The Opening Kickoff Read online

  As it turns out, his position was secure. Pat was forced into action just after halftime with the Badgers already up 34–0, as starting fullback and team captain John Richards was sent to the sidelines with a knee injury. O’Dea made an immediate impression: “He punted clear over Lake Forest’s backs on the first attempt,” the Cardinal reported, “and the ball was 85 yards from where O’Dea stood when they fell on it.” That 85-yard punt is in the Wisconsin record books to this day as the sixth-longest in Badgers history and the third-longest of O’Dea’s career.

  O’Dea also tried to drop-kick a goal from the field late in the game. “He stood exactly 60 yards from Lake Forest’s goal when he kicked the ball, and probably had it not been for the wind the ball would have gone between the posts.” As it was, the “beautiful kick . . . missed by barely three feet.” Moments later, time was called, and the Badgers walked off the field with a 34–0 victory.

  Though O’Dea had played only briefly, word of his performance spread. In fact, it initially caused some confusion. Pat was such an unknown commodity that some wire reports initially indicated that Andy had suited up for the Badgers. Under the headline ’Twas Not Andy O’Dea, the Minneapolis Journal ran a clarification, informing its readers the man who came in for Richards was actually “Patrick O’Dea, a brother of the trainer and a student at the university.” King quickly promoted the talented newcomer to the “first eleven.”

  Two days later O’Dea was in the news for another reason. As the Badgers practiced for a midweek game with Madison High School, their newest player lined up for a punt. Suddenly, one of the “second eleven” players broke through the line and blocked it. “I ran for the ball intending to fall upon it,” O’Dea told a reporter from the Daily Cardinal later that evening, “but on account of the closeness of the crowd fell short of it and with my arm reached for it across the plank bordering the track. Somebody in trying to fall on the ball then fell on my arm.” The prognosis was not a good one. O’Dea’s arm was broken.

  While the Cardinal reported that Pat would “not be able to play for a month or more,” the Eau Claire Leader was even more pessimistic, saying that O’Dea was “done up for the season.” The Leader saw this as a significant blow for the Badgers, noting that O’Dea (who, to this point, had played one football game in his life) was “famous as a great punter.” The promise the newcomer had shown was quickly put on hold.

  Chapter Six

  The Challenge of Amateurism

  The 1896 season that saw Pat O’Dea make his debut for Wisconsin was a monumental one in Midwest football. It was the first year of competition in the recently christened and awkwardly named “Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives,” which would come to be referred to as the Western Conference and, eventually, the Big Ten. The conference was formed as a reaction to the most perplexing problem of college football’s early years—that of player eligibility.

  As the stakes involved in the games got larger, schools began to wrangle with the issue of who should actually be allowed to play on their teams. There had been some attempts at legislation in the early 1880s, with movements both to limit the number of years in which a player could participate and to ban professional athletes from intercollegiate contests. The enforcement was left to individual schools, whose teams were essentially run by students and graduates. Not surprisingly, many of them chose simply to ignore the rules.

  The first true eligibility controversy had arisen between Harvard and Princeton in 1889. The Tigers had a team full of questionable characters. Among them was a twenty-six-year-old named Elwood Wagenhurst, who had graduated from the school the year before, played professional baseball, and was now attempting to play football at Princeton while simultaneously coaching at Penn. Princeton captain Edgar Allan Poe said of Wagenhurst: “We do not deny that the reason of his returning for a post-graduate course is to play football.”

  He was joined on the team by Walter “Monte” Cash, who had played for Penn the year before but left as soon as the season ended, heading back to his home in Wyoming. He was invited back east by Princeton and arrived on campus with two pistols and a deck of playing cards, which would explain the nickname. He entered school as a special student just weeks before the Harvard game.

  Harvard objected and released a number of letters that they believed highlighted the indiscretions at Princeton. For instance, one Harvard man produced a note from a former Tigers captain that read, “I can get your board, tuition, etc., free. The athletic men in Princeton get, by all odds, the best treatment of any of the colleges.” The Princeton folks said it was all just a big misunderstanding. “[H]e refers simply to the fact that, as a democratic spirit prevails at Princeton, athletic students can win a certain social position which they could not at some other colleges,” Princeton’s advisors and graduate managers wrote in a statement. “Nothing else is implied in this passage.” Besides, the Princeton men argued, their school left the decision of who should and shouldn’t play up to the students, and they did not want to take from that group “the power of initiative in the development of independence of character and action.”

  Meanwhile, others accused Harvard of similar behavior. A Penn player named R. R. Ammerman released a letter that was published in a Philadelphia newspaper in which he claimed “a scholarship and pecuniary compensation, a ticket to Boston, etc., were extended to me by a Harvard man in early November, to enter the Law School at Harvard and become a member of the . . . Football Eleven.” Not surprisingly, Harvard denied the claim.

  That kind of back-and-forth squabbling was typical of the controversies at the time, which, on reexamination, essentially boil down to “he said, she said” disputes. In the big picture, the game’s leaders repeatedly expressed an interest in creating a fair system that would work. On a game-to-game basis, though, schools seemed more focused on doing whatever they could to get their questionable players on the field and their opponents’ questionable ones ruled out. In the 1889 case, the two sides eventually withdrew their claims of ineligibility, and Princeton whipped the Crimson 41–15. Harvard refused to play the New Jersey school for the next five years.

  The problems weren’t limited to the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of the world. As the game spread in the late 1880s and early 1890s, abuses materialized throughout the country. As one history of the University of Illinois notes, “There were no codes of (eligibility) rules and no organizations to enforce any.” Charles Baird, who managed Michigan’s football team in 1893 and later became the school’s athletic director, recalled that seven of the eleven players on that 1893 team were not actually enrolled in school. Few involved really saw this as much of a problem. “No one thought of inquiring about their standing,” Baird said.

  The situation was similar at Notre Dame. The South Bend school’s 1896 team included a tackle named Frank Hanley, who made no secret of his lack of academic ambition. An article in Harper’s Weekly noted several years later of Hanley: “Asked what he took at the college, he naively replied, ‘Baths!’ Not an undesirable course, especially for a football player,” the writer quipped, “but hardly sufficient to maintain class-room standing.”

  Equally troubling was the phenomenon of the “tramp” athlete—students who might show up just before a big game, play, and then wander off, or, in some cases, might switch schools in the middle of the season. Perhaps the most prominent example of a tramp was future Michigan coach Fielding Yost. Yost began the 1896 season as a tackle at West Virginia. He then “transferred” to Lafayette just in time to play in a shocking upset win against Penn. And almost as soon as that game ended, he made his way back to Morgantown and proceeded to finish off his career at West Virginia.

  The problems weren’t limited to the college game. In 1893 Harper’s accused the famed prep school at Exeter of importing three men in their twenties to play against rival Andover. Noted writer Caspar Whitney blew the charade open, complete with details about each of the me
rcenaries and their backgrounds. Among them were two professional athletes, one of whom, according to Whitney, was also a well-known circus performer. As soon as the game was over, Whitney alleged, the three men disappeared, never to be seen on campus again. As you might expect, the writer was outraged: “As the boy is at school,” Whitney wrote, “so will he be at college; as at college, so in after-life. If he begins on dishonest principles, where will he end? If the seeds of professionalism are sown at schools, how shall we ever keep them from taking root at colleges?”

  Professionalism bothered Whitney, and many others, immeasurably. It is impossible to talk about the eligibility issues of the day without touching upon professionalism, as the two were inextricably linked. In much the same way, it is impossible to talk about professionalism without discussing class and (obvious race and gender issues aside) the American movement toward a more egalitarian society.

  Amateur sport as we think of it today began in England, and that country’s sharp class divisions were reflected on the playing fields. Professional athletics were looked down upon—the domain of those who lacked the wealth and leisure time to participate in sport for sport’s sake. In some pursuits, such as golf and tennis, this attitude persisted well into the twentieth century. Amateurism and social elitism went hand in hand.

  That class divide was reflected in the university system in England as well, a system dominated by the two elite institutions in the country—Oxford and Cambridge. Those two schools began to compete in cricket and rowing in the late 1820s, viewing the games as friendly, collegial student matches, a mind-set that still held sway as the turn of the century approached.

  Many of the most powerful early boosters of American collegiate sports wanted to see a similar attitude here. Perhaps none had a bigger platform than Whitney, who wrote about amateur athletics for Harper’s Weekly throughout the pivotal decade of the 1890s.

  Whitney constantly discussed the threat professionalism posed to the college games, warning that “continuously aggressive vigilance is the price of purity in college sport.” In his view, it was quite simple: Men were either amateurs or pros, and pros had to be kept out of the college games at all cost. “Semi-professionalism is a paradoxical and a meaningless term,” Whitney wrote. “There are no degrees of amateurism.”

  What Whitney viewed as professionalism differed greatly from today’s definition. Not only did he fulminate against obvious issues—using players who had been paid, illegal recruitment, and tramp athletes— but he also denounced practices such as, well, practices. Whitney believed strongly that teams should only work out during the college term. In the fall of 1896, for instance, he took the University of Pennsylvania to task for what amounted to a preseason training camp, charging that the school spent a month in an off-campus hotel preparing its men for the season ahead. “This is not the spirit of sportsmanship that thrills under the glory of honorably contesting for victory,” Whitney wrote of Penn’s practices. “It is the spirit of the professional, to whom victory is everything, and the game mere means to that end.”

  Along the same lines, Whitney protested high ticket prices, off-campus games, and the Thanksgiving Day battles. He was also deeply troubled by a new career path that developed around the game in the 1890s—that of the professional coach.

  The earliest college football teams were coached by the students themselves or, as the game became more sophisticated, by recent graduates who worked in an unofficial, uncompensated capacity. Yale, in particular, had this system down to a science, as the previous year’s captain often remained in New Haven the year after his graduation to oversee the team. Those coaches were relegated to mere spectators on game day, though, as, in a concept borrowed from rugby, all on-field decisions were to be the domain of the captain. Coaching from the sidelines was seen as a violation of the amateur ideal. “Now the good name of the sport demands that this offensive feature be recognized and penalized,” Whitney wrote in 1899. “I suggest taking the ball away from the side receiving coaching.”

  Walter Camp, while generally referred to today as Yale’s “coach,” technically only served in that capacity for five years right after his graduation, though some dispute whether he was even the coach in those years. He held a full-time job with the New Haven Clock Company and often missed practices, depending on his wife, Alice, to go watch the day’s training and then huddling with her and the captains at night to plot strategy. As historian Ronald Smith notes, “Whether or not Camp was officially a head coach, it is clear that he was the individual who most Yale captains went to for coaching advice and direction for the team.” Camp’s role was so significant that one professor began a letter to him with the greeting, “Dear Oligarch.”

  The movement against professional coaching was tenable in the East, where many recent graduates, well-versed in the nuances of the game, lived in close proximity to their alma maters. It was a far bigger challenge in the West, though, where the game was new and experienced men were harder to find. This was the dilemma facing University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper in the early 1890s, and the decision he made to address it changed the direction of the game forever.

  A linguistic prodigy who entered college at age ten and graduate school at Yale at age seventeen, Harper seemed an unlikely candidate to alter the college athletic landscape. After all, this is a man whose doctoral thesis boasted the scintillating title, “A Comparative Study of the Prepositions in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Gothic.” That specialty led him to a position teaching Hebrew at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary of Chicago. It was there that he first met oil baron John D. Rockefeller, a trustee of the seminary.

  Rockefeller originally dreamed of using a portion of his fortune to start a major Baptist university in New York, but eventually he was persuaded to look to Chicago instead. Plans were made to open the doors of the university in the fall of 1892, and finding a president was Rockefeller’s first step. He immediately thought of his friend Harper and offered him the spot in September 1890.

  The task put in front of Harper was a difficult one: not simply to create a university from scratch, but also to create one that would rise from nothing to instantly compete with the likes of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It is a measure of just how far football had come in the twenty-one years since that first game in New Brunswick that Harper made the sport part of his plan. As historian Robin Lester notes, “Harper saw football as an important means to elbow his way into the select circle of higher education.” He didn’t know much about the game himself, but he knew who he needed to get in touch with. Harper quickly wrote to one of his former students—a young man named Amos Alonzo Stagg.

  Stagg was born in 1862 in West Orange, New Jersey, the poor son of a local shoemaker. The stocky youth gravitated toward sports, excelling particularly in baseball. Like Walter Camp, he built up his endurance running to and from school. He worked harvesting grain and cutting hay, which helped build his physique. Young “Lonnie,” as he was known, performed reasonably well scholastically, but he hit a dead end after grade school. West Orange had no high school. If he wanted to attend the one in Orange, he would have to pay tuition. So, Stagg went to work “tending furnaces, lawns and gardens, cutting wood, [and] beating carpets.” He paid his own way through Orange High School in three years.

  Stagg decided to become a minister, setting his sights on attendance at Yale. Unable to pass the school’s entrance exam, he followed a childhood friend to Phillips-Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he again worked his way through school. Life in New Hampshire was rough. Stagg was so strapped for cash that he didn’t even have enough money to afford underwear. He subsisted on a diet of crackers, stale bread, and milk—cuisine that cost him a grand total of sixteen cents a day—and lived off-campus in an unheated attic.

  After spending the 1883–1884 school year at Exeter, the now twenty-two-year-old Stagg gained admittance to Yale. He matriculated in the fall of 1884 and spent the next
four years dazzling batters as a pitcher for Yale’s baseball team. In 1887, in an exhibition game against the Boston Nationals professional team, Stagg struck out future Hall of Famer “King” Kelly, perhaps the greatest player of his time. Upon returning to the bench, Kelly was heard to mutter, “Think of a son of a gun who can pitch like that going to be a minister.” The next season, Camp struck out twenty players in a game against Princeton, prompting one writer to observe, “The greatest man in America today undoubtedly is Pitcher Stagg.”

  As his fame as a hurler grew, Stagg was offered numerous professional contracts, but he turned them all down, citing the sordid lifestyle of a pro athlete. It was a rationale that seemed appropriate for an aspiring minister. “There was a bar in every ball park,” Stagg observed, “and the whole tone of the game was smelly.”

  After making a name for himself on the diamond, Stagg turned his attention to the gridiron in the fall of 1888, his first year as a divinity graduate student in New Haven. He went out for the football team, earning a spot as a starting end on one of the most dominant teams in the history of the sport. Yale went 13–0 that season, outscoring its opponents by an incredible 698–0. The next year, Stagg was named a first-team All-American.

  His athletic career was going better than his academic one. He spent two years at the divinity school taking a wide range of courses, including a biblical literature class taught by a young professor named William Rainey Harper, before deciding he was not cut out to be a minister. Stagg later attributed the decision to “an inability to talk easily on my feet,” though his ultimate career choice also involved a great deal of public speaking.

  He left Yale in 1890 and eventually made his way to the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, joining a staff that included James Naismith, who would invent basketball there a year later. Stagg took over as the school’s football coach. He did more than just lead the team, though. Capitalizing on his fame as both an athlete and an advocate of Muscular Christianity, Stagg went on tour to promote the school, speaking of the virtues of a life that combined athletics and religion. He was serving in that capacity when Harper, his former professor, contacted him with the invitation to come to Chicago.