offenses of both Stagg's and Cochems' 1906 squads was Lt. Hackett, who officiated games involving both teams. His verdict, as contemporaneously reported by Wray, was that St. Louis' passing game was different and superior to anything else he had seen that season. Cochems' own star, Bradbury Robinson, also disputed Cochems' claim to be the developer of the forward pass. In a 1940 letter to Ed Wray, Robinson wrote : The story of the beginning and development of the forward pass does not reside with Eddie Cochems but with myself. Strange as it may seem I began the development of the forward pass in [1904] at Wisconsin university before I ever came to St. Louis. I anticipated that it would be introduced into the rules because of the efforts Theodore Roosevelt as president was making to tone down the game and make it more spectacular. ... Mr. Cochems' connection with this development only occurred in 1906, in Wisconsin, where the St. Louis university squad had gone for early training. In a 2006 feature story on the 100th anniversary of the forward pass, St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Vahe Gregorian staked out a middle ground, noting, "While Cochems was the first to harness the potential of the newly legalized pass, he hardly was its architect or inventor." Impact of the Rockne legend Despite Cochems' contribution to football, his story was long the stuff of trivia. Years passed and a generation of first-hand observers died. They were replaced by generations influenced by the popular 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American in which Notre Dame's Knute Rockne was portrayed as the originator of the forward pass. Another factor that may have contributed to Cochems' story fading from the public's memory was the decision of St. Louis University to discontinue intercollegiate football in 1949. The New York Times columnist Arthur Daley, the first sportswriter to win the Pulitzer Prize, wrote in 1949 that Rockne and Gus Dorais, "caught a much larger share of immortality than they actually deserve, including credit for inventing the forward pass. That, of course, belongs to Eddie Cochems of St. Louis." In 1952, Dorais himself tried to set the record straight (as Rockne had more than 20 years earlier), telling the United Press that "Eddie Cochems of the St. Louis University team of 1906-07-08 deserves the full credit." Tampa Bay newspaper columnist Bob Driver wrote in 2006, "Cochems' name is mostly a