The Slump in Football Common
I
‘GAELS, Rams, Plan Aerial Warfare.’ ‘Bears, Hornets, Break Relations.’ ‘Clash of Juggernauts Approachin.’ ‘Purple Cyclone Sweeping Nation.’ ‘Lions Still Muskrats’ Roaring.’ Ah, another great European war! Civilization on the brink of disaster, you say, as you read these headlines in the daily press. No, not that. The Bolshevist Revolution, then — Germany and Russia against the world? Nothing of the sort. Football is with us again. Once more we are at the peak of the silly season in American sport.
Writing three years ago, I ventured to suggest that ‘a new high-for-alltime was made in November 1929 by Football Common.’ Like Mr. Babson and the rest of the predictors, I was taking a chance; but, curiously enough, 1929 actually was the top of the Great Bull Market in American football. Since then the sport, along with commodity prices, investment trusts, the steel industry, and real-estate values, has, in the parlance of the moderns, ‘been forced to take a licking.’ Nor is there any evidence at hand as yet to prove that the deflation of this athletic bull market has been fully accomplished; or, as the statisticians would put it so eloquently, that in sports as in business ‘we have touched bottom and are moving slowly to higher levels.’
During the past few years football has been coming in for some really serious attention, and to-day all sorts and conditions of men are concerned about its future. ‘Except possibly when a championship is at stake, we may no longer count on the enthusiastic support of the public that we have enjoyed during the past eight years,’ remarks Dr. Edward C. Elliott, the president of Purdue University. In other words, the public is finally ‘getting on to itself.’ A pity that. Or, rather, a pity for the colleges, because if things continue, and the current depression in the greatest of American games keeps on, who knows but that something may come of it? What exactly do I mean by this? I mean that without football the universities of the United States might be reduced to becoming institutions of learning. A sad situation to contemplate.
Nor are the heads of our universities the only ones to view this with alarm. Even the sports writers are upset, and you know how much it takes to arouse a sports writer. Thus Mr. Grantland Rice, the dean of the profession, after years of research has arrived at the conclusion that football is being commercialized. Or, as the headline writer for the magazine in which his researches were published remarks,
‘ Mr. Rice hears faint rumblings of a revolt against football as it is staged and publicized to-day.’ Faint rumblings! Who says the world does not move?
Last summer a letter appeared in the Paris edition of the New York Herald by a Mr. Charles K. Purdy, faculty representative of an American college visiting the various universities of Europe. He was distressed and disturbed to discover that these institutions possessed ‘neither a swimming pool nor a gymnasium, and there is no athletic field and not even a student’s athletic association.’ Think of it — the University of Bologna without a swimming pool, the Sorbonne without a student’s athletic association! As Mr. Purdy so eloquently puts it, ‘A sad state of affairs when one considers the splendid up-to-date features of our educational life at home.’ Yes, Mr. Purdy.
Extraordinary, is it not, that in this day and age so many Americans still fail to realize that in decadent Europe men do not go to a university to join a fraternity, to make the football team, or yet to skim through courses on how to become a junior executive? Strange as it may seem to us in this land of the high standard of living, men do not go to a university abroad with the intention or the ambition of becoming realtors, morticians, or owners of a ‘lubritorium.’ Rather do they enter universities to read, to study, to think, to enrich their mental life and benefit in unmaterial ways. There have been of late many changes in some of the older American universities, and a few at any rate are tending to become havens of cultivation much like the greater universities of Europe. In fact the time may not be far distant when an institution of learning in this country without a student’s athletic association will not seem as absurd and irrational as it does at the present time.
II
Before glancing at the future, I should like to take you back forty-two years in the history of American sport — to Springfield, Massachusetts, on the day of the Yale-Harvard football game, November 22, 1890. Although new stands had been erected to seat over 8000 people, the largest crowd ever to witness a football game in this country up to that, time, more than 5000 extra tickets had been sold, although no more seats were available. A squad of policemen was therefore called out to keep order among these ticket holders; they had to sit on carriage robes spread along the ground behind the goal posts at the open ends of the field, or else on the coaches drawn up in rows just behind. These seats cost a dollar apiece, the price being raised to keep the crowd out, but failing to do so. With commendable enterprise, the New York Times had sent a reporter all the way up to Springfield for the game.
The Harvard team sprang rather a surprise. Instead of traveling to the game by day coach on the regular Boston & Albany train the morning of the game, they arrived the previous evening and spent the night at Mrs. Gardiner’s boarding house close to Hampden Park. Yale was further handicapped by the fact that one of the players stopped off at Hartford on the way up to see his girl, and missed the next train. Consequently a crew man from the side lines had to be pressed into service to act as a substitute. No wonder Harvard won.
Nothing like this happened when Harvard came to New Haven the last time. Autres temps, autres mœurs. Instead of eleven players, the Crimson horde which came to New Haven the day before the game consisted of about thirty-six players and twenty-seven attendants, in special cars carrying equipment, jerseys, sweaters, shoes, pads, blankets, footballs, carboys of drinking water, a drug department with tape, bandages, ointment, ankle rolls, liniment, and so forth, not to mention games, cards, backgammon sets, magazines, chewing gum, phonographs, and signs urging the players to ‘Drink Only Bottled Water.’ Why an attendant for almost every player? There are eight coaches, ten managers, five rubbers, the Director of Athletics, the Assistant Director of Athletics, the Publicity Director, and the Business Manager. The various scouts who have been charting Yale plays all season are not included in this list, because they may not have come down until the next day. The actual cost of transporting this company to Boston and back, its food and shelter and entertainment, cut down this year as much as was thought possible, must have been well around $10,000. Not excessive, either, considering the pleasure given.
In 1890 a handful of young men carrying tattered suitcases boarded a day coach, went to Springfield, played, came back the night of the game, and that was that. No high-powered coaching staff, no movies of the other team’s pet plays, no enlarged pictures of the Yale players to be studied, no articles in the newspaper by the head coach, no herd of reporters following the team — in short, nothing. Which team, I wonder, had the most fun?
III
‘Ah,’ you will say, ‘there is little new in all this. We know about the paraphernalia of modern football. What you are describing is rather old stuff.’ Precisely. I am not pretending that this is new. I am simply trying to show, as suggested at the beginning of the article, that Football Common, although it has suffered along with other good securities in the recent bear market, is still selling at a price fifteen to twenty times its earnings. In other words, it has not yet been thoroughly deflated, and cannot therefore be recommended to the cautious investor.
The chart of Football Common, which took such a marked upswing after the war, and particularly during the big bull market, has been going steadily downhill in company with even sounder values since 1929. That year the stock reached its peak when Notre Dame traveled 8300 miles and played before 600,000 spectators, taking in the tidy sum of over $2,000,000. That was an all-time high which has never been reached since, nor is it ever likely to be attained again.
First effects of the current slump were noticed during the season of 1930. Harvard, which played to over 400,000 in 1929, drew but 350,000 in 1930. In its Bulletin No. 26 the Carnegie Foundation reported that football attendance and receipts fell off at practically every leading university in the United States that year, including California, Chicago, Harvard, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio State, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford, and Wisconsin. The Army-Navy football game, played for charity to obtain the sum of $1,250,000 for the Salvation Army, actually brought in $600,000, or half the amount expected. As early as December 1930, one or two universities had the good sense to perceive the way the wind was blowing. Already Nebraska and Iowa were beginning to cut down their athletic expenditures in various ways. The deflation in Football Common had commenced.
Last season it was far more noticeable. In the South, football receipts fell away from 3 to 40 per cent, according to the college. Ohio State’s takings went off by a fifth from the previous season. One large institution in the Middle West had but 17,000 persons at its three big home games. Iowa drew 60,000 spectators instead of 80,000 for the year before. Wisconsin cut its schedule from seven to six games. John L. Griffith, high priest of football for the Western Conference, declared that in the Middle West receipts fell off from 30 to 40 per cent at every college. ‘Ticket purchasers showed more discrimination in the question of selecting games they wished to see than a year ago,’ he explained tactfully.
For the first time in our athletic history the public could obtain seats for such important contests as the Dartmouth-Harvard, Yale-Army, and Yale-Princeton games, to name but a few of the principal ones in the East. One contest in the Yale Bowl last fall drew fewer than 5000 spectators — a record since that structure was built in 1914; the arena was actually but half filled for the Yale-Princeton classic. There were empty seats at the ArmyNavy game, and the receipts, which were expected to be over $400,000 (notice the modest shrinkage from 1930 expectations), were about $250,000. Comparative figures of attendance in 1930 and 1931 are instructive. Pennsylvania played to 364,000 and 330,000 respectively; Washington and Lee to 70,000 and 60,000; Minnesota to 167,000 and 147,000; Illinois to 165,000 and 111,000. Stanford, although playing one more game than the previous season, only drew 160,000 as against 180,000 the year before. Ohio State, which usually takes the field before 100,000 at its Homecoming Game, had 40,000 in the stadium in 1931. Gate receipts declined about $20,000 at California and $50,000 at Harvard.
Nearly every prominent college eleven earned less money in 1930 than in 1929, and still less in 1931. The surprising thing is that these figures cover a period during which interest in athletics generally was greater than at any other period in our history, a time when professional sports had banner seasons. Professional hockey in 1930 and 1931 prospered, professional football in 1931 had its best year in both attendance and receipts, while the million-dollar gate for the World’s Series of October 1931 was the largest since 1926.
IV
What is the reason for this slump in Football Common? The reason is the waning interest in the game, despite the assertions of its paid publicists, on the part of the classes whence its customers come — graduates, undergraduates, and the general public. With less money to spend, the public stays home and listens over the radio. Also with less money, and with steadily decreasing interest in the outcome of big games, the undergraduate is tempted to play golf on sunny November afternoons. The alumni, for whom a trip from New York to New Haven will break up a twenty-dollar bill, can no longer afford many such trips. Protests of graduates echo on every side. A young graduate student in Boston remarked to me recently, ‘Four dollars is too much to pay for a game of football — especially such football as Harvard plays.’ Another man, a Harvard graduate, a millionaire who has given buildings to his Alma Mater, remarked in my hearing that he was not going to New Haven for the Yale game this year because he felt the price excessive in view of the times. Writing to the Yale Alumni Weekly, a graduate stated recently, ‘I find many Yale men like myself who feel it an imposition to be requested to pay $4.00 for major game tickets, and are simply forgoing the privilege.’ Mr. Lamont Dominick, Yale ’95, a prominent alumnus of New York, wrote to the Yale Daily News to demand the ending of the ‘exploiting of the students for large gate receipts.’ I remember several years ago talking to Director William J. Bingham, Director of Athletics at Harvard, about the price of seats at games. ‘ But you would pay $5.00 for a show and think nothing of it,’ he said. Nor did he appear to understand why I laughed at this excellent though unintentional analogy.
It is also my conviction, though I shall doubtless be chivied for saying so, that there is a large and fast-growing number of graduates who are eternally sick of the football madness, who are weary of the stress upon the financial side of what is presumed to be a sport, who become tired of the noise and uproar about what is supposed to be a game, who read this sort of thing, a gem which actually appeared in a New York newspaper, with something akin to disgust: ‘As Booth halted in the striped end zone, his old schoolmate at New Haven High, Freddy Looser, rushed up, threw gorilla-like arms about the midget’s shoulders, and, believe it or not, kissed him upon the cheek. It was the French Army accolade delivered for the first time upon an American gridiron, the spontaneous tribute of a hard-boiled fighter to a football genius.’ The first time, and let us hope the last time, too.
Such mawkishness is causing many followers of football to desert it. The maudlinism over the death of Cadet Sheridan in the Yale-Army game last fall is another instance to the point. Instead of showing the tragic waste of a fine young life, the press in general devoted columns to comparing him with every great American soldier from Washington to Pershing, explaining that his life was sacrificed for his country and wallowing in the crassest kind of cheap sentimentality. Only one newspaper pointed out the difference in the times as evidenced by his death and that of Cadet Byrne in the Harvard game some twenty years earlier. Then the remainder of the West Point schedule was instantly abandoned. Last year it was carried out in full, every game was played. Yes, Cadet Sheridan would have wished it so. Doubtless. Besides, the Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, and Navy games were yet to come. Half a million dollars at the box office was involved. ‘ Sport ’ has become too complicated to be given up just for a mere gesture.
Does one wonder that there has been heavy short selling in Football Common of late years?
V
Yes, Football Common has recently been the subject of bear attacks by the Carnegie Foundation and others. Cynical sporting columnists have also been persistent short sellers, until, as shown above, earnings of the stock have fallen off considerably during the past few years. Its dividends have been passed, and it reflects this pressure by its present low earnings. I now intend to show some more reasons for the decline.
The chief reason, as of course everyone is well aware, comes from within the colleges themselves — not, as it should, from authority, but usually from those without authority, the articulate minority of the undergraduate body. They were the first to realize the absurdity of the football situation. Just when the earliest outbreak within the colleges began is rather hard to determine, but one of the first and one of the most important appeared in the Harvard Crimson in December of 1925, when that newspaper made definite suggestions for changes in the game. These suggestions, which appeared radical and visionary at the time, seem less so now. Some, such as the abolition of spring practice, the institution of House teams, a final House game with Yale, have been adopted. Others, such as the reduction of the schedule to a few games in mid-November, seem to be on the way.
What was an isolated instance of revolt in 1925 is to-day common everywhere — east and west, north and south. Curious, is it not, that the undergraduate has forced the hand of authority? Even the conservative régime which dominates the American university has been obliged to bestir itself under the urgings and proddings of the undergraduate press and the pressure of a small section of the undergraduate body. Rarely, all too rarely for American intellectual integrity, have those in charge been trail blazers.
Recent years have witnessed a whole series of attacks upon football by undergraduates, ranging from demands for the abolition of gate receipts as ‘not in accord with the spirit of amateur sport,’ at Haverford, to the more sensational outbursts at Northwestern, where the student newspaper declared openly that despite the creditable season the majority of the undergraduates were tired of football, and to the vote at Johns Hopkins, where 320 students out of 850 actually voted to abandon the game. Even more spectacular were the uprisings at Columbia and New York University last winter. Mr. Reed Harris, the editor of the Columbia Spectator, by his outspoken criticism was even able to move President Nicholas Murray Butler to some slight action, a magnificent feat under the circumstances. It was largely undergraduate sentiment which forced the resignation of the head coach at New York University, John H. (Chick) Meehan, who symbolized big-time football with all its trappings, and the appointment of a graduate of the college in his place. This, too, at a time
when Meehan was producing first-class teams.
Exactly how much do these college newspapers reflect undergraduate opinion? Sometimes not at all. Often only to a small degree. Frequently they represent the opinion of a tiny but articulate minority and nothing more. The point is, however, that these views, so often considered advanced and radical, have a tremendous importance and influence on the thinking of those who follow. If Manchester thinks to-day what Paris will think to-morrow and what London will think next year, the Harvard Crimson of 1925 held views which the average undergraduate holds to-day and which the college authorities will accept in a few years more as their own.
Several seasons ago Head Coach Fletcher of Case had the everlasting temerity to declare that ‘intercollegiate football is dying.’ He was merely laughed at for his statement; to-day it seems less amusing. Since then three colleges — Loyola with 5000 undergraduates, Regis, another Jesuit institution, and Kentucky Wesleyan — have definitely abandoned the game. True, these are small and comparatively unimportant colleges. But there is hardly a university in the United States that has not overhauled its athletic practices rather sharply during the past twenty months.
VI
Most surprising of all in recent years was the housecleaning at the University of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania symbolized the Great God Football. Those who have seen its magnificently caparisoned 80-piece band strutting into the double-decker stadium at Franklin Field filled with 70,000 cheering spectators, and followed by its freshman band, less gayly caparisoned but also strutting, will admit this. Pennsylvania alumni were earnest recruiters for promising football material. Pennsylvania players were generously treated when athletic scholarships were handed out. Pennsylvania teams traveled in de luxe style across the country. Pennsylvania squads were given week-ends and pre-season practice at luxurious beach resorts along the Jersey coast. In short, at Pennsylvania, football was king.
Under President Thomas Gates a new régime was instituted. No concessions or special privileges to athletes. No training tables, week-ends, or preseason practice at the seaside. No recruiting of preparatory-school athletes. The head coach became a regular member of the faculty with a faculty member’s salary of $7500 a year. The former head coach had received $12,500. A new Department of Physical Education was created, with a Dean in charge of all athletics. The title of the story might be, ‘How Deflation Came to Franklin Field.’
About this time Dr. Butler, who seldom speaks without having his utterances appear on page one of the New York newspapers, came out with notice of a revolutionary change in the conduct of Columbia’s athletics. Sports were to be placed under the supervision of Mr. Rogers Bacon, ’96, with the title of Controller of Athletics, assisted by the able Dr. Edward S. Elliott, as Director of Athletics. Dr. Butler’s further plea for an endowment for college sport predicates the complete independence of athletics from gate receipts and consequent entanglements. Certainly, under endowed sport, there would be no money for an $18,500-a-year football coach and a $12,000-a-year rowing coach such as Columbia has at present.
In line with this step, Syracuse University also adopted a reorganization of its athletic department ‘with particular attention to be given under the new programme to a more intensive development of intramural sport.’ At Franklin and Marshall, all athletics have been centralized under a faculty department of Physical Education. Much the same thing was done at Boston University, under the courageous Dr. Frederick Rand Rogers. At Wisconsin, the athletic department has been investigated by a committee of six appointed by the State Legislature.
It may be news to some readers to learn that there are actually colleges in this country without a football team. Besides the three already mentioned, there are Emory University at Atlanta, Georgia; Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge; Reed College in Portland, Oregon; Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and doubtless many others. Certainly the number seems destined to increase. When the game was abolished at Loyola, the Reverend R. M. Kelley, S. J., the president, remarked, ‘It has been a matter of agreeable surprise to me to find out how many thoughtful people are in complete agreement with me on this important subject.’ He was further surprised, after a year without football, to discover that the athletic finances of the university were actually in a better state than before. ‘With the discontinuance of football,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘we expected that a substantial saving could be effected. The athletic statement at the close of the year surpassed our fondest expectations, for it shows that Loyola has been able to operate its new athletic programme without a loss. It is significant that this has been accomplished without curtailing the basketball, track, or minor sport programmes.’ What a blow to those apologists for the game who have long argued that football gate receipts were essential for the support of other sports, as if, indeed, this was reason enough for all the ballyhoo!
These brief indications simply show what is taking place the country over. Terrible though it is that a stock as fundamentally sound as Football Common should have to suffer such a drop in value, there is one bright spot upon the horizon. Periods of depression always stimulate efficiency: high salaries are cut, useless retainers are discharged, extravagant practices are eliminated, costs are pared to rock bottom. What has taken place in American business is also taking place in America’s greatest sport — which, after all, is only sublimated business.
VII
One reason why Football Common has taken a slump is that the leaders of the game have not been leaders. The men in charge of football, the head coaches, have almost without exception preferred to follow the trend rather than lead. Since 1907, when the forward pass was introduced into football, the coaches have invariably been found on the timid, conservative side. If football is the game of blood and iron that it is supposed to be, one would expect to have discovered its leading exponents in the van of any progressive movement for the betterment of the sport. On the contrary, they appear to have done their best to keep football in a condition from which, first of all, they could benefit personally. Some coaches have had an unfortunate influence on the game. Some have had a tremendously beneficent influence. Some men are bad coaches. Some are good coaches. But all are human.
The morning newspaper before me carries the following headlines on its sport pages: ‘Montgomery’s Injured Knee Keeps Him Out’; ‘Mendelsohn’s Collar Bone Broken in Navy Practice’; ‘Lyons Suffers Broken Nose’; ‘Morton Watches Practice with Bruised Leg’; ‘McCarthy Gaining after Concussion.’ Headlines such as these, picked at random, can be duplicated almost any day during the football season. Whether or not football is the most dangerous of sports is open to question. Certainly it is dangerous enough. What steps have been taken by the coaches to obviate these dangers?
Painfully few. That some coaches permit, even if they do not actually teach, the famous rabbit punch — the blow delivered on the back of the neck to lay a man low with ease — is pretty well established. Many good folk were shocked a few years ago when it was discovered that linesmen went into battle with hands taped like prize fighters, in order to deliver this rabbit punch, which, incidentally, is a form of punishment not permitted in the prize ring. In an open letter to the press, Mr. W. S. Langford, Secretary of the Rules Committee and himself a former coach, denied that such a practice existed. Shortly afterward Mr. Langford’s own committee, composed largely of former coaches and assisted by an advisory board of coaches including Mr. R. C. Zuppke, Mr. J. F. Meehan, and Mr. J. B. Sutherland, adopted a rule barring the punch. This was an illustration of intellectual dishonesty which it would be difficult to equal in the history of American universities.
The penalty for this punch, which can cause and doubtless has caused men’s deaths in football, is fifteen yards. Hardly, one would say, excessive. No, the coaches decry unnecessary roughness, but there it ends. By their own words they stand condemned. ‘The offensive linesman wishing to force his opponent back should drive his head directly into the opponent’s stomach,’ says Mr. Zuppke in Football. Again, ‘A defensive linesman, if he is a fast starter, a low-crouching fighter, with his feet continually under him, can, after some practice, handle his opponent as a good baggage smasher handles a trunk.’ Or as the late Mr. Knute Rockne, the Aimee Semple McPherson of the football cult, remarked in Coaching, ‘Slap him with the hip and with the head and shoulders in the stomach, if possible.’
Have any of the coaches been in the forefront of the various changes that have been made recently in what was once a game? Not visibly. ‘Football reform is the bunk,’ said Mr. Zuppke, and doubtless the other members of the hierarchy would cordially agree with these sentiments. Along with Mr. McGugin and Mr. Dobie of Cornell he sees nothing in giving football back to the boys. Why not, retort the coaches, give racing back to the horses? The analogy is indicative of the mentality of the average ruler of the game. Have any coaches protested against spring practice? Against night football? Painfully few. There are to-day five pages of rules in the Rule Book describing the improper use of hands, but rules are superfluous in a thing of this sort. If the head coach merely says a sentence or two condemning roughness before the first practice, there will be no slugging on his team.
Of course there are many fine and honorable men in the coaching profession. So, too, there are in politics. But in politics, as in football, these men do not lead. ‘The game may be stopped from the inside instead of from the outside if conditions remain as they are,’ said Mr. W. W. Roper of Princeton several years ago. He was right. Mr. Roper was a leader. Among the school ranks Mr. Edward F. Storey of Mamaroneck, New York, also stands out; he has worked to eliminate injuries and simplify the rules. These men are the exception. To-day the leading coaches show a painful lack of intellectual leadership. Their mentality can best be described by two examples, one from the pen of Walter Trumbull, a leading sports writer who tells a story on Head Coach Lou Little, Columbia’s $18,500 magician. While the good Dr. Little was playing a game at Georgetown, his team was backed up to its own goal — opponent’s ball on the one-yard line, fourth down. Suddenly the coach observed that the substitute next to him had slipped off the bench and was kneeling with his head in his hands. Wondering what was the matter, he asked the lad whether he was sick.
‘Sick, hell! I’m praying,’ came the answer.
‘And I guess the boy’s call for help must have been heard somewhere,’ said Mr. Little, ‘because they didn’t cross our goal line.’
Last winter a reporter from the New Yorker went to a movie theatre and there took down an actual transcription of the remarks of Mr. Heartly (Hunk) Anderson, who was describing the equipment of a football man in a news reel. Mr. Anderson joined the fellowship of educated men at Notre Dame in 1922, and is now head coach at that institution.
‘The fellow on the left,’ said Mr. Anderson, ‘couldn’t run a hundred yards in fifteen seconds with all them pads and contraptions, and as a matter of fact he is not as well protected from injury as the one dressed in silk pants. That roll-neck collar there affords a lot of protection with them funny-looking shoulder pads, and all they did was look tough and not protect; and the pants with the funny old pads; then you go down to them shin guards with the big knee pads to protect the legs and the heavy shoes. No wonder they could n’t run in them days.’
Mr. Little and Mr. Anderson are leaders in their profession.
Football Common selling off? Naturally. For the coaches have spent their time doing about everything but coaching. From Cambridge to California the head coach writes for the newspapers; very often he acts in a news reel, talks over the radio, draws comic strips, conducts summer schools for fellow coaches, acts as sales manager for a brokerage house, sells his name and endorses any product that comes along, and in general does whatever he can to feather his own nest to the detriment of the game itself.
VIII
‘If undergraduate interest continues to shift from the conventional type of intercollegiate contest to intramural sport, new and serious problems are certain to arise. There may easily result a new phase of inter-college competition, important chiefly for its spontaneous support by undergraduate players with much less of panoply than now surrounds our conventional intercollegiate athletics, but with far more genuine enjoyment among the undergraduates participating. Incidentally, inter-college matches of this type fortunately have, and probably will continue to have, little news value. It remains to be seen whether the colleges will encourage or discourage this development.’
So says the Carnegie Bulletin No. 26 published in April 1931.
To-day practically every college in the country has an intramural athletic programme more or less extensively developed. This may lead, as at Notre Dame, to a compact and flourishing system of feeding athletes to varsity teams, and a consequently successful record in most intercollegiate competition. Or it may tend to bring out many men who would otherwise neglect athletics, at the same time decreasing the interest in and importance of extramural contests. At Yale and Harvard each winter almost a hundred teams compete in various sports, and, despite opposition from deploring old grads, intramural athletics are growing under the House Plans, and tending eventually toward fewer intercollegiate games. The Yale Record over a year ago said editorially: ‘We predict, with no great astuteness, that the time is not far distant when Yale and Harvard will abandon varsity teams, restricting their extramural activities to a single game between the all-House teams.’
The old grads may growl and groan, but this is coming, whether they like the idea or not. When it does come, what will these colleges do without the money from football gate receipts to support their athletic programmes? One of the so-called justifications for football has been the fact that it financed all other sport within the university, and when gate receipts were running over a million a year all was well. As long as the bull market held, things were likely to remain in statu quo. But now the gate receipts are falling off, and are likely to fall off still more.
Many observers believe the answer lies in athletic endowments. Some years ago it was prematurely announced in the press that Harvard had actually undertaken a campaign to endow sport under the House Plan, with only a single football game against Yale, with undergraduates engaging chiefly in friendly sport against each other, with little publicity and no lengthy write-ups in the daily press. The report was untrue. A pity.
How interesting it would have been had it been true: the gate eliminated, the head coach a teacher and not a money grabber, the star athlete obscured, the publicity man, the chief scout, the various supernumeraries gone from the picture — everything, in short, reduced to its simplest common denominator. Impossible, say those wise in athletic lore. Yet one wonders?
Before me is a Remington Rand Business Service Card on which is printed the list of articles necessary for Harvard football players, including the following: undershirt, underdrawers, cotton socks, wool socks, stockings, garters, belts, inner soles, jerseys, pants, shoes, sweat shirts,Glastonburys, hoods, headgears, shoulder pads, knee pads, kidney pads, gloves, sweaters, and so forth and so on.
Is all this paraphernalia really necessary to play a game? Is it really obligatory for Harvard to have a dietitian to watch over the team’s food, for the Yale crew to row — and lose races — in a $10,000 shell, for New York University to have a ninety-piece band in full regalia, for Notre Dame to journey across country to uphold the honor of the East against Southern California, for Ohio State to have twenty cheer leaders in red and gray uniforms at the Homecoming Game? Why can’t the modern college track star come out for practice without an elegant track suit and a gaudy pair of pyjamas? Why, in short, can’t the colleges do what the rest of us are doing these days, and develop a little sales resistance? Especially when the manager of the sporting-goods corporation comes to town in the fall. The athletics-for-all programme would suffer? Well, every other business in the United States has had to suffer of recent years, so why not the athletics business? If reductions were made in the useless overhead of sport, only comparatively small endowment funds would be necessary to carry intramural programmes along without gate receipts from football.
Swarthmore actually has such a plan under way. A $200,000 fund to endow athletics has been started, and in a recent report Dr. Frank Aydelotte, the president, says: ‘There is a growing dissatisfaction among undergraduates and alumni with our traditional policy of playing one or two big football games against large universities. Games of this type with teams outside our own class cannot be justified on any except financial grounds. They are not fun either, for spectators or players.’
If the colleges can be persuaded to abandon the race to keep up with Athletic Director Jones, to curtail the building of ultra-luxurious marble shower baths, blue-tiled swimming pools, hospitals with radiotherapy apparatus to bake out the aches and pains of the football heroes; if they can be persuaded to hand out $500 shells to the varsity crew, cut down the scouts and curtail the number of camp followers who trail along for the Big Game, abolish Pullman-car football, give up the athletic scholarships (Professor Maurice A. Blake, Chairman of the Council on Athletics at Rutgers, says, ‘A scholarship of $200-$300 is now regarded as mere pin money by an athlete of recognized football ability’), endowment funds may be sufficient for intramural sport programmes without considering gate receipts from the overdeveloped business of football.
Possibly the colleges of the country will have to adopt some such idea whether they like it or not, because football, in its present complex and unhealthy condition, is dying from the inside. Every evidence shows that the game is being killed by its own excesses. To argue that this is a good thing or a bad thing is useless. Football’s day is done.
Nor can one help feeling this to be regrettable. In Europe, where football is unknown among the universities, students vent their wildness and give rein to their high spirits in less harmless ways: they shoot down the Rector, they toss bombs instead of pigskins, they overturn governments instead of street cars, and generally interrupt the course of public life. Football, whatever its faults, does not require the Garde Civile parading the streets, or machine guns on the corner roofs. There is also another reason, largely sentimental, why one dislikes to see football vanish. It is one of the last — if not the last — great phenomena of a restless, surging, pioneer nation; it is the sublime spectacle of a lusty and growing race. Yes, America is coming of age. Football is no longer in tempo with modern American life. We have outgrown it, though of course most of us don’t recognize this fact as yet.
‘Only the financial factor,’ said the Princeton Tiger last year, ‘has kept football where it is to-day. When this disappears, or the loss becomes greater than the gain, football will go. We give it ten years.’
Ten years! Well, ten years is indeed a short time. But what do you suppose they will be using the stadiums for in the year 1957?
Football Common has an enormous funded debt and no big surplus tucked away for such an emergency as confronts it at present. If, therefore, you are heavily interested in the stock, there is only one thing to do: take your losses and get out — before it is too late.