"Pitt is credited with having been the first team to identify its football players by numbers on the uniforms. It started many years ago as a bright idea to sell more programs. Yesterday I learned another version from Jim Jerpe Jr., son of a famous baseball writer for the old Gazette Times. He says that when he registered at Pitt, from which he was graduated as a chemical engineer, he was told by the late Karl E. Davis, the then graduate athletic manager, that Jim's dad was responsible for the numbering, which Davis instituted. It seems, according to what Davis said, that Jerpe Sr. complained about the difficulty of covering football games in those days before elevated press boxes, when writers trudged up and down the field, and in protest wrote a story in which he reported that a player named Joe passed the ball to another player named Joe, who took off on a run and was stopped by another player named Joe."
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Journalists from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesPeople from PittsburghSports writers
Original Language: English
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Sources
, "Sports: West Virginia Not Conceding, Will Be 'Up' for Pitt Game," Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph (October 13, 1959), p. 26
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Jerpe
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James Jerpe
1885 – 1917
(1885 – January 16, 1917) was an American sports writer and columnist, writing for The Pittsburgh Dispatch, ' and ' from 1909 until 1916.
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