The Roots of Football

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, October 2, 1996

I watch the NFL with some pleasure — pleasure of the sort felt by the ancient Romans when they went to the Colosseum. But though NFL football is 'better' than Ivy League football, it is also less interesting. The amateurs have more plays, use more tricks and deception, while the pros depend almost entirely on execution.

It also pains me when world-class universities like Stanford and Rockne's Notre Dame buy semi-pro teams with football scholarships. At Dartmouth the football players were like other students, weren't paid, showed up in my classes, and did
their work. I would hate to teach at one of the big football factories.

And once again the football season opens. The smack of the practice punt mingles with the smell of burning autumn leaves, and there is a chill in the air. Football weather.

Part of college football is its rich past, and I can recommend two fine books about this, Thomas Bergin's The Game (Yale), about the Harvard-Yale games, and the new Ivy League Autumns by Richard Goldstein (St. Martin's). They are rich in history and lore.

I suppose most football fans know that football originated back in the 1870s. In 1869, Princeton played Rutgers in a game that claims to be the origin — but what they played was really soccer. Harvard claims it started football, but what they were playing at about the same time was really English rugby. They and a few other colleges struggled to straighten out this confusing situation.

Walter Camp of Yale personally devised and imposed the game we now call football. Once, when Knute Rockne was asked where his famous Notre Dame 'shift' came from, he replied, 'Where everything else in football came from Yale.'

I am not a Yale man, but the Yale football tradition is — to use an undergraduate word 'awesome.'

To enter the grounds near the Yale Bowl you pass through the 'Walter Camp Gate,' a huge structure like some sort of Roman arch with columns — fitting enough given his achievements, but amazing when you think of his inconspicuous beginnings.

Walter Camp entered Yale as a freshman in 1876, the son of a New Haven school principal. Six feet tall and 157 pounds, he seemed to have played every sport: tennis, crew, track, swimming. He is even said to have invented the curve-ball pitch. But about football he was obsessive. He evidently developed a vision of the game that went far beyond the disorderly rumpus he played as a freshman.

While still an undergraduate, he attended discussions with Harvard and a few others about how to better organize the game, and began to shape it.

At Camp's urging, the number of players was held to eleven. He helped formalized the seven-man line and the four-man backfield. He thought up the center -snap instead of the chaotic Ruby 'scrum.' Camp thought up the 'downs' system. Until 1882, a team retained possession until it either scored, fumbled, or kicked the ball away to gain better position. This led to the lengthy and boring possessions. Camp's 'downs' system led to the drawing of white lines on the field to measure how far the ball advanced. He invented audible signal-calling.

He played seven years on the Yale team, including three while in medical school, serving as captain and coach. He never became a physician. Instead, he worked at the New Haven Clock Company and served as Yale's unpaid coach. When he had to be at the plant, his wife Alice, daughter of Yale's pioneering sociologist Professor William Graham Summer, walked the practice sideline and took notes for Camp. While he had been player-coach, Yale went 30-6.

Under his guidance, Yale was by far the dominant football power well into the early years of the twentieth century. They bought the first Bulldog mascot from a local blacksmith and taught him to growl at the word 'Harvard.'

Camp had towering Victorian integrity. In 1885, the Princeton team had an upcoming game against Yale in New Haven. They thought the previous year's referee, a Harvard man, was unacceptable, so he wasn't invited back. Remarkably, Yale's Walter Camp was acceptable. He called the game with ruthless impartiality, ruling against his own Yale team on two crucial plays as Princeton went on to win 6-5 in the final minute.

Richard Goldstein's book is rich in this material. Here's one fine anecdote, illustrating the intensity of feeling about football in its earlier period:

'A political science professor at Princeton named Woodrow Wilson — a former student football manager — also defended the sport. His wife, Ellen, said that her husband was so depressed over the school's first-ever loss to Penn (by 6-4 in 1892) that only fellow-Democrat Grover Cleveland's presidential election victory that week lifted his spirits. 'Really, I think Woodrow would have had some sort of collapse if we had lost in politics too,' she said.'

A follow up anecdote from my files. On the day he was elected President of the United States in 1912, Wilson, then Govenor of New Jersey, attended Princeton football practice.

Finally, his great rival in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, wrote, using football as a metaphor for life: 'In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and don't shirk, but hit the line hard.'

Wilson and T.R. were probably our two most scholarly Presidents. Think about that.

The Roots of Football

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