Reviewed by Kathy London
Football always involves controversy. Sports news today is filled with debate about football and concussions. I just read a proposal to eliminate the kick-off to make the game more exciting. Debates stretch back over 100 years. This book by John J. Miller says the game of football originated shortly after the Civil War, when the game looked like rugby. The book explores the evolution of the game through the early 1900s.
The audience for Miller’s book seems limited. Readers interested in Roosevelt may find his biographical treatment too limited (though Miller promises this is a neglected episode in standard Roosevelt biographies). Fans involved in football controversies today may find 100-year old arguments irrelevant. I don’t know who will be interested in the personal lives of otherwise-obscure people who influenced the evolution of football.
The West was still wild when the game was first played. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won one of the most contentious and hotly disputed elections in our history. (He lost the popular vote but won the presidency. Such outcomes are not recent developments!) Organized sports were almost unknown in America. Football was played at elite ivy-league universities, and some people objected to the use of referees on the grounds that “gentlemen” shouldn’t need oversight.
Objections to violence in football were a social and political threat from the beginning. I can see why: Miller includes an appendix listing the annual deaths starting in 1905: Eighteen dead, 11 dead, 11, 13, 26! And this at a time when few colleges played football and there were no professional leagues. Football was brutal. One standing weekly game was called “Bloody Monday”.
Roosevelt’s journey through a sickly childhood to an obsessively-robust manhood is probably known to even casual readers. He first watched football in college at Harvard, but did not play. Roosevelt was a Progressive, involved in trust-busting, railroad regulation, food and drug regulation, child labor restrictions, alcohol prohibition, and the beginnings of Federal income tax. But he wanted to keep government out of sports. Roosevelt viewed football (and boxing, lacrosse, rowing, hockey, and other “sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation”) as necessary to “build men”.
Various famous names appear throughout Miller’s book: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Heisman, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, Bill Lewis (a black player in the 1890s), Knute Rockne, and Edgar Allan Poe (the author’s grand-nephew).
Oddly enough, even as football became more popular with students, the public, and alumni, many tried to ban it; notably the president of Harvard. After highly publicized deaths, there would be movements to ban or regulate football. The sport’s early promoters realized that football needed to change to survive. Rule changes pushed by promoters both reduced violence and “opened up” the game to make it easier for spectators to follow and enjoy.
I don’t think Miller completely makes his case that Roosevelt was pivotal to football’s survival. Roosevelt sponsored meetings to bring promoters and opponents together, but his role seems secondary. Miller admits that Roosevelt intentionally stayed off the record and behind the scenes. Still, Miller says “the man who coached Harvard during football’s most tumultuous episode never doubted the importance of what Roosevelt did…. ‘You ask me whether President Theodore Roosevelt helped save the game. I can tell you he did.’”