The Opening Kickoff

by Dave Revsine

  It was the cash that initially caught Stagg’s eye. Stanford and California were drawing significant crowds on the coast—a reported 11,000 for their 1894 game. What’s more, the schools had charged up to $1.50 per ticket, three times the face value of a seat at the Chicago–Michigan game.

  Stagg quickly went to work trying to arrange a deal, exchanging a series of telegrams with a number of Stanford officials, including a student by the name of Herbert Hoover. The future president was serving as the treasurer of the school’s athletic association. Eventually, the two sides came to an agreement: In order to help cover the cost of its travel expenses, Chicago would be guaranteed $1,000 or 75 percent of the gate receipts. Other schools also wanted an opportunity to play the Maroons while they were out west, but Stagg held out for favorable terms. After the University of California offered a 50–50 gate split, Stagg declined, reasoning, “I do not see the justice in receiving 75 per cent of the gate receipts from Leland Stanford and then playing [the] California Varsity for 50 per cent.”

  While money was a driving force behind the decision to play in California, publicity also played a role. As Stagg stated simply, “we could use the advertising.” He got no argument from his boss. “President Harper was entirely agreeable,” Stagg remembered later, “as he was toward anything legitimate that put the university’s name in print.”

  Expenses for such a journey were a major concern, but Stagg caught a fortunate transportation break. A Chicago woman named Mary McMahon, who owned her own buffet sleeper car, offered it to the Chicago team for a nominal fee. Stagg was delighted to accept, sight unseen. The trip out west was doubling as his honeymoon, and the private car, which had a “stateroom” that he and his wife would occupy, only added to the allure of the journey. “I should take my bride to Golden California in a palace on wheels,” Stagg thought in anticipation of the trip.

  The Chicago papers gave glowing descriptions of the Maroons’ accommodations. One raved about the interior of the “white coach,” including descriptions of the players’ berths. It left out no details, including the locations of the storage departments for the luggage and food. A second paper gushed over the “elegantly equipped car,” which had been “fitted up especially for the convenience of the class of people who are to be its occupants.” The team hired a chef and a porter, both of whom received plaudits in the local press, with one paper describing the former, C. F. Bishop, as a man “with an unblemished reputation as a culinary artist.” McMahon allowed the school to decorate the coach especially for the occasion, painting the words: “The University of Chicago Football Team” in huge maroon-bordered black letters on the side of the train car. As one student observed, the team was a “traveling advertising organization of the University.” Stagg’s enthusiasm was palpable. “From numerous letters I have received from points along our route,” he said, “we are in for royal receptions before we reach the Golden Gate.”

  Reality turned out to be a little different. Stagg was shocked when, on the day of the team’s departure, he actually saw the car for the first time. “The wheels were flat, the paint scabrous, the body humped at one spot and sagged at another,” he recalled many years later. Though it had been described in the papers as having “thirty berths,” the accommodations were actually bunks, and the upper ones collapsed the first night out from Chicago under the weight of the men, who were then forced to double up in the lower bunks. As bad as that was, things soon got considerably worse. On its way over the Rockies, the train caught on fire.

  The coal stove that warmed the car overheated, igniting the woodwork. The team tried in vain to signal the crew, Stagg recalled, but “the train air cord ended with the car ahead of us, [and] the rear flagman was away from his post.” The horrified players took matters into their own hands. “While the train toiled upgrade, we fought the fire with axes and water and beat it after a blistering fight,” Stagg recounted. “Had the flames ever worked through to the outside, where the wind could have got at them, we either should have had to jump for our lives or have been burnt to a crisp.” The team quietly wired ahead for a substitute car, and the mishap was somehow kept out of the papers. Upon their arrival, the players described the journey as “a picnic.”

  The Maroons split two games with Stanford, winning a Christmas Day game in San Francisco and losing four days later in Los Angeles. They then returned to the Bay Area, where they dropped a New Year’s Day game to a local athletic club. As was typical at the time, they had brought their own drinking water with them on the journey, but they had been forced to use a significant portion of it to fight the fire. Their supply exhausted, the Maroons had to consume the local liquid, which Stagg believed upset their stomachs, thus contributing to the defeats. He didn’t get much sympathy from the San Francisco press, which quipped that the Chicagoans “were not used to water that [they] did not have to chew.” Facing a minor deficit, the team stopped on the way home for a game against the Salt Lake City YMCA, which it won handily. The meager gate receipts in Utah weren’t enough to close the small financial gap, which totaled $136.

  While technically a money loser, Stagg believed that the western trip had been well worth the hassle. He got no arguments from other midwestern schools such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, which, within months, were rumored to be planning long-distance journeys of their own. As historian Robin Lester notes, “Chicago’s extravagant trip heralded the faint beginnings of a national commercial enterprise characterized by inter-regional play.” Indeed, just eight years later, Michigan and Stanford played on New Year’s Day in Pasadena in the first-ever Rose Bowl game, a grand tradition that remains—more than a century later—one of the highlights of the college football season.

  But at Chicago in the 1890s, no one was thinking a hundred years down the line. Harper was focused on raising the new university’s profile, and football was simply part of his formula for doing so. As journalist Milton Mayer observed of the early years at Chicago, “Rockefeller gifts were celebrated like football victories, and football victories were celebrated like the Second Coming.” Indeed, the two were inextricably linked.

  In 1895, the year after the Maroons’ West Coast journey, Chicago found itself trailing Wisconsin 12–0 at halftime of the teams’ battle at Marshall Field. As a disgusted Stagg addressed his troops, Harper burst into the dressing room and told the team that Rockefeller had just promised the school a three-million-dollar gift. “Our benefactor,” he said of Rockefeller, “believes in the greatness of the University. The way you played in the first half,” he continued, “leads me to wonder whether we have the spirit of greatness in ambitions. I wish that you would make up your minds to win this game and show that we do have it.” The Maroons dominated the second half, winning the game 22–12.

  While Chicago’s ambition in its early years provides a vivid example, the school was simply part of a large, nationwide movement. “As football’s potential for public relations became evident,” historian Michael Oriard observed, “presidents often had to reconcile their own moral misgivings to the sport’s pragmatic benefits in attracting both students and financial support.”

  Take Colorado College in Colorado Springs, for example. In the 1890s it was trying to shed a reputation as a mere literary institution and saw football as a ticket to broader acclaim. Before a game against the University of Colorado, university president William F. Slocum entered the locker room to address the team. “Colorado College is a great institution, but it can never gain the recognition that it deserves until it has a winning football team,” he told them. “You are Tigers, and a Tiger is the fiercest beast of the jungle; it can whip any other beast on earth. Take that spirit into the game today. Go out and win.”

  The emphasis on public relations and, ultimately, on money made many in the educational field uncomfortable. “There has grown up around football an unpleasant business atmosphere of profit and loss,” one grad wrote in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine in 18
95. Not surprisingly, President Eliot agreed. He observed that the public’s interest in football “has made it easy to collect large sums of gate-money, both on college grounds and on public grounds convenient to New York and other cities. The money thus easily got is often wastefully and ineffectively spent. There is something exquisitely inappropriate in the extravagant expenditure on athletic sports at such institutions as Harvard and Yale.”

  Criticism came from outside academia as well. Edwin Godkin, founder of the weekly magazine The Nation, said of the sport, “we know of no compensating advantage to put over against the distorted conception of life, and particularly of college life, the false standard of individual and college distinction, and the evident retarding of young men in arriving at serious and worthy ideals, all of which have been involved in the increasing glorification of college athletics.” The Chicago Tribune, meanwhile, said of football’s rise, “This monstrous perversion of sport can be seriously defended only on the ground that ‘there’s money in it,’ for the gatekeepers of the battlefield and for the treasury of the university.”

  Chicago had its system down to a science. Football’s place in the university was firmly established. As Professor Phillip Allen noted a few years later, the school had two purposes: “to spread the light of knowledge over the western world and to ‘lick’ Michigan.”

  By the late 1890s, the administration was doing everything it could to ensure the proper athletic material for the accomplishment of the latter goal. The university had approved a system for enrolling “unclassified” students, whose primary purpose at the school was to participate in athletics. These students entered Chicago in much the way Pat O’Dea did at Wisconsin—without any examination and without needing to declare themselves candidates for a degree. They spent the summer taking a couple of courses with professors who were in on the academic ruse, a plan that left plenty of time for recreation. “[T]here are few pleasanter places for summer residence than the University of Chicago,” Caspar Whitney observed as he exposed the plan in Harper’s Weekly, “with the lake, Jackson Park, fine roads, and a public golf-links not a half a mile away.”

  By the time football began in the fall, these players had established residence and, at least by Chicago’s reckoning, were eligible to represent the school on the gridiron. That this flew in the face of the Western Conference’s standards seemed not to bother the university one bit. Stagg had always seen the eligibility rules as a bit of an unnecessary hindrance anyway, and he would often appeal for exceptions to the conference rules for Chicago athletes. “A university whose regulations are so loose as to permit the practical abandonment of class-room, by its athletes,” Whitney complained of Chicago’s view of academics, “needs thorough shaking up.”

  The problem was that Chicago’s opponents weren’t in much of a position to do anything about it—and that came back to finances. While the West Coast swing had highlighted the PR potential of taking the show on the road, Stagg soon came to realize that the best strategy for Chicago was to play at home, and to do so frequently. The reasoning was simple—due to its location in far and away the largest metropolis in the region, Chicago was uniquely positioned to make money from football gate receipts. Lots of money. Lots more money than could be made in, say, Champaign, Illinois; Madison, Wisconsin; or West Lafayette, Indiana.

  Stagg used this advantage to dictate the locations of the Maroons’ games and the manner in which the receipts would be divided. He even insisted that University of Chicago opponents help pay for half of the improvements to Marshall Field—generally increases in the seating capacity—in advance of the biggest games. The argument, of course, was that the larger capacity meant more money for both sides. But while the opponents only cashed in once, Chicago could take advantage of the changes in perpetuity. “Michigan is tired of building grand-stands and making other improvements to Chicago’s grounds, which are saddled in as part of the legitimate expenses of the games,” the Ann Arbor school complained in the late 1890s. “Last year cost us $1100.”

  And, yet, as the dispute played out over the course of several seasons just before the turn of the century, the opponents kept coming. Though they were frustrated by Stagg’s stubbornness, the payday derived from a game in Chicago was too tempting to resist. Between 1897 and 1899, for instance, the Maroons played 47 games, 44 of which were at home. For its part, Chicago insisted that it would be happy to play on the road, but would do so only under favorable economic conditions. The school required either a guarantee for a road game equivalent to what its opponents would get in Chicago or that its visitor accept as its guarantee the same amount that it would pay Chicago if it traveled.

  For instance, a home game at Chicago might net each school $3,000, while a game in Madison might clear only $1,000 per side. So, if Chicago were to host Wisconsin twice, it might be able to clear $6,000, whereas if they played one game on each campus, the take would be only $4,000. Chicago proposed two solutions. The first was that Wisconsin accept $1,000 for playing in Chicago. That would mean that Chicago would get the other $5,000 from the home game, which, added to the $1,000 for the return game in Madison, would mean it would still clear $6,000 for the two games. Alternatively, Stagg said Wisconsin could guarantee Chicago the same $3,000 for a game in Madison that the school would get at home. Given that scenario, Wisconsin would actually lose $1,000 in the home game, though it would make $3,000 off the game in Chicago. Either way, in the hypothetical example, Chicago stood to make $6,000 from a home and home series, $4,000 more than Wisconsin.

  Stagg saw this athletic Darwinism as the only fair solution, as opposed to the model that the other schools proposed, which was to simply alternate hosting and split the gate receipts equally. “(U)nder the thin guise of a demand for ‘perfect equality,’ the Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois are insisting that it is Chicago’s duty to do what the Creator of all the universe himself does not do,” Stagg complained. “They assume that persons occupying unfavorable business positions ought to receive as much remuneration as persons enjoying the most exceptional opportunities for trade and profit, and, if they do not receive as much it is the duty of those better off to give of their earnings enough to make all share alike.”

  Stagg referred to his model as “a matter of self-preservation,” an assertion that Caspar Whitney attacked in Harper’s as further evidence of the manner in which finances were distorting the world of college football. “The self-preservation of what?” Whitney wrote. “Of student athletics for the health of the body and the glory of the sport, or of a big successful business?”

  In the spring of 1898, as the financial issues threatened to boil over, Chicago and Wisconsin threw additional fuel on the fire. Just days before the conference’s spring track meet, Chicago, in conjunction with Michigan, protested the eligibility of two of Wisconsin’s top stars, James Maybury and Henry Cochems. The schools alleged that the pair had competed for cash prizes at track meets under assumed names. As was the protocol in such situations, the protesting universities provided a number of sworn affidavits from witnesses who claimed to have seen the men compete.

  The cases were heard in a seven-hour session the day before the meet in Chicago. Both men were acquitted of the charges. Convinced that justice had not been served in the case, Chicago, Michigan, and the University of Illinois all withdrew from the Western Intercollegiate Athletic Association—deciding to hold a separate meet of their own the following day. In a stroke of nomenclatural genius, they dubbed their new league the Western Intercollegiate Amateur Athletic Association. At the same time, Chicago severed all future athletic relations with Wisconsin, including the football game scheduled for the fall of 1898.

  The local press was aghast. “The three schools have been criticized and scored roundly by outside athletic circles and by other members of the association,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “Their conduct has been characterized as unsportsmanlike and childish.” The contention was that the
rules for trying protests had been followed, and that the three departing schools needed to abide by the group’s decision. Stagg, in particular, came under criticism for his comportment. He reportedly had strong evidence against the two men but held it back until the last moment. As this ran counter to the rules for such proceedings, the committee had refused to hear the information.

  The larger issue, of course, was the future of the conference. Given that they had Chicago, with its financial strength, on their side, the three withdrawing schools were in a position to succeed without Wisconsin, Northwestern, Minnesota, and Purdue. “They are strong enough to be a law unto themselves,” the Tribune pointed out, “whether their course is right or wrong.” The issue was whether the other four could survive without Illinois, Michigan, and, most important, Chicago.

  The situation promised to get worse before it got better. In his frustration, Wisconsin president Adams wrote to Chicago’s Harper in the summer of 1898, accusing Stagg of ruining the athletic relations between the two schools. The Chicago coach, Adams contended, had “violated without any justification” the agreements on dealing with eligibility issues. The cancellation of the football game particularly galled Adams. It was a move, he said, that lacked both “comity” and “courtesy.” The ongoing dispute threatened to derail the future of Midwestern football.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “They All Knew Stagg Was a Sham”

  The disagreement surrounding the eligibility of Wisconsin track and football athletes James Maybury and Henry Cochems continued into the summer of 1898, leaving the Badgers in a tough spot. For the past few years, the battle with Chicago had been the most anticipated game on the schedule. It certainly would have been true in the 1898 season, as the teams boasted the two most exciting players in the West—Pat O’Dea and Clarence Herschberger. But as a new school year dawned, Chicago refused to schedule Wisconsin, due to Amos Alonzo Stagg’s ongoing insistence that the two Wisconsin players had forfeited their amateur status. The Badgers were left with just two “big” games scheduled—a late October meeting with Minnesota and the Thanksgiving Day battle with Northwestern.