The Opening Kickoff Read online

  THE OPENING KICKOFF

  THE OPENING KICKOFF

  The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation

  Dave Revsine

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Copyright © 2014 by Dave Revsine

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Justin Marciano

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  eISBN xxx-x-xxxx-xxxx-x

  To my father, Professor Lawrence Revsine, who shared with me his passion for college sports. That he is not here to read this book is sad beyond words.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  Chapter One: “Football Day”

  Chapter Two: The Kangaroo Kicker

  Chapter Three: From Scrummage to Scrimmage

  Chapter Four: Mass Plays and Mass Popularity

  Chapter Five: To Madison

  Chapter Six: The Challenge of Amateurism

  Chapter Seven: “The Most Mischievous Offender of the Year”

  Chapter Eight: The Rise of the Football Media

  Chapter Nine: “Bigger Than Any of Pillsbury’s Great Mills”

  Chapter Ten: “There’s Murder in That Game”

  Chapter Eleven: Slugball

  Chapter Twelve: “There’s Money in It”

  Chapter Thirteen: “They All Knew Stagg Was a Sham”

  Chapter Fourteen: East vs. West

  Chapter Fifteen: A Premature End

  Chapter Sixteen: “The Most Disgraceful Scandal Ever Known”

  Chapter Seventeen: “The Silent Protests of the Nineteen Graves”

  Chapter Eighteen: Football’s New Rules

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  “Dad, what’s a dropkick?”

  It was a rainy, cold fall afternoon sometime in the early 1980s—a miserable day. I was seated with my father, a college professor, in our own semiprivate hell: Dyche Stadium in Evanston, Illinois—home of the hapless Northwestern Wildcats. On the field, my father’s alma mater and employer was getting smacked around, as it did every Saturday. The Wildcats were in the midst of what would turn out to be a thirty-four-game losing streak, the longest in major college football history.

  In order to distract myself from the carnage on the turf, I had begun flipping through the game program, eventually stumbling across a page entitled: “NU/Opponent Records.” There, in the midst of the 90-yard passes and 300-yard rushing days, was an entry for the longest field goal ever kicked against the Wildcats. “62 yards,” it read. “Pat O’Dea, Wisconsin, 1898 (dropkick).” It was that parenthetical “dropkick” that prompted my question.

  Seemingly pleased to have something to talk about aside from the matter at hand, my dad explained all he knew about the early days of football, describing an antiquated kicking method, where a player would allow the ball to hit the ground before booting it. The entire conversation couldn’t have taken more than five minutes. I stored the name “Pat O’Dea” in my head and didn’t think about him again for roughly thirty years.

  In the late summer of 2010, I encountered O’Dea again. I was thumbing idly through the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia, anticipating the start of a new season. In the Wisconsin section, there was a one-paragraph mention of O’Dea, describing not just his remarkable skills, but also a fascinating and somewhat bizarre personal story. Memories of that long-ago conversation with my now deceased father flooded back. I began to search the Internet for more information about O’Dea. I was captivated. What a remarkable tale: a 110-yard punt, a record-setting dropkick in the middle of a blizzard, and a riveting mystery to boot! How had I, a passionate college football fan and studio host of a network devoted to covering the Big Ten, not been aware of this?

  Coincidentally, I was headed to Wisconsin’s campus in Madison the next week to give a speech. I made an appointment with the university archivist, who pulled O’Dea’s file for me. I spent the rest of the day poring through the amazing details of his life and the period in which he played. I had always assumed that the nineteenth-century game was an afterthought—a series of sparsely attended contests between undergraduates who were looking for a distraction from their studies. As I learned, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. O’Dea, I discovered, had been a full-fledged superstar long before Red Grange or Jim Thorpe. He helped raise the national profile of a university, put fans in the stands, and left journalists searching for new adjectives to describe his feats. And, like many of today’s top athletes, he encountered a fair amount of controversy along the way. I left campus that day determined to find a way to tell the story.

  During my free time over the next couple of years, I read everything that I could about O’Dea’s era and the early development of college football. I discovered that the sport wasn’t that much different in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than it is in the early twenty-first. The issues were largely the same. Only the scope had changed.

  I came to realize that, as interesting as O’Dea was, he was really just a mechanism for telling a much bigger story—the story of the most pivotal time in the development of college football.

  What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

  —Ecclesiastes 1:9

  Preface

  These are challenging times for college football. I have watched ­the challenges escalate for nearly two decades, while sitting at the anchor desk at ESPN and the Big Ten Network. It’s the scandals that grab most of the headlines. And, while I was writing this book, there was plenty of scandal to go around.

  The University of North Carolina was rocked by the revelation that one of its professors was catering his courses to the school’s football players, offering limited work and unauthorized grade changes.

  At Miami a convicted Ponzi-schemer named Nevin Shapiro admitted to showering that school’s football players with everything from cash to prostitutes. Sports Illustrated ran a series claiming that Oklahoma State had engaged in similarly sordid tactics.

  And, of course, there was the shocking story of Penn State, where a university president, an athletic director, and a legendary football coach allegedly protected a child abuser so as not to jeopardize their school’s lucrative football program.

  But the problems went beyond these abominations. Greed rules. The University of Texas practically allowed a conference to disintegrate around it so it could have a greater share of television revenues.

  Debates raged over amateurism. Reigning Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel’s playing status was up in the air for weeks as the NCAA investigated whether he had violated the organization’s rules by profiting from autographs. Time magazine put Manziel on its cover, accompanied by a headline reading, it’s time to pay college athletes.

 
Meanwhile, concern about safety at all levels of the game grabbed headlines, as the effects of years of traumatic head injuries manifested themselves in dementia and, in some cases, suicide. Two-time NFL MVP Kurt Warner told a national radio show that he’d prefer it if his sons didn’t play football. Warner said the notion of his kids absorbing violent hits, “scares me as a dad.” Former Detroit Lions cornerback Lem Barney publicly referred to the game as “deadly.” The Hall of Famer expressed the belief that “in the next 10 to 20 years society will alleviate football altogether,” due to concerns over violence and concussions. It was such a big issue that even President Barack Obama weighed in, telling the New Republic that the violence in the game needs to be reduced, adding, “I tend to be more worried about college players.”

  It is a period, we’ve been told, unprecedented in the history of the sport. But what if I told you that it did have precedent? In fact, what if I told you that the current problems in college football might actually be viewed as an improvement—that, in some regards, the college game was once far worse than it is today?

  That is partly the story of The Opening Kickoff, which explores college football in the years between 1890 and 1915. It was during this time that many of the game’s current problems first manifested themselves.

  The North Carolina academic scandal, for instance, had its precedent at the University of Chicago. That school’s greatest star of the early twentieth century, Walter Eckersall, was allowed to compete for three years despite making almost no progress toward a degree. He was enabled along the way by legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, whose friends on the faculty did all they could to keep the All-American eligible.

  Nevin Shapiro is nothing more than a modern-day version of the Yale boosters of 1905, who gave their star, James Hogan, a free Caribbean vacation at the end of the season.

  Though no one committed offenses nearly as horrifying as those alleged at Penn State, the concept of the athletic tail wagging the academic dog is certainly not a new one. The administration of Princeton president Francis L. Patton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is just one example. One university history noted that Patton’s desire for winning teams and increased alumni donations led him to promote the school’s athletic program with a “shocking apathy of conscience.”

  Texas’s greed? No different than that of Chicago under Stagg’s leadership in the late 1890s. Finding itself in an advantageous financial position due to its location in a major city, the school refused to share football gate receipts equally with its conference foes, nearly causing the dissolution of what is now the Big Ten.

  Amateurism has been a source of contention since the earliest era of the sport. Universities often spent the days leading up to games filing sworn affidavits charging that their opponents had benefitted from illegal inducements. And, in fact, many had, as schools routinely shopped the open market for so-called “tramp” athletes.

  And the violence? In 1905 a Harvard star named Karl Brill retired prematurely from the sport, saying, “I believe that the human body was not made to withstand the enormous strain that football demands.” He dismissed the game as “a mere gladiatorial contest.” In that same year, eighteen players died at all levels of football from injuries suffered on the gridiron. President Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to call the game’s leaders to the White House for an emergency summit, and a number of schools dropped the sport.

  The game’s problems, though, are only part of the college football narrative, as the modern-day challenges are accompanied by immense popularity. College football ranks behind only professional football and baseball on a list of Americans’ favorite sports. It is thrilling to watch—an extravaganza full of pageantry and passion. It brings people together—uniting grads and nongrads alike behind a common cause and filling stadiums from coast to coast. It is a sport that moves rational people to drive through the night to attend a game, unload significant portions of their income on bowl trips, or spend countless hours on websites devoted to speculating about the college choices of eighteen-year-olds. It spawns new television networks. And it makes money. ESPN paid $5.64 billion for the right to broadcast the first twelve seasons of the new College Football Playoff.

  The seeds of that popularity were sown in the same twenty-five-year period covered in this book. Between 1890 and 1915, the modern spectacle of the game began to emerge. It was the byproduct of a combination of factors, many of which were only tangentially related to football itself. The sport’s rise was far from inevitable. College football was simply in the right place at the right time, quickly rising to the forefront of the burgeoning sporting consciousness.

  Grandstands overflowed for the biggest games, with school spirit whipping campuses into a frenzy, and the media breathlessly covering it all—creating new superstars along the way. Though the game may have looked very different, it felt the same. Even then, college football was a big deal—captivating the nation, and changing the tenor of the campus experience.

  The story of the game’s rise begins in the East. Those who wonder why we can’t “just go back to the way it used to be,” might be surprised to find that, in fact, we have.

  Chapter One

  “Football Day”

  As Thanksgiving Eve, 1893, turned to Thanksgiving Day, Billy Edwards prepared to leave his post and head home. He made one last pass through his palatial workplace, the elegant bar at New York’s exclusive Hoffman House hotel, briefly reflecting on what had been one of the busier and more remarkable nights of his career as the famous establishment’s bouncer.

  He walked past the gorgeous carved mahogany bar, momentarily pondering his reflection in the massive mirrors that lined the walls, mirrors that were said to be the largest in the nation. Standing less than 5'5", the forty-eight-year-old Edwards was an impeccably dressed and strikingly handsome man. He fit in perfectly with the Hoffman House’s high-end clientele. Despite his advancing age, he had a perfect physique. An Englishman by birth, he had once been the lightweight boxing champion of America—an indefatigable fighter, who, twenty-two years earlier, had gone a remarkable ninety-five rounds in a championship match.

  On his way out the door, Edwards paused beside an out-of-towner transfixed in front of the bar’s most famous attraction. It was a massive painting, the scandalous “Nymphs and Satyr,” the work of celebrated Frenchman William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The man stood before the twelve-foot-high canvas, mouth slightly agape, staring longingly at the four frolicking naked women at the centerpiece of the work. As the tourist absentmindedly attempted to light a cigarette, Edwards quipped, “Say, young fellow, don’t light your nose,” and walked out onto Broadway.

  Edwards was immediately struck by the almost overwhelming din, standing in stark contrast to the more dignified scene inside the Hoffman House. Even at this late hour, the streets were jammed with people—many of them collegians, wearing huge overcoats and fashionable yellow shoes and carrying canes wrapped in either blue or orange ribbons. College cheers rang through the air, the “rah, rah” of Yale answered by the “sis boom bah” of Princeton.

  Edwards quickly got lost in the crowd. It was probably for the best. Though he was certainly more than capable of defending himself, the former boxer felt a little trepidation in the early hours of this Thursday morning. At a time when the average American made less than ten dollars per week, he was carrying roughly fifty thousand. It was the day of the biggest sporting event of the year, the annual championship football game, and Edwards was New York City’s best-known bookie.

  Intercollegiate football was still in its infancy, less than a quarter of a century removed from its humble beginnings—an 1869 match between Princeton and Rutgers. The early games were sparsely attended and had a collegial feel. A visiting team might roll into town on game day, stroll around with its hosts—perhaps play some billiards—and then head off to the field for the contest, the result of which was a veritable afterthought. When th
e game ended, the two teams often dined together, sharing toasts and laughter.

  Within a decade, though, the games became a more serious matter. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia formed a football association in the mid-1870s and began crowning an annual champion. The tenor changed. The emphasis on camaraderie was replaced by an emphasis on winning. Students rallied around the team as an expression of loyalty to their school. Its fortunes helped determine the university’s reputation.

  The championship game was moved to New York City in 1880, though, in the first few years, it remained largely a curiosity. That first big-city game was played in front of just 5,000 fans, netting each school the modest sum of $320.42. A little more than a decade later, the crowd had increased by a factor of ten, while the gate receipts had grown by a staggering 5,600 percent. Near riots broke out on the day the reserved tickets went on sale, and students resold them for more than five times their face value. Football had become a big business.

  That business was driven largely by the social elite. One of the year’s most-anticipated social events, the championship game was a place for high-society New Yorkers to see and be seen. It was an age when conspicuous displays of wealth were becoming more and more acceptable, and the Thanksgiving game was the perfect time to show off, as the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys used the contest as a convenient excuse to spend and celebrate. Their activities were breathlessly described in New York’s powerful and ubiquitous newspapers, which spread the gospel of the event to the masses.

  “No one who does not live in New York can understand how completely it colors and lays its hold upon that city,” famed journalist Richard Harding Davis wrote in 1893 of the Thanksgiving Day game. “[I]t, in short, became ‘the thing to do,’ and the significance of that day which once centred in New England around a grateful family offering thanks for blessing received and a fruitful harvest now centres in Harlem about twenty-two very dirty and very earnest young men who are trying to force a leather ball over a whitewashed line.”