Sports Biblio Digest, 12.23.18: Walter Camp and the Shaping of College Football
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Washington Redskins; Mark Kram; Ice Skating Art; Mike Piazza’s Soccer Fiasco; A Sports Fashion Blogger; Transgender Athletes; Baseball Hibernation Reads; Remembering Penny Marshall
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The origins of American football are growing closer scrutiny as the sport has reached a crossroads over concussions and the future of the game.
The deathly evolution of the gridiron game, contested in its first decades mostly among a handful of elite Eastern universities, has been noted often in contemporary tellings. Theodore Roosevelt’s White House confabs with the game’s leaders were meant to address fatal violence on the field, and they largely had the desired effect.
Among those meeting with the Moose Bull President was Walter Camp, who did more than perhaps anyone to shape the rules of American football away from its rugby roots, and to evangelize for a game in the late Victorian fashion despite its inherent violence. Camp was synonymous with Yale University in the late 19th century and early 20th, a coach, player, rules-maker and author and writer who did all of that on the side, beyond his job as an executive with the New Haven Watch Company.
In “Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football,” published earlier this year by the University of Illinois Press, author Roger R. Tamte chronicles these developments in straightforward but compelling detail. A patent attorney who’s followed Camp’s life and work for years, Tamte takes a different path from Julie Des Jardins, a previous Camp biographer and an academic gender theorist who examined the notions of masculinity that prevailed during the time.
Tamte sticks to the prolific work of Camp in shaping the rules of the game, and writing about it for major publications. In the 1875 Harvard-Yale clash in which Camp played, negotiators approved a set of rules that favored rugby over the soccer that Yale had preferred: “On such a decision,” Tamte writes, “American football had its beginning.”
What Camp did over the next 50 years would be instrumental not only in the growth of the game, but also in helping it address early controversies that threatened its survival.
Most notable is Camp’s emphasis on making American football a model of practical efficiency. Hemmed in by rugby-like thinking, football was still rooted in by the remnants of the scrum. There was no forward pass, which Camp would resist until later in his life.
But he did invent the concept of “downs and distance” that advanced the game immeasurably. The year 1882, Tamte argues, was “the closest the game has had to a ’birth year.’” Teams now had to get five yards after three downs to maintain possession. Later, that rule would expand to the 10-yard standard that remains today, but at the time this was a revolutionary development:
“In contrast to the minimally structured and random play of English rugby and soccer, American football required study and planning, innovation, teaching, repeated practice. Increasingly, Americans would call football scientific, as play became more studied and creative.”
Camp drew many of his ideas from Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered the father of scientific management who influenced many corporate leaders at the turn of the 20th century.
Camp expanded his ideas on rules and football strategy and organization in a number of popular publications, including Collier’s Weekly, Harper’s Weekly and more. This was as big-city newspaper coverage of sports was expanding rapidly and was especially the case in New York City, where Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst were engaged in circulation wars royale. College football was a big part of those battles, as game and feature coverage included lush illustrations.
Lists off all kinds came into vogue for these publications, including sports, and Camp was the compiler of the first football All-America teams, published in the Week’s Sports magazine. In addition to updating the annual Spalding’s Foot Ball guides, Camp also was expanding his expertise into book authorship.
Tamte writes that his writing also paid off financially, as he was one of the best-paid non-fiction writers in the United States for a while. Camp used his column space in Collier’s to advocate for rules changes and innovation in football, but also for it to hew to old-school notions of amateurism and sportsmanship. The problem was, competitive athletics in America was reflecting gentlemanly values less as they grew in popularity. Tante notes the irony of a man who was enriched writing about the unpaid labor of others, an issue that still exists in college football more than a century later:
“Camp might fume at incidents of ‘overpopularity,’ but he made little effort to limit the surging media attention that contributed to American football’s problematic excesses.
By the time the forward pass was finally put in the rule book in 1912, Camp’s influence was appearing to be on the wane. Typically cordial even when disagreeing with others on rules-making bodies, Camp felt that varsity football on college campuses was becoming too exclusive; he wanted to expand the football-playing experience to the rest of the student body in something resembling intramural fashion.
Camp also found sportswriting becoming more professionalized in the 1920s. As his Collier’s work wound down the year before his death in 1925, Grantland Rice was given his first stab at a newspaper column as the Golden Age of Sports was unfolding.
As the four participants in the College Football Playoff—Clemson vs. Notre Dame and Alabama vs. Oklahoma—square off in the national semifinals next Saturday, it’s hard to tell what Camp would think of what the game has become. But the work and legacy of “the father of college football” are well intact.
Mark Kram, Senior and Junior
In writing the foreword to a collection of his late father’s works he had chosen, Mark Kram Jr. acknowledged the difficulties of separating the man who gave him the same name from the acclaimed writer and the flawed human that he was. Mark Kram Sr., who died in 2002, was among the legends of Sports Illustrated, and of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight in Manila in particular.
In introducing the 2015 collection, “Great Men Die Twice,” the younger Kram mentioned his father’s depression, money problems, fear of flying and drinking, and how those problems, among other issues, hampered his ability to do his job: “I think it would be accurate to say that he did not do himself any favors by the way he comported himself."
The son wrote more expansively on his father’s complicated life and career in a 2007 piece, “Forgive Some Sinner,” published at The Smart Set, which goes deeper into family history, including long absences and separation.
Best known for the title piece of this essay book, a 1989 piece for Esquire, Kram Sr. wrote of Ali:
“For twenty years, while he turned the porno shop of sports into international theater, attention was paid in a way it never was before or has been since.
“He was the demon loose with holy rite.”
Such luminous writing led to a later book, “Ghosts of Manila,” published the year before his death. Kram never bought into the media reverence for Ali, calling him a “sham” and claiming that he was “no more of a social force than Frank Sinatra.” Kram Jr. observed that his father “had a unique understanding of both Ali and [Joe] Frazier; I think he saw some of himself in both.”
From “At the Bell,” the following essay in the collection:
“Contrasted to Ali’s past, Frazier much more expresses the hard reality—other than politics—of what the black man’s life has been and is.”
Kram’s range went far beyond the ring, with “Great Men Die Twice” including heralded pieces on his hometown Baltimore Colts, Negro Leagues star Cool Papa Bell, Olympic track gold medalist Edwin Moses and even Marlon Brando.
The chilling closing essay, “Dead End,” initially published in GQ, is about the 2001 death of a young American boxer, Bee Scottland, who was pulverized in a 10-round fight and died comatose, six days later. The full effects of the violence that Kram chronicled, in the ring and on the gridiron, had come to a place where this one individual was to die just once:
“Bee had been endangered by indifference, by a woeful failure of the officials to encourage what was before their eyes: styles and pattern. . . . the young man was done in not only by indifference but by a passion and a heart far too large for a certain talent and reality.”
A few months later, Kram also would be gone, leaving his son to sort through the legacy of a journalistic giant whose writing could be as uneven as the rest of his life:
“When he hooked into a story that called upon his literary skills, he labored hard and well, stretching his ability as far as it would go and producing a body of work that shines in a way that journalism seldom ever has.”
Back in August, this newsletter examined the younger Kram’s award-winning book, “Like Any Normal Day.” He’s at work on a Frazier biography, “Smokin’ Joe,” to be published in June 2019. He talked about the book with Boxing 24/7.
Mascots and Nicknames
The Washington Redskins have had devastating injuries at quarterback but still have a shot at the NFL playoffs. In the front office and in the larger society for years, the franchise also has been under siege. While most of the current focus will be on the distastrous ownership of Dan Snyder, the coaching future of Jay Gruden and whether to blow up a high-priced, low-performing roster, those vexed by the team’s nickname figure to remain unrelenting. In 2016, C. Richard King’s “Redskins: Insult and Brand,” served up a sizzling polemical history of what he calls “a living slur.”
An anthropologist now chairing the humanities, history and social science department at Columbia College in Chicago, King writes and argues like a fierce abolitionist, which serves his argument well at times (excerpt here). Elsewhere, it lets his thesis down badly, especially when he prattles on with social-justice jargon like “white privilege,” “everyday whiteness” and “hegemonic masculinity.”
These unhelpful terms don’t engender much of a conversation that’s needed about the subject, and not just regarding the Redskins. I lived in Washington in the 1980s, when they were a Super Bowl-winning team, and even attended a few games at RFK Stadium.
If those diehards reading this book wanted to try to understand the issue better, I’m not sure King is eager to help them. Many of his culprits are fans who don’t see things quite the way he does.
Instead, his prescriptions for change amount to little more than virtue-signaling. “The white problem,” as he sees it, needs to be addressed by “recognizing the value and validity of others, a willingness to listen, and a capacity to change.” This sounds more like self-help. Above all, these efforts should be part of “ongoing efforts to rethink and refashion sport and society.” How lovely, if only we lived in such a perfect world.
How guilty should I, a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, feel about this? My team retired Chief Knockahoma and his teepee years ago (he used to do a rain dance around the pitching mound before the first pitch), but fans still do the Tomahawk Chop, and the weapon is emblazoned across the front of every player’s uniform.
Likewise, what about those who root for the Kansas City Chiefs, Golden State Warriors, Chicago Blackhawks and Cleveland Indians? The latter is doing away with the grinning Chief Wahoo logo, but should the name be next? Should all of these teams do the same?
The move away from Native American nicknames has been in gradual progress since the 1970s, when the Stanford Indians became the Cardinal. College teams, prompted by NCAA bans on such monikers, have been following suit: Marquette (Warriors to Golden Eagles), Dartmouth (Indians to Big Green), Miami Ohio (Redskins to RedHawks) and St. John’s (Redmen to Red Storm).
The University of Illinois, where King previously taught, retains the tribal Illini nickname, but was forced to ditch the Chief Illiniwek mascot. North Dakota State faced an NCAA ban over resistance from state legislators to change the Fighting Sioux nickname.
Florida State is an outlier, having a working arrangement with the Seminole tribe of Florida, to keep that nickname, and the Chief Osceola mascot who rides onto the field on a horse before each home football game, jabbing a spear into the turf at the 50-yard line. King writes unhappily:
“They give it an approved space to fester, as evidenced by the dehumanizing caricature of Chief Osceola, the cartoonish anthem played by the band, the demeaning marketing campaigns, and the antics of the fans, most notably in the form of the tomahawk chop.”
These developments on the college scene didn’t fit King’s narrative to warrant any further attention, but his interest in guilt-tripping prevails over any other consideration. There’s a worthy public discussion to be had about this, but King fears change above all, worried that “it will be superficial or stop with the slur.”
A Few Good Reads
Did Mike Piazza kill an Italian soccer club? In 2016, he purchased controlling ownership of A.C. Reggiana, a lower-division side, which has since gone bankrupt. At The Athletic Ink, Robert Andrew Powell talks to the Baseball Hall of Famer and his wife Alicia, who presided over a mismanagement debacle that led to the dissolution of a club that would have turned 100 years old in 2019;
Paul Lukas parlayed his background in product design into an ESPN gig writing its Uni-Watch column, focusing on sports uniform fashion and design. After 15 years, ESPN is continuing the column but without Lukas, as the niche has grown into a wider sports aesthetics field that includes stylish athletic gear. On his separate Uni-Watch blog, Lukas wrote in a post titled “In Which I Am Designated for Assignment” that he’s not bitter about not having his contract renewed, and that he remains the owner of the Uni-Watch name: “While this isn’t great news, it’s also not the end of the world.” Next May marks the 20th anniversary of his first post on the topic, which was published by The Village Voice;
The history of ice skating goes back to the 1600s, and even King James II of England took it up while in exile in Holland. That’s part of the storyline in an exhibit continuing through the end of April at the National Heritage Center for Horseracing and Sporting Art in Newmarket, England. Around 40 works on display include 17th century Flemish paintings, Victorian panoramic scenes, 20th century photography, vintage skates and Pathé films. More recent works include Bassano Studios photography of teenage stars from the 1930s, and portraits of British Olympic stars John Curry and the gold-medalist ice-dancing duo of Jayne Torvill and Christoper Dean on loan from the National Portrait Gallery in London;
At Bleacher Report, Mirin Fader writes undiluted hagiography of a female-identified biological male who’s been allowed to compete against girls in high school track in Connecticut. Andraya Yearwood isn’t the only transgender athlete who’s doing this in that state, and the parents of some girls have been pressing, without any success, for a ban. Yearwood, 17, has undergone no medical or hormone treatments, an inconvenient fact that Fader relegates far down in a very long piece designed to rouse uncritical sympathy and blur some very real physical lines. It is possible to have empathy for this young person while pointing out that the competitive integrity of sports for females will be compromised if this practice is allowed to continue. The silence of sports feminists has been stunning, save Martina Navratilova (who often played doubles with Renee Richards, a fully transitioned transsexual in the 1970s):
“You can’t proclaim yourself to be a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”
From the Baseball Bookshelf
A few baseball books I’ve been meaning to write about here previously would make ideal off-season reading, with a couple months to go before pitchers and catchers report. They’re a bit different in style, form and storyline than so much of what’s published with baseball themes, and they encourage a reader to plug into an imaginative vein. Most of all, they’re just a lot of fun, and I can’t think of a better way to get through my baseball hibernation:
From 2008, “Crazy ’08,” by Cait Murphy, a lively and entertaining read about the 1908 major league season that was about so much more than what would become the start of a 108-year World Series drought for the Chicago Cubs. A business journalist and editor at McKinsey & Company, she weaves together many interlocking tales (some better than others) during a summer in which “baseball comes of age.”
There’s some compelling social and cultural history that blends into the story, in the way of several “Time Out” chapter interludes. Murphy references the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, which she calls the “catalytic event” for a new modern American city, and the “City Beautiful” notion of civilized life that drew many from pastoral modes of living. Among those increasingly popular urban delights were baseball games. As Robert W. Creamer writes in his foreword, “she makes you feel what New York City was like when John McGraw was riding high, what America was like, what people were like.”
Murphy (also author of the 2016 book “A History of American Sports in 100 Objects”) cuts through baseball’s literary paeans when she feels she needs to, calling Franklin Evans’ famous Tinkers to Evers to Chance poem an “overblown and overanthologized scrap of mediocre doggerel,” but admitting in the same breath that:
“Baseball’s Dante gets the Big Truth right: as Tinkers, Evers, and Chance go, so go the Cubs. When the infield is not clicking, the team struggles, and that has been the Cubs’ fate for most of the year.”
Along the way, Murphy casts her astute business eye on the dealings of owners and amply describes the Fred Merkle “boner” play that crushed the New York Giants’ pennant hopes and that stood apart in what she declares the greatest season ever in baseball history. The World Series won by the Cubs was anticlimactic, but 1908 was the beginning of a new era in baseball, and in American life:
“The twentieth century is an age defined in large part by the rise of the city, of technology, of leisure, and of the corporation. Baseball faithfully reflects all these trends.”
From 2016, “A Single Happened Thing,” by Daniel Paisner: A fanciful work of fiction about David Gelb, a weary book publicist who attends a Phillies game in the late 1990s, convinced he’s seen the figure of a man he learns was Fred “Sure Shot” Dunlap, a late 1800s star who was, “in every respect, a dandy.”
What transpires amid Gelb’s midlife crisis is a whirlwind of ruminations about the game and human obsessions, and when joined by his daughter to find out the truth about Fred Dunlap, his quest becomes about something much more than that:
“Why is it that we are so quick to endorse such delusions and leaps of faith in our fictions and so reluctant to accept them as part of our reality? Why do we offer our cursory attentions to paranormalists and mediums and palm readers when we come across their accounts in newspapers and magazines, only to reject such claims when they’ve been superimposed onto our own lives? UFOs. Crop patterns. Images of the Virgin Mary or Abraham Lincoln in a wisp of cloud or a slice of burnt toast. Everything is fair game but ourselves, our husbands, our neighbors. Why is it that when it hits close to home, whatever the it happens to be, we look away?”
Also from 2016, “Double Switch,” by T. T. Monday: The second baseball mystery from the writer known in real life as Nick Taylor (“The Setup Man”), this once again features the persona of aging relief pitcher Johnny Adcock, who doubles as a private investigator and delights in his part-time work:
“I may not be Clayton Kershaw, but I am immortal.”
The story is set against a backdrop of shady international player smuggling, and defected Cuban star Yonel Ruiz, who’s represented by TIff Tate, a slick female public relations “stylist.” She tries to frame Adcock in a murder, but they end up getting involved instead. The pitcher is urged by his big-league team to stop moonlighting, but he can’t stay away from the intrigue, despite the deadly risks: “Tiff Tate hired me to protect Ruiz, or his he the danger? I’ll say this: He keeps strange company for an innocent man.”
Passings
Penny Marshall, 75, directed what would become the best-earning baseball film ever in “A League of Their Own.” The actress known for her “Laverne and Shirley” fame revived a slice of sports history that has continued to draw interest 26 years after the movie’s release in 1992, and serves as a continuing flashpoint for issues of women and baseball.
Marshall first heard about the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League while watching a PBS documentary in the late 1980s, right before some of those players were to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Marshall’s portrayal included an ensemble cast of Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Lori Petty, John Lovitz, Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell (as well as Marshall’s daughter, Tracy Reimer, who played the player “Betty Spaghetti.”).
The characters in old age are shown in Cooperstown, touring the exhibition created in their honor, and watching some play in an exhibition game. The Madonna-sung “This Used to Be My Playground” that played during the closing credits quickly became an anthem in the early 1990s, as Title IX compliance, Olympic growth and greater media coverage were building for women’s sports. There were times when I drove by the softball field where I played as a kid and that song just popped right into my head.
More on Marshall and the impact of “A League of Their Own” from the Los Angeles Times, The Ringer and SB Nation. Cast members remember Marshall, who died of complications from diabetes, at Vanity Fair and People.
Terry Hutchens, 60, covered Indiana University basketball and football and other sports for the Indianapolis News, Indianapolis Star and CNHI Sports Indiana for nearly three decades, and also wrote several books. After he was seriously injured in a car accident Monday, IU left his seat on basketball press row as it was for a Hoosiers game in tribute.
A five-time winner of the Indiana Sportswriter of the Year Award, Hutchens died of those injuries on Friday. He befriended many on the IU beat beyond the typical interactions. After a former basketball player was sent to prison, Hutchens visited him there regularly. “He wasn’t doing it to write a story, he never wrote anything,” said that incarcerated player, Todd Leary. “He wasn’t doing it for gain. He was just truly being a friend.”
Hutchens also tucked away his notebook when he came to the home of former IU football coach Terry Hoeppner, who had died of cancer, intending to write a story about his family. Instead, he just listened. “When I stepped into that living room and sat on the couch across from Jane Hoeppner, I felt like I was there as her friend first.”
He later returned to the home and interviewed the coach’s son for a story that was published in the Star and eventually wrote a book about Hoeppner, and ghosted his widow's book on handling tragedy and adversity.
Coming Next Week
Sports Biblio’s year-end issue will recap the notable sports books of 2018. Merry Christmas!
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This is Digest issue No. 148, published Dec. 23, 2018.
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