The Opening Kickoff Read online

  In New Jersey, the few Princeton students who remained on campus during the Thanksgiving break made a racket of their own—ringing the college bell for four straight hours. As the townspeople joined in the celebration, exuberant students paraded to the homes of school professors and administrators demanding speeches. The academics cooperated. “Gentlemen,” said one, “I congratulate you that Yale is nowhere and Princeton is everywhere.”

  Back at the Hoffman House, bookie Billy Edwards had plenty of work to do that night, collecting betting slips from the victorious Princeton fans and passing along their winnings. In all, an estimated $100,000 changed hands, with the biggest losses coming from Wall Street, where several Yale men lost thousands in bets with colleagues at the New York Stock Exchange.

  In all, rules and technology aside, it was a day that felt much more like a modern college game than like that first intercollegiate contest between Rutgers and Princeton. What had begun as an informal, gentlemanly pursuit between students of rival universities was well on its way to becoming a thrilling nationwide spectacle.

  Chapter Two

  The Kangaroo Kicker

  Wisconsin’s Pat O’Dea stood alone, 12 yards behind his center, Roy Chamberlain, and 60 yards away from the goal post. He awaited the snap. It was a seemingly ordinary moment very early in a seemingly ordinary football game—Thanksgiving Day, 1898. O’Dea’s Badgers were at Sheppard Field in Evanston, Illinois, taking on Northwestern.

  The Wisconsin captain called out the signals. “Nine, ten,” the lanky Australian yelled. “Nine, ten.” His teammates looked at him incredulously. Unbeknownst to the Northwestern players and the 3,000 or so fans looking on, Pat O’Dea was attempting to make history.

  Five years after he had helped lead Princeton to its shocking victory over Yale, former Tiger quarterback Phil King had a new Thanksgiving challenge on his hands. King was in his third year as the football coach at Wisconsin. His initial seasons had been remarkable successes, as the Badgers had captured the first two championships of the newly formed Western Conference, the precursor of the modern-day Big Ten.

  In O’Dea, Wisconsin boasted one of the Midwest’s first true superstars. He didn’t necessarily look the part of a rugged football player. Though unusually tall for the time at nearly 6'2", he weighed just 170 pounds. He was strikingly handsome. His pleasant and expressive face was topped by a generous helping of seemingly never ruffled light brown hair that swooped dramatically across his forehead in a right-handed part. It was O’Dea’s legs that really stood out, though, described by one contemporary as “abnormally long and wonderfully developed.” Those legs were his weapon of choice. In a short period of time, they had earned him remarkable fame. He drew headlines everywhere he went—the most celebrated kicker in the country at a time when, due to the nature of the rules, the kicker could literally take over the game. With O’Dea booting and the Badgers winning, Wisconsin games were always a big deal. Always, that is, until this one.

  The Badgers were coming off a devastating defeat—having fallen 6–0 twelve days before to the University of Chicago. The game was played in miserable field conditions. The mud-caked ball and the inability to plant his feet solidly had neutralized O’Dea’s effectiveness. Wisconsin’s typical offensive strategy revolved almost exclusively around the Aussie’s kicks. With their primary weapon severely limited, the Badgers had fallen apart.

  Losing to a conference foe for the first time in more than two seasons had been bad enough, but that the defeat had come at the hands of the Maroons was particularly galling for King. The Wisconsin–Chicago rivalry had quickly become a bitter one—pitting the Badgers’ coach against his Chicago counterpart, Amos Alonzo Stagg, whom he viewed as a poor sport.

  The antipathy was fueled by debates over a couple of the hot-button issues of the day: player eligibility and the division of gate receipts. It had gotten so bad that the two schools had briefly ceased athletic relations the previous spring before agreeing to an uneasy truce over the course of the summer.

  While their mutual boycott was behind them, the acerbic feeling remained. O’Dea had said before the battle with Chicago that it “meant more to Wisconsin than any game of football we ever have played.” The loss had been a difficult one to swallow.

  The problem now was that it was almost impossible to put the defeat out of their minds. The Badgers were just minutes away from kicking off their game against Northwestern. Yet it was Stagg’s Maroons who had stolen the headlines during the course of the week, as Thanksgiving Day had drawn nearer. They were scheduled to host Michigan at Marshall Field on their Hyde Park campus at exactly the same time the Badgers and Purple were squaring off in Evanston. Since neither team had lost to another Western Conference foe all season, the Michigan–Chicago game was now the battle for the championship. The contest between the Badgers and a middling Northwestern team was, in many ways, meaningless. “The game at Marshall Field is undoubtedly the star attraction of the day,” the Chicago Tribune had commented that morning. Even King and his players would have been hard-pressed to disagree.

  Now, as he stood before the team in the cramped dressing room wedged under the grandstand at Sheppard Field, King couldn’t help but notice the ambivalence. His players simply weren’t used to being in this position. The coach sensed they needed some inspiration. So, just moments before the Badgers were to take the field for the final pregame warm-ups, King delivered a short, unconventional speech. “Gentlemen,” he told the players, “score in the first two minutes, and tonight, we’ll celebrate with all the champagne you can drink.”

  The cheer that went up from the players was quickly replaced by mild panic. Two minutes? As powerful as the Badgers were, two minutes wasn’t a whole lot of time—particularly in an era when the forward pass was still illegal and results like that 6–0 final against Chicago twelve days before were commonplace. Still, the team charged onto the field with a newfound sense of purpose.

  They were greeted by a surprisingly energized crowd. Though Northwestern had endured a difficult season, the lure of a Thanksgiving Day game and a battle with O’Dea and the Badgers was strong enough to fill the grandstand, a covered wood-and-brick structure that stood at one end of the playing field, behind the north goalpost. These were the most exclusive seats—packed with many of Evanston and Madison’s most prominent citizens.

  Fans lined the sidelines as well, cramming the ten or so rows of bleachers, one side made up predominantly of rooters wearing Wisconsin cardinal, in sharp contrast with the Northwestern purple on the other. The many women in the crowd were particularly resplendent. Enormous feathers flowed from their hats and long pieces of colored ribbons cascaded from their jackets. Alongside the bleachers, horses munched idly on hay as they stood in front of the carriages that had carried many of the fans to the game. Some of the larger coaches were occupied by members of Northwestern’s boat club, as well as some fraternities and sororities.

  Those students were ready for O’Dea. In its most recent edition, the Northwestern student newspaper had chastised them for their subpar singing several weeks earlier in a narrow one-point loss to a superior Michigan team. “Song is the most potent thing to awaken spirit and spontaneity in college gatherings,” the editors of The Northwestern had reminded their readers. In response, the Evanston undergraduates had redoubled their efforts, belting out the university songs each day at chapel. In addition, they had prepared a special tune for the Thanksgiving Day game, sung to the melody of “The Grand Old Duke of York” and aimed squarely at Wisconsin’s superstar. The students sang along, as the Northwestern band blasted the tune from its spot in the bleachers:

  The poor old Pat O’Dea,

  He had a wooden leg,

  He shot it up on Sheppard Field,

  Then shot it down again.

  Seemingly unfazed, O’Dea went through his warm-ups, which in and of themselves were worth the price of admission. He boomed jaw-dropping
punts and converted remarkable dropkicks, routinely splitting the uprights from distances others could only dream of. In a time when field goals were worth five points, one more than touchdowns, and teams often punted on first down, kicker was the single most glamorous position on the field, and the handsome, exotic, and talented O’Dea was redefining the position. He was the best kicker in the West, and fans in that part of the country believed he was superior to any player in football.

  Of course, they couldn’t say for sure. Games between Eastern and Western teams were virtually unheard of, so most of them had never seen the players from the traditional powerhouses like Yale, Harvard, and Princeton—the schools that had invented the game about thirty years earlier. Those colleges were the gold standard. The West was an afterthought. A total of 187 players had been named “All-Americans” since the first selections were made back in 1889. All 187 had been from the East. In an era when travel was difficult, the Eastern writers never journeyed West to watch games, confident there was nothing to see out in the hinterlands.

  When warm-ups were over, O’Dea and Northwestern captain Clarence Thorne met at midfield. Wisconsin won the opening coin toss, which automatically gave a team the ball as well as the choice of which goal to head toward. O’Dea chose the north goal, though the difference was negligible. After an unseasonably warm week, which had seen the temperatures peak in the mid-sixties just three days earlier, the weather in the Chicago area had turned bitterly cold over the past couple of days, with lows in the single digits and highs well below freezing. Still, Sheppard Field was bathed in sunshine, and the day was almost completely devoid of any wind, a bit of a rarity given that the playing surface lay only a few hundred yards from the typically blustery shores of Lake Michigan.

  The Purple kicked off to O’Dea, who caught the ball at his own ten-yard line and ran it back to the twenty. Then, in an effort to improve their field position, O’Dea and the Badgers chose to punt the ball right back to Northwestern, hoping to pin their opponents deep in their own territory.

  O’Dea’s kicking style was an unusual one. When he made contact with the ball, he did so with both feet off of the ground—appearing almost to jump at the pigskin. He did this on both punts and dropkicks, that now-obsolete form of kicking in which a player would bounce the ball off the grass and kick it on its way back up. Though placekicks played a minor role in the game, dropkicks were the typical way to convert a goal.

  What O’Dea’s approach lacked in convention, it more than made up for in effectiveness. He unleashed a phenomenal punt, one that spun high in the air before landing 50 yards down the 110-yard field, at Northwestern’s 35-yard line. Northwestern kicked it right back, but the punt was a poor one, giving the Badgers the ball near midfield. In light of the improved field position, Wisconsin chose to hang onto the ball and try to move it toward the Purple goal, hoping to gain the requisite five yards in three downs.

  O’Dea was far and away the best athlete on the Wisconsin team. In fact, a little more than a year earlier, he had briefly held the world record in the 300-yard hurdles. But, due to the violent nature of the game, King was reticent to use him as a primary ball carrier, out of fear of losing his most valuable weapon. Instead, the Badgers tried two halfback runs, neither of which netted any yardage. The game was nearly two minutes old. O’Dea dropped a dozen yards behind the line and barked out the shocking “nine, ten” signal.

  “Slam” Anderson didn’t believe what he had heard. As one of the two ends for the Badgers, his duties changed significantly depending on O’Dea’s signal call. On a punt, Anderson’s job was to race down the field as fast as he could in an effort to tackle the opponent’s return man. On a dropkick, Anderson would stay in, blocking the opponent’s rusher in order to give O’Dea time to get his boot off. Yes, he knew that O’Dea had called out a signal for a dropkick—but he also knew that it was a preposterous notion. The Aussie was 60 yards from the goal. No one in the history of the game had ever converted a dropkick from farther than 55 yards out.

  Convinced that O’Dea had simply misspoken, Anderson sprinted down the gridiron at the snap. That decision nearly doomed the play to failure. When the Aussie caught the ball, he almost immediately had a Northwestern rusher in his face, in prime position to block the kick. It was the man Anderson had neglected to block. O’Dea avoided him with a quick sidestep move, let the ball bounce, and simultaneous with it hitting the ground made perfect contact with his right foot, resulting in a mighty dropkick. The ball flew more than half the length of the field on an awe-inspiring arc, seemingly on a collision course with the grandstand behind the north goalpost. It sailed squarely between the posts and over a fence that lined the field, landing easily 10 yards beyond the goal line, just in front of the stands. O’Dea had booted it at least 210 feet. In a game where lengthy kicks were celebrated the way long runs or passes are today, this was the single most remarkable football play anyone in attendance had ever witnessed.

  The initial reaction was one of stunned silence. That bewilderment soon turned to an orgy of sound. Wisconsin fans hugged one another and threw their hats into the air. The game umpire, Everts Wrenn, himself somewhat astonished, signaled a goal. The only person in Evanston who didn’t seem fazed by the achievement was O’Dea himself, who, perhaps eager to get on with the now-assured champagne feast, called on his team to assemble at midfield for the ensuing kickoff.

  The early 5–0 lead quickly ballooned, as the Badgers went on to win 47–0. O’Dea’s record-breaking kick was the story. The Milwaukee Sentinel led its entire paper with a bold front-page headline in the left-most column blaring: o’dea kicks a 60-yard goal. Just to the right was the story deemed the second most important of the day, announcing that the Spanish cabinet had authorized the signing of the peace treaty that would end the Spanish-American War.

  The Sentinel praised not just O’Dea’s foot, but his all-around game, declaring in another headline that o’dea played the game of his life. “The tall young man from Australia shone brilliantly in every play,” the paper reported. “He repeatedly saved his men from the exhausting work of line bucking by his famous long punts. He mixed in every scrimmage as he has never done before. He sprinted around the ends for several long runs of 40 yards or less. He tackled low and hard and interfered well for his running mates. O’Dea was preeminently the star of the big Thanksgiving game.”

  The Chicago Tribune described O’Dea’s performance as “miraculous,” continuing: “Everyone figured O’Dea would work havoc with the chances of the home team, but that he would do such phenomenal punting and drop-kicking as that which electrified the crowd was beyond the wildest dreams of his most ardent supporters.” The Duluth News Tribune put it more succinctly, saying simply, “Pat O’Dea is king.”

  And it wasn’t just the newspapermen who left in awe of O’Dea’s performance. Umpire Wrenn told the Chicago Times-Herald afterward that he knew “of no performance on the gridiron to equal O’Dea’s wonderful drop kick and goal from the sixty-yard line.” King added, “It almost took my breath away to see him try it. I never heard of the goal being made from any distance within ten yards of this new record.”

  O’Dea’s postgame comments were consistent with his on-field demeanor. “I was not surprised at all at making the goal,” the Aussie said later. Though there was certainly plenty of newspaper ink spilled regarding Michigan’s 12–11 win over Stagg’s Maroons, O’Dea’s kick made headlines nationwide and gained the attention of the Eastern establishment. At the end of the 1898 season, the Aussie was one of the first Westerners ever named to the All-American team. The legend of “The Kangaroo Kicker” was born.

  Chapter Three

  From Scrummage to Scrimmage

  People have been congregating to kick round objects for cent­uries—like the craniums of dead people, for instance. Legend has it that the residents of Chester, England, began a tradition of Shrove Tuesday football matches during the Middle Ages, when townspe
ople amused themselves by booting the skull of a Danish pirate, who, presumably, would have been less amused, had he been around to see it.

  By the 1400s, inflated swine bladders had somewhat mercifully replaced skulls. Games were prevalent enough and, apparently, seen as enough of a nuisance, that King James I of Scotland was moved to ban “all rough and violent exercises, as the foot-ball” in 1424. The decree evidently had little impact, as history is littered with descriptions of similar games. A match in the village of Scone, Scotland, for instance, pitted the married men against the bachelors, with one group shooting the bladder into a hole in a field while the other looked to kick it into the river.

  Related games made their way to the United States and onto college campuses. In the mid-1800s, Harvard students began each new term with interclass football matches. The sophomores used the violent kicking sport as a means of initiating the freshmen into college life, a tradition known as “Bloody Monday.” Those games grew so heated that the faculty banned them in 1860, threatening those who failed to heed the prohibition with expulsion.

  Up until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the games that were permitted had a tenor of informality. Classmates or friends would simply gather and play for nothing beyond the sake of playing. It was fun. It was something to do. So, what changed? How did it go from a leisurely activity to an organized sport contested in front of tens of thousands of paid spectators?

  The game took off on college campuses due, in part, to a national mentality shift, as intense physical activity became more acceptable. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, leisure time at a university was spent in intellectual pursuits. Speech making and oration were the most popular pastimes. Not only was physical prowess deemed unimportant, it was looked down upon. “A man who was known to be gifted in this way, was thereby disparaged in public estimation; if he were known to make much of it, he was more likely to be despised,” observed the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. “The only things to be admired were mind and soul.”