People think it’s crazy. This is my passion’: The story of the world’s largest collection of college football helmets
By Josh Kendall 3h ago
COLUMBIA, S.C. — On July 7, Justin King tweeted a five-second video clip of South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer looking quizzically at a 45-year-old Gamecocks football helmet.
King claims he didn’t know what he was starting, but Beamer isn’t so sure.
“We were literally just goofing around,” said King, the Gamecocks’ director of new and creative media. “I go back to my phone a couple hours later, and I’m like, ‘Oh shoot, I should probably say something that this wasn’t serious.’”
It was too late. South Carolina Twitter already had jumped on it, retweeting and replying and generally working itself into the kind of tiny tempest that college football in the summer is so good at spawning.
“Blame Justin King for that one,” Beamer said. “He gave me that helmet and said we needed to take a picture because it would set Twitter ablaze, and it did, for sure.”
Some South Carolina fans thought the message was hinting at a change in headwear this season. Some thought it was a sign of a throwback jersey to come. Some just really wanted to talk about college football in July.
They were all sucked in by that singular image of the game — the helmet, which signifies at a glance that the South’s favorite game is at hand and elicits warm and fuzzy feelings because of it.
“People love talking about helmets,” Blaise D’Sylva said.
D’Sylva is uniquely qualified to speak about the iconic ground the helmet holds in college football history, but we will circle back to him in a minute.
The helmet that Beamer was studying in the tweet was last worn by a South Carolina player on the field in 1974. It features a garnet Gamecock on a white background atop a banner that reads “Scholarship-Leadership.”
It is not remembered fondly by most, which was evident based on the reactions to King’s tweet.
There is a very prominent member of the South Carolina family, though, who has good memories of that helmet. Tommy Suggs, the veteran analyst on the Gamecocks radio broadcasts, wore it in 1969 when he quarterbacked the school to the ACC title, its only conference championship.
“The only issue I had was you couldn’t read scholarship and leadership on them (because it was written so small),” Suggs said. “I’ve got one at home, the black one that Coach (Pual) Dietzel gave to all the seniors.”
Dietzel, the head coach from 1966 through 1974, designed the helmet himself. The man who coached Army, Indiana, LSU and South Carolina spent his retirement years as an artist. (You can pick up a decent watercolor of his on eBay for $25.00.)
“That (helmet) was kind of his creation,” Suggs said. “The players didn’t have any input at all. Of course, we didn’t care. Give me something to protect my head that doesn’t fold in half and slide in my back pocket and I’m fine.”
South Carolina wore the “Scholarship-Leadership” decal in 1966 and 1967 with a triple stripe from front to back on the helmet and from 1969 to 1974 with a single stripe from front to back.
The reason we know this last fact is that D’Sylva … well, he’s a little crazy about football helmets.
“I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on this thing,” D’Sylva said.
“This thing” is a website called HelmetHistory.com and a collection of almost 6,000 miniature helmets that is on its way to chronicling the entire history of what football players have worn on their heads. D’Sylva is the James Audubon of football helmets. Just as Audubon searched the country for birds to shoot and stuff and tack up on his wall, D’Sylva scours college yearbooks, media guides and the internet for football helmets to re-create and display.
“People think it’s crazy, but it’s like my artwork,” the 55-year-old said. “It’s like buying a nice painting and displaying it in your house. This is my artwork. This is my passion.”
It is not an inexpensive obsession. The total dollar figure, in fact, is best not calculated publicly.
“I don’t like to publicize because if it ever gets in an article and my wife sees it, she would …” said D’Sylva, who grew up a Washington fan but switched his allegiance when he enrolled at Washington State in the mid-1980s. “The beauty of it is it’s spread out over 18 years and you’re doing it a little bit at a time.”
Looking for a BYU helmet — or every BYU helmet? Blaise D’Sylva has you covered.
This is his process: After finding a new helmet, D’Sylva sends the image to one of two artists he has contracted to help with his work. The artists create a vinyl replica of the helmet decal, and D’Sylva affixes that to a generic Riddell Pocket Pro helmet, a two-inch replica version of the real thing.
“I met this guy and bought some Arena football helmets from him, and he said, ‘What do you want?’” D’Sylva said. “I said, ‘I want everything.’”
You can buy a complete set of 2020 SEC helmets on eBay for around 40 bucks. But you can’t find the white helmet with American flag insignia that Texas A&M wore for one game against UTEP in 2013. Or the helmet The Hawaiians wore in 1974 and 1975 in the World Football League.
Only D’Sylva has those. And so many more. The collection currently is in tubs in his Las Vegas garage. The helmets haven’t been unpacked since he and his wife moved from Dallas — where he held a job in marketing for Dr Pepper — to put the sports-mad D’Sylva in closer proximity to potential jobs in sports.
He has all 130 FBS teams going back to the ’60s, which sounds like a massive undertaking on the surface but is actually significantly more difficult when you factor in that most of those teams have worn more than 40 helmet variations in that time. He has NFL Europe and both Arena Leagues. He has 42 versions of South Carolina helmets dating to 1932.
D’Sylva’s website is exhaustive and still growing.
“I monitor every game, and if it’s a new helmet, I put it on a list for my guys to make,” he said.
Fans send in submissions to help when a school slips one past him. Ole Miss, for instance. In 2013, the Rebels wore their regular dark blue helmet without the stripe for one game.
“I didn’t have that one in there,” he said.
He does now.
“My ultimate goal is somehow I’d like to display it somewhere where more people can see it because people love it,” he said. “The only people who see it are the people who come over to my house, and they go, ‘Oh, this is cool.’”
He has considered taking his collection on the road in the fall and displaying it tailgate-tour style in Walmart parking lots. When he entered Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Fan in College Football” contest in 2017, he offered to lend the collection to the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta if he won.
Helmets simply stir passion. They always have.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” said Atlanta-based sports radio host and longtime memorabilia collector Chuck Oliver. “South Carolina was not having a good season last year, and I’m getting tweets about the helmet. ‘Do you like the helmet? Do you like the uniform?’”
It’s not just the Gamecocks, either.
“Jim Donnan got hired at the University of Georgia,” Oliver said. “Georgia had always had the red helmet with the single white stripe. I think he put a thin black stripe on the outside white stripe, and Georgia fans acted like he had suggested the closing of the Vatican. ‘What are you doing to my helmet?’”
King should have remembered all of this before he sent his tweet, he acknowledged. South Carolina fans need to know they shouldn’t expect to see the “Scholarship-Leadership” helmet or anything else new or old this season.
“There are zero plans,” he said.
(Photos courtesy of Blaise D’Sylva)
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Josh Kendall has covered SEC football since 2000 and South Carolina football since 2010. Among the natural wonders he has witnessed are Matthew Stafford throwing a football, Jadeveon Clowney nearly decapitating a Michigan running back and Steve Spurrier skewering countless people. It has been better than working for a living the entire time. Follow Josh on Twitter @JoshTheAthletic.
