Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession
Reviewed by Daniel R. Bronson, Department of English, Montclair State University
MAY 21, 2004 archive
As a recently arrived exchange student from Budapest, my mother was taken to the University of Pennsylvania-Cornell football game in the early 1930s. She had absolutely no idea what was happening on the grass below her, but she was struck by the sense that half of Philadelphia was either in or around Franklin Field that day.
Such was the power of Ivy League football back then that a city-whether it was Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven or even New York-might go mad over a big game weekend; such had been the pattern for some 50 years. This was the heyday for teams in a league that did not officially exist and yet set the tone, the style and even the rules of football for the rest of the nation. As Mark Bernstein makes clear in Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession, most of the first All-Americans were from the prestigious “Ivies”; in fact, the term All-American was coined by the man who picked the teams, Yale’s Walter Camp.
Bernstein’s eminently readable book covers familiar ground for any fan or student of Ivy football history, but it is far more than a nostalgia tour of the Ancient Eight. He makes it clear that out of college football’s beginnings at our most prestigious institutions arose many of the problems still plaguing the sport today. From violence to questionable recruiting practices and even more questionable eligibility to the problem of a financially successful, semi-autonomous sports program dictating policy to an ever needy university-all the familiar litany of troubles appear early and far too often. How could the Ivies be immune when as Bernstein reveals in a stunning sentence, “In 1928, Yale’s football team took in $100,000 more than the rest of the university had received in gifts and grants over the first 150 years of the university’s existence combined.” (130)
While all eight teams draw some attention, the book’s focus is on the ups and downs of the Big Three-Harvard, Princeton and Yale-plus their prickly ongoing relations with Penn. Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Dartmouth get shorter shrift, no doubt in part because their early football history was too often in the shadow of the Big Three’s jockeying amongst themselves-at one time each played according to different rules--or Penn’s forays into national prominence.
All the usual names appear here, from “Pudge” Heffelfinger and the Poe brothers to Fritz Pollard, Heisman Trophy winners Larry Kelley and Clint Frank, Albie Booth, Dick Kazmaier, Chuck Bednarik, Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill, Ed Marinaro and on up to the book’s publication. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of all remains Harvard’s star of the late 1920s, Barry Wood, who “won ten varsity letters, something no Harvard athlete has done before or since.” (141) Wood’s brilliance as an All-American and College Football Hall of Famer was almost matched by his accomplishments as a hockey and baseball player and as the top-ranked tennis player in New England. But even more striking is the fact that Wood also “managed to graduate summa cum laude, number one in his class, and Phi Beta Kappa…went on to medical school at Johns Hopkins, became a renowned molecular biologist, and was named dean of the Washington University medical school at the age of thirty-two” (141-42)
While Bernstein notes that the term ivy league can be dated back to 1933, the league itself “was one of the last major athletic conferences to be formed…” (xii) after World War II. The elite group, many of whose presidents had called for a de-emphasis of football for decades, chose to forgo the big time. No longer a national force, the Ivies saw their huge old stadiums rarely filled by the 1960s. Students and other spectators often came to see the halftime shows in which bands competed to see which could be the most amusing, anarchic and tasteless. All too frequently, the bands were less disappointing in their performance than the football teams. If some teams rise to a brief excellence, it is appreciated by alumni, but goes largely unnoticed by the national polls. The spirit of Walter Camp rests uneasily.
As recent newlyweds, my wife and I wangled tickets to the great Harvard-Yale tie game of 1968. Driving up from Philadelphia, we found Boston and Cambridge unusually crowded and alive, as if time had turned back to another era. Nevertheless, we walked out with five minutes to go, Yale leading by what seemed an insurmountable score. It was hours later when a heartbroken Yale alumnus revealed that we’d missed the most exciting (or excruciating) few minutes in Ivy football history. We were surprised, even delighted, at the result, but hardly inconsolable at having missed it. I’m glad I did not miss Bernstein’s fine book.
Mark F. Bernstein. Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Xiii + 267 pp. Appendix, notes, sources and index. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8122-3627-0.