American College and University: A History

18. The Rise of Football

i8 The Rise of Football Football of sorts was played in tenth-century England, where it was largely a matter of kicking a skull or a cow's bladder between towns. The Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869, which inaugurated American football, was in this tradition. During the next decade, initially at Harvard and at Yale, a shift occurred from the soccer or kicking style of play to the Rugby or running style of play. American football, therefore, was a cultural adaptation of the English gameof Rugby.1 It took a few yearsfor the gameto catch on, but its growth was extraordinary. In 1873 football seemed sufficiently ridiculous to prompt a classic remark of President Andrew D. White of Cornell. In response to a challenge from thirty players of the University of Michigan who wanted to arrange a game in Cleveland, President White telegraphed: "I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles 1 David Riesman and Reuel Denney: "Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion," American Quarterly, III (1951), 309-25; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker: Princeton 1746-1896 (Princeton, 1946), pp. 325-6; William H. S. Demarest: A History of Rutgers College 17661924 (New Brunswick, 1924), pp. 428-30; Parke H. Davis: Football: The American Intercollegiate Game (New York, 1911), pp. 44-50; Morris Allison Bealle: The History of Football at Harvard, 1874-1948" (Washington, 1948), pp. 17, 26-8. See also Allison Danzig: The History of American Football (Englewood Cliffs, 1956). THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY 374 merely to agitate a bag of wind."2 In time Cornell fell fully in line, as indeed did almost everyone else. But no one should have been surprised when within less than twenty years one season's football coach at Syracuse turned out to be next season's captain at Cornell.3 Few movements so captured the colleges and universities. In 1881 Michigan—spurned by Cornell less than ten years earlier—went East and played Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in a period of less than a week. A few years later a young bachelor president at Miami University in Ohio all but required his faculty to go out for the team: in those days there were no problems of eligibility. In 1889 the University of the South at Sewanee sent out its team for six successive days of play away from home. At a common-sense hard-headed institution like the Connecticut Agricultural College at Storrs the official program for physical training had at first assigned the young men to three sessions a week of picking up stones from the college farm; in .the 1890*5 they picked up footballs.* Indeed, the game became so widely adopted that for the first time since the founding of Harvard College in 1636 colleges began to recognize the existence of intercollegiate relations . Institutions that had never found it advisableto consult on matters of curriculum now sought means of regulating their athletic relations: from this impulse came the agreement among a number of midwestern colleges in the early 1890*8 to employ no more than two professionals per game.6 The need for regulation was generally admitted, for the game intruded a spirit of athletic professionalism into an atmosphere where many believed that it did not belong. One year in the 1890*5 the University of Oregon football team in three suc2 Kent Sagendorph: Michigan: The Story of the University (New York, 1948), p. 150. "William Freeman Galpin: Syracuse University: The Pioneer Days (Syracuse, 1952), p. 170. 4 Amos Alonzo Stagg: Touchdown! (New York, 1927), p. 70; Walter Havighurst: The Miami Years 1809-1959 (New York, 1958), pp. 148-51; Walter Stemmons: Connecticut Agricultural College—A History (Storrs, 1931), p. 83. 5 Allan Nevins: Illinois (New York, 1917), p. 202. 375 T/ie Rise of Footbdl cessive contests with three different colleges found themselves playing against the sameyoung man. The game, however, encouraged such a will to win that undergraduate and graduate imagination found its way around any traditional sense of ethics. A senior might invite the fullback on the freshman team to room with him and forget to ask him to share the charges. A student might make a preposterous wager with a star athlete and, of course, lose. Instead, the money might go directly to a father or brother. One college ball player so learned the price of his usefulness that without fear of failure he presented his laundry bill...