Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports

Chapter 9: The Tight End, Freedom, and the Antitrust Laws

THEßTIGHTßEND ßFREEDOM ßANDß THEßANTITRUSTßLAWS I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind. andrew d. white Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become. mary mcgrory  • • • previous page Tight end John Mackey, president of the NFL Players Association, achieved the union’s greatest victory in federal court. ap Photo / HO Football began on the nation’s college campuses shortly after the end of the Civil War. An amalgam of English rugby and soccer, the game proved very rough. As a result, it was irresistible to the young men who played the sport, even if Cornell University’s president, Andrew D. White, disapproved of the pastime. (His “bag of wind” referred to the ball at the center of the mayhem. White resigned from Cornell in 1885. The school would become a football powerhouse by the end of that century.) It is unclear exactly when football began. Rutgers and Princeton played a contest on November 6, 1869, that some consider the first game of American football, although it was more like soccer since no one picked up the odd-shaped ball. Harvard played McGill in Cambridge in 1874, in a rugbylike game much closer to modern football. By 1876, the boys from Harvard had joined others from Yale, Princeton, and Columbia to form the Intercollegiate Football Association. The elite schools began to recruit a sturdy stock of Midwestern young men to bolster their club teams, and the game was on. To be a sport, football needed written rules that would be uniformly enforced. Walter Camp, the “Father of American Football,” supplied those rules in his 1891 book American Football, setting the game firmly on its modern path. Although the rules shifted over time, football was always a violent confrontation to gain and hold territory in an effort to score points at the opponent’s goal line. Professional football also began late in the nineteenth century. Barnstorming teams in western Pennsylvania visited neighboring towns for friendly, if blood-soaked, matches. Participants would do anything to avoid a dreary and dangerous life in the mines or mills, and playing football was one of the few available options. The modern sport emerged from this working-class, immigrant background, even though it was mostly the East Coast colleges that perfected the game. Open professionalism with paid players dates from 1892, when William “Pudge” Huffelfinger of the Alleghany Athletic Association received five hundred dollars to play in a game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. On September 3, 1895, teams from 160 • • • sports justice Latrobe and Jeannette in western Pennsylvania played what was considered the first professional game. On August 20, 1920, representatives of the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles met in a Jordan and Hupmobile automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, and formed the American Professional Football Conference. On September 17, they were joined by the Hammond Pros and Muncie Flyers of Indiana, the Rochester Jeffersons of New York, and the Rock Island Independents, Decatur Staleys, and Racine Cardinals of Illinois in what was now called the American Professional Football Association. These entrepreneurs, joined later that year by the Buffalo All-Americans, the Chicago Tigers, the Columbus Panhandles, and the Detroit Heralds, formed the first lasting professional circuit of clubs. It would become the National Football League in 1922, although the early all-professional game was a far cry from the business juggernaut we know today. By the 1950s, professional football began to outstrip the college game for national attention. Many credit the 1958 nfl championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, decided in sudden-death overtime , as the dawn of today’s pro football supremacy. America’s blue-collar sport was filled with military precision and violence, rivalry and retribution. It attracted hot-blooded participants and a growing cadre of spectators who lived through their heroes’ performances on the field each Sunday. john mackey and a union of football players John Mackey was a premier athlete: All-American in high school football , basketball, and track; All-American in football at Syracuse University; All-Pro in the National Football League over a ten-year career. A Hall of Fame performer for the Baltimore Colts, Mackey revolutionized the way the tight end position was played. He ran with the strength of a running back—“as if he were a bull,” the New York...