jrn 362 / sps 362 - lecture five

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Five

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review - Football in Crisis• Football’s first crisis occurred in 1894 when critics pounced on the

game for the violence embedded in game play.

• In an article titled “The Evils of Football,” and published in 1894, even before the infamous Harvard-Yale game that year, Eliot asserted that “the American game of football, as now played, is unfit for colleges and schools … As a spectacle football is more brutalizing than prize fighting, cock fighting, or bull fighting … Football sets up the wrong kind of a hero—the man who uses his strength brutally, with a reckless disregard both of the injuries he may suffer and of the injuries he may inflict on others.”


Review - Football in Crisis• In May 1896, Camp asked a physician to comment on the possible

concussions, or accidents to the “nervous system” suffered by football players.

• The doctor, Morton Prince, reported that the force of two men colliding exceeded that of passengers in train accidents.

• Yet he asserted that surgeons who had treated football players everywhere reported that they did not see any “traumatic neurosis” stemming from football injuries.


Review - Football in Crisis• Football, indeed, survived the first phase of the mass formations

and mass momentum tactics of the 1890s by altering rules to placate critics who called for the game to be banned.

• Play opened up, and formations that featured a quarterback under center who would toss the ball to a running back proliferated.

• The Rules Committee annually changed the game to make it safer and more appealing to the thousands of fans who attend big games.


Watch – Football in 1903• Film footage of the Yale-Princeton game from 1903 is available on

the next slide. It is believed to be the first moving film ever shot at a football game.

• The film shows the enormous spectacle of football at the turn of the century, as thousands of spectators fill the bleachers to watch the game.

• The game play itself is little more than a pile moving every so slightly from play to play. There are many punts.


Watch – Football in 1903• The next slide consists of a film shot during the University of

Michigan – University of Chicago game in 1904.

• Please note the injuries that occur during play, particularly one injury early in the game action that shows a player grabbing his head.


Dream Life - Sex• One element that accompanied

the game from the start in the became a vital part of the spectacle by the 1890s and the 1900s: sex

• America’s dream life of ecstasy and violence needed sex, and football provided that, too.


Dream Life - Sex• Harper’s magazine put a couple on a

cover for the 1894 Yale-Harvard game, referencing the appeal of the game as an acceptable social event.

• The game, of course, turned out to be among the most violent ever played, but both the game and the sex endured.


Dream Life - Sex• Earlier that year, the Princeton-Yale

game was touted for its particular sex appeal.


Dream Life - Sex• The humor magazine Puck took a

less subtle approach to the same subject, publishing a caption about football as a brutal game as a man escorts his date to the stands and other spectators turn to watch her, not the game.

• Postcards and songs followed, too.


Dream Life - Sex

• And as the game’s popularity soared in the 20th century, the sex appeal grew alongside with it.


Dream Life - Sex• The reason for the association of sex and football can be traced

to the season itself: fall presented opportunities for a display of fashion unmatched at any other time of year.

• Dresses, sweaters, coats, hats and all sorts of the finest clothing could be worn to a football game, as the previous drawings suggest.

• It was socially acceptable for the genders to meet at a football game and then hit the town afterward.


Dream Life - Sex

• The game provided the backdrop for even the youngest of infatuations, according to prints from that period.


Dream Life - Sex• Please keep in mind the profound role of football and sex

together as partners in creating America’s Dream Life.

• It figures prominently in movies from the 1920s – 1950s, setting the mythological vision of college life for millions of Americans over generations who would never actually set foot on campus.

• And it assigned gender roles that persist well into the 21st century.


Dream Life – Children• Children were likewise drafted

into this Dream Life almost from the start.

• That created a generational structure to keep the game percolating throughout the U.S.


Dream Life – Children• Textual work in the form of

football guides published by Spalding, newspaper and magazine articles, and factual and fictional books animated the Dream Life for boys.


Dream Life – Children• Books by Walter Camp, including one

he co-authored with Harvard’s Lorin Deland in 1891, circulated widely among teachers and civic leaders, who used its lessons on game play and rules when they formed teams in schools and in civic associations.


Dream Life – Children• The depth - depravity? - of the Dream

Life in American children was evident in the newspaper cartoons of Richard Felton Outcault, who is credited with inventing the comics.

• His famous “Yellow Kid” character transformed print media, leading to the expression “yellow journalism.”


Dream Life – Children• This 1896 cartoon shows the Yellow

Kid, holding a football, charging through a group of players leaving bodies flying in all directions. His girlfriend Liz, wearing knickers (labeled "Vassar Junior, we have the hair") sprints alongside.

• Note the action in the panel.


Dream Life – Children• The Yellow Kid, however, did

not inspire rowdy boys to play football.

• Fictional characters such as Frank Merriwell played that role.


Dream Life – Children• Merriwell is the ideal football hero,

signally to boys the characteristics needed to play.

• Boys must pursue a clean and sober life of great humility and piety, which applied a thick layer of morality on boys dreaming of playing a violent game.


Dream Life – Children• Camp himself installed his moral

code in books for boys such as The Substitute.

• Such tales of freshmen and substitutes rising to glory added to the appeal of the game to boys who became spectators and then players.


Dream Life - Sex

• Board games based on football, such as the 1895 game on the next slide. amplified the Dream Life by encouraging role-playing and fantasy.


Dream Life – Children• The impact was extraordinary.

• Prep schools fielded teams as did communities throughout the country in addition to colleges.

• The next slide shows the Lawrenceville team from around 1890.


Dream Life - War• In the book referenced earlier in this presentation, Camp and

Deland made a firm comparison between football and war, with little room for interpretation.

• The passage occurs at the start of Chapter 8, p. 278:


Dream Life - War• We have discussed how Deland was heavily influenced by the

tactics of Napoleon in developing the flying wedge in terms of attack.

• In the book, Deland and Camp attach Napoleon’s moral philosophy of war to football, a relationship cemented in 1892 when Deland’s flying wedge causes the country to take notice.

• Here is the critical passage:


Dream Life - War• Please note that the connection among football, war and the

popular press of the day all plays into the concept of manliness then rippling throughout the country, particularly among college students.

• In 1898, the United States goes to war against Spain and wins, becoming a global power in what turned out to be a war to project manliness.

• And football was there, as the image on the next slide of a team practicing at the Presidio post in San Francisco shows:


Dream Life – Sex, Children & War• Thus, at the turn of the 20th century, the elements of America’s

Dream Life of Ecstasy and Violence are in place, and these are sex, boyhood fantasies and war.

• In the 20th century, all three would work to make football the most popular sport in America, but it first had to survive the crisis of 1905.


Football Wins• The crisis of 1905 emerged when deaths stemming directly from

game play reached 19.

• Critics who pounced in 1894 refreshed their arguments and called once again for the game to be banned.

• Unlike in 1894, 1905’s crisis came amid a movement toward health and safety in the U.S. as the nation sought to leave the 19th century and its frontier approach to life behind it. In short, it would be a tougher sell.


Football Wins• In the second half of the 1890s and into the first part of the

1900s, football’s leading authorities were more concerned with professionalism than renewed calls for the game’s banishment from America.

• Civic and neighborhood associations were forming teams and paying players for the first time, headed Yale’s great Pudge Heffelfinger.

• Camp in particular worried endlessly about the impact of pay-for-play on college football and its moral code.


Football Wins• Camp concluded that a danger far and above physical trauma was

the “evil of notoriety” as generated by newspapers who inflicted “gross exaggerations of the importance of individual and topical affairs.”

• “A gentleman never competes for money, directly or indirectly” Camp wrote in 1889. “Make no mistake about this. No matter how winding the road may be that eventually brings the sovereign into the pocket, it is the price of what should be dearer to you than anything else, - your honor …


Football Wins• “… If a man comes to you and endeavors to affect your choice of

college by offers of a pecuniary nature, he does not take you for a gentleman or a gentleman’s son, you may be sure. Gentlemen neither offer nor take bribes.”


Football Wins• The continued popularity of the game and the focus on the of the

moral code as a shield against professionalism left the game unprepared for the biggest crisis it faced then and now.

• And why not?


Football Wins• The college was enormously popular, with games covered by the

urban press as major events on both the sports and social calendars.

• The demand for tickets to see the game live was spurred in part by the accounts of heroic players in the newspapers as they weekly documented the test of strength unfolding on college campuses.

• Yale responded by erecting a stadium on land it owned to the west of campus in 1900.


Football Wins• Harvard, of course, topped Yale in 1903.

• The college built the largest stadium of its day, a massive amphitheater based on classical architecture, blending massive columns with steeply raked seats.

• It held 30,000 fans, and that proved to be short of the demand.


Football Wins• The spectacle itself of the game

often overshadowed the action.

• Bands played fight songs penned by pro songwriters and talented students such as Yale’s Cole Porter, whose work circulated beyond school.

• Crowds took part in stage-managed cheer routines.


Football Wins• The game itself was getting better,

too.

• Deland had established the combination military/scientific approach to tactics and training, amplifying the game’s increasing complexity.


Football Wins• The insertion of these training

methods, along with the recruitment of bigger players, increased skills and made the game more athletic.


Football Wins• Teams formed everywhere, including at a lumber mill located in the

deep woods of Georgia …


Football Wins• But there was no getting around the fact that this Dream Life

exercise in ecstasy and violence disturbed many people who saw anything but honor on the football field, as the following cartoons suggest.


Football Wins• The mounting toll of injuries and deaths chipped away at football’s

self-selected role as the building of character in boys and young men.

• Even unintentionally, the game’s depravity appeared in publications, including one published in 1914 about a game at the turn of the century.


Football Wins• Take this passage from the book

Andy at Yale, written for boys:


Football Wins• “It was the signal for Andy to take the ball through right tackle and

guard. He received the pigskin and with lowered head and hunched shoulders shot forward. He saw a hole torn in the varsity line for him, and leaped through it. The opening was a good one, and the coach raved at the fatal softness of the first-team players. Andy saw his chance and sprinted forward. But the next instant, after covering a few yards, he was fiercely tackled by Mortimer, who threw him heavily. He fell on Andy, and the breath seemed to leave our hero. His eyes saw black, and there was a ringing in his ears as of many bells.”


Football Wins• Even factual accounts of games did not try to hide the violence

and the wreckage it caused.

• Football Days, written by Princetonian William Hanford Edwards in 1916, revisited the game as it was played at the turn of the century.

• It included images of the violence, and he as a matter of fact described the crash of bodies and the toll it extracted.

• Here’s a Princeton star named Hillebrand on the field, unconscious, in 1900.


Football Wins• By 1905, the pressure to

change the game and modify rules to control violence grew too intense to ignore.


Football Wins• President Theodore Roosevelt

convened a meeting in October 1905 among football’s rule authorities, including Walter Camp, from Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

• Roosevelt was a Harvard alumni who loved football and tried to save it.


Football Wins• Roosevelt told Camp and the

others that he wanted to endorse football as an important character-building sport played under a moral code.

• He said that the rules had to change to make the game less hazardous to the players.


Football Wins• All agreed, and on Christmas Eve 1905 at a New York City hotel, a

meeting took place among representatives from 68 colleges.


Football Wins• Eventually, that meeting led to the formation of an institution to

oversee the game throughout the United States, later known as the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

• But the most profound change to the rules to reduce violence would slowly but inexorably disrupt football.


Football Wins• That disruption? A rule

permitting a forward pass to open the game and give offenses a new weapon.

• The Official Rule Book of 1906 turned out to be the document that not only saved football but took the game to a new level of popularity.

jrn 362 / sps 362 - lecture five

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