The Opening Kickoff Page 12
In response, the committee proposed a number of changes covering areas as disparate as rules alterations and ticket sales, designed to make the sport both safer and saner. The committee stated that they “have no illusions as to the evils of intercollegiate football in its present condition: but they are reluctant to believe that Yale and Harvard teams cannot compete with each other in the spirit of gentlemen, or that it is impossible to bring the sport into a proper relation with the main purpose of college life.”
Another back-and-forth exchange ensued, with the faculty issuing a statement declaring that it remained “of the opinion that no student under their charge should be permitted to take part in intercollegiate football contests,” only to be overruled by the athletic committee, which said the game should and would continue.
Despite the internal resistance, the decision to continue playing the sport had the strong support of several prominent Harvard alums. As early as 1893, Theodore Roosevelt, then serving on the Civil Service Commission, advocated in favor of the game, contending that sports in general, and football in particular, helped create well-rounded men. In an article in Harper’s Weekly, Roosevelt, the advocate of Muscular Christianity, acknowledged some inherent risk in football, but concluded, “it is mere unmanly folly to try to do away with the sport because the risk exists.” The future president expressed a similar opinion in an 1895 letter to Walter Camp, saying that he was “utterly disgusted” with the efforts by Eliot and the Harvard faculty to banish the game, adding that he “would a hundred fold rather keep the game as it is now, with the brutality, than give it up.”
Just a year later, addressing the Harvard graduating class of 1896, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge echoed those sentiments. “I happen to be one of those,” Lodge proclaimed proudly, “who believes profoundly in athletic contests. The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors.”
Given the aggressive efforts to reduce risk and injury in our time, attitudes like those of Roosevelt, Lodge, and many other defenders of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century football seem almost impossible to fathom. What were they thinking? What kind of person would view injury, or even death, on the football field as some sort of grand, collective “character builder?”
The context of the time is crucial here. Fewer and fewer men were engaged in professions that focused on traditionally male characteristics, such as physical strength, bravery, or vitality. This shift brought the entire concept of what it meant to be a man into question. No one would impugn the ruggedness of early or mid-nineteenth-century farmers, artisans, Wild West settlers, or Civil War soldiers. But, as the workplace evolved, the number of men engaged in such virile occupations decreased. “Where would a sense of maleness come from for the worker who sat at a desk all day?” Elliott Gorn asked in a study of the rise of bare-knuckle boxing.
Many believed that something was needed to fill that void, to prevent an entire generation of males from deteriorating into a bunch of effete sissies. “The whole generation is womanized,” a character in Henry James’s 1885 novel The Bostonians complained. “The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is . . . that is what I want to preserve.”
Organized sports, particularly violent ones, were part of the answer. They weren’t simply contests unto themselves, but part of a broader metaphor, a chance to simulate the physical struggles that developed manly men. In 1896 Walter Camp noted the “remarkable and interesting likeness between theories which underlie great battles and the miniature conquests on the gridiron.” For Roosevelt, who had tirelessly developed his body after a sickly childhood, the message was simple: “In short, in life, as in a foot-ball game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”
University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper put it all in starker, more shocking terms. “If the world can afford to sacrifice the lives of men for commercial gain, it can much more easily afford to make similar sacrifice on the altar of vigorous and unsullied manhood,” Harper said in 1895. “The question of a life or a score of lives is nothing compared with that of moral purity, human self-restraint, in the interests of which, among college men, outdoor athletic sports contribute more than all other agencies combined.”
While some football advocates defended the game with statements like Harper’s, others contended that the injury problem wasn’t nearly as bad as the sport’s opponents were making it out to be. In 1894 Walter Camp posited just that argument in a book entitled Football Facts and Figures. Camp sent out questionnaires to current and former players, as well as coaches and administrators. He then published them, claiming, “in order to have a fair showing of both sides, all the letters received . . . are printed.” That assertion was cast into doubt many years later, with one historian claiming that as many as 20 percent of the responses were omitted.
Even still, Camp did quote some former players who had their hesitations about the sport. “The game as played today is much too rough,” said one, while another discussed an injury that had kept him out of school for six months and that had “cooled my ardor for the game personally.” But even those notes were couched in language that spoke positively of the football experience.
Some repeated the arguments of Roosevelt, Lodge, and Harper, claiming that the nation’s prospects depended on the game’s survival. “[T]he man of the future must be able to elbow his way among rough men in the foul air of primary elections; he may need courage enough to take his part in vigilant and safety committees and the like; he may need to ‘tackle’ an anarchist now and then and perhaps oftener. Where shall he develop his courage?” one respondent asked. “Can he do it where there is no physical danger? If the game of football has a moral and mental side to it, if it furnishes good ideals of courageous manhood and of physical excellence to those who play it and to those who look on, if it can rescue the dude from his nambypambyism, then play football.”
More typical were such testimonials as the one from Pudge Heffelfinger, the most feared player in the game just a few years before, who said of football, “During all the years I have played, I have known no one personally who has been seriously injured.”
Camp’s book certainly had a place in the debate, but the strongest arguments about football took place in the popular press, many of which emulated the Yale advisor’s approach, soliciting and publishing a wide range of opinions. One popular tactic among the game’s supporters was a tendency to, in essence, blame the victim. Within a couple of weeks of Gammon’s death, for instance, the Chicago Tribune surveyed a number of national football captains about the issue of violence in the sport. Cornell’s captain asserted that most of the injuries had taken place in smaller schools, “where the men have a crude knowledge of the game.” Princeton’s Garrett Cochran concurred, saying, “Of course the game is rough, but the majority of those who are injured throughout the country . . . are men or boys who are not in condition to play the game.” Penn’s captain, John Minds, went so far as to suggest that players were faking injuries in order to get fresh men into the game.
But, gradually, more and more newspapers began to campaign for reform. The Chicago Tribune railed against the sport, saying “it is ridiculous to apply the term ‘game’ to the rush of bruisers carried on for gate money in the presence of thirty thousand spectators.” The New York Tribune assumed a similar stance, contending, “The chief objection to football . . . is that a football player enters every game with a reasonable expectation of being more or less completely crippled in the course of it.” Throughout the 1890s, the same newspapers and magazines that had helped build up the game now became its harshest critics. This was particularly true in New York, as a byproduct of a trend that came to be known as “yellow journalism.”
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bsp; Yellow journalism got its name from a comic strip called Hogan’s Alley, which originally was published in Pulitzer’s World. The strip’s main character was a child in a yellow nightshirt, known as the “Yellow Kid.” The cartoon proved so popular that Hearst paid its creator to move it to the Journal as well, and it came to symbolize the battle between the two newspaper magnates—hence, the term “yellow.”
Yellow journalism encompassed much more than the tussle over a comic strip, though. It was a movement that took the gradual shift toward human-interest stories and expanded it in a sensationalistic manner. It was a natural offshoot of the circulation wars of the late nineteenth century—a means for increasing distribution, which, in turn, paved the way for higher advertising rates. It was characterized by enormous headlines, frequent use of large pictures, and, often, flat-out fabrications. The articles themselves contained, in the words of author Will Irwin, “reading matter so easy, with the startling points so often emphasized that the weariest mechanic sitting in his socks on Sunday morning, could not fail to get a thrill of interest.”
Joseph Pulitzer is generally credited with originating what came to be known as the “yellow” movement. By the end of the 1880s, his World, in Will Irwin’s opinion, “was altogether the most reckless, the most sensational and the most widely discussed newspaper in New York.” It was also the most successful. In 1890 Pulitzer moved his operation into the new Pulitzer Building on Park Row in Lower Manhattan. It was a spectacular edifice—the tallest in the world upon its completion—topped off by a stunningly ornate dome, visible well into New York Harbor. “The first sight of the New World for immigrants entering New York,” Pulitzer biographer James McGrath Morris notes, “was not a building of commerce, banking, or industry. Rather, it was a temple of America’s new mass media.”
One glance at Pulitzer’s shrine reinforced the power of sensationalism. Thus, “When William Randolph Hearst purchased the Journal in 1895,” Irwin noted, “he copied and even amplified Pulitzer’s approach.” As Irwin put it succinctly, “Life, as it percolated through the World and Journal became melodrama.”
Football’s troubles happened to coincide with the peak of the “yellow” battles in the mid-1890s, and through the combination of its violence and popularity, the sport became easy and frequent fodder for the “yellow” press. On November 7, 1897, just a week after Gammon’s death, Hearst’s Journal devoted its entire front page to football violence, under the headline, A Law To Make Football a Crime. It included three vivid illustrations of players with broken spines and fractured skulls, each purporting to show the exact injuries that had killed players on the gridiron that fall. One of the drawings included the caption, “How Von Gammon Was Killed by Concussion of the Brain.” The accompanying article included the text of Georgia’s antifootball bill.
Not to be outdone, Pulitzer’s World published a front-page story on football violence on the following Sunday. The centerpiece was an enormous drawing of a skeleton wearing only a sheet emblazoned with the word death. The figure was snapping a football. Behind it was a field strewn with fallen players. The caption read, “The twelfth player in every football game.”
Of these articles and others that appeared throughout the next few years, Michael Oriard has observed, “These cannot be considered campaigns to clean up football; they were campaigns for circulation.” Indeed, as Oriard points out, the same papers that on their front pages were calling for an end to the sport, also carried evenhanded accounts of the previous day’s games, “untouched by any suggestion that elsewhere in the paper football was being exposed as mayhem.”
The New York Herald on November 13, 1897, was a case in point. Under the headline Death on the Football Field, the paper listed the names of nine players who had perished playing the game in the previous year, complete with detailed accounts of their demise. The paper claimed that it was publishing the report in order to arouse public spirit to rescue the sport “from a brutality which is only paralleled by the exhibition in the Coliseum of ancient Rome, where men died to gratify the savage instincts of onlookers.” Right next to that story was a glowing preview piece about the renewal of the Harvard–Yale rivalry, which had been on hiatus for two years after the violent 1894 game in Springfield. The article contained not one mention of the brutality that was plaguing the sport.
While the methods of the yellow press might have been extreme, the truth was that the game was in serious trouble. In addition to the near-banishment in Georgia, antifootball bills were introduced in Indiana, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Illinois—all of them in 1897 alone. The Illinois bill hit particularly close to home for Pat O’Dea and the Badgers.
Chapter Eleven
Slugball
As Pat O’Dea stood ready to receive the opening kickoff of Wisconsin’s showdown with the University of Chicago, he had to be a bit awed by the scene around him. Chicago’s Marshall Field was packed. “The spectators stood on sawhorses, overturned barrels and the covering of the grandstand. They sat astride of fences, peered out of windows and hung on to telegraph poles,” the Chicago Tribune reported the next day. “Far off in the distance—so far that the individuals in the mass were barely distinguishable—the roofs of overlooking buildings were black with people.” The paper estimated that 10,000 fans were on hand on that November day in 1897—the largest crowd in the field’s history.
The story wasn’t just how many people were there, either. It was who was there. Former Wisconsin governor George Peck, Wisconsin senator John Spooner, and Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Jr. were among the dignitaries packed into the grandstand. They had come to see a game that many thought might determine the championship of the West—as both teams came in boasting undefeated records. Most in the stands were feeling the buzz of eager anticipation. But one notable attendee, Chicago alderman Nathan Plotke, was feeling nothing but dread.
O’Dea caught the kickoff and weaved his way upfield. “Plotke,” the Tribune reported, “drew in his breath sharply.” O’Dea was taken down, sandwiched between two Chicago tacklers just shy of midfield. “There, I knew they’d kill him!” Plotke reportedly exclaimed. His face showed some relief as all three men jumped up and took their places for the first snap of the game. Plotke allegedly “smiled weakly,” and “perspiration stood out on his forehead in drops.”
Nathan Plotke had hoped this game would never occur. He was the sponsor of a bill that would prohibit the playing of football games within Chicago’s city limits. The ordinance was supposed to be brought to a vote in the city council meeting a few days prior to the game, but those proceedings were put on hold out of respect for fellow alderman Henry Ludolph, who was struck by a train and killed on his way to the meeting. Now, a horrified Plotke sat in the stands watching the game he opposed so strongly.
Plotke was a German by birth, having immigrated to Chicago in 1860 at the age of eighteen, settling in a portion of the city’s North Side that was heavily populated by natives of his homeland. He was both a practicing attorney and a politician, serving as the assistant state’s attorney before his election to the city council. To call Plotke a crusader would be an overstatement. Prior to his campaign against football, his most publicized endeavor had come the previous winter when he led a successful ban against view-obstructing high hats in the city’s theaters. For months now, the local papers had been referring to him with terms like “the hat ordinance man.”
Plotke’s antifootball proposal was straightforward, aiming to ban the playing and watching of the game within the city limits of Chicago. Each offense would be punishable by a fine of between five and fifty dollars. The proposal had the strong backing of the Tribune’s editorial staff, which had been merciless in its attacks against football throughout the mid-1890s, derisively referring to the game as “slugball.”
“When slugball has been driven out,” the Tribune opined at the end of the 1896 season, “then, perhaps, the students will enjoy the restoration of that
interesting and wholesome game of football which some people will remember as an admirable part of the athletic curriculum of the colleges a few years ago.”
The attacks continued at the outset of the 1897 season. “[F]or several weeks to come,” the paper editorialized at the end of September, “the various grounds set apart for the killing, wounding, wrenching, bruising and slugging of certain young men who were sent to college to obtain a liberal education will be occupied for this elevating purpose.” As debates over football’s future raged in its pages throughout the fall, the paper remained consistent in its strongly worded critiques of the game. “The Tribune’s main position remains untouched,” the paper remarked in late November, “namely: that slugball as it is now played is not only a brutal, ungentlemanly, and demoralizing game, but the most brutal, ungentlemanly, and demoralizing of all games. . . . As The Tribune has already said: There are numerous sports and manly exercises which are just as beneficial to mankind as slugball is, and are free from its objectionable features; and there appears no reason, therefore, why it should not be condemned for a disgusting, brutal, degrading, ungentlemanly, dangerous and often fatal practice.”
Incidents such as the death of Georgia’s Von Gammon gave the paper plenty of fodder, and the Tribune kept a running tally of slugball casualties throughout the 1897 season. An article published on November 12, the day before the Wisconsin–Chicago game, read, “Since Oct. 25, when The Tribune stated the summary to be two killed, three probably fatally injured, and eighty-eight severely injured, two more players have been killed, two have been injured with probably fatal results, and thirty-eight have been severely injured.”
As a means of furthering its case, the paper essentially sent a reporter to Marshall Field to watch Plotke watch the game. The result was an article that had the feel of a “yellow” fabrication. Anti-Football City Father Looks on with Horror, one headline proclaimed. Sure Wisconsin and Chicago Lads Will Inflict Death, read another. While it is eminently plausible that Plotke was shocked by the game’s brutality, many of the quotations and observations that were attributed to him throughout the story border on the preposterous. For instance, the reporter claimed to have caught the following one-sided conversation between Plotke and his companion: “ ‘See, they have a band,’ said the protector of the people’s limbs, “ ‘and hundreds of instruments to make a noise. That is just like real war, isn’t it? They want to drown the groans and screams of the wounded, I suppose.’”