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c h a p t e r t h r e e College Football If ever there was a good time for an anthropologist from outer space to drop down and take a reading of modern U.S. masculinity, it would have been at a college football game between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley played in 1896 in San Francisco’s Central Park. More than twelve thousand people came together to watch two squads of large, heavily padded men face each other and try to push an oblong ball through the other team and over its goal at the opposite end of the field.1 The violent crunching and grunting sounds produced by the clash at the line of scrimmage may very well have drawn the anthropologist’s attention, as would have the impassioned cheering of each team’s supporters located in separate sections of the grandstands. The Stanford fans’ cardinal red clothes, flags, and banners and Berkeley’s colors of blue and gold would have suggested the student bodies’ extremely close identification with their teams playing below—a point confirmed by the radically divergent response to Stanford winning the game 20–0. As Berkeley fans “saw defeat at hand,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, “there was a hush, a cessation of yells from the blue and gold”; in sharp contrast, “the Stanford bleachers rose to the occasion and gave out a cry of victory, that swept grief, despair and gloom flying before it.” It was, the Chronicle continued, “the climax of a scene of the wildest sort,” with one “delighted young gentleman arrayed in a Sunday suit and irreproachable linen, lay[ing] down in the dirt and [rolling] over a dozen times in ecstasy.”2 For the visiting anthropologist, this scene alone would have been worth the trip, as it betrays a type of deep-seated emotional investment usually reserved for religion. Overall, the highly ritualized event centering on extreme physical exertion and risk taking by the young men on the field of play would have given the alien social scientist more than enough material from which to gain understanding of masculinity at that particular time and place. Imagining an extraterrestrial anthropologist at the Stanford-Berkeley Big Game is a way to demonstrate by exaggeration the analytical goal of creating a perspective free from prior knowledge of or contact with the event at hand. The anthropological ideal of outsidedness can be useful to the historian considering a topic central to his or her own culture and experience. Of course, this form of historical objectivity can never be realized in full; affected unfamiliarity is the best one can do, an ironic distance that can lead to close observation and fresh insight. To be sure, ironic analysis isn’t exclusive to the anthropologist or cultural historian. The Chronicle reporter exhibited a good measure of it while covering the Stanford-California game. As the “collegians invaded the field, carried away the heroes, marched about cheering and hollering and hugged each other in excess of joy,” the reporter noticed that the Stanford fans focused most of their attention on the team captain, Charles Fickert; in honoring him “there was placed about his shoulders a wreath of olive leaves and everybody shouted and red flags waved, and the homage of a crowd had been paid to the man who led his team to victory.” The Chronicle reporter—at this point at least, clearly separated emotionally from those around him—found added meaning in the celebratory scene: “That wreath, by the way, showed that brawn, and not brain, is the fin de siècle fashion. The laurel was so big that it fell to his waist—a tribute to his muscle.”3 As trenchant as the Chronicle reporter’s reading of Stanford’s celebration is, academic anthropology offers specific methodologies for breaking down a football game into distinct dynamics and then tracing the deep structural ties between the sport and de-evolutionary masculinity at the turn of the century. That is the goal of this chapter. After surveying the rise of American football through Thorstein Veblen ’s understanding of the sport as the self-conscious expression by male elites of the “predatory instinct,” we focus on the birth and growth of one program, that of Stanford University, and the way it conferred manly identity to the new institution. Understanding football as cultural performance is central to my analysis, and Victor Turner’s work on liminality leads to tracking...

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