The Ball (25 page)

“Out of the Game,” from
Harper's Weekly
, 1891.

Harvard-Yale games were particularly prone to carnage. When he played for the Bulldogs, Frederic Remington, the flamboyant western artist and sculptor, was known to dip his uniform in blood from a local slaughterhouse before games to make it “more businesslike.”

Charles Eliot, Harvard's president, emerged as the leading spokesman of the reform movement. Along with other prominent college presidents at the time, Eliot was at the forefront of building what Mark Bernstein describes as a “new empire of the mind” governed by science and reason. Football had no place in Eliot's vision of the university. Though claiming to appreciate the value of athletics in moderation, Eliot saw football as, at best, an unwanted distraction from academics. At worst, he argued, the game brought out violent tendencies in both players and spectators that had no place in civilized society. “To become brutal and brutalizing,” he wrote, “is the natural tendency of all sports which involve violent personal collision between the players.”

In a foreshadowing of recent medical inquiries into collision-induced brain trauma, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
in 1902 supported Eliot and the reformers with a report suggesting that football was becoming a public health concern. Reviewing that season's “very respectable record of casualties, enough to supply a respectable Spanish-American War,” the editors reported 12 deaths, several fatal injuries, 80-plus serious injuries. “To be a cripple or lunatic for life is paying high for athletic emulation.”

Although he regretted the reports of injury and death, Camp thought them exaggerated and quickly turned his focus on mounting a defense of his beloved sport. Even as other coaches pushed for the abolition of mass momentum plays, like the flying wedge, Camp defended the strategy as a “piece of clever headwork.” Contrary to Eliot, Camp believed that football built character and “manliness” in young men, preparing them to live lives as leaders. Like many contemporaries, he believed in the “survival of the fittest” and viewed the gridiron as a proving ground. His views on the subject were unquestionably influenced by his close friend and brother-in-law, William Graham Sumner, the leading proponent of Social Darwinism.

To build his case for football, Camp sent out a questionnaire to hundreds of former players, coaches, doctors, and administrators to gather objective evidence on both the dangers and benefits of the game. He captured and published the testimonials in
Football Facts and Figures: A Symposium of Expert Opinions on the Game's Place in American Athletics
, a 230-page manifesto for football as a safe, valuable, and morally upright pastime. It has been suggested since that Camp discarded 20 percent of the responses in order to arrive at the right conclusion.

In Camp's report, a professor from Yale presented his findings that football was an “intellectual game,” presenting evidence that Ivy League football players had higher academic achievement than those who played baseball or rowed. One former player declared that “besides the ‘humanities' which were dinged into me in the classroom, I value what some would be pleased to call the ‘inhumanities' dinged into me on the football field.” Along with the physical benefits, carefully delineated in a chart comparing lung capacity and leg and neck girth of players and nonplayers, the “moral effects” of the game were touted, including courage, self-control, respect for authority, and manliness. Football, one expert argued, produced “God-fearing men, upright in action and clean of speech.” Harvard's surgeon, Dr. Conant, downplayed the injuries caused by the game, concluding that most consisted of ankle and knee sprains. The coach at Pennsylvania even suggested that many players who got hurt were “playing baby on the field.”

Camp sent copies of his study to a number of influential leaders, including Theodore Roosevelt, serving at the time on the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt was a fan of rough sports and regarded football as the best way for a young man to build character. After reading the study, he wrote Camp a letter of support, concluding that football's risks were no worse than those of boxing or polo. “I would rather see my boys play it, than see them play any other [sport].” The opponents of the game were, in his view, “timid.” And though he was open to reasonable reform of the game, he quoted another Yalee and future president, William Howard Taft, who said that he preferred reformers “who ate roast beef and were able to make their blows felt in the world.”

Eliot and other vocal critics regarded football as a primitive throwback, out of place in a progressive age dominated by science and reason. But the new gilded class harbored concerns that their college-graduate sons, doted upon and spoiled with money and idle time, were coming up soft and losing their edge and pluck in the process. In a chest-thumping call to arms for Harvard's graduating class of 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes exhorted the elite of the effete to embrace blood sport as part of the “soldier's faith”:

Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism. . . . Therefore I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued. . . . If once in a while in our rough riding a neck is broken, I regard it, not as a waste, but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.

Holmes's call to the wild was well received and continues to be heard. As Michael Oriard has documented in
King Football
, every attempt over the decades to make the game less violent has run into concerns over “sissifying” the game. Football was always a man's game, a sport that defined and celebrated the masculine ideal. In the postwar boom of the 1920s, for example, college football's rugged violence was regarded by many as a healthy counterbalance to an increasingly feminized culture where men sported raccoon coats, listened to jazz, and attended tea parties. “Modern life,” as Oriard puts it, “was
soft
 . . . football was
hard
.”

The flying wedge only lasted a couple of years before being abolished, but in its wake came a host of other momentum plays and backfield strategies designed to take out vulnerable defensemen. The era of “trench warfare” reached a new low point in 1905, a season in which 18 young men died and 159 were seriously injured. Roosevelt, now president and father of two sons about to play college ball, felt the need to intervene, as much to save football as to save lives. He called Camp and other representatives from the Big Three—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—to the White House with the intent of making the game “not soft but honest.” The attendees pledged to follow the spirit and law of the rules. But the brutality continued. Harvard tackle Karl Brill made news when he quit the team, declaring, “I believe that the human body was not made to withstand the enormous strain that football demands. It is a mere gladiatorial contest.” That season, Columbia University, Northwestern, Union College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropped their football programs. Stanford and the University of California went back to rugby, a more acceptable alternative to what American football had become.

Along with its brutality, another strike against football for its critics was the rising professionalism in the college game. More than 30 years after baseball's first professional association was formed, football supporters, including Camp, still held fast to the amateur ideal and decried the “tramp athletes” and “ringers” some college teams were recruiting on the sly. As early as 1894, seven of Michigan's 11 starters weren't even enrolled in the school but were farmhands or steelworkers brought in to work the gridiron on weekends. Critics saw brutality and professionalism going hand in hand, as gate receipts drove a “win at any cost” mentality into the sport—a mentality reformers have fought in vain ever since.

“Football of the Future,” from
Harper's Weekly
, November 1889.

Attempts at real reform began in earnest in 1906 when 38 schools came together to form the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (ICAA), later renamed the NCAA. The purpose of the rules that emerged that year were, as a
New York Times
report stated, to “ ‘open up the game'—that is, to provide for the natural elimination of the so-called mass plays and bring about a game in which speed and real skill shall supersede so far as possible mere brute strength and force of weight.” An extra referee was added to enforce existing rules against kneeing, kicking, punching, and other excessive roughness. The requirement for a first down was bumped up to 10 yards. But the greatest innovation that emerged to nudge football toward modernity was the legalization of the forward pass.

The forward pass was nothing new. Players had experimented with it for years, but the limitations and penalties imposed on throwing the ball made it more of a desperation play than a core strategy. Passes could only be thrown from five yards behind the line of scrimmage and had to be thrown to either side of center. Incomplete passes resulted in a 15-yard penalty on first and second downs and a turnover on the third. If a pass went out of bounds, possession went to whichever team retrieved it first. The forward pass became an instant game-changer in the 1906 season, even though the best quarterbacks could only throw the watermelon-shaped ball 20 yards or so. Amos Alonzo Stagg claimed that by that first season he was already running 64 different forward-pass patterns.

T
o encourage the more open and safer passing game, the NCAA in 1912 reduced the size of the football to dimensions that Barbara, the Wilson football inspector in Ada, could almost sign off on: “It shall be tightly inflated. . . . Circumference, long axis, from 28 inches to 28½ inches; short axis 22½ to 23 inches. Weight, from 14 to 15 ounces.” That same year the committee shortened the field to add end zones and permitted touchdown passes over the goal line for the first time, giving quarterbacks a new target and the prolate spheroid a reason to exist.

Not everyone was a fan of the passing game, though. Walter Camp fought it tooth and nail, and as late as the 1930s Jock Sutherland, University of Pittsburgh's coach, stated that “throwing laterals is an attempt to sissify a man's game and there is no fun in getting over the ground that way.” Pitt, unlike their softer competitors, was, he declared with testosterone-laced bravado, “a sock-it-to-'em school.”

With mass plays a thing of the past, and the forward pass opening up the game to hundreds of new play patterns, football evolved into the game of “contact ballet” it is today. But as Camp learned early on as he tweaked and tested new rules, changes designed to make the game safer can also have the opposite effect. Helmets, introduced as protection and required in the NFL starting in 1943, are today used as weapons. Tackles that used to take place over short distances and involved mostly arms and shoulders are now high-speed helmet attacks. And the same forward pass that rescued football from the brink in 1906 created more room for players to gather deadly speed and momentum. Troy Polamalu, the All-Pro Steelers safety who has been dragged to the ground more times than he can count (including once by his wild mane of Samoan hair), has pointed to the passing game as it's evolved as a reason for the rise in head injuries, including the seven concussions he's had:

In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn't see too many of these big hits, because there wasn't so much space between players. I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there's more space between these big hits.

According to Timothy Gay, author of
The Physics of Football
, an average defensive back's mass combined with his speed—40 yards in 4.56 seconds—can produce up to 1,600 pounds of force on collision. And that assumes the other guy is standing still.

L
ess than two weeks after Super Bowl XLV, Dave Duerson, the Pro-Bowl safety who helped lead the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl victory in 1985 and did the same for the New York Giants in 1990, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. In a final text message to his family, he wrote: “Please see that my brain is given to the NFL's brain bank.” Duerson had deliberately spared his brain so it could be studied for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated concussions and head trauma in football.

To date, some two dozen retired NFL players, including Duerson, have been found to have suffered from CTE, which can only be identified by autopsy. Most of them battled depression, many had run-ins with the law, and several ended their lives by suicide. “Iron Mike” Webster of the Pittsburgh Steelers took to living in train stations and tazing himself to relieve chronic pain. Fellow Steelers lineman Terry Long killed himself by drinking antifreeze, and his teammate Justin Strzelczyk died in a high-speed police chase by driving head-on at 90 mph into a tanker truck. After years of repeated collisions on the gridiron, the brain tissue of these large, muscle-bound men was found to resemble that of an 80-year-old suffering from Alzheimer's disease.