By the early 1880’s, the system of downs enabled teams to abandon a fundamental rugby concept thus making play more interesting as well as more violent. In rugby, teammates cannot protect the ball carrier from the opposing team’s tacklers, a practice known as “interference.” In the new system, however, interference became legal, leading to mass formation plays that protected the ball carrier. The type of game that developed with mass plays was extremely violent, bloody, and ruthless with the worst offender being Yale, who learned many mass plays from Camp. Ronald A. Smith (1988), a well respected expert in early intercollegiate football, concurred that the continually victorious Yale often endured complaints regarding brutish behavior, such as one from Tufts College that suggested the “Yale team have cultivated a habit of . . . mauling their antagonists with double fists” (p.89). Camp did nothing to hinder the growing violence associated with football. Contrarily, in 1888 he encouraged more of it when he led the IFA to pass a rule allowing tackling below the waist to the knees. This new rule increased the frequency of mass plays and gave birth to many “wedge” plays, including Harvard’s infamous “flying wedge,” which resulted in increased football brutality.

By the 1890’s, with violent injuries and death becoming the constant nemesis of college football, many influential colleges constituted abolishing the sport. In 1894, Camp led a six-member committee to determine if football was too dangerous to be played as a college sport and the results appeared in his book, Football Facts and Figures. The data revealed “that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton players during the previous eighteen years had an ‘almost unanimous opinion’ that football has been a ‘marked benefit’ both physically and mentally” (Smith, 1988, p.92). Yet, after a particularly violent game between Harvard and Yale, delegates from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Pennsylvania met and abolished the use of mass momentum plays.

Aside from the violence of the game, actual fist-fights began to break out among players and coaches as rivalries became more intense. In addition, questions of scholarship and eligibility arose and without a national governing body, each college handled these problems themselves. Smith (1981) points out an illegal scholarship issue that occurred at Columbia in which the undergraduate football manager paid the tuition and expenses of five players from the gate receipts. Columbia’s coach never knew these payments occurred and this created a deep sense of mistrust in the athletic department as well as towards it. A “win-at-all-costs” mentality began to dominant the college football scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as teams strove to reach the pinnacle of success exemplified by the “Big Three”-Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Even Harvard, a powerhouse of college football, faced an eligibility issue when Yale protested the legality of Oliver Cutts. In this instance, Cutts finished attending Bates College five years prior to playing football at Harvard while attending Law School (Smith, 1981). Yale’s opposition to Cutts stemmed from the fact that during his break from school he taught boxing and fencing for a fee. The fact that Cutts received money made him a professional, an anathema to Camp’s highly preached ideals of amateurism.

The concept of amateurism Camp extolled arrived in America from Great Britain in the 1870’s. Amateurism was an ideal devised in nineteenth century Victorian England by the upper class in order to prevent members of the lower class from participating in sport. Under this notion of amateurism,

an amateur was one who never competed in an athletic event open to all, never competed for public money such as subscriptions or for gate receipts, never competed with or against a professional, and never taught, coached, or pursued athletics for a living (Smith, 1993, p. 433).

In England, this definition excluded anyone who performed any kind of physical labor for which they received compensation, limiting sports participation to the wealthiest members of society. Oxford and Cambridge, the British institutions of higher education, supported athletic teams made up entirely of pure amateurs, due to the aristocratic student body. Thus, the American colleges, using Oxford and Cambridge as models, adopted the ideals associated with amateurism. This ideology did not fit well into an American society that promoted equality as well as mobility among the classes. Smith (1993) suggested that the American version of amateur sport was altered because Americans renounced the British idea of a fixed social status dictated by heredity, position, education, and wealth. In order to modify amateurism, Americans needed to redefine the characteristics of an amateur.

In America, the main factor distinguishing the amateur from the professional in the realm of sport was whether the participant received money for his athletic endeavors. A professional received monetary compensation for playing while an amateur played for the love of the game. Thus, amateurism in America became an attitude of the participant, creating “a vision of an orderly, genteel, harmonious world of sport and healthful recreation, open to all classes” (Pope, 1996, p. 292). Ideals of amateurism spread rapidly among the elite eastern colleges, but many of these colleges already supported practices that opposed the tenets of amateurism. As the “win-at-all-costs” mentality tightened its grip on American college athletics, universities were faced with two options. Colleges could either promote “pure” amateurism with athletes playing for the love of the game and lose competitions, or adopt professional tactics such as hiring a professional coach, and lose respect. The solution, according to Pope was to publicly endorse amateurism while privately embracing professionalism. Camp and the athletic program at Yale exhibited this approach to intercollegiate athletics by epitomizing British amateurism as the role model for American collegiate sport while Yale itself, the strongest athletic power in the country, integrated several professional tactics into its program (Pope, 1996).

Intercollegiate football during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the Yale eleven rise as the indomitable competitor. Although Harvard and Princeton, the other teams composing the “Big Three,” became powerhouses as well, Yale produced consistently excellent teams for decades. As Thelin (1994) asserted, “Yale was the real and symbolic force in American collegiate athletics,” and the leader of this force was Camp, the “Father of American football” (p.17). That grandiose title bequeathed upon Yale’s football leader combined with its unmatchable winning record easily lends itself to the creation of legends. Camp did nothing to dissuade these idealistic visions of Yale or of college athletes in general. Instead, he seized upon his own popularity, as well as the Yale football program’s, to create and spread a “collegiate ideal” derived from the ideals of amateurism. As Thelin pointed out,

Yale’s presence in American popular culture was conspicuous, as sports page coverage of its winning teams combined with the mass circulation of the fictional ‘Frank Merriwell at Yale’ juvenile stories to capture the American imagination in shaping the ‘collegiate ideal’ and the glorification of the ‘student-athlete’ as cultural hero (p.17).

The intense press coverage Yale received, coupled with an average weekly sale of the Merriwell stories exceeding two million copies, allowed Camp to personally promote the ideals of amateurism and gentlemanly play.

To spread these ideals of amateurism and gentlemanly play, Camp wrote many newspaper columns, magazine articles, and books. He dutifully endorsed the “collegiate ideals” as seen in the introduction of his book, Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports. In this introduction, Camp (1893) encouraged each athletic young boy to be “a gentleman,” who “does not make his living, however, from his athletic prowess. He does not earn anything by his victories except glory and satisfaction” (p. 2). Inherent to the idea of a gentleman playing to win is that he must do so while remaining within the “spirit of the rules” and do so only for the love of the game. Gentlemanly heroes of the playing field abound in early twentieth century children’s literature, particularly at Yale University, and some examples will be examined later in this paper.

Camp eloquently preached these ideals and the press seized upon and endorsed them, college football programs in the early twentieth century rarely reflected these ideals. In fact, “competition for money and status, contests against professionals, collection of gate receipts, support for training tables, provision for academic tutors, recruitment and the payment of athletes, and the hiring of professional coaches pervaded the intercollegiate athletic scene” (Pope, 1996, p. 302). Camp himself, the champion of the amateur athlete, made a fortune through his books, columns, and articles in addition to endorsements and newsreels. Essentially, he made an enduring and lucrative career for himself as a “professional amateur” (Thelin, 1994). He praised the virtuous athlete for playing without the incentive of compensation, yet he never shunned the money he made through his involvement with amateur college football. Furthermore, Camp did not always follow the gentlemanly behavior he prescribed for those involved with other intercollegiate programs. Aside from being the “Father of American football,” Camp acquired the title “czar of college football,” at times becoming a domineering megalomaniac whose fellow coaches scarcely regarded him as a “good sport” (Thelin, 1994). Although he rarely followed the ideals he stressed, these ideals enabled the press to create the athlete-hero worship as well as increase the popularity of college football. As Smith (1988) stated, “Camp helped transform football from a relatively insignificant fall pastime in colleges to a gigantic commercial attraction which was the most visible sign of college life” (p.84). The relationship between the press and football did not occur immediately, but developed slowly as football itself evolved into today’s game.


Section Three