The Opening Kickoff Read online

  Interestingly, the battle for that soul was experiencing a similar change. Men, in particular, were finding the Protestant movement to be unappealing. In 1832 English writer Frances Trollope observed of the United States that she had never seen a nation “where religion had such a strong hold upon the women or a slighter hold upon the men.” That divide intensified over the course of the nineteenth century, as religion grew more and more feminized. As historian Michael Kimmel observes, this passive message even showed up in depictions of Jesus: “a thin, reedy man with long, bony fingers and a lean face with soft, doelike eyes.” It led one observer to ask rhetorically, “Have we a Religion for Men?”

  Muscular Christianity, a mid-nineteenth-century movement that coupled Christian evangelism with unabashed virility, helped change that mind-set. Physical strength, once seen as antithetical with religious piety, was gradually recognized as a mechanism for bringing men back to the church and thus spreading God’s word. Images depicting Jesus “at his carpenter’s bench, with sleeves rolled up, leather apron around his torso, and his strong set eyes gazing heavenward, fused the sacred and the muscular.” Influential ministers such as Josiah Strong warned that a faith “which ignores the physical life becomes more or less mystical or effeminate, loses its virility and has little influence over men or affairs.” The impact of this shift in thinking was widespread. Elmer Johnson, who wrote a history of the YMCA, observed of the late 1800s that “almost every sport, program feature, training institution, and operational principle of any consequence or enduring value had its origin in this period.”

  While changing belief systems made the football-like games more palatable, it was the dramatic shifts in education and population that made them practical. More young men were attending college than ever before, thanks to what can only be termed as a nineteenth-century college-starting frenzy. As one historian put it, “Americans founded colleges, then searched for students to serve.” By 1870 there were roughly five hundred degree-granting universities in the United States, more than in all of Europe combined.

  The growth of universities was accompanied by a lifestyle shift, as Americans increasingly left their agrarian past behind in favor of the city life. The Industrial Revolution crowded people closer together, and their shorter workdays left them with time on their hands—time that could be spent playing or watching sports. As one university history noted, “Given a large number of healthy young men, the talent for organization always present in such a group, relatively easy transportation of players and newspapers eager to dramatize the events, the stage was set for the rise of intercollegiate athletics.”

  What was new on that fall day in 1869 when the men from Princeton journeyed to New Brunswick wasn’t the game itself. The breakthrough was the concept of one school playing against another. Football wasn’t born that day; intercollegiate football was.

  That being said, there was no real uniform code for what the game would be. Those informal contests that were played between students on campus all had the same overriding idea—that of kicking a ball through goalposts. But there were many variations on the theme and subtle nuances in the rules that had to be agreed upon.

  At the time, no American schools were playing rugby, a game that, legend had it, began at the Rugby School in England in the 1820s when a young student picked up the soccer ball and began to run with it. But many weren’t playing pure soccer, either. For instance, some schools permitted the ball to be batted with the hands. Others allowed players to catch it and, if they did, to get an unencumbered free kick at the goal. Princeton students generally played by the latter rule, while Rutgers did not permit catching. So, the two teams agreed to play without free kicks in New Brunswick but to allow them in the second of the two games, which was to be played in Princeton the following week. In the end, the game that was played that November day in 1869 would appear to a modern spectator to be an amalgam of soccer and rugby, though any resemblances to the latter were coincidental.

  About fifty “rooters” made the 20-mile journey with the Princeton players to New Brunswick. The students spent the early afternoon hours with their hosts—walking around town and passing time playing billiards. Then, in the mid-afternoon, they assembled on an open field near campus for the game.

  Each team was made up of twenty-five players. The Rutgers men wore red shirts to distinguish themselves. Some wrapped scarlet turbans around their heads. A group of several hundred spectators lounged on the grass alongside the field to watch, while others sat on a nearby fence. Rutgers took an early 4–2 lead, before Princeton battled back to tie the match at four. The men in scarlet scored the final two goals, though, and prevailed 6–4.

  The result, however, was truly secondary. The aim of the day was to have fun, which both sides clearly did. “After the match the players had an amicable ‘feed’ together,” the Rutgers Targum reported, “and at eight o’clock our guests went home in high spirits, but trusting to beat us next time, if they can.”

  And they did. Princeton won the rematch 8–0, but, again, the social component of the day was the story. The Princeton men prepared lunch for the Rutgers team beforehand, then hosted a banquet after the game. “Speeches and songs, accompanied, of course, by the study of practical gastronomy, passed the time pleasantly until the evening train bore us Brunswickward,” read the Targum account. “We thank them for their hospitality. If we must be beaten we are glad to have such conquerors.” That general attitude prevailed in the early years of the game. Schools only played a few matches each year and little emphasis was placed on the results.

  But that tenor changed fairly dramatically in 1876. That year Yale elected a new captain, Eugene V. Baker. Baker instilled in his men a will to win and aimed to do so through far more strenuous training methods than football players had ever seen before. The student body quickly rallied behind the cause. “All in college who can play at all,” the Yale Courant urged in the autumn of 1876, “especially the larger and heavier men, should be out every afternoon for practice. Let there be no holding back on the part of any.”

  That same fall, representatives from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia met in Springfield, Massachusetts, to codify a uniform set of rules. They also decided to crown a champion at the end of the season. It was a seemingly minor step, but it had far-reaching consequences. The game was no longer simply about playing. It was now about winning.

  No school won quite like Yale. Fueled by the “Yale Spirit” that Baker had infused, the men from New Haven lost just once between 1876 and 1884. The team became a source of pride on campus, to the point where, by 1878, students were congregating to watch practice. “The interest which the university feels in the game even surpasses that of last year, and the number and strength of the players who have been brought to light are most encouraging,” the Courant reported, adding, “all should make a common effort by doing what lies in his power to put in the field the strongest possible team to represent us.” The faculty did its part, as, in that same year, players were first allowed to miss class for games.

  In that 1878 season, Yale had a new captain, a New Haven native named Walter Chauncey Camp. The son of a schoolteacher, Camp had grown up near the university, and, inspired by the Yale football team, the gawky young man undertook a Spartan training regimen. He swore off sweets, ran through the countryside on his own to build endurance, and began each morning with a set of secret calisthenics in his bedroom. Though he weighed only 156 pounds when he enrolled at Yale in 1876, Camp had evolved into a well-conditioned, impressive athlete. He made an immediate impact on the football field and quickly earned the respect of his teammates.

  “When [Camp] was elected captain in his junior year, his quarters in Durfee Hall became the campus shrine, and his word the law,” one biographer noted. “If disputes within the team arose, he would gravely state his position and leave the room with a solemn promise to resign if the vote went against him. He always won.” Camp’s close a
ssociation with the operations of the Yale football team continued up until the day of his death in 1925 at the age of sixty-six. If Yale was the first football factory, Walter Camp was its foreman.

  Though Camp was a fine player, his greatest contributions came off the field, as the single most influential member of the football rules committee. His playing days coincided with a series of dramatic changes in the game.

  In the spring of 1874, McGill University of Montreal came to Cambridge to play Harvard. The Canadian school played rugby rather than the soccer-type game favored by the American colleges. Harvard was quickly converted. “The Rugby game is much better favor than the somewhat sleepy game now played by our men,” the Harvard Advocate declared afterward.

  The next year Harvard challenged Yale to a rugby match. Though Yale insisted on a few concessions, the men from New Haven essentially agreed to abandon soccer and play by Harvard’s rugby rules. The match was a huge hit—not only with the students who played in it, but also with the spectators, including a couple of Princeton men, who went back home and convinced their schoolmates to essentially switch sports. “The 1875 meeting of Harvard and Yale,” football historian Alexander Weyand wrote, “was the game that sold Rugby to the American colleges.” At the same 1876 Springfield meeting that brought about the concept of a championship, the schools agreed to play rugby, rather than soccer, going forward.

  As Yale’s captain, Camp first attended the rules meeting in 1878, and he quickly began to advocate for change. His most passionate crusade was for the elimination of the “scrummage,” which was the manner in which a play started in rugby. When the ball was downed, the men from each side joined together and, arms interlocked, tried to kick it free.

  “The original scrummage was a weird and unscientific institution. The ball belonged to neither side,” observed Amos Alonzo Stagg. “It was dull business for the backs and the onlookers. For long periods the ball could not be seen and nothing happened. All the spectators could distinguish was a ton and a half of heavyweights leaning pantingly against one another. Eventually the ball would pop out by accident or surrender, a back would seize it for a run, be tackled and downed, and back went the ball into scrummage.”

  Camp’s solution was what came to be known as the scrimmage. Instead of reestablishing possession each time the ball was downed, Camp believed that the downed team ought to retain possession and simply start the play anew. This rule passed at the 1880 convention, along with the reduction to eleven players. American football was born.

  There were some stops and starts along the way over the next few years. In the early days, a team that had been declared the champion the previous season had to lose in order to be dethroned. They could retain the championship with a tie. This led to so-called “block” games, where the past season’s champion would intentionally play for a scoreless draw, repeatedly snapping and downing the ball.

  Again, Camp had the solution—the concept of downs. In order to retain the ball, Camp suggested, why not mandate that a team had to gain a certain amount of yardage? His recommendation passed in 1882, with the committee deciding on three downs to make five yards.

  Camp next tackled the game’s byzantine scoring system. The method for determining a winner in the early days of football was complicated, focusing on accomplishments rather than points and weighing the accomplishments relatively against one another. By means of example, a goal (a successful kick through the uprights) equaled four touchdowns. Goals could be kicked in one of two ways—either from the field in the run of play or after a team scored a touchdown. So, for instance, one team could hypothetically score three touchdowns and miss all of the kicks afterward and lose to a team that scored just one touchdown but converted the kick.

  At the 1883 rules convention, Camp pushed through a plan that assigned numerical values to the scoring plays. Beginning with the 1884 campaign, goals from the field counted for five points, goals after touchdowns counted for four points, and touchdowns themselves were valued at two points. The following year, the value of the touchdown and the goal after touchdown was reversed, and by 1898 the touchdown was worth five points and the goal afterward counted for just one.

  So, in eight short years, intercollegiate football had changed quite dramatically. Soccer had been replaced by rugby, the scrummage had given way to the scrimmage, the concept of downs had been introduced, and, finally, a scoring system had been devised. And, though historians debate whether all of these ideas were Camp’s alone, he was clearly the driving force that pushed them through.

  While the students and recent graduates on the rules committee felt better and better about the game they were creating, football almost immediately met resistance from the various university faculties. In 1873 Michigan challenged Cornell to a game in Buffalo, an invitation that was quickly rebuffed by the university president in Ithaca, Andrew White, who said dismissively, “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.”

  While early objections were due primarily to a sense that the game conflicted with the broader mission of universities, violence was also a concern—and justifiably so. Accounts of early games are chock-full of sentences like this one, describing the 1884 meeting between Yale and Princeton: “There came a crush on one of the edges of the field about midway between the goals. All of the maddened giants of both the teams were in it and they lay heaped, kicking, choking, hitting, gouging and howling.” Any modern-day football fans yearning for a return to a simpler, halcyon time when the game was enjoyed by well-mannered and cultured Ivy Leaguers should quickly disabuse themselves of that notion. There was no such time.

  The rules exacerbated the issue. For instance, a player wasn’t technically down until he stopped moving, meaning a tackled player would often try to squirm forward on the ground, as members of the opposing team jumped on his back or head trying to stop his progress. Additionally, touchdowns didn’t count until the ball had actually been touched to the ground, leading to brutal battles called the “maul-in-goal” where members of the defensive team would wrestle with an offensive player who had crossed the goal line to prevent him from placing the ball to the turf. Stagg described a battle in a practice game that lasted “for fifteen minutes—and I do not exaggerate.” The maul was restricted to players who had their hands on the ball when the runner crossed the goal line. If a player lost contact with the ball, he could not rejoin the melee, “and if he attempts to do so, [he] may be dragged out by the opposite side.”

  By early 1885, influenced primarily by the violence in the game, Harvard decided it had seen enough. Declaring football to be “brutal, demoralizing to the players and to the spectators, and extremely dangerous,” the school banned the game. The banishment was short-lived, though. Within a year, Harvard was back in the football association.

  Other schools embraced the game more enthusiastically. Princeton’s president-elect, Francis L. Patton, spoke glowingly of the sport when he addressed the school’s alumni at a dinner in New York City in the spring of 1888. “I can well believe,” Patton declared, “that out of these brawny contests, some of the very best elements of manhood may emerge.” But Patton didn’t just support the game with his words, he also did so with his actions, as, during the course of his administration, “intercollegiate athletics rose to an absorbing prestige, with a shocking apathy of conscience.”

  The absence of scruples likely had something to do with a benefit of the game that outweighed its manhood-building qualities—its ability to generate cash. “I am pretty sure,” Patton noted, “that there are friends enough who will see to it that Princeton shall come behind Yale in no gift.”

  Indeed, money was rapidly becoming a major part of the football story. In the short period between 1885 and 1893, Yale’s football-related revenues increased more than thirteen-fold. And, while the direct benefits of the game were enormous, schools quickly came to recognize that it had ancillary benefits. In 1
891 a writer for the University of Kansas’ student newspaper observed that the “influence and result of our football victories can hardly be estimated. . . . It has advertised the University more than an outlay of a thousand dollars could have done in any other way.”

  The expansion of the game to schools like Kansas was a major part of the football story, as the sport inspired a manifest destiny of sorts, quickly spreading west. In 1888 about sixty colleges had teams. Within a handful of years, that number had more than doubled. Many of the new adopters were west of the Alleghenies, schools such as Minnesota, Chicago, and Wisconsin. The proliferation was fueled by graduates of the “Big Three” who fanned out across the country like preachers, carrying the gospel of the game in a full-fledged diaspora. Football historian Parke Davis asserted that “at one time in this period there might have been counted no less than 45 former players of Yale, 35 of Princeton and 24 of Harvard actively engaged in teaching the science of the game.” Football may have been objectionable to some, but it had too many forces working in its favor. Its rise coincided perfectly with the opening of new colleges desperate for attention and money.

  Back east, schools began to recruit actively, often offering inducements to promising athletes. In the fall of 1889, former Yale captain Bill “Pa” Corbin telegraphed Camp, who was serving as Yale’s football advisor. The subject was a prospect named Highland Stickney, who, it seems, was in search of a handout. “Stickney wrote,” Corbin reported, “Have received good offers from Harvard and Princeton to play football. What will you give[?]” Apparently, not enough. Stickney landed in Cambridge.