The Opening Kickoff Read online

  Harper’s proposal was unprecedented. He was not simply offering Stagg a part-time position as the school’s coach. Instead, he was offering him a tenured professorship, heading up his own academic area—the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics. The football team would be the centerpiece of the department, and Harper made it clear he wanted to win. “I want to develop teams which we can send around the country and knock out all the colleges,” he wrote to Stagg. “We will give them a palace car and a vacation too.”

  After some deliberation and negotiation, Stagg accepted the job at a yearly salary of $2,500, nearly twice that of the average professor. The new coach was on the job simultaneous with the opening of the university, which was barely ready to go when he arrived on campus in September 1892. “The carpenters still were at work in Cobb Hall, the one structure nearing completion,” Stagg recalled many years later. “We entered the building over bare planks, and, in lieu of knobs on the doors, the teachers carried square pieces of wood to insert in the doors to turn the latches.” The University of Chicago hadn’t quite gotten around to doorknobs, but it did have a football team, and one of the nation’s most famous stars leading it.

  Within a week of its first classes, the new university played its first game, topping a local high school. Just three weeks later, they were on the field against Northwestern, playing the Evanston school to a scoreless tie. Stagg not only coached the team that first year, he also played on it due to a dearth of students. As an early university song put it, “Then Stagg was catcher, pitcher, coach, shortstop and halfback too: For in those days of ‘Auld land syne’ our good athletes were few.”

  By the next season, the team was on its way, knocking off Michigan without Stagg in the lineup—a victory that led one of the school’s professors to remark, “We will have a college here soon if this keeps up.” The editors of the school’s weekly newspaper agreed, asserting that the win gave Chicago “what we most need—a reputation.” They reminded their readers that “the best colleges are, as a rule, the leaders in athletic games.”

  Stagg’s early participation was not seen as unusual in the Midwest, where nonstudents continued to infiltrate the top teams. In 1895 an indignant Whitney wrote of the situation at schools like Michigan, Chicago, Minnesota, Illinois, and Northwestern, “Men offer and sell themselves for an afternoon for from twenty-five to two hundred and fifty dollars, and apparently there is something like a scale of prices just as there is for horses and cows and grain.”

  Whitney cited numerous examples: a Chicago lawyer who was paid $500 to play for Minnesota, a former Princeton player who earned $250 to compete for Michigan against Chicago, and a player on what amounted to a Chicago professional team who was plucked off a city cable car on his way to a game by Michigan’s manager, agreeing to play the rest of the season in Ann Arbor for $600. The student newspaper at Illinois, the Daily Illini, described one of Stagg’s players as the school’s “professional star,” saying that the man “has been in athletics there since the institution opened,” and joked that he would still be enrolled at Chicago at the end “of modern civilization.”

  Steps were being taken to curb the abuses. In the winter of 1895, seven Midwestern schools met in Chicago to formulate a series of rules to govern intercollegiate athletics. Eight of those twelve original regulations focused on the issues of eligibility and professionalism. Among the mandates: players had to be bona fide students, athletes could not be paid, and coaches could not play. The rules went into effect in 1896 with the formation of the Intercollegiate Conference, consisting of Purdue, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Northwestern, Michigan, and Chicago. Whitney roundly approved: “The meeting last winter in Chicago marked the beginning of a new and clarified era in Western college sport,” he wrote.

  Yet, as important a step as the formation of the Western Conference was, plenty of problems still remained.

  Chapter Seven

  “The Most Mischievous Offender of the Year”

  As Pat O’Dea’s broken arm healed in Madison, controversy swirled over eligibility issues. Five days before Wisconsin’s opener against Lake Forest, the faculty had met to discuss a football concern. Several of the men who had been practicing with the team were ineligible under the rules agreed upon in Chicago. The belief among those gathered was that Wisconsin had adopted the new code the previous spring, though that assumption was about to be put to the test.

  The clause referred to as the “six-month residence rule” was the most contentious component of the agreement among the seven schools in the new conference. It required students who had played previously for another school to spend six months on their new campus before participating in athletics. The idea was to eliminate the problem of the “tramp” athlete. Though the rule had seemed like a great idea in theory, the practical application had proven to be a challenge. Already, Chicago, Northwestern, and Michigan had made it clear that they would not abide by it. All of those universities had significant graduate schools and claimed the regulation unfairly hampered them from using grad students, who had, for years, been integral to their success. Why they approved the rule in the first place is anybody’s guess.

  Against this backdrop, the Madison faculty was faced with a difficult choice. Wisconsin, too, had a number of strong football players who would not be eligible under the residency requirement. Still, the professors held firm, refusing to rescind the rule. An editorial in the Chicago Times-Herald voiced its support of the decision. “The action may weaken the team, but it puts Wisconsin in a desirable position,” the paper opined. “Football never was so near shipwreck as it was last year when the undeniable facts about the hiring of players came out.” Caspar Whitney, the staunch defender of amateurism, wired his approval, telling the Daily Cardinal: “All friends of honest college sport applaud and support Wisconsin.”

  In the complicated university structure, though, it turns out that the faculty did not have the final say. That distinction belonged to the university regents. Though everyone had been operating under the belief that the regents had approved the rules, university president Charles Kendall Adams now revealed that they had not and would not—at least for now. Just four days after the faculty meeting, on the eve of the Lake Forest game, the regents decided to postpone a decision regarding the enforceability of the residency requirement until January, which, not so coincidentally, was after the end of the football season. “This will allow all the new men to play,” the Cardinal reported, “and leaves Wisconsin’s chances of becoming champion of the west very bright.”

  It was certainly not the first time Adams had sacrificed academic integrity for athletic success. One of the players on the team, a guard named “Sunny” Pyre, was a Wisconsin graduate who had continued to play for the Badgers even after earning his degree. In 1895 he started at tackle for Wisconsin while working on his PhD in English. As was required of a doctoral candidate, he also taught at the university. On November 16, 1895, Pyre was scheduled to give a Saturday lecture at the university extension in Chippewa Falls, about 200 miles northwest of Madison. On that same day, the football team was to be in Minneapolis for a game against Minnesota. Pyre appealed to his supervisor for help. He was told it was “absurd to ask for the postponement of a lecture for a football game.”

  The team felt it needed Pyre, though, and asked President Adams whether anything could be done. He quickly replied in the affirmative and sent a telegram to Pyre, who was at a different lecture stop, informing him that he would be able to play. He added: “Now go in and win.” As for his supervisor, who had been operating under the misguided notion that academics were more important than the football team—he was put on a 3:30 a.m. train to Chippewa Falls to help reschedule the lecture.

  Given that recent history, it was no surprise that Adams had decided not to enforce the new eligibility rules. But the regents’ delay did nothing to quell the controversy surrounding the decision. In fact, it dominated the headlines
of the Cardinal during the course of the fall, as hardly a day went by where there wasn’t some sort of coverage of the issue. To their credit, the student editors of the paper took a strong stand against the university’s decision. “The considerations involved in the question are numerous, but . . . if the rules were wholesome at the time of their adoption, they are now,” the paper editorialized on the day of the Lake Forest game. “If they were good rules when considered in the abstract . . . they are just as good now, when the first real test comes. If they are right, they should be enforced.”

  A few weeks later, Whitney echoed those sentiments in Harper’s in a scalding repudiation of the school’s decision, declaring, “Wisconsin stands disgraced before the college world.” He outlined the series of events for his readers: Wisconsin’s acceptance of the rules the prior spring in Chicago, the decision of the faculty to uphold them, and Adams’s instruction to the regents to ignore the faculty’s recommendation.

  “There are two sides to most stories, but this has only one. And that one is thoroughly noxious from the beginning to the ending of its recital,” Whitney wrote. “From being a leader in the reform making for healthful college sport, Wisconsin has become the most mischievous offender of the year. Compared with this disregard of ethics by Wisconsin, the ‘inducing’ of athletes last year by other Western universities was of no consequence. In the latter case the offenders were enthusiastic, oftentimes ethically ignorant, alumni, who deluded the faculties. In Wisconsin’s case, the men who trample upon the very spirit of amateurism are the highest officials of the university!”

  Whitney went on to list the names of five men who had played against Lake Forest who should have been ineligible under the rules. Pat O’Dea was among those he singled out. Though Whitney didn’t specify the reason for O’Dea’s ineligibility, it became clear as the controversy played out that it was a function of his status as an “adult special” student—a category that included those who were admitted to the school despite deficient academic backgrounds. Under the proposed rules, adult specials—like everyone else—had a six-month residency requirement for athletic eligibility. Though nobody had the time or resources to investigate it, O’Dea might also have been ineligible as a result of his participation in Australian Rules Football. While he was technically an amateur, the world of Aussie Rules in the 1890s operated much like American college football, with teams and wealthy patrons often finding ways to make under-the-table payments to top players. The Chicago rules banned anyone who had ever made money for their participation in athletics.

  Whitney’s attack was published in its entirety in the Cardinal, and the next day Adams responded. His defense essentially amounted to: “Everybody else is doing it.”

  “To suppose that by enforcing the rule we could compel others to enforce it,” Adams wrote, “is too much like supposing that by going to war with mere recruits we could induce our enemies to discharge their veterans.”

  The team’s captain, John Richards, expressed a similar opinion. “Everybody here is anxious to put out winning teams and all lament the existence of a weak one,” he said. “The institution—including faculty—sends out its best team and tells them to win from Minnesota, Chicago and Northwestern. But if it places restrictions upon it and fetters it in such a manner that it will lose there is certainly an injustice. Of course, it can be claimed that we would be heading a reform, that would reflect great credit to our college. Even here we can accomplish little without the cooperation of other colleges, and Wisconsin must not think that it is big enough to rule the west.”

  With their questionable men on the field, the Badgers went on to have the best season in their brief football-playing history. They beat Madison High School, Rush Medical College, Grinnell, and Beloit in October; then, in their first big game of the season, they knocked off Stagg’s Chicago team 24–0 on November 7 in Madison. The Maroons played without their injured star, Clarence Herschberger, and their performance was subpar. In the opinion of one reporter, they “tackled around the neck, ran slow and were not stout-hearted.”

  The only disappointment for Badgers fans was the lackadaisical effort given by the operator of the new “bulletin board,” which was rushed into service for the game. The board, which carried a price tag of $50, was to give ongoing updates of the Minnesota–Michigan game being played at the same time in Minneapolis. The Cardinal had eagerly described the marvel of modern technology in the days leading up to the game. “Every three minutes,” it reported, “reports will be hung, showing who has the ball, the number of downs and the number of yards to gain.” In order to help defray the costs of the installation and operation of the device, the price of admission was raised from 50 to 75 cents.

  The board was put in place, but the updates were never posted. Team management stated afterward that, though it had received periodic telegrams, the decision was made not to “shift the movable bag” since no touchdowns had been scored. “It goes without saying that the crowd would have been vastly interested in watching the exciting struggle . . . at Minneapolis if indicated on the bulletin board and the neglect of the men in charge is lamentable,” the Cardinal opined.

  No bulletin board was necessary to watch the Gophers two weeks later. They came to Wisconsin for a much-anticipated showdown. A school-record crowd of nearly 5,000 watched a battle that went right down to the wire, with John Richards plunging over the goal line for the game-winning touchdown in the final minute.

  Wisconsin fell short in its quest for a perfect season, though, tying Northwestern on a sloppy field in Evanston on Thanksgiving Day. The mere four days off in between games was too much to overcome for the banged-up Badgers, with Richards saying afterward, “the Minnesota game knocked us to pieces.”

  Chicago beat Michigan on the same day—the Wolverines’ first loss of the year—meaning no Western team had an unblemished record or the clear claim to the “championship” that would have gone along with it. Wisconsin’s case seemed strongest, though, as they were the only Western team that hadn’t lost to any of the other conference schools. Still, the unbalanced schedules left that fact open for debate, at least for the time being.

  The day after the Northwestern game, the seven conference schools met again in Chicago to revisit the rules issue. They emerged with a renewed pledge to enforce what were essentially the same guidelines they had adopted and ignored the year before.

  Just four days after the season-ending contest, Wisconsin’s faculty representative brought the new rules up for a vote at a meeting. Adams was in attendance, and the implication was that decisions made would be upheld by the regents. Not only did the faculty vote in favor of the regulations, it also added a local addendum strengthening the language of the rule pertaining to adult special students like O’Dea. Whereas the Chicago meeting stipulated that adult specials would be subject to a six-month waiting period to play, Wisconsin voted to extend that waiting period to a year. If there had ever been any doubt, it was now clear that Pat O’Dea was ineligible for athletics until the spring. It seemed like a safe route to take. After all, the season was over.

  Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t. A group called the Chicago Press Association had been trying to get the Carlisle Indian School from Pennsylvania to the city for a game. The Indians refused the initial propositions, eventually saying they would come only if they could play the “champions of the West.” During the first week of December, the Press Association wired Wisconsin with the challenge, a move that, it was pointed out, “finally settles the question of the western championship.” The Badgers quickly accepted. Phil King had left after the Northwestern game but was reached by telegram and pledged to return to Madison. The team resumed practicing. In blatant disregard of the rules agreed to only days before, a now healthy O’Dea practiced with them, with the intention of playing in the game.

  The match was to be played December 19 at the fabulous Chicago Coliseum, a new arena on the south side of the city,
which had seen William Jennings Bryan give his famed “Cross of Gold” speech while accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency the previous summer. The novelty of the indoor game created plenty of buzz. “The scene on the field lighted by electricity will be something quite out of the ordinary,” the Daily Cardinal predicted.

  In Carlisle, the Badgers would face a team that had played a brutal schedule without a whole lot to show for it. While they had wins over four lesser opponents, the Indians had dropped all of their games against the East’s most powerful teams—losing to Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Penn by a combined 59–12. Though, as the Cardinal pointed out, “When it is considered there are only about 100 students from which to select the material for the team, the record this season is nothing short of marvelous.” It was to be the first major game between an Eastern and Western team in the 1896 season.

  Both teams arrived in town on Friday. The Carlisle players got a tour of the city’s top attractions, including the Stock Exchange, the Board of Trade, and the Art Institute. They stayed at the swanky Palmer House hotel, where they were “the objects of much curiosity.” The Badgers, meanwhile, took in a performance of Rip Van Winkle that evening. They rested on Saturday before heading over to check out the Coliseum late that afternoon.

  The arena was a sight to behold—“unlike anything ever witnessed before,” the Chicago Tribune observed. “Under the glare of scores of arc lights, in a temperature like that of a sunny October afternoon, the game was played with all the conditions ideal to secure the comfort of spectators and the best work on the part of the players.” With an enormous crowd of 8,000 looking on, the Badgers took the field first and one player immediately grabbed the spotlight. “Patsy O’Dea, their champion drop-kicker, a recent acquisition, won plaudits by kicking a half-dozen drop-kick goals from well out toward the center of the field, just for practice.” After the “pale faces had the field to themselves for nearly half an hour,” the Carlisle players finally came out and warmed up for a few minutes before the game got under way.