The Opening Kickoff

by Dave Revsine

  In fairness, Hogan and Yale weren’t the only ones bending the rules in the early years of the twentieth century. But their transgressions might have never come to light were it not for another development in journalism—the rise of the muckrakers. “Muckraker” was a name applied to a group of magazine writers in the first decade of the 1900s and popularized in a 1906 speech by President Theodore Roosevelt. Though he commended the work of journalists in search of the truth, Roosevelt initially meant for the description to have a negative connotation, indicative of those who raked “the filth of the floor.” The movement was, in some ways, an offshoot of yellow journalism, as it looked to stir up emotion in its readers. There was one significant difference, though. Whereas the “yellows” were simply in competition for circulation, with no regard for whether their articles contained much in the way of truth, the muckrakers were crusaders, looking to expose society’s wrongs.

  McClure’s Magazine published the first significant muckraking articles in late 1902. Among them was a nineteen-part series on the Standard Oil Company written by a woman named Ida Tarbell. Tarbell grew up in the oil-producing region of western Pennsylvania. Her father, Frank, had, for a time, been a successful oilman, but his business suffered a major blow in the 1870s. John D. Rockefeller, president of the Standard Oil Company and later the benefactor of the University of Chicago, reached a secret deal with a number of railroads. In the scheme, the railroads jacked up their shipping rates but agreed to pay rebates to Rockefeller, meaning he spent significantly less to transport his oil than other companies. As one would expect, the collusion had a disastrous effect on the smaller refiners, including Frank Tarbell, who patiently explained the reasons behind the family’s reversal of fortune to his young daughter. “Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold that what had been undertaken was wrong,” Tarbell wrote many years later in her autobiography.

  She ended up being uniquely positioned to do something about it. Tarbell was a trailblazer. In 1880, a time when very few women continued their education past high school, Tarbell graduated from Allegheny College, not far from her western Pennsylvania home. She eventually became a writer, ultimately hired by McClure’s in 1894. She wrote a number of serialized life histories for the magazine, including a glowing profile on Abraham Lincoln that helped establish her as one of the nation’s foremost biographers. The magazine’s founder, Samuel McClure, then assigned her to write a piece on Standard Oil.

  Though Tarbell’s life experience would suggest otherwise, the goal at the outset, it seems, was not to expose maleficence in the company, but to use Standard Oil “as an example of the achievements of business in production and efficient distribution.” That’s certainly what the company believed. Tarbell received tremendous help from Standard Oil, which opened its records to her. After five years of investigation and writing, she produced a series that blew the lid off the company’s operation. “The articles,” James Wood wrote in his 1956 book Magazines in the United States, “showed that Standard Oil was magnificently organized, that it functioned superbly, but that the methods by which the corporation had been built included bribery, fraud, violence, the corruption of public officials and railroads, and the wrecking of competitors by fair means and foul.”

  Tarbell’s series started a tidal wave. The muckrakers and the magazines that employed them “wrested from the daily newspapers the influencing of public opinion by the direct discussion of public affairs,” Wood wrote. As a result, “All the important general weeklies and monthlies began to give more coverage and more thorough discussion to public matters and thus to exert a greater influence on the minds of their readers.” College football was one of their targets.

  McClure’s struck the first blow. Starting in June 1905, the magazine published a lengthy two-part indictment of the sport authored by Henry Beach Needham. The first portion of Needham’s series, entitled “The College Athlete: How Commercialism Is Making Him a Professional,” was particularly damning. Though there had been some reporting done in 1899 and 1900 on the Columbia scandal, Needham went into greater depth. He described the role of the fired manager, Mitchell, labeling him as a “scapegoat,” quoting an anonymous Columbia professor who said, “the manager and captain are clay in the hands of the potter—and the coach is the potter.” In other words, he refused to buy the explanation that Coach Sanford had played no role in the recruitment of nonstudents to Columbia’s team. George Kirchwey, the dean of the Columbia Law School and the chair of the Athletic Committee, agreed that the issues were deeper than simply a rogue manager and a few hired-gun players. In a 1902 letter to Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler, he wrote, “I believe the whole present system to rest on a false basis and its evils to be incurable.”

  Needham and McClure’s also exposed Hogan’s story at Yale, including details of the athlete’s deal with the American Tobacco Company. As it turns out, the arrangement wasn’t unique. At Princeton, for instance, the athletic association gave certain athletes the privilege of selling advertisements in the scorecards that were sold at baseball games. They were allowed to keep the profits as well as the revenue from the sale of the cards themselves. “When the association gives away this privilege,” Needham wrote, “it puts its hand in its pocket and pays the athletes.”

  As Needham revealed, though, the inducements for athletes began well before they arrived on campus. He spoke of a new “class of students tainted with commercialism.” These young men, Needham wrote, “are resolved that their athletic ability shall put them through college, and they propose to go to the institution offering the best ‘opportunities’—a gentle word, elastic and covering many sins.”

  Included among the sinners was Penn, historically a school not quite as obsessed with athletic success as some of its counterparts. As the school newspaper wrote in 1899, “every student must learn that Pennsylvania goes into sport for sport’s sake—that sport is primary, winning secondary.” It sounded nice, but Needham reported it was an attitude that had been changing. An anonymous Penn alum said of his alma mater, “we had to do as the other colleges were doing. It is all summed up in these words: Couldn’t stand losing.”

  As an example, Needham gave the story of a Penn football player named Edward Greene, who returned to his alma mater of Exeter in 1904 to pursue some promising young prospects, including an underclassman named Edward Hart, whom he brought back to Philadelphia for what amounted to a recruiting trip. “They certainly gave us a slick time,” Hart recalled afterward. “Why our dinner cost nine dollars! They must have spent $200 setting us up. I tell you they are good fellows at Penn. It ain’t just the students either. The city folks take an interest in the boys. One man offered Greene his room and board, and he bought him a sixty-dollar overcoat.” Enticing as it all seemed to Hart, it wasn’t enough. The future College Football Hall of Famer eventually went to Princeton.

  Though Needham’s exposé focused on the East, the Midwest didn’t escape the scrutiny of the muckrakers. In the fall of 1905, Collier’s magazine published a four-part series entitled “Buying Football Victories,” which centered on the schools of the Western Conference. The articles, written by a recent Wisconsin grad named Edward S. Jordan, went into great detail, though they were essentially summarized in the statement of University of Illinois coach George Huff, who asserted that “victory in the West today depended upon the ability of the colleges to sustain men by devious means.”

  Not surprisingly, Chicago was at the center of the report. “Western educators who have helplessly watched this campaign,” Jordan wrote, “place the University of Chicago first among the violators of the trust which rests upon all universities for the conservation of academic ideals.” Jordan described a fund of $80,000 that the university held in a trust to aid “needy students.” He reported that the fund was being used to pay tuition for athletes, with no actual demonstration of neediness. The money, Jordan said, was
being given out “for athletic qualifications alone.” Theoretically, the recipients were supposed to do university service in exchange for the grants, but the reality was altogether different. “In some instances no work is required of athletes,” Jordan wrote.

  The plan was being executed at the highest reaches of the school, as the dean of the Senior College reported that he had “arranged the student service scholarships for Stagg’s men, according to [President] Harper’s instructions.” Before the beginning of the 1904 school year, Stagg wrote to Harper, “Provision should be made so that eighteen new students can work out their tuition free. This is very important.” In a return letter, Harper responded, “We will of course do what is necessary to be done.” And it seems Harper was true to his word. One player reportedly told a Northwestern recruiter during the courting process, “You fellows can’t get me at Northwestern, and they can’t get me at Wisconsin. You haven’t got the money.” The player, Walter Steffen, went to Chicago, where he became an All-American. Like Princeton’s Hart, he’s enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.

  No single player exemplified Chicago’s strategy quite like Walter Eckersall. Eckersall was a gifted athlete at Hyde Park High School, which sat in the shadow of the university’s campus. In addition to quarterbacking the football team, he also set the state record in the 100-yard dash at ten seconds flat, a mark that stood for twenty-five years. In his final season, Hyde Park played what was billed as a high school national championship game against Brooklyn Poly Tech at Chicago’s Marshall Field. With Eckersall leading the way before leaving late in the game with a broken collarbone, the Chicago team won rather convincingly. The final score was 105–0.

  The subject of an intense recruiting battle between Michigan and Chicago, Eckersall ultimately decided to enroll at his hometown school, though, it seems, he had some help in making the decision. Stagg later admitted to grabbing the star player off a Chicago train platform as he prepared to leave for a campus visit to Ann Arbor.

  Eckersall was a student at Chicago in name only. To begin with, he was grossly unqualified academically. He was initially categorized as a “sub-freshman,” as he had yet to complete his college prep work, having entered school “short three of the minimum number of credits for the admission of the most poorly prepared freshman.” He compounded that lack of preparation with an acute lack of interest in academic pursuits. According to Robin Lester’s book Stagg’s University, in his first quarter at Chicago, Eckersall had the worst grades and most classroom absences of any player on the football team. And it’s not like the rest of the group was full of academic overachievers. Only three of the team’s twenty-three members took a full load of courses that quarter. Undaunted, Eckersall registered for classes with the same professors the next quarter, “but his political science instructor, Charles Merriam, reported that ‘he never appeared in class.’ ”

  Eckersall was a disaster in other areas of life as well, gaining a reputation on campus as a carouser and a con artist. But the Chicago native lived up to his promise on the field, as perhaps the greatest player Stagg ever coached. A three-time All-American, he at times seemed like a one-man team, as evidenced by a Wisconsin newspaper headline after a particularly dominating performance during his freshman year that read, Eckersall, 15;Wisconsin, 6.

  When Eckersall finally used up his eligibility in the fall of 1906, he was nowhere near graduation, having earned just fourteen course credits of the thirty-six needed for a diploma. Eckersall’s last game came against Nebraska in late November 1906. At halftime the faculty presented him with a gold watch in appreciation for his “service in the University.” Less than two months later, the school put a notation on Eckersall’s transcript reading, “Mr. Eckersall is not permitted to register in the Univ. again—for cause.” President William Rainey Harper died during Eckersall’s time at Chicago, so the order was signed by Acting President Henry Pratt Judson.

  The nature of that “cause” was, and still is, unclear. An older alum of the university, George Buckley, wrote an angry note to Judson in March 1907. While he acknowledged the “many deplorable and unfortunate actions of Mr. Eckersall,” he also took the school to task. Chicago had been derelict in its duties, he wrote. “Derelict in so far as their having knowledge of his loose morals, and yet willing to use him for advertising purposes until he had completed his college career.”

  That issue was at the crux of Edward Jordan’s Collier’s series. Eckersall, he said of the man who was still playing for the school when the piece was published, “is simply an ‘athletic ward’ of the University of Chicago. . . . Eckersall entered Chicago, and received free tuition during his entire course, with no return except in kicking and tackling ability. He has demanded nothing. Chicago has provided for his retention and that is enough.”

  Jordan did not limit his attacks to Chicago, though, next turning his attention to Michigan. In 1901 the Ann Arbor school had hired Fielding Yost, who had gained a reputation as a “tramp athlete” in college after his well-publicized midseason switch between West Virginia and Lafayette. Upon his graduation, Yost quickly found success as a coach, producing outstanding teams in one-year stints at Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas, and Stanford. His methods, Jordan reported, were a bit suspect. “Four men on his Wesleyan team were reputed to receive pay. Two players who appeared and disappeared within a few days are said to have saved his reputation at Nebraska in the great annual game with Kansas.” As for his year at Stanford, the article quoted university president David Starr Jordan as saying of his then-former coach, “All of us who have had Yost or any Yost-like man are not to be counted as sinless.” Yost, of course, went on to become one of the most accomplished coaches in college football history. His first Michigan team outscored its eleven foes by a combined total of 555–0.

  But it wasn’t the game-day results that Collier’s writer Edward Jordan questioned; it was the methods. Jordan told the story of Yost’s first great star, Willie Heston, who, like Hogan at Yale, got a portion of local tobacco sales through a product branded as “Willie Heston’s cigars.” The star halfback, Jordan reported, had a succession of easy jobs as well, and “in all positions Heston was well paid.” Jordan quoted a former state senator named James Murfin, later a university regent, who admitted he “took care of Heston while in college.” Murfin said of the law student, “I don’t suppose he knows much about law, but you ought to see that boy hit the line.”

  By the end of the Collier’s series, Jordan had essentially taken all of the Western Conference schools to task, pointing out transgressions at Illinois, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as well as Chicago and Michigan. “These fellows are so crazy to win that they forget what colleges are established for,” said former Yale star Pudge Heffelfinger, then working as an assistant coach at Minnesota.

  While not the focus of the pieces, the violence that had stolen the headlines during Heffelfinger’s time at Yale more than a decade earlier had a place in the muckrakers’ stories as well. Needham, for instance, described an incident from the Dartmouth–Princeton game of 1903. Dartmouth’s star player was an end named Matthew Bullock, the son of two former slaves. An African American was a rare sight on college campuses of the era, let alone on the playing field. Though it is typically impossible to discuss the history of sport in America without touching on race, the sad truth is that African Americans were so excluded from elite institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there is precious little to say about their role in the early years of the college game. With only a very few rare exceptions, they simply weren’t a part of it.

  The inclusion of Bullock on the roster caused a travel hardship for the New Hampshire team. The group was forced to take the train to Princeton from New York City on the day of the game, as the Princeton Inn refused to provide rooming for African Americans. When Bullock and his teammates arrived for the contest, Needham recalled, they received a rude greeting. On the first play of t
he game, a number of Princeton men piled on Bullock, breaking his collarbone. An angry friend of Bullock’s accused a Princeton player of being a part of a racist attack. “You put him out because he is a black man,” he said of Bullock. In a response that foretold incidents like the New Orleans Saints’ bounty scandal a century later, the Princeton man replied, “We didn’t put him out because he is a black man. We’re coached to pick out the most dangerous man on the opposing team and put him out in the first five minutes of play.”

  Indeed, efforts to combat against the ongoing violence in the sport continued during the critical years between 1900 and 1905. In an effort to promote open play and reduce the number of injuries sustained in mass plays, the rules committee made an unusual adjustment in 1903, creating separate rules depending on where the ball was on the field. Between the 25-yard lines, the new rule stated that at least seven players on the offensive team had to be on the line of scrimmage. In addition, the player receiving the snap, who, in the past, had been prohibited from running with the ball, now could carry it, providing he crossed the line at least five yards to the left or right of the spot at which the ball had been snapped. In order to help the officials in enforcing the new regulation, the field was marked with vertical lines in addition to the horizontal yard lines, giving it a checkerboard effect. Inside the 25-yard lines, the old rules applied, meaning teams needed only five players on the line and could continue with mass plays.