‘That’s the week I scored a touchdown for the Falcons and hit a home run for the Yankees, so that was a special time for me, too.’

 – Deion Sanders, Power, Money, & Sex: How Success Almost Ruined My Life

1

American football was never invented; it was fashioned by committee, over a span of decades. The first college All-Americans list went to press in 1889, seventeen years before the game’s adoption of the forward pass, thirty-eight years before the first recorded sighting of the ball now claimed as its namesake. 1905 was a catalyst year, the year the sitting president of the United States got involved. Teddy Roosevelt counted himself an advocate for the sport, professing the belief that the game’s inherent violence was wholesome for the character of American boys. When he spoke on the subject he made vague and ominous references to future difficulties, saying the boys would need to be tough for the times to come. Yet it had been brought to his attention that the sport was infected with an ungentlemanly virus, that cheaters and hoodlums plagued collegiate football, and that schoolboys were being coached in the art of ‘mucker play’ – the deliberate injuring of an opponent in order to remove him from the game.

There were reasons for concern. In the wanton day of mass-formation play, of the Princeton V and the flying wedge, football was averaging about fourteen players killed per annum. Chancellors, athletic directors, and boards of overseers were under pressure to ban the sport. Roosevelt wanted to avoid that outcome. Three universities controlled the rules committee of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA): Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and so Roosevelt summoned representatives from all three to meet with him at the White House on 9 October 1905. Football was on trial, said Roosevelt. To save the game, the IFA would need to reform it. There was only the matter of how.

The forward pass was suggested. At the time, a player could throw the ball backwards or laterally but not upfield. The team on defense could commit all its players to attacking the offense’s backfield, and the offense didn’t have much chance outside of out-bludgeoning the defense. Scoring was rare and far from assured. Apart from the violence, the games were uneventful slogs, melees, devoid of finesse. Some hoped a forward pass would change things – players would be more spread out; the game better balanced, safer, more dynamic. With more field to take into account, teams would not concentrate into mass formations, and defenses would have to commit players to guard the area behind their lines.

The Yale contingent balked at the idea. They suspected Roosevelt had an ulterior motive: helping his alma mater Harvard (their arch rival) gain an advantage over them. Representing Yale was Walter Camp, the (unofficial) director of its football team. Camp was no lightweight: the line of scrimmage; the eleven men on a side (down from fifteen); the safety penalty and it being worth two points; the point system itself – all these and more were his contributions to the genesis of the game. He had been in attendance at the 1873 meeting when the IFA was formed; his name was on the rule book; in 1892 Harper’s Weekly had called him ‘the father of American football’. It would be a great help for Roosevelt’s reform initiative if he could talk Camp into throwing his support behind it.

This seemed within the realm of possibility. Camp’s crowning achievement, the line of scrimmage, had been a player-safety measure. When he took it to the Rules Committee, he brought statistics that showed the greatest number of injuries happened in scrums. If Camp had been for improving player safety then, it stood to reason he could be coaxed to be so again. But the forward pass was anathema to Camp, for whom the essence of the sport was the ground attack. In his game, an edge was sought by forming as many of your players into as fine a point as possible and running it through the adversarial body. Football strategists of the day thought in terms of phalanxes and legions, studied battle formations back to ancient Macedonia in search of an insight, some irresistible spearhead lost to time.

However much Roosevelt dug him, Camp wasn’t won over. He wasn’t some uneducated sucker – he was a Yale man, a member of Skull and Bones, and the top power broker in football, a schemer with a $100,000 slush fund who for decades had been calling the shots for the Eli of Yale from his office at the New Haven Clock Company. The White House meeting adjourned with no promise from Camp beyond a commitment to join the others in issuing a public condemnation of mucker play, and a pledge to clean up the game from any disgraceful, unsportsmanlike or immoral element.

Roosevelt was quick to declare victory. In a letter to Camp, he expressed effusive satisfaction, writing of his trust in the integrity of the football men and in their ability to enact reforms that would restore the game to good standing. Seven weeks later, three players were killed, all on one Saturday, 25 November 1905. The names of the dead ran in the Chicago Tribune: ‘Those Killed Yesterday . . . OSBORN, CARL, 18 years old, Marshall, Ind.: killed in game of Judson high school vs. Bellmore high school; injured in tackle, rib piercing heart and killing him almost instantly . . . MOORE, WILLIAM, right half back of Union college; killed in game with New York university; fractured skull in bucking the line: died in hospital . . . Fatally Injured . . . BROWN, ROBERT, 15 years old, Sedalia, Mo.; paralyzed from neck down; dying.’ The headline read: football year’s death harvest: records show that nineteen players have been killed; one hundred thirty-seven hurt.

Over that Thanksgiving break, Columbia, Duke, and Northwestern universities went ahead and banned football, having lost patience with the Rules Committee. Predictably, Roosevelt was outraged and vowed action. Using his executive powers as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces, he ordered the military academies to come to their own consensus on a new set of rules. He wasn’t the only one making moves. Chancellor of New York University Henry MacCracken and Harvard coach Bill Reid were arranging an emergency meeting of sixty-two colleges and universities. The newly assembled body called itself the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. Its first order of business was to take a vote on whether or not to ban football. A general ban fell short by two votes. The next step was to revise the rules. Camp had been usurped – not being present he was unable to argue for the sanctity of the ground attack. Legalization of the forward pass was a foregone conclusion.

The first legal forward pass was attempted on the first weekend of the 1906 season. Bradbury Robinson of St Louis University tried it out against Carroll College. The pass fell incomplete, which made the play illegal. In the 1906 rules, a forward pass was legal only if completed – an incomplete pass was a penalty, and the penalty was a turnover, which meant the passing team lost possession of the ball. Here was the problem: the forward pass had only been legalized by half measures, relegated to the status of a trick play, a play you ought to be embarrassed to try, that you should be penalized for if unsuccessful. You could try to shoot the devil in the back, but if you missed then the devil got the ball and, in the name of the father of American football, God willing, rammed it down your throat, ground-and-pound style. There was still no penalty for pass interference, which meant the defense was at liberty to tackle the receiver mid-route. Anybody stout enough to run a pass route and not get knocked down was unlikely to have enough speed to get open and vice versa. Most teams stuck to the ground game.

Camp continued politicking for the repeal of the forward pass, on the grounds it left the outcome of games too much to chance, that an undeserving team might win. His time dictating the precepts of the sport meant that he still held sway over football men throughout the country, and many were not quick to relinquish the philosophy they had imbibed from him. But the problem for opponents to the forward pass was that players kept dying. The 1909 season saw twenty-six players killed in action. As had been going on for thirty years, most of the dead were high-school players – to put it another way, children – and less and less did people care what the Father of American Football was saying about the essence of the game.

The 1910 season was inaugurated with the forward pass on equal legal footing as run plays. The new era could now begin in earnest. Purists of the day said American football was ruined forever.

2

Out of these ruins green shoots did grow, and a new game flowered and spread. The forward pass proved to be an equalizer. Before the forward pass, whoever could acquire the most body, the most beef, was the favorite to win. Now speed, agility, timing, and field vision counted almost as much as pure violence. Glenn Scobey ‘Pop’ Warner perceived these things, since he had an interest in working them to his advantage. When he first arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to take over the job as head coach of the Carlisle Indians, the team had already competed against top schools and held their own well enough. But Carlisle’s teams tended to be underweight, shorter in height and reach than their competition. To overcome this they outmaneuvered, out-schemed, and out-executed their opponents. Warner was an established journeyman coach, with a reputation for running up the score on the other team. He was ready for the forward pass. In 1911, Warner and Carlisle went 11–1.

The next year, the Carlisle team won its most poetic victory:
9 November 1912, Carlisle Indian Industrial School versus Army at West Point. Three thousand were in attendance, and the symbolism not lost on one of them. Warner professed himself not one for pregame speeches, but in this case he made an exception: ‘I shouldn’t have to prepare you for this game, just go read your history books. Remember that it was the fathers and grandfathers of these Army players who fought your fathers and grandfathers in the Indian Wars. Remember it was their fathers and grandfathers who killed your fathers and grandfathers. Remember this, every play. These men playing against you are the soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are Indians. Tonight, we will know if you are warriors.’

The game was remembered for its roughness. Carlisle got off to a shaky start, shut out for most of the first half by a score of 6–0. The second half was another story. Warner’s star tailback Jim Thorpe ran riot. The Army team went to pieces. The Cadets targeted Thorpe. Mucker play. But Thorpe was ‘impervious to injury’, and the attention Army paid him freed up Alex Arcasa at halfback to score three touchdowns. Army kept trying to move the ball on offense and showed a spark of life when freshman halfback Dwight ‘the Kansas Cyclone’ Eisenhower ripped off a twelve-yard run almost to midfield, not quite into Carlisle territory. Eisenhower tried to knock Thorpe out of the game, went for him so hard he missed the mark when Thorpe juked him and crashed into the Army halfback Leland Hobbs instead. Hobbs had to be carried off the field. Eisenhower sat out the rest of the game with a knee injury – the Kansas Cyclone would never play again. Carlisle didn’t let off after that. The game was called a few minutes early due to a lack of light. Carlisle beat Army 27–6.

The Army team captain, first-team All-American tackle Leland Devore had been disqualified for unnecessary roughness. Devore would go on to take part in Black Jack Pershing’s ‘Punitive Expedition’ against Mexico in 1916, and then to serve as an infantry officer in France, where he would be wounded, one of several American football standouts to be injured in the Great War. The linebacker, Eisenhower, missed that one; perhaps his knee kept him out or perhaps he was just lucky. The Second World War he wasn’t as lucky. The Army put him in charge of Overlord; he was smoking five packs of cigarettes a day; he had an affair with his secretary; he tried to resign; the Chief of Staff laughed in his face, told him to get real, told him to mash the button. And he did the deed. Americans were so grateful they elected him president, and they liked the job he did so much they elected him again. At the end of his second term, in a speech to the Republican National Committee, his thoughts wandered to his counterpart from the Carlisle–Army game of 1912: ‘Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.’

Such was the stature and reputation of Wa-Tho-Huk (Bright Path), government name James Francis Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation. Jim Thorpe became the greatest football player of all time. He was among the first players for the National Football League, a new professional league founded in 1920 – now the highest-grossing league in American sport.

Thorpe went on to fame and glory – Pop Warner to a season of infamy. He was discovered by the Department of Interior to be in league with Carlisle superintendent Moses Friedman playing fast and loose with the money. Carlisle was foul to begin with, the school being an instrument of genocide. The students, young Native American men and women, were taught that their cultures were inferior to European culture, forced to disown their customs and rituals and to attend Christian religious services. The food was
rough, the discipline strict, the books cooked. Of the over 10,000 youths to attend Carlisle since its founding, hundreds had died and many were buried there, far from home, under names that were not their own.

The public image of Pop Warner, surrogate father, leader of men, benevolent genius, progressive white man: it was exposed as a fake. The players knew who Warner was. They knew he was getting rich off of them or else he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Perhaps the most striking example was the presence of Warner in hotel lobbies selling the comp tickets the home team gave the Carlisle team when they came to town to play. One Carlisle football player testified that he saw Warner sell seventy-five such tickets on one occasion, seventy-five being the total number of tickets the home team had set aside for the visitors. The player said he never found out what Warner did with that money. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was closed down in 1918. Taken over by the Department of the Army, it was converted to Base Hospital 31. Carlisle was forgotten. Army had its revenge.