Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (15 page)

Some years the game erupted into a full-blown riot, and even when it didn’t it was still pretty rough; game day became known as “Bloody Monday.” The 1860 Bloody Monday game was
so
bloody, in fact, that the university banned football altogether.

Games involving teams of people kicking and throwing a ball toward opposing goals have probably been around for as long as there have been things to kick; no one knows for sure when the first football-type game was played or who played in it. Different football games are believed to have appeared independently of one another in cultures all over the world. In China, for example, people were kicking around balls stuffed with human hair as far back as 300 B.C.

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The ancient Greeks played a game called
Harpaston
on a rectangular field marked off with goal lines. When the Romans conquered Greece in 146 B.C. they picked up the game, renamed it
Harpastum,
and spread it all over the Roman Empire, including England and Ireland. (Tradition has it that the first English game, or
melee,
was played “with the head of an enemy Dane.”)

By the 12th century, many neighboring towns or parishes in the British Isles played an annual football game against one another on Shrove Tuesday, the British equivalent of Mardi Gras, as a sort of last, violent hurrah before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday.

An inflated pig’s bladder or some other kind of ball was brought out to whatever served as the traditional starting point of the game: the town square, marketplace, or a field between the two towns. A local dignitary threw the ball into the crowd of hundreds or in some cases thousands of participating townspeople, who immediately surged toward it. As the quickest, strongest participants muscled their way toward the center of the action, the people at the periphery grabbed on for dear life, pushing, pulling, punching, and kicking each other as they tried to somehow steer the brawling mass of humanity toward the goal.

There were no rules or referees and no restrictions on how the ball could be kicked, carried, or thrown. Some matches restricted participation to young men only; others allowed women and children as well. Most games lasted for hours on end, with the action ending only when it became too dark to play (unless people decided to play in the dark).

“Broken shins, broken heads, torn coats, and lost hats are among the minor accidents of this fearful contest,” one chronicler wrote of the annual Shrove Tuesday game between the St. Peter and All Saints parishes in the town of Derby, England, in 1795. “And it frequently happens that persons fall, fainting and bleeding beneath the feet of the surrounding mob.…Still the crowd is encouraged by respectable persons…urging on the players with shouts, and even handing refreshment to those who are exhausted.”

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Shrove Tuesday matches and other annual games proved to be an effective means for neighboring towns to settle scores that had arisen since the year before. It was the element of revenge, perhaps more than any other, that allowed football to survive, Stephen Fox writes in Big
Leagues:

Football came down the centuries less as recreation than as an expression of durable animosities between longstanding rivals. The essential point was to smite the enemy, not to play the game. Football by itself was too rough and risky to attract many players without the extra, emboldening goad supplied by smoldering feuds and hatreds.

Playing football proved such a compelling distraction that it even got in the way of other more traditional forms of violence: In 1389 King Richard II tried to ban the game, claiming that it threatened the kingdom’s defenses by interfering with archery practice. He failed, as did every other monarch who tried to ban football.

By the early 1800s, traditional Shrove Tuesday football games had faded into history, replaced by similar grudge-match games between rival English secondary schools. The game they played was similar to modern-day “English football,” or soccer, a kicking game that did not allow touching or running with the ball. The game remained virtually unchanged until 1823, when someone broke the rules at the now-famous Rugby school. William Web Ellis happened to get the ball just as the clock began to strike five. The rules stipulated that all games ended on the final stroke of five, but Ellis was too far away from the goal to have a shot at scoring. With only seconds left, he picked up the ball and ran across the goal line, just as the clock struck five.

Carrying the ball was against the rules, but it was also fun. And as the Rugby students quickly realized, so was tackling the ball carrier. “Rugby rules” football soon began to emerge as a separate sport. Rugby even developed its own egg-shaped ball, which was easier to carry under the arm than the traditional round ball.

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Rugby enthusiasts brought the new game with them to the far reaches of the British empire, but in the United States it was still virtually unknown. By the early 1800s, many eastern universities were starting to invent their homegrown versions of football, with each college making up its own set of rules. As with Harvard, many of these games were blood-sport rituals that allowed students to bond with their own classmates against men of other classes. Princeton played a game called “ballown” as early as 1820, and Yale began playing a rowdy form of soccer in 1851.

Because each university’s game was different, the schools did not play each other until 1869, when Rutgers and nearby Princeton University both adopted the soccer rules of the London Football Association and played what historians consider to be the country’s first intercollegiate football game. (Rutgers won, 6–4.)

Columbia and Yale started playing Rutgers and Princeton in 1870; and in 1871, Harvard lifted their ban on football, but they played their own version, known as “the Boston Game.” Unlike the soccer played at other universities, the Boston Game was more than just a kicking game. A player could pick up the ball whenever he wanted and pass it to his teammates; he was even allowed to run with it.

In 1874 the rugby team at Canada’s McGill University challenged Harvard to a series of three games of football. On May 14, the two schools played the Boston Game. Harvard won, 3–0. The next day, they played rugby, which meant that tackling was allowed, and
carrying
the ball across the goal line and touching the ground with it—making a “touchdown”—was scored just like a kicked goal.

Switching from the Boston Game to rugby wasn’t easy for the Harvard team, since no one on the team had ever even seen rugby played before. The game ended in a 0–0 tie, but the Harvard team enjoyed rugby so much that when they made a trip to Montreal later that year to play the third game, they played rugby again. This time they beat McGill 3–0, and were so taken with the new game that they abandoned the Boston Game and switched to rugby.

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In 1875 Yale decided to try rugby and challenged Harvard to a game. The game retained much of its rugby character, with a few concessions to Yale’s rules thrown in for good measure: Touchdowns, for example, had no value, but gave the scoring team a chance to kick a goal.

A record crowd of 2,000 spectators showed up to watch the game that day, and Yale lost, 0–4. That didn’t matter—the crowds were huge and the Yale players had fun. They switched to rugby in 1876.

Two Princeton students watching in the stands that afternoon enjoyed the Harvard-Yale game so much that they convinced the Princeton student body to change over to rugby and to invite representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia to form an Intercollegiate Football Association to draw up a uniform set of rules.

Another person watching from the stands at that first Harvard-Yale game was a 16-year-old named Walter Camp, who would enter Yale the following year. Camp was thrilled by what he’d seen on the playing field, and as he left the game that day he made two promises to himself: 1) the next time, Yale would win, and 2) he would be on the team.

Camp got everything he wanted—he made the team and Yale beat Harvard, 1–0. And he got a lot more than that: He went on to play halfback for Yale (1877–1882), then coached the team (1888–1892), winning 67 games and losing only two. He also served on every collegiate football rules committee from 1878 until his death in 1925, and was so instrumental in guiding and shaping the new game that was beginning to evolve out of rugby that sports historians consider him the father of American football.

Ready to move the ball downfield? Turn to
page 155
for Part II of the The History of Football.

We all love bloopers. Here are a bunch of movie mistakes to look for in popular films. You can find more in a book called
Roman Soldiers Don’t Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs,
by Bill Givens.

Movie:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1991)

Scene:
As Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character heads toward a bar, he passes a parked car.

Blooper:
Arnie’s cranial read-out says the car he’s scanning is a Plymouth sedan. It’s actually a Ford.

Movie:
Forrest Gump
(1994)

Scene:
In a sequence set around 1970, someone is shown reading a copy of USA
Today.

Blooper:
The newspaper wasn’t created until 1982.

Movie:
Camelot
(1967)

Scene:
King Arthur (Richard Harris) expounds on the joys of his mythical kingdom.

Blooper:
The 6th-century king has a 20th-century Band-Aid on the back of his neck.

Movie:
Wayne’s World
(1992)

Scene:
Wayne and Garth are filming their cable access show.

Blooper:
The exterior shot of the house shows it’s night. Look out the window of the interior shot: it’s daytime.

Movie:
The Invisible Man
(1933)

Scene:
Claude Rains, in the title role, strips completely naked and uses his invisibility to elude police.

Blooper:
The police track his footprints in the snow. But check out the footprints—they’re made by feet wearing shoes.

Movie:
Field of Dreams
(1989)

Scene:
Shoeless Joe Jackson is shown batting right-handed.

Blooper:
The real Shoeless Joe was left-handed.

Before appearing in
The Exorcist,
Linda Blair starred in a mustard commercial on TV.

Movie:
The Wizard of Oz
(1939)

Scene:
Before the Wicked Witch of the West sends her flying monkeys to capture Dorothy and friends in the Haunted Forest, she tells the head monkey that she has “sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them.” What does she mean by that? She’s referring to a song-and-dance sequence featuring “The Jitterbug,” a bug that causes its victims to dance wildly until they are exhausted.

Blooper:
The sequence was cut from the film before its release.

Movie:
Face-Off
(1997)

Scene:
The hero (John Travolta) learns that a bomb is about to go off somewhere. But where? He’s got six days to pry the information from the villain. We then see the bomb—it shows 216 hours.

Blooper:
Do the math: 216 hours equals
nine
days. Did someone forget to tell us we’ve gone to 36-hour days?

Movie:
Entrapment
(1999)

Scene:
Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character says she needs 10 seconds to download computer files that will steal billions of dollars from an international bank. She states further that after 11:00 p.m. her computer will steal 1/10th of a second every minute, totaling ten seconds by midnight.

Blooper:
More Hollywood math: One-tenth of a second per minute for 60 minutes equals only six seconds…four shy of the required ten.

Movie:
The Story of Robin Hood
(1952)

Scene:
In one scene, Maid Marian (played by Joan Rice) wears a dress with a zipper in the back.

Blooper:
Did they have zippers in the 12th century?

Movie:
Wild Wild West
(1999)

Scene:
After thwarting the plans of the evil Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), Jim West (Will Smith) and Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) ride off into the sunset heading back to Washington, D.C.