by Dave Revsine
Opinion was divided as to whether the new rules would help curb the violence. At least one well-known former football star said they would not. “The new rules do not improve the game. Instead of lessening the danger, they increase it,” Pat O’Dea told the Dallas Morning News at the outset of the 1903 season, voicing the opinion that open-field running was actually more dangerous than mass plays.
O’Dea was about to begin his first season as the head coach at the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri. It was hardly the position he had imagined for himself when he left Wisconsin three years before.
Though O’Dea, finished as a college football player, had said he would stay in Madison to continue his studies for another year, he actually graduated with a law degree in the spring of 1900. He then announced his intention to head back to Australia, while rumors circulated that the motivation for his return was “to get his share of a great fortune to which he was one of the heirs.”
Though he refused to comment on that speculation, O’Dea did mention that, after sorting out some affairs in his native country, he hoped to journey to Africa to fight the Boers, a group of Dutch descendants who had formed their own independent colonies in the British-held southern portion of that continent.
Instead, O’Dea headed for a significantly less-distant destination—South Bend, Indiana. He accepted a position as the football coach at Notre Dame. While today that is considered one of the elite jobs in college football, at the time Notre Dame was barely a factor in the sport, enjoying limited success in its battles with high schools and other colleges.
In his two years in South Bend, O’Dea elevated the program, largely due to the exploits of Louis “Red” Salmon.
Legend has it that, while walking around campus one day with one of the Notre Dame priests, O’Dea discovered Salmon kicking in a field and was impressed with his form. He asked the father why Salmon wasn’t out for football and was told, “He isn’t a student. He’s a waiter.”
“I don’t care what he is,” O’Dea responded. “I want him.”
Sure enough, Salmon showed up for football practice the next day and embarked on a career that would end with his selection as Notre Dame’s first-ever All-American. As O’Dea remembered many years later, “He learned to kick so well that later, in a Purdue game, the Purdue boys half scalped him trying to pull his hair off. They thought I was out there kicking disguised by a red wig.”
Led by O’Dea and Salmon, the 1901 team won the “Indiana championship” for the first time, defeating the other two major football-playing institutions in the state, Indiana and Purdue. Notre Dame’s Scholastic magazine raved about the success of that team, proclaiming, “all hail to them (and) to Coach O’Dea.”
But O’Dea’s tenure ended badly in South Bend. Notre Dame concluded the 1901 season with a game against the South Bend Studebakers, a professional team that O’Dea had been playing for on the side. Coached by Salmon, the Notre Dame team defeated the Studebakers 22–6. “The surprised and humiliated Studebakers blamed O’Dea for not knowing what to expect from his own team,” Notre Dame historian Herb Juliano wrote. “O’Dea blamed his Studebaker cohorts and a brawl ensued with some serious punches thrown.” Embarrassed by the unfavorable light cast upon the Golden Dome, university president Father Andrew Morrissey fired O’Dea.
But losing his job turned out to be the least of O’Dea’s issues. Just weeks later, playing for the Studebakers in a game against the Rensselear Athletic Club, O’Dea injured his shoulder early in the second half. He played the rest of the game, but it was determined afterward that the shoulder was broken and would need to be in a sling for six weeks. A few weeks later, O’Dea was mugged while walking in downtown Chicago—knocked unconscious by two men who proceeded to rob him.
Just days after the assault, right after New Year’s, O’Dea was severely burned after stepping into a bathtub of scalding water. O’Dea had been staying at a Chicago hotel and had ordered a bath to be drawn. “When he came to take his plunge he neglected to notice that the boy had turned on only the hot faucet. To make matters worse, his foot slipped as he sprang out of the tub and he fell partly into the water, severely burning his back as well as one of his legs.”
For a while it appeared O’Dea might not survive. Reporters showed up outside his hospital room hoping to get word from the doctors regarding his condition. Upon learning of their presence, O’Dea scowled, “Go out there and make them a bet that they’re wasting their time.” Which, apparently, they were.
In March 1902, the University of Missouri announced the hiring of O’Dea as its coach, and the immediate reaction in Columbia was a positive one. “O’Dea has a fine reputation both as a coach and a player,” the Omaha World Herald reported, “and great things are predicted of the Tigers next season.” The team did improve under O’Dea’s tutelage, winning five games, as compared to just one the year before. Still, O’Dea did not return to Missouri for a second campaign. While there were newspaper accounts indicating that the school unsuccessfully tried to sign him to a new two-year contract, family lore presents a differing picture, with accusations that O’Dea had “sold” the season-ending game against Kansas and, in fact, needed to carry a pistol in town for his safety. Either way, O’Dea left Columbia and took a new coaching job about 90 miles to the north in Kirksville.
He arrived with a new bride by his side, having married the former Agnes McConnell on Valentine’s Day of 1903. The wedding was a small affair held at Agnes’s uncle’s house in St. Louis. The bride, it was reported, was in poor health and was “just able to sit up during the hurried ceremony.”
The inauspicious beginning was a portent of things to come. The marriage quickly disintegrated. In personal letters with her aunt, Agnes expressed her unhappiness, reporting that Pat was often away for many days at a time without informing her about where he was going or when he might return. Agnes also believed Pat to be involved with another woman in Columbia, and after giving her new husband an ultimatum, the now-pregnant Agnes left Kirksville and moved to a relative’s home in upstate New York, where she gave birth to a daughter, Teresa, in November. Pat did not travel to the baptism, though his brother Andy did, beginning a long and close relationship with the baby and her mother. Appalled by Pat’s behavior, Andy apparently never spoke with his brother again.
Pat coached the Osteopaths for just one year, a season that saw them play impressively in defeat against both Wisconsin and Notre Dame. The school’s catalog listed him as the Director of Athletics, erroneously crediting him with having received a bachelor’s degree from Melbourne University in 1893, the same year that school had actually rejected him on three separate occasions. He departed Kirksville soon after graduation in the spring of 1903. His life, like that of the sport that had made him famous, was reaching the point of crisis.
None of the changes that O’Dea had criticized in the Dallas Morning News in 1903 had a significant impact on the game. Football violence continued to escalate, and the game’s detractors continued to voice their disgust. “Disabling opponents by kneeing and kicking, and by heavy blows on the head and particularly about the eyes, nose, and jaw, are unquestionably profitable toward victory; and no means have been found of preventing these violations of rules,” Harvard president Charles Eliot complained in his annual report on the 1903–04 school year.
Though Eliot disapproved of the violence, his real issue was the lack of morals that pervaded the game. It was not a new position for Eliot. Thirty years before, he had threatened to shut down the Harvard baseball program for its “deceptive” practices. “I heard that this year we won the championship because we have a pitcher who has a fine curve ball,” he said. “I am further instructed that the purpose of the curve ball is to deliberately deceive the batter. Harvard is not in the business of teaching deception.”
Despite Eliot’s strong objections, the school was in the business of teaching football. Frustrated by his te
am’s struggles against Yale, whom Harvard had failed to score upon in three straight meetings, the school’s football captain asked the athletic committee to hire alum Bill Reid to coach the team in 1905. Reid was a Harvard hero, the team’s fullback as a student between 1898 and 1900. Upon graduation, he became the coach, leading the 1901 team to a perfect 12–0 mark, including a 22–0 win over Yale. That margin of defeat was, at the time, the largest ever experienced by the New Haven school.
Motivated by grumbling from frustrated grads, and hopeful that Reid could repeat his past success, the committee acquiesced. Reid was offered $3,500 to come from his home in California to coach the team, a salary that would likely have made him the second-highest-paid coach in the country, behind only Columbia’s Sanford. Reid turned them down. Undeterred, a group of alums raised another $3,500, meaning Reid would earn $7,000, which, as historian Ronald Smith observes, was “nearly double the salary of the average professor at Harvard, 30 percent more than the highest paid professor and nearly as much as Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president since 1869.”
Reid arrived in Boston in March of 1905 and immediately set about the task of trying to assemble a team. Though Harvard had always professed to operate differently than archrival Yale, a few excerpts from Reid’s diary show quite clearly that he was not dealing with the cream of the academic crop. “Unless one keeps everlastingly after them,” Reid said of his potential team members, “there is very little possibility of having them pass through their examinations. I have had to do more police duty this spring than anyone would have considered possible.”
Among those troubling Reid was 225-pound tackle Preston Upham, who had already been expelled from Harvard due to behavioral issues and then readmitted. Upham’s conduct was deplorable. “He cut, went in town continually, and stayed in for three or four nights at a time,” Reid wrote. “[He] got into street rows, into automobile scrapes, and bad repute in money matters, into gambling, and other forms of trouble. . . . The fellow seemed to lack all idea of responsibility or sense of decency, and all interest in things except loud women.” Yet Reid continued to make efforts to get Upham eligible for the team. Even after a street fight in which Upham knocked out three policemen, the school attempted to work with him. But to no avail. Upham left Harvard and went to Kansas City to work installing telegraph lines.
Though his behavior was extreme, Upham’s scholastic indifference seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. Another potential star, Walter Harrison, “has impressed me as being very lazy in nature, and is lacking in ambition in many ways,” Reid wrote. “However, as the last year’s full back leaves this year, and we shall need a good man, I made up my mind to try to get him eligible.” Reid worked tirelessly with Harrison, ultimately getting him to the point where he needed only to pass a summer-school geometry class to become eligible. Instead of taking the class, Harrison left Cambridge, opting to spend the summer at the seashore in Maine, leaving an exasperated Reid to observe, “The utter helplessness of these big fellows is disgustingly ludicrous.”
And then there was the odd case of Harry LeMoyne. LeMoyne was one of the greatest schoolboy athletes of his time, having set numerous American records as a short-distance swimmer while simultaneously holding the national mark in the 16-pound shot put. He was a star guard and kicker on the Harvard football team as a freshman in 1903 before academic struggles led him to leave the school. He eventually made his way to tiny Hagerman, Idaho, where he went to work on a sheep ranch. Reid tried everything to get him back, lining up tutors, jobs, and a train ticket and, after repeatedly getting no response from his would-be star, arranging for a Hagerman storekeeper to deliver his appeals on horseback. LeMoyne stayed in Idaho.
As a result, Harvard didn’t have the team its coach had hoped for as the 1905 season dawned. But eligibility issues turned out to be the least of the concerns facing Reid and the rest of those who ran the game. 1905 would prove to be the most trying season in the history of the sport.
Chapter Seventeen
“The Silent Protest of the Nineteen Graves”
Harvard coach William Reid’s train rolled into Washington, DC, just after 9:00 a.m. on October 9, 1905, a full four and a half hours before he was due to join other football power brokers in a summit with President Theodore Roosevelt. The invitations had come just a week earlier and were somewhat cryptic in nature. “I want to talk over certain football matters with you,” the president had written, “and I very earnestly hope that you will be able to come.” Reid’s primary concern, as it had been from the moment he took the Harvard job the previous spring, was preparing for the year-end showdown with Yale. But when the president beckons, you figure out a way to make some time. So Reid and Dr. Edward Nichols, the team physician and assistant coach, had boarded the Federal Express train out of Boston’s Back Bay Station on the evening of October 8 and headed toward the nation’s capital
They spent their spare time on the journey going over Yale’s defense, poring through their notes in hopes of finding some sort of weakness in their archrival. But once they arrived in Washington, they allowed themselves a little bit of time for sightseeing. They stopped briefly at The Cosmos Club, an elite social club that still exists to this day. After freshening up there, they took in some of the sights, including a visit to the top of the Washington Monument. From there it was a short walk over to the White House for their lunch with the president.
The visitors were greeted at the entrance by an usher, who took them into the main reception hall, an imposing room featuring the seal of the President of the United States embedded in the floor and immense portraits of Roosevelt and his predecessor, the late William McKinley. They were then led to the main corridor, past more presidential portraits, to the site of their meeting, the State Dining Room.
It was an impressive place, having just been expanded and refurbished three years earlier. The enormous room measured 2,400 square feet, with a 21-foot ceiling that made it seem even larger. The decor was vintage Roosevelt. The first thing that caught the visitor’s eye was an immense moose head mounted high above the lightly colored stone mantel. Flanking it on either side were matching ram trophies, both set into the natural oak paneling. Seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries depicting outdoor scenes adorned the walls. They blended nicely with the color scheme—green carpeting and oak chairs with green velvet cushions and backs.
Despite the massive space, it was an intimate gathering, with just eight places set at the table. The president and his secretary of state, Elihu Root, occupied the middle spots on the long sides of the table. They were surrounded by six football men, two from each of the “Big Three” powers of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Walter Camp and John Owsley, who was Yale’s coach that year, represented the New Haven school. Coach Arthur Hillenbrand and athletic committee head John Fine had made the journey from New Jersey.
The meeting was partly a reaction to Henry Beech Needham’s muckraking series in McClure’s. The articles were an embarrassment to the game—so much so that Yale had unsuccessfully appealed to the magazine not to publish them. While Roosevelt didn’t hold the entire class of new crusading journalists in particularly lofty regard, he did think highly of Needham. In fact, the writer had joined him at the president’s retreat in Oyster Bay, Long Island, just a month or so after the exposé was published. After reading the articles himself, Endicott Peabody, Roosevelt’s son Kermit’s headmaster at the elite Groton School, suggested a meeting of the “Big Three.” The president immediately sprang into action.
Roosevelt felt strongly that football did more good than harm, particularly when it came to developing physical and mental toughness. He feared that the trend away from more labor-intensive occupations was creating an effete national population, and he believed football could help counteract that trend. “We were tending steadily in America to produce in our leisure and sedentary classes a type of man not much above the Bengalee baboo,” he had told Camp ten years earli
er, “and from this the athletic spirit has saved us.” He had no issues with the sport’s inherent danger. “No fellow is worth his salt if he minds an occasional bruise or cut,” he wrote. In Roosevelt’s mind, football helped create the kind of men America needed—tough men of character. As he told Camp, “The rough play, if confined within manly and honorable limits, is an advantage.”
But Needham had described a game that was distinctly dishonorable, on and off the field, and dishonor bothered Roosevelt a great deal. The president wanted his guests to repair the sport’s disrepute. He cited a number of examples—everything from violence on the line, which was easy to hide due to the closely packed nature of the scrimmage—to attempts to deceive and injure the opposition. After sending the group out to the porch while he tended to some other business, Roosevelt rejoined them and made a request. “Will each of you,” he asked, “give your word to me, as President of the United States, that you will obey the rules of the season, both in letter and spirit?” The men said they would and pledged to draw up an agreement to that effect on the train.
Camp forwarded the resulting one-sentence note to Roosevelt for his approval later that day. It read: “At a meeting with the President of the United States it was agreed that we consider an honorable obligation exists to carry out in letter and in spirit the rules of the game of foot ball relating to roughness, holding, and foul play, and the active coaches of our Universities being present with us pledge themselves to so regard it, and to do their utmost to carry out these obligations.” Roosevelt wired back that he approved of the memo and thanked the men for their service.