Schools of Hard Knocks
By KENNETH C. DAVIS
NYT
HEADLINES on the sports pages in recent years paint a picture of scandal and violence in football: college students playing for pay; recruiters doling out money under the table; professional agents trolling campuses from North Carolina to Southern California. And in both the N.C.A.A. and the N.F.L., crippling tackles cause head injuries bad enough to lead to dementia and suicide.
But American football has seen all this before. More than a century ago, before there was a true professional league, cash payments were made to “amateur” college athletes. Coaches gave orders to take out rivals on the field. In the sport’s primitive era, body blows, concussions, spinal injuries and even blood poisoning — the result of on-field savagery that included late hits, punching, kneeing, eye-gouging and vicious blows to the windpipe — often proved fatal. In 1905, these abuses and catastrophic injuries were so widespread, and public disapproval of them so deep, the game faced extinction. Football was saved, in part, by the intervention of the American president.
A crusading journalist named Henry Beach Needham brought the controversy to the forefront of national debate. In a sensational two-part article, “The College Athlete,” in the June and July 1905 issues of McClure’s magazine, he exposed the brutality and scandalous practices then engulfing the college game.
In sometimes quaint Victorian prose extolling the gentlemanly virtues of fair play, Needham revealed how elite prep schools like Andover and Exeter had emerged as football factories, producing crop after crop of players for the major college powers. Cheating on prep school admissions tests in order to start on the path to a college football career — a practice Needham called “cribbing” — was commonplace. Recruits, he said, were wined and dined and given money and expensive clothes. And Needham described “tramp” athletes who played for more than one college in the space of a few days.
(More here.)
NYT
HEADLINES on the sports pages in recent years paint a picture of scandal and violence in football: college students playing for pay; recruiters doling out money under the table; professional agents trolling campuses from North Carolina to Southern California. And in both the N.C.A.A. and the N.F.L., crippling tackles cause head injuries bad enough to lead to dementia and suicide.
But American football has seen all this before. More than a century ago, before there was a true professional league, cash payments were made to “amateur” college athletes. Coaches gave orders to take out rivals on the field. In the sport’s primitive era, body blows, concussions, spinal injuries and even blood poisoning — the result of on-field savagery that included late hits, punching, kneeing, eye-gouging and vicious blows to the windpipe — often proved fatal. In 1905, these abuses and catastrophic injuries were so widespread, and public disapproval of them so deep, the game faced extinction. Football was saved, in part, by the intervention of the American president.
A crusading journalist named Henry Beach Needham brought the controversy to the forefront of national debate. In a sensational two-part article, “The College Athlete,” in the June and July 1905 issues of McClure’s magazine, he exposed the brutality and scandalous practices then engulfing the college game.
In sometimes quaint Victorian prose extolling the gentlemanly virtues of fair play, Needham revealed how elite prep schools like Andover and Exeter had emerged as football factories, producing crop after crop of players for the major college powers. Cheating on prep school admissions tests in order to start on the path to a college football career — a practice Needham called “cribbing” — was commonplace. Recruits, he said, were wined and dined and given money and expensive clothes. And Needham described “tramp” athletes who played for more than one college in the space of a few days.
(More here.)
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