JRN 362 - Lecture Seven

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Seven

Review
• Football surged in popularity despite
concerns over its brutality at the turn
of the 20th century.
• As this cover from Puck magazine,
mothers urged sons to play football –
returning home with their shield or on
it in a satirical reference to Sparta.

Review
• For one, football was grounded in the
“institutional fabric of Christendom” –
the eastern colleges of Harvard,
Princeton and Yale, as sociologist
Thorsten Veblen argued in 1918.
• Camp hard-wired Muscular
Christianity into the game.

Review
• Rule changes kept critics at bay and
worked to open play, permitting
passing and thus giving fans a more
appealing game to watch because
they could see the ball from the
beginning to the end of a play.
• The golden age was soon to begin.

Review
• Why did that Golden Age emerge?

Review
• Service football had introduced the
game to millions of young men during
World War I.
• A generation of boys had grown up
on football books about heroic
fictional players such as Frank
Merriwell.

Review
• And then there was something else:
the dream life football presented to
young and old like alike as a cultural
signifier.

The Golden Age
• In 1994, former sportswriter Leonard
Koppett created a list of seven
cultural attributes that made football
and other spectator sports unusual in
the firmament of entertainment in
America:

The Golden Age
1. Comprehensibility
2. Continuity
3. Readability
4. Coherence
5. Hazard
6. Low cost
7. Vicarious experience

The Golden Age
• Vicarious experience as defined by
Koppett is more pronounced in
football than other sport.
• As such, It served as a propulsive
agent for football in the 1920s.

The Golden Age
“… With all my heart do I admire
Athletes who sweat for fun or hire
Who take the field in gaudy pomp
And maim each other as they romp
My limp and bashful spirit feeds
On other people’s heroic deeds … ’’
- Ogden Nash/Confessions of a Born
Spectator.

The Golden Age
• Vicarious living in football:
a. Violence
b. Triumph
c. Second-guessing (sports
commentary)
d. Patriotism (Wilson’s
letter)

The Golden Age
• That’s why football became such an
important subject for “electric” media
emerging in the 1920s:
1. Film
2. Radio
• Hollywood amplified the American
Dream Life of ecstasy and violence,
creating myths.

The Golden Age
• As the 1920s deepened, football’s
structural advantages in both cultural
and physical terms elevated it to the
top tier of entertainment. It owned
autumn in the U.S.
• All of football is professional, wrote
one sportswriter as a new pro league
formed. And he meant the college
game, too.

The Golden Age
• To illustrate the power of football,
take a report published in 1933.
• The President’s Commission on
Recent Social Trends, published in
1933, reported on the state of the
nation in great detail with both
statistics and analysis.

The Golden Age
• Athletics caught the attention of the
authors of the study, and one sport –
football – stood out.

The Golden Age
• “Evidence of the popularity of games,
played by both professional and
amateur teams, can be found in the
increasing size of grandstands and
stadia, the large amount of space
given to sports by news-papers, and
the broadcasting of games play by
play over nationwide networks of
radio stations …

The Golden Age
• “... Following the fortunes of favorite
teams and players is an important
leisure time pursuit for large numbers
of people …

The Golden Age
• “… Among athletic sports which are
popular public spectacles, college
football has outstanding public
support. The whole nation demands
information concerning victories and
defeats of better-known teams, and
the accomplishments of the more
successful players also receive wide
publicity.”

The Golden Age
• The report noted that between 1921
and 1930. attendance at college
games doubled.
• Baseball, meanwhile, faltered as
attendance, while strong, grew by
only 11.5 percent, or about half of the
population growth in the cities where
Major League teams played.

The Golden Age
• “The spectacular increase in
attendance at football games during
the past decade has been
accompanied by a wave of
grandstand and stadium building far
surpassing any previous
development of this kind.”

The Golden Age
• Scholar Ronald A. Smith concluded
that the animating motivation behind
the construction of campus stadia for
football stemmed from the desire to
keep games away from cities such as
New York.

The Golden Age
• “The desire for stadiums to be built
on college campuses, rather than
using those in large cities such as
New York, was a perceived need if
the games were to be kept away from
the supposed evil influence of the big
city …,” Smith wrote.

The Golden Age
• The sites were on the fringes of
campus, away from urban or college
centers.
• Wooden stands boxed in the field.

The Golden Age
• As noted, in 1903 Harvard became
the first college to build a concrete
stadium, funded by alumni, to
underscore the sense that football
would be a permanent part of the
collegiate experience.

The Golden Age
• Yale followed in 1914 with a stadium
more than twice the size of Harvard’s.

The Golden Age
• Also in 1914, Princeton opened
Palmer Stadium, the third concrete
football edifice.
• That meant the Big Three – Harvard,
Yale and Princeton – all featured
permanent football stadiums
(although Palmer is now gone).
Colleges elsewhere took notice.

The Golden Age
• Regardless of the motivation,
stadiums rose seemingly everywhere
to host football games.

The Golden Age
• Seating capacity increased from 929,523 in 1920 to 2.3 million in 1930.
• Until 1920, only one stadium held 70,000 spectators – the Yale Bowl. By the
end of the decade, seven could hold 70,000 or more.
• Note that some are named Memorial, as football stadiums became linked to
the patriotic impulses of the nation. That helped to secure financing and
support.

The Golden Age
• Competition among schools also worked to support the rush to build stadia.
• Interestingly, schools in the midwest and the west outpaced schools in the
birthplace of modern football in constructing massive structures for football.
• That signaled a physical shift in the game’s geographic core, from the east
to the football crescent rimming the Great Lakes in the upper midwest, the
south and the west.

The Golden Age
• The University of Michigan began the
decade at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor.
• The university decided to build a new
stadium and happily took the design
of the Yale Bowl as a model, opening
Michigan Stadium in 1927.

The Golden Age
• The building boom included the west
coast, where Washington built a
stadium in Seattle.

The Golden Age
• Even Stanford, which had banned
football in 1906, revived its varsity in
Palo Alto after World War I and
proceeded to build a stadium that,
like Michigan, was modeled on the
Yale Bowl.

The Golden Age
• Stanford’s archival, the University of
California, which had banned football
in 1906, built a massive edifice of its
own upon reinstatement of its football
team.
• California Memorial Stadium opened
in 1923.

The Golden Age
• To the south in Pasadena, city
leaders likewise found the Yale Bowl
design appealing.
• The city built the Rose Bowl in 1922,
in a nod to the Yale Bowl and to an
annual post-season game first held in
Pasadena earlier in the century.
Hence, post-season games are
bowls.

The Golden Age
• Nearby Los Angeles joined the trend,
too, building the Memorial Coliseum
in 1923.
• It was named in honor of World War I
veterans, as were many stadiums in
the 1920s (and again in the 1960s
but named directly in honor of all
veterans).

The Golden Age
• Construction work wasn’t entirely
absent in the east during the 1920s.
• In Philadelphia, Franklin Field rose to
host University of Pennsylvania
games. It opened in 1926.

The Golden Age
• Some 74 of the new stadiums built in the 1920s were made of concrete and
included footings designed for expansion if necessary.
• Michigan, for example, expanded from its base of 70,000 seats to more than
100,000 by the turn of the 21st century.
• The concrete foundations of the stadiums proved that college football was
now a permanent part of the American landscape.

The Golden Age
• The construction frenzy revealed the role of college football to be something
more than a test of manliness for students.
• Now, the game would be about selling tickets to pay back the money
borrowed to build these temples to the college game.
• Even the top coach of the period, Knute Rockne of Notre Dame,
acknowledged the reality of it all, and this was before the university built a
stadium of its own.

The Golden Age
• “These new stadiums are mighty fine,
but they simply add to the worries of
a coach … Some of the stadiums
cost as much as $200,000. Forgetting
football for a minute and taking up
frenzied finance, it is easy to figure
that a team must take in about
$100,000 profit before it pays the
interest on the investment …

The Golden Age
• “For a coach to turn out a bad team
with a stadium to worry as well as the
players makes the job all the harder.
In football the fans like a winner as in
baseball and a poor team puts an
awful dent in the receipts.”

The Golden Age
• Even Walter Camp worried.
• “We may have gone too far in the
erection of huge bowls, and
stadiums, but time alone can tell.
Meantime these structures yield the
necessary funds to support not only
the major but minor sports, and to
defray the general athletic upkeep,”
he wrote.

The Golden Age
• Camp‘s worries went deeper than
that.
• The 1920s would test his moral
worldview of football as a game ruled
by the spirit of amateurism and fair
play.
• But by the 1920s pro football was
finally ready to emerge.

The Golden Age
• As noted in the first quarter of the
class, the man whom Walter Camp
considered the paragon of football
virtue William “Pudge” Heffelfinger
because the first play to be paid to
play when he signed to appear in a
game in 1892.

The Golden Age
• The first all-professional football
game took place in 1895, between
Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and the
Jeannette Athletic Club.
• Two years later, paid players
appeared for clubs throughout
western Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The Golden Age
• In 1899, the Morgan Athletic Club
was founded in Chicago. It later
became the Chicago Cardinals, and
after a stop in St. Louis, moved to
Arizona, where it still plays today as
the oldest pro team in the U.S.

The Golden Age
• It is here, in the football crescent
rimming the Great Lakes and
mountains of coal country, that
professional football took root.
• And the center of football gravity
would inexorably shift there by the
start of the 1920s for college, too.

The Golden Age
• The crescent stretches from upstate
New York to the east to Illinois and
Wisconsin (and to a lesser extent
Minnesota) to the west, forming an
arc, supported by western
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, northern
Indiana, Ohio and northern Kentucky.

The Golden Age
• The crescent dwarfed the eastern
cradle of football.

The Golden Age
• This large crowd at a high school
game in Ohio between Massillon and
Canton foreshadowed the shape of
things to come as the football
crescent proved to be fertile ground
for training the next generation of
players – and would for generations

The Golden Age
• Even before the 1920s, a gap had
emerged between the east and west
coasts in approaches to football even
though western schools hired alumni
from Yale and other eastern colleges
to introduce football to the campuses.

The Golden Age
• In the 1890s, a San Francisco writer
Frank Norris sought to define the
“western college man” as distinct
from his eastern counterpart.

The Golden Age
• The westerner “comes back from the
mountains, or, perhaps, from the
desert with hair long and his chin
rough with an incipient beard and the
skin burnt off his nose ... Then he
settles to the grooves of his college
life again … [and] returns to the
serious business of the fall term,
which is coaching the football team.”
Norris wrote.

The Golden Age
• Still, eastern college teams controlled
the rules, and that would create a
deep psychological gap between
teams on the east coach and teams
west of central Pennsylvania.
• And one coach - Rockne - would
represent this shift from Camp’s
moral code of football to one that
reflected contemporary culture.

The Golden Age
• Rockne would set the template for the modern football coach: part scientist,
all motivator.
• First, though, we will examine what developed outside of college football.
• That development, the pro game, would give college players a chance to
chase fame and money after their eligibility ended even though college
coaches urged their players to pursue other things.

JRN 362 - Lecture Seven

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JRN 362 - Lecture Seven