Rugby league was not the only football code for which 1906 was a pivotal year. In the United States and Canada, football was also consumed by a crisis over commercialism and the way the game was played. By the early 1900s American football dominated winter sport in the United States, attracting five-figure crowds that often exceeded those for baseball, and command-ing vast amounts of coverage in the press. College footballers had become celebrities, their exploits watched by tens of thousands and read about by millions more. The game was now the concern not only of university presidents, for whom the game provided considerable revenue, but of the U.S.
president himself, Teddy Roosevelt.2
Football’s importance to college life and the vast public that followed the game meant players were often covertly rewarded for their deeds and recruited purely for their football achievements rather than their scholarly abilities. Suspicions of professionalism, both in deed and in spirit, were legion. The desire to win at all cost had turned the game into a war of attri-tion. Football “was dominated by mass plays, allowing the offensive team to keep possession with wave after wave of charges through their opponents’
line. Tactics such as the ‘flying wedge’, where offensive players would link together as an arrowhead to force the ball-carrier through the defensive line,
148 The 1905-07 football crisis in North America also increased the risk of serious injury and death. In 1904 alone, twenty-one players were killed on the gridiron.3
By 1905 these concerns reached crisis point. At the start of the year
Harvard president Charles Eliot used his annual report to declare that ‘the American game of football as now played is wholly unfit for colleges and schools’. It was, he believed, promoting ‘great moral mischief ’ and should be prohibited, not least because football’s rule-makers could not be trusted to reform it. 4 ‘The main objection lies against the moral quality’, argued Eliot, that gave it a dangerous and ‘brutalizing’ nature. 5
Four months later, an article titled ‘The College Athlete: How commercialism is making him a professional’ by Henry Beach Needham in” “McClure’s Magazine, provided the hard evidence for Eliot’s concerns. The top college players, he argued, were effectively professionals and the commercial benefits of football to universities were now so great that the game could no longer claim to be an educative or moral force. 6 Football’s violence was a result of its embrace of competition and commercialism. The solution, he believed, lay ‘in the awakening of the spirit of true sport – fair play, and sport for sport’s sake.
blogpay
Total Comments: 0