The Opening Kickoff Page 9
Depending on which account you believe, Wisconsin was either thoroughly outplayed or was a victim of circumstance. The Tribune described the Indians as “quick on the line-up, sharp at dodging, hard to tackle, alert and indefatigable.” The same paper saw the Badgers as “easily winded.”
The Cardinal, meanwhile, lashed out at the “unfairness” of the crowd, complaining, “It is generally presumable that a team battling for western honors on a western field would receive the encouragement of an audience whose honor and reputation they were fighting for.” Instead, it noted that the Badgers were “greeted with hisses, while every move of the ‘clean protégés of the east’ evoked the wildest applause.” This, the report claimed, influenced the umpire, who “was not stout-hearted enough to give decisions contrary to the wishes of a rabble crowd.”
The most memorable incident of the game came courtesy of O’Dea’s right foot, as one of his punts got stuck in the metal girders that held the Coliseum’s massive roof “and there it remained until a boy in the gallery climbed out and dropped it to the ground.” Many years later, in a letter to the New York Times, a reader who had been in attendance that night recalled seeing the “Indians standing open-mouthed, waiting for the pigskin to return to earth” while the crowd stood in “awe-stricken silence” until the “foolhardy boy” knocked the ball back down.
Carlisle won the game 18–8. While there was at least one person in attendance who claimed that “[h]ad the game been outdoors and with a square umpire, Wisconsin would have won easily,” that was clearly not the prevailing opinion on the Illinois Central train afterward, where the Indians were surrounded by “an admiring group of young women anxious to gaze at the descendants of the natives, who had beaten the sons of their fathers’ conquerors at their own game.”
The Badgers, meanwhile, headed back to Madison the next day, their “championship” season having ended on a bit of a sour note. As for O’Dea, the faculty met again to discuss his situation in the spring and issued the following ruling: “Resolved: That Mr. P O’Dea, being registered as an adult special, not having resided at the university for one year and being deficient in scholarship is not eligible for any athletic team.”
It was a meaningless edict. Within just a few months, O’Dea represented Wisconsin in the Western track meet—justifiable, perhaps, because his year of residence had now passed. He’d be back on the field for the football team the following fall.
Chapter Eight
The Rise of the Football Media
The capacity crowd of 20,000 people shoehorned themselves into Yale’s football stadium on a late fall day in 1900 for the annual showdown with Harvard. The conditions were perfect for football: not a cloud in the sky; brisk, but certainly not cold, though the occasional wind gusts reminded the throng that the bitter chill of winter was just around the corner. Still, in the words of one chronicler, it was “one of those clear, crisp New England days which make life worth living.”
The minutes until the scheduled 2:00 kickoff ticked away. As fans of both schools cheered lustily, Yale’s mascot, a bulldog dressed in a blue sweater, raced out onto the field and, seemingly without any prompting, barked menacingly at the Harvard faithful. The Yale fans, their blue pennants flapping in the breeze, gave an even louder yell. Their feelings for their rival were tough to explain—an interesting mix of respect and disdain. “No other athletic contests are just like those between Harvard and Yale,” the scribe noted. “In athletics, the highest ambition of either is to defeat the other.”
Unbeknownst to many of the Yale rooters, however, their chances of topping the men from Cambridge were far slimmer than they had been less than a week before. Yale’s captain, Frank Merriwell, known to all football fans for both his remarkable skill and his impeccable character, had spent the last several days suffering from a frightening illness—one that, just two nights earlier, had caused him to lapse into delirium.
“Now men, all together, once more for old Yale!” Merriwell had shouted from his bed, clapping his hands, while his teammates, a number of whom were keeping an around-the-clock vigil in his room, shook their heads sadly. Several had tears welling up in their eyes. Merriwell was both the greatest athlete and the greatest leader they had ever known. As his fever raged unabated, they had even begun to consider the possibility that he might not survive.
Thankfully, Merriwell had pulled through. By Saturday morning, he was well enough to summon the team for a meeting in his study. “The doctors have forbidden me to go to the field,” he told his teammates. “So I will have to sit here as well contented as may be, watching the dispatches that come from the field, anxiously waiting one that says, ‘Yale wins!’ ”
He concluded with some words of inspiration. “Fight as Yale fights in the last ditches,” he told them. “Never say die! Never let up!” His teammates gave out a cheer so loud it could be heard in the courtyard outside. Merriwell’s speech had an incredible impact on the men, who had been so dispirited by his illness and impending absence from the biggest game of their lives.
But the Elis couldn’t win on emotion alone. Harvard dominated the first half. All but a handful of plays were run in Yale territory. Still, the men from New Haven almost miraculously prevented Harvard from scoring—forcing both a fumble and a turnover on downs inside their own 15-yard line. All the while, they shouted “Merriwell!” using their ailing captain for inspiration. Soon the crowd picked up on the battle cry, “and the name of ‘Merriwell!’ rolled skyward in a thunderous outburst.” The battle was scoreless at halftime.
The second half started much like the first had ended. The Harvard men moved the ball steadily, dominating the line, though they were unable to convert that dominance into points. Yale’s offense was completely ineffective without Merriwell, and the Elis eventually resorted simply to punting back to Harvard each time they gained possession. One of those punts was returned into Yale territory. Harvard drove the ball down to the Elis’ 20-yard line and, rather than risk another mistake, decided to attempt a goal. The kick was a beauty. Harvard had a 5–0 lead.
The news of Harvard’s score was quickly carried to Merriwell. He had sensed from the previous dispatches that things weren’t going well but kept hoping for some sort of fluke occurrence that might give his team a shot. The slip of paper that the young messenger boy handed him confirmed that one wasn’t in the offing. The Yale captain could stand it no longer. He raced into his room, pulled on his uniform, and, cleats pounding on the stone stairs, raced to the courtyard.
In a stroke of good fortune, Morris, a trusted local cab driver, happened to be standing outside. “Ten dollars to drive me to the field in ten minutes!” Merriwell yelled.
Merriwell leaped into the cab, while Morris grabbed the reins and urged his horse forward, his whip whooshing through the air. The houses of New Haven raced by them in a blur. Merriwell sat anxiously, hoping against hope that his arrival would not come too late. There was not a moment to spare.
As they reached the stadium, Merriwell sprang out of the cab and charged inside. There were five minutes left in the game. Harvard was driving. As his astonished teammates looked on, their captain went directly to Yale’s coaches and demanded to be put in the game. They tried to dissuade him, arguing that he was putting his life in jeopardy. Merriwell would not be denied. “Take out Haggard!” he said of the man who had replaced him at halfback. Realizing who they were up against, the coaches acquiesced. Merriwell entered the fray.
The Crimson had the ball at Yale’s 48-yard line. They ran two plays. The defense they had been carving up just moments before stiffened—inspired by the appearance of its captain. The game was nearly over. Harvard decided to punt.
Merriwell fielded the kick at his own 10-yard line. He dodged the first tackler and made his way upfield. His teammates blocked perfectly—Harvard men fell left and right. One Yale hit was so ferocious that the man who delivered it, Frank’s teammate and close friend
Dade Morgan, fell to the ground on contact, having lost consciousness. As the crowd roared, Merriwell raced on. Finally, there was just one man between him and the goal line. That man was Harvard’s captain and surest tackler, Fulton. He dived to hit Frank low. Merriwell leaped into the air. “High and fair like a flying bird over Fulton he sprang, then struck the ground, stumbled, fell to his knees, staggered up, fell again and, rising with a last effort, literally shot himself across the line for a touchdown just as the whistle blew to end the game.”
The rules allowed Yale a chance to kick the goal after the touchdown. As the crowd yelled deliriously, Merriwell defied the suddenly strong wind, drilling a perfect goal to give the Elis the 6–5 victory. They had won the championship.
The campus celebrated long into the night. Merriwell was unable to participate. He blacked out just seconds after his game-winning kick. When he awoke two hours later, he was back in his room. Cheers echoed outside his window. One of his teammates was sitting by Frank’s bedside. He noticed the star’s eyes were open. “They’re cheering for you, Merry,” he said, “for you, because you won the game!” Merriwell asked his friend to open the window. He leaned out, waving his handkerchief, as the crowd that had gathered below cheered. His lips shook and his eyes filled with tears. Would his heroism never cease?
Across America, satisfied readers closed their copies of Tip Top Weekly. Burt Standish had done it again. Merriwell was one of the most famous characters ever created in a literary subgenre known as the dime novel. During a span of twenty years, Standish, whose real name was Gilbert Patten, churned out a 20,000-word Merriwell adventure every week. And although publisher Street and Smith didn’t keep exact circulation numbers, conservative estimates put that figure at about 135,000 copies a week, meaning the company sent out roughly seven million Merriwell books every year.
Merriwell wasn’t just a football star—he excelled in every sport he tried. As a pitcher, for instance, he was known far and wide for his double-shoot, a curveball that started off straight but then curved in one direction before amazingly changing course midway to the plate and bending the opposite way. On top of that, he was a model citizen, standing for all that was virtuous, despite spending his life surrounded by any number of scoundrels who were trying to steer him off course. In a scene that typified his character, Merriwell told one ne’er-do-well, “I do not use liquor, and I will thank you to put away that flask.”
That Street and Smith chose Merriwell as a means of reaching America’s youth is evidence of the power not just of college sports, and football in particular, but also of the power of the written word in spreading the game. The popular press, which had scarcely existed sixty years before, was the sport’s greatest ally. Merriwell was simply a culmination of a process that had actually begun even before that famed first game between Rutgers and Princeton.
In the early portion of the nineteenth century, readership of magazines, books, and newspapers was largely restricted to the privileged classes. The reason was simple—these were the people who could both read and afford to make purchases. At the time, “newspaper” was almost a misnomer. The papers didn’t report news in the way we think of it today. They were much more focused on dissemination of editorial opinion than on the description of everyday events. And, given the hefty price of six cents per copy, those papers’ editorials tended to be highly partisan, catering their opinions toward the upper classes.
But in 1833, a New York City printer named Benjamin H. Day stumbled upon a different business model. Day was looking for a way to advertise the services of his printing shop and decided to do so on what amounted to a handbill that would contain a summary of the day’s news. He sold it for a penny, a fraction of the cost of a daily newspaper. He called it the New York Sun. The public snapped it up nearly as quickly as Day could churn it out. And with that, the news business was forever changed. “In short,” historian Will Irwin observed many years later, “here was a newspaper, the first on our soil.”
What Day had started, James Gordon Bennett quickly refined. In 1835 Bennett, a Scotsman who had been working in the US newspaper business for a decade or so, started a penny paper of his own—the New York Herald. As he announced the endeavor, he made no bones about his methods, saying simply, “I renounce all so-called principles.” Give the man credit. He lived up to that manifesto. “Bennett, ruthless, short in the conscience, expressing in his own person all the atrocious bad taste of his age, was yet a genius with a genius power of creation. And he, through two stormy, dirty decades, set an idea of news upon which we have proceeded ever since,” Irwin wrote. “He set out to find the news, and to print it first.”
Bennett tried every imaginable method to beat his opponents to print—utilizing everything from flag-signaling systems to hot-air balloons. He had vast networks of couriers—some as far away as Europe—who worked tirelessly to get the latest dispatches to the Herald. They were so successful that during the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, officials in Washington complained that they were getting information from Bennett’s Herald more quickly than from their own official government transmissions.
Bennett changed more than just the method of news gathering, though. He changed the nature of news itself. Bennett’s stories often weren’t about the most significant issues of the day. “He, first of all Americans,” Irwin wrote, “violated the sanctity of the home; he made private scandals, personal troubles, the business of a newspaper.” The 1836 murder of a New York prostitute named Ellen Jewett, for instance, dominated the Herald’s front page, trumping even information about the ongoing Texas War of Independence. “News was received from Texas, highly disastrous to the colonists,” the Herald reported, “but the private tragedy of Ellen Jewett almost absorbed all public attention.” Though it seems like an obvious move in hindsight, the decision to broaden the newspapers’ appeal was a revolutionary one.
The addition of sports coverage was simply a means to add to that breadth—to expand into a new domain. It certainly wasn’t a huge priority. Bennett, for instance, initially used his delivery room superintendent, Joe Elliott, to cover the sporting world for him. In 1847 Elliott was dispatched to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, to report on a bare-knuckle prize fight between “Yankee” Sullivan and Englishman Robert Caunt. The bout itself is a reasonably insignificant one in the history of the sport. Caunt was horribly overmatched and was defeated in a mere twelve minutes. What was important about the proceeding was how quickly the news was dispatched back to New York for publication. Thanks to the speed of horse-riding couriers, Bennett’s Herald ran Eliott’s full two-column, front-page story with a blow-by-blow description of the fight just days later.
Technology quickly made efforts like that one unnecessary. By the 1850s, telegraph wires dotted the country. The increased efficiency in the news-gathering operation was matched by improvements in the dissemination process. Day had begun the Sun with an old handpress, not much different than the one Ben Franklin had used more than a half century before. That press could, at best, produce 300 sheets per hour. Within fifteen years, the cylinder press increased that rate to 8,000 copies per hour. By the 1890s, the technology had advanced to the point where a single press could produce 72,000 eight-page papers in sixty minutes—or 576,000 sheets per hour—nearly 2,000 times more than had been possible just sixty years earlier.
And those presses were churning out more newspapers than ever before. In 1870 there were 3,500 papers in the United States. A mere twenty years later, that number had more than tripled to 12,000. By the mid-1890s, it was fair to conclude, as writer J. W. Keller did, that “the modern newspaper is the greatest power on earth. In comparison with it every other individual influence sinks into insignificance.”
That explosive growth and influence changed the nature of the industry. Competition now reigned. Papers became an entertainment vehicle—aimed at appealing to as broad a swath of the population as possible as they battled to survive in a suddenly gl
utted field. Their business model changed as well, as the focus shifted from subscriptions to advertising. In the mid-1870s, ads accounted for about 35 percent of the industry’s revenue. By the turn of the century, that number had swelled to 90 percent. Writer and publisher Frank Munsey observed that newspapers had become “a business enterprise, pure and simple, conducted with business instincts and business energy.”
The advent of the sports section was an offshoot of that competition for circulation and advertising dollars. Sports coverage had gradually increased since the days of the Sullivan–Caunt fight, to the point where it had become a newspaper staple by the early 1880s. It was during the next twenty years, though, that sports writing really took off. It’s impossible to credit one single person for that change, given the gradual nature of the process, but Charles Dana of the Sun, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, and William Randoph Hearst of the New York Journal all played significant roles. Between 1881 and 1893, the World’s sports coverage increased six-fold, while the Sun’s expanded fifteen-fold. Hearst got into the game a little late, as he didn’t purchase the Journal until 1895, but he quickly upped the ante. “Finding his rivals running from three to seven columns of sport news daily,” historian William Nugent noted, “he doubled, trebled and quadrupled the space.” Once readers got a taste of the sports coverage, they wanted more. As historian Michael Oriard put it, “Sport both benefitted from and contributed to the newspaper revolution of the era: sports coverage attracted readers, who in turn looked to daily newspapers to satisfy their growing desire for more and more sport. College football, initially, was simply a beneficiary.”