by Dave Revsine
The Wolverines had a plan for O’Dea, and the Badgers’ star was well aware of it. “The Michigan men had threatened, through letters sent to our people, to disable me, to get me out of the game,” he said afterward. That the threats were more than just idle chatter became evident just minutes into the game. O’Dea called for a fair catch on a Michigan punt, but the Wolverines’ David Gill ignored his hand signal “and tackled the Australian foully.” The ensuing 10-yard penalty gave the Badgers the ball at Michigan’s 35-yard line. “With the wind blowing rather stiffly at his back and the center of the goal posts directly before him O’Dea’s task seemed a foregone conclusion,” the Chicago Chronicle reported. “The ball rose straight as a shot from the Australian’s cleated toe and sailed between the uprights with an aim and directness that seemed almost stereotyped.” The Badgers had an early 5–0 lead.
Michigan was undeterred by the penalty against Gill and continued its rough play on O’Dea. “Every time that O’Dea punted opposing men would break through and rush upon him needlessly,” the Chronicle observed. “Efforts to block a kick are most praiseworthy, but there is no excuse for the rough work of the Michigan men,” the Tribune admonished. “It was dirty football, as dirty as ever was seen without actual slugging.” O’Dea said afterward that he could overhear the Michigan players urging one another to “cripple me if possible so I would have to retire,” but each time he complained to the game officials, his pleas were ignored.
Finally, he could take it no more. Late in the first half, O’Dea boomed a punt from midfield. It slipped through the arms of Michigan’s John McClean and rolled over the goal line, where Wisconsin’s Frank Hyman recovered it for a touchdown. Back behind the line of scrimmage, O’Dea “was attacked by Snow, Gill, France and Richardson,” who, according to the Milwaukee Sentinel, “dug their elbows into his ribs with terrific force.” O’Dea swung his arms in an effort to fight off his assailants and, depending on what account you believe, either accidentally or purposefully nailed France in the face. At that moment the umpire, Laurie Bliss, whose job it was to maintain order, “whirled about on his heel and ordered O’Dea out of the game.”
The ejection was roundly criticized. The Sentinel condemned the decision as “autocratic and unjust.” The Tribune agreed, saying, “No man ever had more provocation or was more justified in hitting back than was O’Dea at this time.” The Chronicle shared that stance. “Ordinarily slugging is reprehensible,” the paper opined, before adding that “in this case O’Dea was not disgraced in the eyes of his admirers.”
His absence, as it turned out, made little difference. The Badgers rolled to a 17–5 win. Afterward, they celebrated at the bar of the team hotel. Coach Phil King was hoisted onto a chair and paraded around the room before being placed triumphantly upon a table. As the crowd called for order, King rose to his feet, the small man now towering over the happy celebrants.
“Quiet! Quiet!” the men shouted, removing their hats in a show of mock solemnity.
King paused dramatically, waiting for the room to silence.
“It goes without saying that I am immensely pleased with the work of the team to-day, and the last half showed that we could beat them without Pat,” he said, before glancing fondly at his star player.
“What would we have done with O’Dea?” a member of the crowd shouted, eliciting cheers and laughter.
King continued, “[T]he captain was, I am absolutely certain, ruled off unjustly.”
O’Dea gave his side of the story. “Michigan was sending five and six men against me repeatedly with the evident purpose of putting me out of the game,” he said. “I simply put out my hands to ward them off and the officials thought I was slugging when I was not.”
Even Charles Kendall Adams, the president of the university, weighed in on the O’Dea ejection. “We who know Patrick know that he didn’t do anything that either he or we should be ashamed of,” he said, placing his arm on his star’s shoulder. “Patrick, I’m proud of you; we’re all proud of you,” he added, as the room again erupted in cheers.
Adams’s business in Chicago wasn’t done. He and the rest of the conference’s presidents brokered a peace agreement at a city hotel the next day. It included renewed relations between Chicago and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. Humbled by the financial losses his obstinacy had caused, Stagg essentially agreed to the terms he had long opposed. His school would host Thanksgiving games every year, alternating between Wisconsin and Michigan as its opponents. On years they weren’t playing in Chicago, the Badgers and Wolverines would have the right to choose the locale for their game with the Maroons. Most important, the universities would split their gate receipts equally, though, in an effort to placate Stagg and help him save some face, the other three schools agreed that the visitor would always be guaranteed at least $1,000.
Given the kind of money they were all pulling in, that portion of the agreement seemed almost pointless, and yet it rankled the devoted amateur Caspar Whitney. “This is really such an absurd and puerile sub-contract as to be amusing,” he wrote. “Fancy mature men, and supposedly sportsmen at that, embarking on such boyish bickering! The pot-hunting spirit larks in this agreement.” Still, there was no doubt that, at least for the time being, Stagg had been put in his place. “The failure of games with Eastern teams to interest the public so much as those between Western elevens is not only complimentary to the growth of a real football spirit in Chicago, but also a straw to show Professor Stagg which way the wind is blowing,” Whitney observed.
As part of the agreement, Chicago and Wisconsin agreed to play a Western championship game the following Saturday in Madison. It was a mob scene. The small city was overwhelmed, with visitors forced to sleep on cots in the lobbies of the jammed hotels and restaurant space proving virtually impossible to come by. Still, it was a festive atmosphere. “The shops that face on Capitol square were ablaze with cardinal,” the Daily Inter Ocean reported. “Every window was decorated with color dear to Wisconsin men.” A reported $20,000 changed hands in wagering.
Those who bet on the Maroons took home the cash. With 10,000 fans jammed into Camp Randall, and many thousand more watching from the surrounding hillsides, Chicago dominated the game from start to finish. The Badgers came out flat and simply never recovered. The Maroons, on the other hand, played like they had a score to settle. “Every man took a hand in the game, and the runner, after being tackled, was always dragged and pushed along for a yard or more. The fierce aggressiveness of the Chicago players bewildered their opponents.”
The Maroons’ strategy was a simple one. They repeatedly pounded the ball at Wisconsin’s young tackles, Arthur Curtis and Edwin Blair. “Blair was found to offer the line of least resistance,” the Tribune reported, “so against him the attack of Chicago . . . was directed.” Wisconsin, noted all year for its defense, was powerless to stop the Maroons’ attack. “Our mass plays worked smoothly,” Stagg observed afterward.
Wisconsin, as always, relied on O’Dea, but perhaps impacted by the drizzly, dreary conditions, the Australian, making his final appearance in a Wisconsin uniform, was largely ineffective. “O’Dea certainly was not in form,” the Inter Ocean observed, “and many of his punts fell woefully short.” Beloit College coach John Hollister, who had come to Madison to watch the game, concurred, observing, “O’Dea’s kicking was poor.” The playing career of one of the game’s biggest stars ended with an uncharacteristic whimper, though it was not the last that college football fans would hear from Pat O’Dea.
As time expired, the thousand or so Chicago students who had made the journey northward rushed the field and hoisted the Maroons on their shoulders, carrying them a full mile to the team hotel, where they celebrated long into the night. Joyous Chicago president William Rainey Harper was hauled away in a similar fashion, though not everyone saw it as a triumph worth celebrating. “It is a fact that in the last two years Chicago has had more athletes of questionable e
ligibility . . . than all the leading Middle-Western universities put together,” Whitney wrote later that month in Harper’s Weekly. “Surely not an enviable record for a university which started with such promise and protested such righteousness.”
Whitney wasn’t the only one who objected to the direction that football was taking. The voices that joined him became more widespread and powerful. They would soon threaten the game’s very survival.
Chapter Sixteen
“The Most Disgraceful Scandal Ever Known”
Wisconsin wasn’t the only notable school to see its 1899 season end in disappointment. The Yale team that had beaten the Badgers in October ended up dropping two games that year, tying for the most in the history of the program, which had begun in 1872.
One of the losses came in Yale’s annual showdown with Princeton. There was no great shame in that defeat. It was the Elis’ fourth setback in their last seven meetings with the Tigers, dating from the huge upset on Thanksgiving Day in 1893. The other defeat was a shocker, as it came against a school Yale had beaten by a combined 155–0 the last two times they had met—a school that hadn’t even had a football team for most of the prior decade.
Columbia had been a part of the early evolution of the game, playing its first intercollegiate match in 1870, just one year after the historic meeting between Princeton and Rutgers. The New York school participated in some of the early rules meetings and fielded a team for much of the 1870s and 1880s. It was a perennial doormat. The 1891 team lost its last five games by a combined total of 220–0. Not surprisingly, there was no 1892 team. The school dropped the game, choosing to focus its athletic efforts on the crew team.
By the late 1890s, though, it became evident that eliminating football might not have been the wisest move. Columbia looked at the crowds, revenue, and publicity that Yale, Princeton, and Harvard were generating and decided to give the game another shot. “Columbia saw greater advertising possibilities in football—successful football of course,” Henry Beach Needham observed in McClure’s Magazine in 1905. “Played in New York, the games would attract large crowds, and sufficient revenue would result to support athletics in general.” The school hired former Yale star George Foster Sanford as head coach and organized a team for the 1899 season. In the words of the New York Times, Sanford’s team was “an experimental one, formed to see if Columbia might not develop an athletic record such as is an honor to other universities.”
On October 28, just one week after the Elis beat Wisconsin, they journeyed to Manhattan to battle Sanford’s team. The result sent shock waves through the Eastern football establishment. Midway through the second half in a scoreless game, Harold Weekes, a talented freshman from Long Island, ran 50 yards straight through the Yale defense for what would prove to be the only score of the game. The 5–0 Columbia win was no fluke. “They outplayed, both offensively and defensively, the arrogant sons of Eli,” the Times reported. It was the first time since the advent of the scrimmage that any school other than Harvard or Princeton had beaten Yale.
The resulting celebration showed the impact that a successful football team could have on a university. On the sidelines, one Columbia grad hugged another while exclaiming, “It’s the first time that Columbia has scored against Yale since 1873, and I played in that game.” He was off by two years, but who was going to correct him at a moment like this?
“What is Yale anyway?” another grad yelled. He quickly answered his own question. “One of those minor colleges located somewhere down in Connecticut!”
“The victory means everything to the local university,” the New York Sun asserted. “It will serve to boom Columbia as a football college in the estimation of thousands of young players who are in the various preparatory schools throughout the United States.” It also helped the school’s immediate bottom line, as the team’s manager, William Mitchell, reported box office revenues of $12,000.
But the result did not meet with universal acclaim. “I am unable to endorse it as a bona fide university team in the ethical sense understood and accepted at all colleges where the wholesomeness of the college sport is considered,” Whitney wrote in Harper’s Weekly. He contended that several of Columbia’s players were not genuine students. The men, he said, were enrolled in the School of Political Science, “where there is no daily roll-call or entrance examinations,” and were there solely due to their football ability.
The Faculty Committee on Athletics demanded an investigation. The results were disturbing. Upon questioning by university officials, Mitchell admitted that he had paid the tuition, board, and lodgings of five men on the football team, a move that, in the days before athletic scholarships, was a blatant violation of the amateur code. The tuition payments were made from the football budget and were hidden with false bookkeeping. For instance, after the two schools met in Manhattan in October, Columbia claimed to have paid $226 more to Princeton in gate receipts than it actually had. That amount was then funneled to the school as tuition payments for the men in question.
Not that it was tuition the men were particularly interested in having paid for them. Two of the players, R. E. Larendon and G. H. Miller, wrote a signed letter to the New York Tribune in March of 1900 countering the notion that they had benefitted in any way from Columbia’s chicanery. “We wish to emphatically deny the current rumors that we received any pecuniary or educational benefit from playing football with Columbia last season,” they wrote. “It is a well-known fact that we did not attend lectures and never had any intention of so doing. We played as a favor to Columbia.”
It was an incident that one university grad, in a letter to a member of the Athletic Committee, referred to as “the most disgraceful scandal ever known in College Athletics.” He added that he and other alums “were subjected to the deepest mortification and humiliation.” In response, Columbia fired the team manager, William Mitchell, and kicked him out of school. As for Coach Sanford? He got a raise. After all, he had defeated Yale.
Football’s physical danger escalated along with its corruption. In 1900 Sanford and Weekes devised a play they termed the high hurdle. They unveiled it in the team’s second impressive upset in as many seasons, a 6–5 home victory over Princeton. Weekes, lined up five yards behind the line, took the handoff and, pushed forward by four of his teammates and using his center’s back as a springboard, “leaped feet foremost into space.” In his 1955 book The Saga of American Football, Alexander Weyand recalled that “Weekes was frequently catapulted over the heads of the linemen, sometimes rising to a height of five and a half feet off the ground.” Two years later, Princeton attempted to stop the play by launching a player of its own at Weekes, causing a midair collision. Not surprisingly, both players left the game with injuries.
Though Columbia’s return to the sport ultimately proved to be brief, it perfectly encapsulated both the positive and negative aspects of intercollegiate football that had developed during the prior decade. It showed the vast power of the game and its ability to generate publicity and revenue for a university while providing excitement for the students and alums. It also showed the game’s sordid side—the emphasis on winning at all costs, the neglect of academic integrity, the taint of professionalism, and the growing violence inherent in the sport. It was far from an isolated example. Between 1900 and 1905, football was under almost constant attack, as years of troubles escalated to the point of crisis—a crisis that nearly led to the abolition of the sport.
As was often the case in the early years of the game, Yale was at the forefront. In 1901 the school enrolled a 26-year-old freshman named James J. Hogan. As his age would indicate, Hogan had taken an indirect path to New Haven. A native of County Tipperary in Ireland, Hogan had come to the United States with his family at age five. They settled in Torrington, Connecticut, where his father found work as a stonemason.
The 5'10" 210-pound fireplug graduated from high school and then went to work in the hardware busin
ess before a friend, noting his size and athleticism, suggested that he might have potential as a football player. Though well into his twenties at the time, Hogan enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he received a full scholarship. To his credit, he worked hard to master his studies, which did not come easily. He was “always on the edge of his seat fighting for every bit of information that he could get,” one instructor recalled, adding, “It was interesting and almost amusing at times to watch him.”
Though Hogan wasn’t a natural in the classroom, he certainly was on the gridiron—literally and figuratively a man among boys. Sleeves rolled up to display his muscular forearms, his massive chest and neck muscles bulging with exertion, Hogan was the driving force behind a Yale team that went 32–2–1 in his last three years in New Haven. An “almost irresistible” ball carrier, Hogan coupled his skill with remarkable intensity, often screaming “from sheer Celtic emotion” when the moment got particularly tense.
The Irishman was named a first-team All-American in each of his final three seasons in New Haven, though his rewards went far beyond simple mention in a magazine. Hogan lived a life of luxury at Yale. He had his own suite at Vanderbilt Hall, the most upscale student dormitory, got his meals free at the ordinarily pricey University Club, and received free tuition and spending money. By today’s standards, such treatment might not seem so egregious, but it flew in the face of the principles of the time, arrived at during an 1898 conference at Brown University, which stated: “The practice of assisting young men through college in order that they may strengthen the athletic teams is degrading to amateur sport.”
Hogan’s deal was about more than just tuition, room, and board, though. He also worked out a side agreement with the American Tobacco Company that gave him a cut of all of its cigarettes that were sold in New Haven. Hogan was an effective salesman. He managed to persuade Mory’s, a local grille room frequented by Yale men, to sell the company’s smokes. “But his efforts did not end there,” J. T. Wilcox, the American Tobacco Company’s assistant secretary noted. “He talks cigarettes to his friends. They appreciate and like him; they realize he is a poor fellow, working his way through college, and they want to help him. So they buy our cigarettes, knowing that Hogan gets a commission on every box sold in New Haven. We are satisfied with our arrangement, and I am sure that Hogan is.” As a token of thanks at the end of his career, the university’s boosters sent him on an all-expenses-paid Cuban vacation.