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  • Walter Camp, Football and the Modern Man by Julie Des Jardins
  • John S. Watterson
Des Jardins, Julie. Walter Camp, Football and the Modern Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 387. $29.95, hb.

Ninety years after his death, Walter Camp (1859–1925), once known as “the father of American football,” has finally received a biography that does justice to his long and varied career. Since Hartford Powel’s hagiographic biography in 1926, Camp has proved an elusive subject for sports scholars. His many activities and accomplishments, not to mention his guarded persona, have often led to partial accounts of his life. By placing him in a framework of changing views of American manhood, Julie Des Jardins has given us a holistic view of Camp. She capably steers her narrative through the opaque spaces of his life while touching on, without becoming mired in, his many sports ventures.

The author expertly conveys the crucial phases of Camp’s career: his role in molding the game that became American football; the continuing conflict between Camp’s Yale and Charles Eliot’s Harvard; Camp’s prolific books and articles on football and other sports; his role as director of athletics on Yale president Arthur Hadley’s University Council; and his business career at the New Haven Clock Company. She also describes his remarkably successful efforts in marketing football using his All-America teams—and his often furtive efforts to defend his game against critics and reformers. Des Jardins also fleshes out his marriage to the highly intelligent Alice Sumner Camp (who helped Camp coach the 1888 undefeated, unscored-upon Yale football team).

Des Jardins’s research and interpretations help explain a celebrated sports figure who dictated the rules of football while acting as the czar of Yale athletics. She asks, for example, why Camp in the 1890s and the period 1905–8 fought rules changes that would make football less dangerous. She answers by showing the conflict between the “stiff-upper-lip” [End Page 342] approach of Camp and the medical reality of football injuries (174). Virility, thought to be the goal of Yale football, exacted a high price. Eventually, it would cost Camp his dominant role, if not his celebrated reputation as American football’s founding father.

After 1905, Camp’s influence waned. He was toppled as football rules czar and soon afterward as advisor to Yale football. As the author aptly points out, the success of football had changed its center of gravity. No longer was college football a “brain trust” operated out of New Haven or even ostensibly amateur (301). Red Grange’s decision (only months after Camp’s death) to quit the University of Illinois and join the Chicago Bears turned the amateur ideal on its head. No longer were white Protestant men, epitomized by Yale teams, holding sway over the game. The physical body, once the end of Camp’s football, had given way to mass entertainment—and a national pastime that Camp could no longer control.

Where does Des Jardins succeed where others have failed? She has thoroughly mined the extensive Walter Camp papers at Yale—largely a collection of letters written to Camp—to enliven Camp and to broaden our knowledge of his life. In addition, she has thoroughly researched archival and published materials, often barely related to Camp’s life or to Yale football, enabling her to make sense of Camp’s life and values. She has referenced sources not only from Camp’s era but also from scholarly studies by contemporary sports historians.

This reviewer finds a single criticism of the book’s content. The fourth and final section, “Manhood Reconsidered,” begins with a chapter that deals with the Carlisle Indian School, notably Jim Thorpe, followed by African Americans Fritz Pollard and Paul Robeson (all picked by Camp to his All-America teams).The oft-told story of the Carlisle Indians and the gridiron careers of Pollard and Robeson makes for lively reading. However, as interesting as the chapter is, it veers unnecessarily from the narrative of Camp’s life. By the 1920s, it is unclear that nonwhite players had yet substantively altered the text of American...

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