JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Seven (September 20, 2016)

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Seven

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football




Review• Football surged in popularity

during the first part of the 20th century despite concerns over its brutality.

• As this cover from Puck magazine suggests in a satirical way, mothers wanted their sons to play football – returning home with their shield or on it in a reference to Spartan glory.


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 – for the most part.

• The golden age was soon to begin.


Review• Why did that Golden Age

emerge?


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 Age1. Comprehensibility2. Continuity3. Readability4. Coherence5. Hazard6. Low cost7. 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 admireAthletes who sweat for fun or hireWho take the field in gaudy pompAnd maim each other as they rompMy limp and bashful spirit feedsOn other people’s heroic deeds … “

- Ogden Nash/Confessions of a Born Spectator.


The Golden Age• Vicarious living in football:

a. Violenceb. 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. Film2. Radio

• Hollywood amplified the American Dream Life of ecstasy and violence, creating fresh myths for decades.


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.

• “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. Every city has its athletes whose prowess is a matter of local pride and concern. 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• Prior to the building boom to meet demand that started at the turn

of the century and stopped only because of World War I, football games were played in fields such as this one in New Haven.

• 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.

• Other edifices consisted of wooden bleachers that boxed in the field.


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 stadia.

• Colleges elsewhere took notice.



The Golden Age• The scholar Smith wrote that colleges wanted to segregate

themselves from the urban masses in planning the first large wave of stadia construction.

• “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 … Historically, most colleges and universities in America were located away from urban areas, in part to keep young scholars away from the temptations of the cities,” Smith wrote.


The Golden Age• Regardless of the motivation,

stadia 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.

• The following chart summarizes the spasm of stadia building in the 1920s.

• Note that some are named Memorial, as football stadia 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 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. More on this later.


The Golden Age• The University of Michigan

began the decade at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor.

• The university decided to build a new stadium to meet demand and happily took the design of the Yale Bowl as a model.

• And opened Michigan Stadium in 1927.




The Golden Age• The building boom included the West coast, where Washington

built a stadium in Seattle (next slide).



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.

• California Memorial Stadium opened in 1923.



The Golden Age• To the south in Pasadena, city leaders likewise found the Yale Bowl

design to their liking.

• The city built the Rose Bowl in 1922, so called in a nod to the Yale Bowl and to an annual post-season game first held in Pasadena earlier in the century.

• It started the pattern of naming post-season games as bowl games.



The Golden Age• Nearby Los Angeles joined the fun, too, building the Memorial

Coliseum in 1923.

• It was named in honor of World War I veterans, as were many stadia in the 1920s (and again in the 1960s).



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 stadia 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 stadia proved that college football was now a permanent part of the American landscape, from East to West.


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. Let me explain. 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– to a

point:

• “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.”


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 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, Penn., 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 term football crescent describes the states either pinned

against the Great Lakes in the upper midwest or adjacent to states that border the Great Lakes.

• Here’s a rough map that establishes the crescent, with upstate New York to the east and 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• This large crowd at a high school game in Ohio between Massillon

and Canton foreshadows 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• 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 would represent this shift from Walter Camp’s moral code of football to one that stood as more representative of the roaring 1920s.

• His name? Knute Rockne, who transformed a tiny school in Indiana into the first national team. That’s him on the left in 1920 at Harvard (next slide).



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.

Education

JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Seven (September 20, 2016)