Football

Football, or American football, as it is called outside the United States, was initially a combination of European football (soccer) and rugby. It emerged as an intercollegiate sport in the 1870s in northeastern Ivy League schools. Yale University's Walter Camp, who came to be known as “the father of American football,” was instrumental in developing and publicizing the sport during the 1880s and 1890s. Despite serious [Page 174]injuries and some deaths during its formative years, football prospered, in part because prominent men such as Camp supported it. Football also owed its initial appeal and success to what the historian Michael Oriard has called its “necessary roughness” (Oriard, 207). Football became popular in the late nineteenth century precisely because it was a rough outdoor sport that young middle- and upper-class (mostly white) men could play. In short, it became popular because it was a “manly sport.”

The promotion of football during the 1880s and 1890s as a manly sport was part of the larger cult of masculinity that emerged in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Ideas about masculinity were transformed in the nineteenth century as industrialization, urbanization, and immigration altered fundamental social, economic, and political relations. With industrialization, the development of white-collar office occupations, the closing of the western frontier, and increased migration to cities, American men felt cut off from many of the outdoor activities that once defined American manliness. Social critics complained that an expanding corporate economy that valued intellectual prowess and subordination within hierarchical structures of authority over individual physical strength and endurance had “feminized” much of American culture. American males, especially middle- and upper-class white men, felt as though their power, authority, and independence, both at home and in the workplace, were in serious jeopardy. Prominent Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt issued a call to beleaguered men everywhere to reclaim their masculinity through the “strenuous life,” including the new sport of football. Faced with conflicting societal demands for both aggression and self-restraint, some middle- and upper-class men turned to football as a way of defining their manliness in a rapidly changing society.

Football appealed to American men because it wed older definitions of manliness that rested upon notions of physical strength, exertion, and endurance with new ideas concerning masculinity that were being fostered by the corporate economy. This new masculinity focused on mental acuity, leadership skills, and teamwork—a combination that many men found difficult to achieve in modern America. Football required strategy and cooperative effort as well as physical strength. It provided participants with an opportunity to reclaim their physical manliness through aggression, without becoming uncivilized.

In its formative years, football was organized and played by elite white men at America's best schools. For college-age men who played the game, it represented a rite of passage from youth into adulthood. The training and education endured by younger players at the hands of their older teammates was a way of initiating boys into an adult culture characterized by a corporate hierarchy. Proponents of the new sport asserted that it developed a manly character and created assertive, charismatic leaders who went on to play important roles in industry and government. Theodore Roosevelt considered football central to a young man's training for life, and in 1890 he linked it with not only the development of character, but also with vigor and courage in the face of physical danger. He and other proponents of football argued that it developed traits in men that were necessary for the survival of both the individual male and American society.

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