answer reader email on the pre-game show, so send your questions to asktheheels@gmail.com.
