by John Fox
He even had opinions as to the level of table service required for an athlete in training. When asked by another coach to diagnose a team situation in which several star players were “manifestly out of sorts,” Camp sat down to dinner with them and quickly pinpointed the problem. “The beef—and an excellent roast it was, too—was literally served in junks, such as one might throw to a dog.” Some boys were accustomed to a certain level of dining, he asserted, and their appetite and physical condition could suffer from poor table service.
In Camp’s vision of football, nothing could be left to the vagaries of chance. And all the fresh air, mutton chops, and fancy flatware paid off. In his eight-year career as head coach, first at Yale and then at Stanford, Camp lost only five games. In 1888, his first year as Yale head coach, the Bulldogs outscored their opponents a staggering 698–0.
With relentless attention to detail, in the smoke-filled huddle of IFA committee meetings, Camp and his fellow rule makers regulated football into existence, converting it in less than a decade from a raucous free-for-all into an obsessively methodical sport. Rules were enacted and put to the test on the field, then brought back to the scrutiny of the committee to be fine-tuned or thrown out. The snap of the scrimmage replaced the scramble of the scrum. Random pasture gave way to the calculated geometry of the gridiron. Time became the most ruthless player on the field, forcing decisiveness and action. Specialization turned the passions of the mob into the precision of the machine, with each man selected and trained to play his part. Plays were called, signals devised, and the quarterback assumed his starring role as “director of the game,” opening a door for the Tom Bradys and Peyton Mannings of the future to step through.
Rule by rule, committee by committee, Camp’s grand vision of order unfolded on the gridiron. But as the game became more open, methodical, and scientific, it also, ironically, became more violent. The 1880s saw running games unlike any that have been seen since. In 1884, Wyllys Terry of Yale ran 115 yards for a touchdown against Wesleyan, setting a record that will stand forever thanks to the field being shortened soon after. And in an effort to discourage blocking and prevent neck injuries in what was becoming an increasingly physical game, Camp pushed through a proposal in 1888 to allow tackling below the waist for the first time.
It was Harvard football adviser and avid chess expert Lorin Deland who in 1892 conceived one of the most brutal plays to ever appear on the field. Deland, who had never played football and only witnessed his first game two years earlier, turned to the history books—and to Napoleon’s military tactics in particular—to devise his take-no-prisoners play known as the “flying wedge.” “One of the chief points brought out by the great French general,” Deland noted, “was that if he could mass a large proportion of his troops and throw them against a weak point of the enemy, he could easily defeat that portion, and gaining their rear, create havoc with the rest.”
In the second half of the annual Harvard-Yale game, Deland lined up his squad in a unique V formation stretching 25 yards behind the ball. At the time, there was no requirement at kickoff to kick the ball a certain distance, so the kicker lightly tapped the ball, then scooped it up and ran with it. Nine other players formed a protective wedge around the runner and bore down on one of Yale’s weakest defensemen, trampling him to the ground in what was known as a “mass momentum” play. Deland’s strategically violent play, described at the time as “half a ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds,” kicked open a hornet’s nest of controversy around football that wouldn’t subside for another 20 years—and has never really gone away. Amos Alonzo Stagg, on his way to becoming a coaching legend at the University of Chicago, called the play “the most spectacular single formation ever.” “It was a play,” wrote a reporter for the Boston Herald, “that sent the football men who were spectators into raptures.”
The standard-issue equipment of the time offered victims little protection from the crushing impact of the flying wedge. To protect their heads, players wore only a knit cap, a strap-on nose guard, and, for a brief spell, fashionably long hair. Rubber cleats were tacked onto street shoes, and the earlier canvas “smock” was replaced by tougher moleskin trousers with sewn-in padding. Coaches and players experimented with new forms of protection as the game became more physical. The first padded leather “head harness” appeared in 1896, and patents were filed soon after for variations on the theme, including a pneumatic helmet that borrowed from ball design by encasing the head in a rubber sack inflated with a hand pump. Among Deland’s many innovations was a one-piece leather suit that made it harder to grip and tackle his players. One particularly industrious halfback of the era showed up on the field for a championship game greased from shoulder to knee, prompting the creation of a rule that lasted in the books for years that “No sticky or greasy substance shall be used on the persons or clothing of the players.”
As the bloodied bodies of 20-year-old men were dragged off the field, public opinion quickly turned against the game. Rugby had always been a rough, even occasionally brutal sport, and controversy had dogged it from day one. But in the Progressive era of the late 19th century, when muckraking journalists and social activists were busy reforming social ills and political corruption wherever they could find them, football was a ripe target for reform. The game was exploding in popularity on college campuses across the country and becoming as integral to the celebration of Thanksgiving as church and turkey. By the 1890s, an estimated 5,000 games involving 110,000 participants were being played on Thanksgiving in every corner of the United States. The holiday, lamented one writer, “is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given. It is a holiday granted by the State and the nation to see a football game.” Weekend games and tailgate parties were already entrenched fixtures of the college experience. And yet, in its “evolved” form, football presented society with an uncomfortable paradox: a game that was more violent in its modern form than it had been before: a game that had been scientifically, if unwittingly, engineered to be more deadly. New training methods made for stronger, bulkier, and more specialized players. New helmets padded their confidence more than their heads as they hit harder, more precisely, and with greater coordination than before. The best coaches devised mass plays like the flying wedge to achieve maximum impact and damage. So much for progress.
A widely read New York Times editorial from December 1893 titled “Change the Football Rules: The Rugby Game as Played Now Is a Dangerous Pastime” called for reform, documenting story after story of players who’d been killed on the gridiron. Another Times editorial went so far as to compare football to lynching. The Nation, amid all the frantic editorial voices, was the game’s staunchest critic, calling over and over again for nothing less than its complete abolition. In just one Saturday in November 1893, the magazine reported a host of injuries and deaths, referring to football as a “murderous game”:
Captain Frank Ranken of the Montauk football team had his leg broken in two places . . . Robert Christy of the Wooster University died from a kick in the stomach. . . . At the game at Springfield . . . Mackie punched his head into Stillman’s stomach . . . Beard stepped “unconsciously” on Wrightman’s head, and Acton hit Beard a smart blow on the chin.
“Out of the Game,” from Harper’s Weekly, 1891.
Harvard-Yale games were particularly prone to carnage. When he played for the Bulldogs, Frederic Remington, the flamboyant western artist and sculptor, was known to dip his uniform in blood from a local slaughterhouse before games to make it “more businesslike.”
Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president, emerged as the leading spokesman of the reform movement. Along with other prominent college presidents at the time, Eliot was at the forefront of building what Mark Bernstein describes as a “new empire of the mind” governed by science and reason. Football had no place in Eliot’s vision of the university. Though claiming to appreciate the value of athletics in moderation, Eliot saw football as, at best,
an unwanted distraction from academics. At worst, he argued, the game brought out violent tendencies in both players and spectators that had no place in civilized society. “To become brutal and brutalizing,” he wrote, “is the natural tendency of all sports which involve violent personal collision between the players.”
In a foreshadowing of recent medical inquiries into collision-induced brain trauma, the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1902 supported Eliot and the reformers with a report suggesting that football was becoming a public health concern. Reviewing that season’s “very respectable record of casualties, enough to supply a respectable Spanish-American War,” the editors reported 12 deaths, several fatal injuries, 80-plus serious injuries. “To be a cripple or lunatic for life is paying high for athletic emulation.”
Although he regretted the reports of injury and death, Camp thought them exaggerated and quickly turned his focus on mounting a defense of his beloved sport. Even as other coaches pushed for the abolition of mass momentum plays, like the flying wedge, Camp defended the strategy as a “piece of clever headwork.” Contrary to Eliot, Camp believed that football built character and “manliness” in young men, preparing them to live lives as leaders. Like many contemporaries, he believed in the “survival of the fittest” and viewed the gridiron as a proving ground. His views on the subject were unquestionably influenced by his close friend and brother-in-law, William Graham Sumner, the leading proponent of Social Darwinism.
To build his case for football, Camp sent out a questionnaire to hundreds of former players, coaches, doctors, and administrators to gather objective evidence on both the dangers and benefits of the game. He captured and published the testimonials in Football Facts and Figures: A Symposium of Expert Opinions on the Game’s Place in American Athletics, a 230-page manifesto for football as a safe, valuable, and morally upright pastime. It has been suggested since that Camp discarded 20 percent of the responses in order to arrive at the right conclusion.
In Camp’s report, a professor from Yale presented his findings that football was an “intellectual game,” presenting evidence that Ivy League football players had higher academic achievement than those who played baseball or rowed. One former player declared that “besides the ‘humanities’ which were dinged into me in the classroom, I value what some would be pleased to call the ‘inhumanities’ dinged into me on the football field.” Along with the physical benefits, carefully delineated in a chart comparing lung capacity and leg and neck girth of players and nonplayers, the “moral effects” of the game were touted, including courage, self-control, respect for authority, and manliness. Football, one expert argued, produced “God-fearing men, upright in action and clean of speech.” Harvard’s surgeon, Dr. Conant, downplayed the injuries caused by the game, concluding that most consisted of ankle and knee sprains. The coach at Pennsylvania even suggested that many players who got hurt were “playing baby on the field.”
Camp sent copies of his study to a number of influential leaders, including Theodore Roosevelt, serving at the time on the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt was a fan of rough sports and regarded football as the best way for a young man to build character. After reading the study, he wrote Camp a letter of support, concluding that football’s risks were no worse than those of boxing or polo. “I would rather see my boys play it, than see them play any other [sport].” The opponents of the game were, in his view, “timid.” And though he was open to reasonable reform of the game, he quoted another Yalee and future president, William Howard Taft, who said that he preferred reformers “who ate roast beef and were able to make their blows felt in the world.”
Eliot and other vocal critics regarded football as a primitive throwback, out of place in a progressive age dominated by science and reason. But the new gilded class harbored concerns that their college-graduate sons, doted upon and spoiled with money and idle time, were coming up soft and losing their edge and pluck in the process. In a chest-thumping call to arms for Harvard’s graduating class of 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes exhorted the elite of the effete to embrace blood sport as part of the “soldier’s faith”:
Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism. . . . Therefore I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued. . . . If once in a while in our rough riding a neck is broken, I regard it, not as a waste, but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.
Holmes’s call to the wild was well received and continues to be heard. As Michael Oriard has documented in King Football, every attempt over the decades to make the game less violent has run into concerns over “sissifying” the game. Football was always a man’s game, a sport that defined and celebrated the masculine ideal. In the postwar boom of the 1920s, for example, college football’s rugged violence was regarded by many as a healthy counterbalance to an increasingly feminized culture where men sported raccoon coats, listened to jazz, and attended tea parties. “Modern life,” as Oriard puts it, “was soft . . . football was hard.”
The flying wedge only lasted a couple of years before being abolished, but in its wake came a host of other momentum plays and backfield strategies designed to take out vulnerable defensemen. The era of “trench warfare” reached a new low point in 1905, a season in which 18 young men died and 159 were seriously injured. Roosevelt, now president and father of two sons about to play college ball, felt the need to intervene, as much to save football as to save lives. He called Camp and other representatives from the Big Three—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—to the White House with the intent of making the game “not soft but honest.” The attendees pledged to follow the spirit and law of the rules. But the brutality continued. Harvard tackle Karl Brill made news when he quit the team, declaring, “I believe that the human body was not made to withstand the enormous strain that football demands. It is a mere gladiatorial contest.” That season, Columbia University, Northwestern, Union College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropped their football programs. Stanford and the University of California went back to rugby, a more acceptable alternative to what American football had become.
Along with its brutality, another strike against football for its critics was the rising professionalism in the college game. More than 30 years after baseball’s first professional association was formed, football supporters, including Camp, still held fast to the amateur ideal and decried the “tramp athletes” and “ringers” some college teams were recruiting on the sly. As early as 1894, seven of Michigan’s 11 starters weren’t even enrolled in the school but were farmhands or steelworkers brought in to work the gridiron on weekends. Critics saw brutality and professionalism going hand in hand, as gate receipts drove a “win at any cost” mentality into the sport—a mentality reformers have fought in vain ever since.
“Football of the Future,” from Harper’s Weekly, November 1889.
Attempts at real reform began in earnest in 1906 when 38 schools came together to form the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (ICAA), later renamed the NCAA. The purpose of the rules that emerged that year were, as a New York Times report stated, to “ ‘open up the game’—that is, to provide for the natural elimination of the so-called mass plays and bring about a game in which speed and real skill shall supersede so far as possible mere brute strength and force of weight.” An extra referee was added to enforce existing rules against kneeing, kicking, punching, and other excessive roughness. The requirement for a first down was bumped up to 10 yards. But the greatest innovation that emerged to nudge football toward modernity was the legalization of the forward pass.
The forward pass was nothing new. Players had experimented with it for years, but the limitations and penalties imposed on throwing the ball made it more of a desperation play than a core strategy. Passes could only be thrown from five yards behind the line of scrimmage and had to be thrown to either side of center. Incomplete passes resulted in a 15-yard penalty on first and second downs and a turnover on the third. If a pass went out of bounds,
possession went to whichever team retrieved it first. The forward pass became an instant game-changer in the 1906 season, even though the best quarterbacks could only throw the watermelon-shaped ball 20 yards or so. Amos Alonzo Stagg claimed that by that first season he was already running 64 different forward-pass patterns.
To encourage the more open and safer passing game, the NCAA in 1912 reduced the size of the football to dimensions that Barbara, the Wilson football inspector in Ada, could almost sign off on: “It shall be tightly inflated. . . . Circumference, long axis, from 28 inches to 28½ inches; short axis 22½ to 23 inches. Weight, from 14 to 15 ounces.” That same year the committee shortened the field to add end zones and permitted touchdown passes over the goal line for the first time, giving quarterbacks a new target and the prolate spheroid a reason to exist.
Not everyone was a fan of the passing game, though. Walter Camp fought it tooth and nail, and as late as the 1930s Jock Sutherland, University of Pittsburgh’s coach, stated that “throwing laterals is an attempt to sissify a man’s game and there is no fun in getting over the ground that way.” Pitt, unlike their softer competitors, was, he declared with testosterone-laced bravado, “a sock-it-to-’em school.”