More than 70 years later, Ron Shipman still remembers what it was like in Cleveland, Oklahoma, circa 1952, when hometown hero Billy Vessels ran away with Oklahoma's first Heisman Trophy.
“We were so proud," Shipman recalled. "Boy, it’s a wonder we didn't go around bragging everywhere in Tulsa and everywhere else. We would have if we’d gotten the chance.”
Vessels tore up the Big Seven in the fall of 1952 and kids like Shipman followed along from Cleveland while he did it.
They watched on as the six-foot tall halfback rushed for 1,072 yards and 17 touchdowns in his junior year, eclipsing 100 yards on the ground in seven of the Sooners' 10 games that season. And at the end of it, they witnessed Vessels secure his Heisman Trophy, finishing ahead of Maryland's Jack Scarbath and Minnesota's Paul Giel.
Back home in Cleveland, they rejoiced.
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“We threw banners up. We had a lot of pride in him. There wasn't anybody who didn't look up to him" Shipman said. "He was our one, main claim to fame."
The Vessels who starred in Norman emerged from difficult beginnings in Cleveland. A Dec. 2017 story in the Tulsa World helps paints a picture of a strained family tree.
A father who drank too much. A sister who died young. A brother who jacked cars. A mother who ran a struggling second-hand store. By the time he was in high school, for one reason or another depending on who you ask, Vessels was living on his own.
Yet when he returned home for breaks during his time at OU, Vessels was everything those admiring local kids could have asked for.
"We grew up idolizing him and he was so accessible to us younger guys," Shipman said. "So approachable. He’d be home from OU and throw football or play basketball with us."
Once, Shipman got a chance to go watch his hero play for the Sooners in person. Shipman and his friends, he says, weren't "sophisticated enough" to realize they could have asked for tickets, so they sat in the cheap seats instead and marveled from afar.
“Some of those runs were just something," Shipman, who went on to serve as mayor of Cleveland, said. "He would just juke people out of their jockstraps and go on down the field. Just one of those pure athletes that doesn't come along all that often.”
Decades later now, those feelings from 1952 still persist. Cleveland named its football stadium after Vessels in 2002. Five years after that, Vessels' original Heisman Park statue — later replaced by a larger one in Norman — came home.
It now sits in front of the Cleveland Event Center and its the first thing Shipman passes each time he visits.
"I can remember the pride," he said. "And I still have that pride. I still think those were great days.”
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