All-Time American List: Pete Dawkins
All-Time American List: Pete Dawkins
Heisman Trophy winner Pete Dawkins left West Point knowing he would never play professional football.
As a graduate of West Point he was certainly destined for great things. He is the only West Point cadet in history to be First Captain, president of the class, captain of the football team, and earn recognition as being in the top 5% of the class. What do you do with someone like that? Well, he was also a Rhodes Scholar, and as such was off to Oxford University as a graduate student.
At Oxford there was no gridiron football to play, but there was rugby, and that is where Dawkins excelled as well. From 1959 through the fall of 1961 Dawkins played rugby at Oxford while attending Brasenose College. He played wing and earned three Blues, playing in the the Varsity Match each year. He was enormously popular as a rugby player there and also helped change the game.
At the time, wings, not hookers, threw the ball into the lineout. Many wings used an underhanded throw to do so, but Dawkins used his football skills to throw quick, accurate passes overhead. It was called the Yankee Torpedo throw. Dawkins threw a football pass, and it was highly effective, so much so that it began to be adopted throughout the game. But few could recreate the Dawkins throw, which sometimes went well past the lineout into the waiting arms of a teammate who had run up from the backline.
Said teammate Dennis Jesson: "His throw was on great form. And I might say the rest of the chaps are trying it now."
Meanwhile, at 6-1, 205 pounds, Dawkins was huge for a wing in his day and an intimidating presence. Wrote E.W. Swanton in the Daily Telegraph after the 1959 Varsity Match that "[Dawkins] looked quite the strongest and most accomplished wing threequarter on the field. ... Not only did he never fail to be on hand in the orthodox place, his anticipation sometimes exceeded all expectations."
Defensively, Dawkins brought a physicality that was startling to many attacking players. Dawkins himself joked about how he would "sap some of their enthusiasm" with his bone-jarring hits.
Dawkins went on to be a decorated officer in the Vietnam War and then advised the White House on how to turn the US Armed Forces into an all-volunteer force. This effort helped form part of the framework of his doctoral thesis at Princeton, and the goal of eliminating a military that used the draft was achieved in the 1970s.
Dawkins retired from the military in 1983 as a Brigadier General, and he retained his connection with rugby, notably having his name on the trophy given to the winner of the CRC collegiate 7s tournament, which ran from 2010-2019.
Aside from his accomplishments off the field, and aside from the fact he never played rugby for his country (because there was no national team to play for), there is no doubt that Pete Dawkins was an effective, exciting, and influential rugby player. Most certainly he is worth remembering.
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