Currents Magazine Winter 2015

ter, the Vice President for Public Relations
and Development for Pikeville College
and the President of the nonprofit Pacific
Homes Foundation.
“Without Pepperdine, I would not be me,”
Skelly said.
From One Battlefield to Another
While today’s college football teams are
packed with kids who have grown up striving
to secure scholarships and maybe push
to the NFL, the mid-20th century football
teams painted an entirely different story.
In 1947, two years out of World War II, the
GPC football roster was stacked with war
veterans, some as old as 27. Alongside the
basic information of height, weight, position
and year, the roster sheets included a
column for “war service.”
Nelson emotionally recalled how special
GPC’s football team’s situation was — they
were a brand new team made up of men
freshly out of the service. “It’s just an honor
that we have,” he said. “Everything turned
out nice. It’s a reflection on the school.”
Pepperdine’s football teams were consistently
a ragtag bunch of players. Skelly,
the team leader and chaplain who had
spent two years in the service but was still
a younger one at 19 years old, remembered
praying for his teammates and building relationships
with them: “It was a precious
group. These guys were married and worked
at night at the bakery … there were longshoremen
with families … a lot of these
guys were veterans.”
The Legacy Lives On
Although the program itself has died, the
former players continue to carry on its legacy.
As one of the 38 from the 1947 National
Championship team, Nelson joined
together with several other football alumni
to pool funds for a Football Players Scholarship
Fund.
“We wanted to let later students know that
we had a football team and it did achieve a
few things,” Nelson said.
In addition to winning, as Skelly said,
“Football was more than football. Football
was my anchor.”
Jay Roelen (‘58) who played QB from
1954-57 said he learned many life lessons
from being on the team about chaos, control,
discipline, teamwork and “all those
valuable traits you get from participating in
athletics.”
Roelen went on to teach Physical Education
for 45 years. He and his wife also put
together four volumes of books filled with
roster sheets, photos, game programs and
newspaper clippings, titled, “Pepperdine:
The Football Years.”
The books can be found at and checked out
of Payson Library.
In the same capacity that the former players
hope students remember and learn about
the golden years of GPC football, they hold
onto a hope that the football will make a
return — from South LA to Malibu.
Miller said his only regret is that Pepperdine
gave up football. Many former players
expressed sadness at its nonexistence.
“Let’s get it back,” Roelen said.
The 1947 small college championship banner
hangs in Firestone Fieldhouse. While
Title IX, budget constraints and other
issues may prevent another Pepperdine
football team from being snapped into existence,
the banner is permanent. And the
impact the players had on Pepperdine’s
campus and beyond is perpetual.
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