The University of North Carolina Press

News Bytes

October/December 1998


Football Frenzy


The Tar Heel State has a long-standing obsession with football. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines.

Former professional football player for the Kansas City Chiefs Michael Oriard shows in his book Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. So, before you turn on that game, let Oriard take you back to the roots of football and explain a little about how it all got started.

Excerpt from Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle by Michael Oriard, chapter one: "In the Beginning Was the Rule." Copyright (c) 1993 The University of North Carolina Press. Reproduction or distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the University of North Carolina Press. All rights Reserved.


Each country seems to have a foot-ball spirit of its own, and that spirit can be satisfied only with a characteristic game.
--Walter Camp (1910)

The Father of American Football

Walter Camp was never an All-American but for thirty-seven years the maker of All-Americans, never a paid coach but the "coach of coaches," never a ruler but the preeminent creator of rules. The son of a middle-class school teacher in New Haven, Camp was a star running back at Yale for six years and part of a seventh (1876-82), first as an undergraduate, then as a medical student (the limitation on seasons of eligibility came later, after years of wrangling among the rule makers). More important, after he left medicine and Yale for a career in business, first with the Manhattan Watch Company, then for four decades with the New Haven Clock Company (eventually becoming president and board chairman), Camp continued as graduate adviser to Yale captains for nearly thirty years, serving "as Yale's unofficial, unpaid, unquestioned chief mentor and arbiter" (Martin, "Walter Camp and His Gridiron Game," p. 54). Richard Harding Davis wrote in 1893, "There is only one man in New Haven of more importance than Walter Camp, and I have forgotten his name. I think he is the president of the university" (Davis, "A Day with the Yale Team," p. 1110). Outside New Haven, among football men he was the game's preeminent spokesman and authority, routinely identified in newspapers and magazines with such epithets as "the leading foot-ball expert in the country" or the "father of football at Yale"; on occasion, with touches of gentle irony, as "the King of American football" or "the great high priest of the grid-iron arena" (See Independent, March 22, 1900, p. 715; New York Times, November 20, 1897, p. 3; and World, November 30, 1893, p.1).
Many of the captains and players Camp advised became coaches elsewhere, carrying with them their mentor's methods and ideas. Most important, from 1878 to his death in 1925, Camp served continuously on football's rules committees, for twenty-eight years as secretary. His views dominated the early committees in particular. The scrimmage rule of 1880, assigning possession to one team at a time, was his idea, as was the five-yard rule of 1882 (years later, Camp wrote that this rule initially "had no adherents save the man who proposed it") (Camp, "Methods and Developments in Tactics and Play," p. 173). He proposed eleven players on a side, instead of fifteen, and devised the point-scoring scale, approved in 1883, that with more tinkering became the basis of our modern system. Ironically, though a most gentlemanly sportsman himself, Camp also proposed the legalization of low tackling in 1888, then through the 1890s fought legislation to eliminate the resulting mass-momentum plays that critics blamed for football's shocking brutality. Losing that battle, Camp then resisted legalizing the forward pass in 1906, the ultimate shift from "mass" to "open" play. But if he yielded reluctantly to the later stages of development (motivated privately by Yale's self-interest and publicly by a consistent vision that football was preeminently a team game, not an individual sport), it remains true that American football was to a considerable degree Walter Camp's creation.

Reading Football is available at bookstores now in paperback for $18.95, or from the University of North Carolina Press. 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet.


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