His first game, against Simpson College, was a good one. He played well, with one newspaper even heralding him as “one of the best tackles in the Missouri valley this year.” He was well on his way. In his second game, Iowa faced off against the University of Minnesota. It should be noted that while this was Trice’s second game, it wasn’t the second game of the season. As historian Donald Spivey explains, “three other teams had refused to play Iowa State,” and Trice sat out at least one game. But he was ready for Minnesota. A note he’d written to himself and tucked in his pocket during the game read, “Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped, I will be trying to do more than my part.”
He was right about being thrown about; there were some vicious hits. As Spivey writes, “The blows were so violent that one spectator was heard to remark that he thought it was getting ready to rain.”
Trice took his share of those hits. In one of the first plays of the game, he already had a shoulder injury, but he continued to play.
“[B]y the end of the first half, both sides were battered, bruised, cut, and bleeding,” Spivey writes. But it was a play during the third quarter that changed everything.
Trice dove to stop an advancing Minnesota player and ended up on his back. After he was trampled by several others, he was taken off the field on a stretcher. Minnesota fans chanted “we’re sorry” over and over, but as Spivey explains, “It is questionable whether [they] were expressing sympathy or disdain.”
Trice was sent to the hospital, where doctors said his injuries weren’t serious; he was fine to travel back to Iowa. As Schultz writes, he made the trip back on “a makeshift straw mattress in a railroad car.” Once back in Iowa, he went to a local hospital, where his injured shoulder was determined to be a broken collarbone. His abdomen and intestines were “so severely damaged that it was too dangerous to operate,” Schultz writes. All damage that the doctors in Minnesota failed to detect.
Trice died from his injuries on October 8, 1923.