Murl and Harold Mauser – High School and College Sports

Sometimes a story comes along that is too good to pass up. Because of a story shared with me a little while ago I decided to put together this post detailing my Grandpa Murl and his brother Harold and their High School and College Sports achievements. I specify High School and College as I know both of these two and some other great uncles had a pretty amazing baseball team going also, but that wasn’t school sanctioned, so we can come back to that later.

I think many of us knew that Grandpa Murl was a pretty good football player and track star and that he played for the University of Nebraska Huskers before being drafted into the war. Some of those details are in the news articles posted below. However the story that prompted this post came from Harold. Harold brought a news article into my mother a while back detailing a football state title game, that in all reality wasn’t sponsored by the High School association and the story goes like this – with articles following.

Big Springs and Holbrook were undefeated at the end of their 1947 football season and both were in Class D 6-Man football. So Harold’s father Ben, and several others decided to organize a game. It was held in Grant, NE.

Kent Mauser also stated that Grandpa Ben had told him Harold was the best fullback ever to come out of Big Springs – which is saying quite a bit as Murl played the same position and received several honors for his time played. Murl scored 180 points his senior season, which is pretty darn good. It looks like Harold scored a total of 154 points, which is also pretty impressive. The clippings below show both of them playing football in college.

It sounds like there is another story in with this in which Big Springs challenged Grant to a game. People got to Grant early, and at the coffee shops got everyone pretty wound up before the game. There were big stakes bets placed on the game, a lot of time in the taverns, and while the Trojans were victorious it sounds like there were fights after the game that Grandpa Ben helped break up and it sounds like a pretty crazy day.

I know most of the article below are referencing Grandpa Murl, but the Holbrook / Big Springs story is in from three different papers and I hope you enjoy it. Somehow I feel compelled to end this post with a GO BIG RED for the Husker Football Team 🙂

The links and the photo gallery are the same content – opening from a link, and then clicking on the image will likely zoom the article in to an easier reading point. The gallery also allows you to right click and download any article.

For those interested in Tom Novak – a starting point

Harold and the Holbrook Title Game

Murl Articles