Something to cheer about

Organized sports were in their infancy 100 years ago when the Southeast Missourian began publication. The 1904 World Series had just been canceled because the New York Giants, champions of the National League, refused to play an American League team. Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Chicago were among the best teams in college football -- a sport that was among the major sports of the day, along with prize fighting, horse racing and bicycle racing.

Locally, the Capahas were in their formative years, and the Jackson Military Academy Tigers had become the first organized football team south of St. Louis.

By 1904, Cape Girardeau had hosted one of those world championship bicycle races, and Cape Girardeau Teachers College was fielding football teams.

The growth of organized sports came with the boom of the 1920s, when Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Knute Rockne's Notre Dame football teams changed the face of sports.

In sports' so-called Golden Age, newspapers became more likely to devote space to the coverage of sports, fueling the growth around the nation.

The Missouri High School Activities Association was formed that decade and began offering championship tournaments. Those high school state tournaments have provided many of the highlights in the sporting history of Southeast Missouri.

Situated between larger markets in Memphis, Tenn., and St. Louis, Southeast Missouri became a place for close encounters with national sports news.

• Cape Girardeau's Elam Vangilder was on the verge of two milestones in his pro-baseball career, winning 19 games in his best season of 1922 and ending his career with 99 victories. His effort during that 1922 campaign nearly lifted the St. Louis Browns past the vaunted New York Yankees for the American League championship.

Alas, "Big Elam" never played in the postseason in his 11-year career.

• The St. Louis Browns didn't have much of a postseason pedigree when they named Cape Girardeau their spring training home in 1943 during World War II-related limitations on travel. In fact, they had never been to the postseason. But after training in Cape Girardeau again in 1944, the Browns won their only American League pennant and lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.

When the Browns and their farm team, the Toledo Mud Hens of the American Association, arrived for spring training in 1945, a crowd of more than 1,500 fans met them at Cape's Frisco station.

Southeast Missouri State University reached the NCAA Tournament in basketball in 2000.

• Professional basketball even stopped by the region, when Jackson hosted an exhibition game for the NBA's St. Louis Hawks in 1958.
• Southeast Missouri State University, which had been a successful NCAA Division II program, has had brushes with fame since moving to NCAA Division I in 1991. The school reached the NCAA championship tournaments in basketball (2000) and baseball (1998 and 2002).

The Indians basketball team pushed nationally ranked LSU to the limit in the first round of the NCAA Tournament before falling 64-61.

The Southeast baseball team has won just one of five NCAA Tournament games in the double-elimination regionals, but the Indians did post a surprising victory against Alabama in 2002.

• While Southeast Missouri State University football has never made the NCAA playoffs since joining Division I-AA, one former assistant coach has a Super Bowl ring.

Jon Gruden, an assistant coach with the Indians in 1988, coached the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to Super Bowl XXXVII championship in 2003 over a team he previously coached, the Oakland Raiders.

• Southeast even had coaching ties to the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Linda Wells, a 1972 Southeast graduate and now the longtime coach at Arizona State University, was chosen to coach the Greece Olympic team in its homeland Olympics.
• Golfers with ties to Cape Girardeau have produced two major victories in the last 100 years.

Murle Lindstrom Breer was 23 years old in 1962 when she pulled a stunning upset of capturing the U.S. Women's Open in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Her husband, Fred, was the golf professional at Cape Girardeau Country Club, which dates back to 1921.

Dalhousie Golf Club, which opened in 2001 on the southwest part of Cape Girardeau and was named one of the best new private courses in the country, contracted with a LPGA touring professional from Britain, Karen Stupples. She won for the first time in 2004, counting the British Women's Open among her conquests.