Jake Hanna

Sport: Football

Induction Year: 1978

University: Centenary

Induction Year: 1978

Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were the pride of the Yankees, Bobby Jones was the world’s greatest golfer, Bill Tilden reigned supreme in tennis and Grantland Rice was writing about the “Four Horseman” of Notre Dame.

It was the golden Age of Sport, and little Jake Hanna wasted no time making his presence felt. He quarterbacked the football team at Shreveport’s C.E. Byrd High School to the state championship, winning All-State honors along with teammate Mercer Tennille.

The following year, as a 19-year-old freshman at Centenary, Hanna was the sparkplug of a team that scored early-season victories over SMU, Baylor, Rice and TCU of the Southwest Conference before completing a perfect season by crushing six lesser foes by a combined score of 191 points to 9.

Coach Homer Norton’s Centenary Gents were the giant-killers of the Southwest and Deep South in those days, defeating larger schools from the Southwest Conference and Southeastern Conference with monotonous regularity.

Playing in an era when college football players were much smaller (none of Notre Dame’s “Four Horsemen” weighed more than 165-pounds), Hanna displayed giant-sized talent as he scored 41 touchdowns in three collegiate seasons.

With Hanna, However, it wasn’t so much how many touchdowns he scored as who he scored them against. As a senior, he passed for one touchdown and ran for another in a 27-12 victory over Baylor. The previous year, he passed for the only score in Centenary’s 6-0 win over Teas A&M . And in the final game of his collegiate career, his 54-yard run provided the only score in a 6-0 victory over Loyola of the South, coached by the legendary Clark Shaughnessy.

Southwest Conference writers said Hanna would’ve been a shoo-in for All-American honors if he had played for a larger school.

Before the 5-7, 165-pound Hanna led Byrd to its first state football title, he helped old Shreveport High win its last two state baseball championships.

The Yellow jackets rolled past Minden 12-1 in the 1926 North Louisiana finals as Hanna, played center field and hitting in the cleanup position, collected three hits. Then C.J. Plott got three hits in a 4-2 victory over Warren Easton for the state title. Jim Swor was the winning pitcher in both games.

How long ago was it? A banner headline across the top of the front page of the Shreveport Journal a few days before the Warren Easton game carried the ominous warning, “ Oregon Indians on Rampage!”

In the 1926 football season, the Byrd High Yellow Jackets were on a rampage. Along with Hanna and Tennille, the backfield stars of Coach H.N. Knilans’ team were Jim Hodgins, Harry Davis and twin brothers Byrd Hamilton and Fred Hamilton. Byrd finished an 8-0 regular season with a 34-0 rout of Bolton (Alexandria) in the state championship game.

Hanna, who was held over for and extra semester to use all of his eligibility, enrolled at Centenary in January of 1927. Centenary hired Byrd Assistant coach George Hoy after the season, hoping he would bring along a few players with him. It turned out to be the biggest “package deal” ever pulled off by a North Louisiana school as Hanna and 16 of his teammates followed Hoy to Centenary, located six blocks away from Byrd.

Hanna and Charlie Smith alternated between quarterback and halfback for the Gents. Hanna usually played safety on defense, but he sometimes moved up to linebacker.

In those days, if a player left the field for any reason, he couldn’t return until the following quarter. In a 7-3 upset victory over TCU, only two Centenary substitutes got into the game.

“I don’t think I could play football under today’s rules,” Hanna said when he was inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 1978. “When you got the hell knocked out of you on offense, you wanted to give them a taste of the same medicine on defense.”

On the same day that the 1927 Yankees completed a four-game sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series, Hanna Threw 16 passes in the fourth quarter of Centenary’s 21-12 win over an SMU team that had lost only one game in four years. Then he scored the only touchdown in the fourth quarter of a come-from-behind victory over a TCU team led by All-American end Raymond “Rags” Matthews, with the Gents six yards away from another touchdown when the game ended.

Although he never ran track, Hanna was clocked at 10.3 seconds for the 100-yard dash wearing football togs. But his passing and his ability to maneuver through a broken field were just as impressive as his speed.

In Hanna’s three seasons at Centenary, the Gents were 6-4 against Southwest Conference opponents. Despite his injury-plagued junior season, Hanna scored at least 13 touchdowns in each of his three collegiate seasons.