Lemonick loved penn-Army games

Currently, Lemonick is the of the Mungermen, those football players who earned letters at Penn between 1938 and '53 and meet annually to honor their legendary coach, George Munger. He returned to Penn for five years in the late '50s as an assistant football coach and is presently the chairperson of the Penn/Cornell Trustees Cup annual awards dinner, which celebrates the 106-year football rivalry between the two schools. A member of Penn's Athletic Hall of Fame, Lemonick recalls his greatest memory as a Penn football player. Bernie Lemonick: The greatest memories for me really are two-fold. No. 1, I loved playing against the Army team. They were coached by a guy by the name of Red Blake. Red Blake was an icon of a coach of the same fabric that George Munger was made up of -- he was very precise, he was very noble, he was very direct and his system was like a Swiss watch, the workings of it were absolutely precise. And I loved playing against them because I figured out just by studying what his systems were and I loved playing against them because I could do a lot of damage to the system that he had worked out so precisely. And I loved playing against the talent that he had -- they were extraordinary football players. The other thing that was really impressive -- and I still get chills -- [was] when we used to run out onto Franklin Field and there were 75 to 80,000 people and we ran out to warm up, the band would strike up and people would cheer, and I'm telling you it was almost like electric shocks going through us, going through me. And so it was a sense of being carried on the wings of the cheers and the music that, in a sense, got me ready to knock people down. So those are two memories that come back at me pretty strongly.