The Ball (22 page)

The impasse was settled, more or less, in 1863 with the formation of the Football Association and the adoption of the Eton rules for the official “Association” game. “Association” was later abbreviated as “soccer” to distinguish it from rugby football, which was codified eight years later with the establishment of the Rugby Football Union.

While football was fracturing in two back in its birthplace, on the other side of the Atlantic an intercollegiate consensus was emerging around the soccer variety of the game.

Riding a wave of popularity out of the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton series, football quickly spread through the college circuit. Columbia played Rutgers the next fall and Yale joined the pack in 1872 with its first game against Columbia. The following year, the Eton team visited Yale, only to be humbled at their own game, 2–1. Despite its explosion of popularity, the new game had its early detractors within the Ivy League. Cornell's president, Andrew D. White, declined permission for his students to leave campus for a game, famously declaring, “I will not permit thirty men to travel 400 miles to agitate a bag of wind.”

In an effort to hammer out a common set of rules to govern college football in the United States, Princeton called a conference in New York City in 1873. Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Columbia all participated and together formed the Intercollegiate Football Association. The rules firmly decided against any throwing or carrying of the ball, establishing “association football,” or soccer, as the official American intercollegiate game. Football in the United States was moving down the same track as football in England until one renegade institution derailed and diverted it forever.

For years Harvard had favored the “Boston Game,” a homespun variety of football made popular years earlier by members of the Oneida Club, a ragtag group of schoolboys who met after school on the pitch in Boston Common. Before the other colleges got around to codifying their rules of play, Harvard had established its own rules around the Boston Game, including rule 8, which permitted “any player to catch or pick up the ball but not to run with it unless pursued by an opponent and then only so long as pursued.”

In 1874, some players at McGill University in Montreal caught wind that Harvard was playing a game resembling the rugby game they'd adopted, so they issued a challenge for a two-game series to be played at Harvard. The first, won by Harvard 3–0, was played following Harvard's rules. The second, which followed the rugby code rules and allowed for tackling, ended scoreless. But everyone who played and watched that second game walked away convinced of its superiority to anything they'd seen before. “Football will be a popular game here in the future,” read a comment in the next day's Harvard
Advocate
. “The Rugby game is in much better favor than the somewhat sleepy game now played by our men.”

Flush with excitement over their newly hybridized game, Harvard next challenged Yale. But the archrivals, who played two very different kinds of football, first had to agree to a set of “concessionary rules.” Harvard managed to win most of the concessions, and the two met in New Haven in November of 1875 for the first occurrence of “The Game,” an annual Ivy League rite that has been repeated 127 times. Following Harvard's lead, the teams played according to modified rugby rules, which allowed for running with the ball and tackling. In concession to Yale and their soccer style of play, only kicked goals, not touchdowns, would count toward the score. And, following an innovation Yale had picked up from the visiting Eton team, the sides were reduced from 15 to 11 men.

The Crimson won, 4–0, the only victory they'd savor over the next 15 years of the rivalry. When the team met for their next appointed contest a year later, a 17-year-old freshman halfback named Walter Camp took to the field for the Bulldogs. Over the next 20 years or so, Camp, as player and then head coach for Yale, would almost singlehandedly close the distance between 19th-century rugby and the modern game of the gridiron. Rule by rule, committee decision by committee decision, Camp transformed the game.

M
uch has been made of American exceptionalism in the sports we uniquely play, and uniquely reject. When seen as a positive (mostly by Americans, of course), exceptionalism means we are a nation born of revolution, “founded on a creed,” as G. K. Chesterton wrote, and driven by a deep-seated belief in our unique destiny to champion individual rights and freedoms. More often, however, the term is used to decry America's perceived unilateralism, the go-it-alone swagger of our economic policies and military interventions, and the fact that we prefer the gladiatorial combat of American football to the “beautiful game” of soccer that unites the rest of the world in ludic harmony.

American football, more than any sport, has emerged as the symbol of this exceptionalism—the game that Americans love and the rest of the world loves to hate. The fact that we play and watch our homegrown game religiously while ignoring the lingua franca of world soccer is perceived by many as a nose-thumbing rejection of the global community and the spirit of internationalism. ESPN correspondent Sal Paolantonio happily fueled this perception and thumbed his nose at the world in his jingoistic tract
How Football Explains America
, an in-your-face takedown of Franklin Foer's global exploration,
How Soccer Explains the World
:

Kicking it. That's what the rest of the world does. And that's what I mostly thought about soccer: a game played by a bunch of guys who wish they could pick up the ball and throw it and would like to do whatever it takes to prevent the other guy from doing so. . . . No throwing, no blocking, no tackling—and most important, very, very little scoring. Not American.

Not surprisingly, the international press savaged the author. Under the memorable title “Worst Sports Book Ever?” a review in the English newspaper
The Guardian
suggested “football no more explains America than spotted dick or the Eton wall game or crown green bowling or the ‘donkey choker' meat pie sandwich explains the English. It's just that nobody else likes the stuff.”

The heated rhetoric around football's exceptionalism and capacity for “explaining” America belies a more complex history. American football emerged not as a rejection of the world or the “global game” that soccer has only since become, but as an assertion of local tradition over the latest foreign export. Before 1863, when the English Football Association was formed, there was no single set of rules for playing football, just hundreds of local variations and traditions that had developed in all their quirky glory over centuries. Most of these—like the Ba',
la soule
, rugby, and the Boston Game—allowed some form of ball-handling, if not running and tackling as well. It wasn't until 1866 that it was ruled illegal in soccer for players other than goalkeepers to catch the ball, and despite rulings to the contrary, tackling players and “grassing” goalies was common practice well into the 1880s. To arrive at the elegant, fast-passing game that it is today, soccer had to break with its high-contact, ball-handling roots, just as American football had to replace the scrum with the scrimmage.

As David Goldblatt recounts, in the late 19th century, as England looked to spread its newly sanctioned game of soccer to its colonies and former colonies, it was the nations once closest to the crown that rejected the game. Kiwis, having sampled the game's many manifestations over the years, chose rugby. Australia had imported football early in the 1850s, before its rules were settled upon, and, as Goldblatt puts it, “like the continent's unique flora and fauna it evolved in isolation.” Aussie Rules football merged soccer, rugby, old folk football, and possibly some Aboriginal influences to form a distinctly antipodean pastime. In Ireland, soccer didn't stand a “tinker's chance,” as my father used to say, arriving at the very moment the island was rising up against British rule. It was viewed as a Protestant game and a symbol of cultural imperialism infiltrating through sport. So the Irish clung all the harder to their Gaelic football (and to the ball they were allowed to handle), a folk game they'd played for the past 500 years. Canada already had a national game, lacrosse, and when it came to football, followed the lead of the elite Ivy League colleges to the south (and vice versa, given McGill's influence on Harvard). By 1891, Canadians had formed the Canadian Football Union, essentially taking up American football with a few different rules.

Far from being a lone holdout, the arrogant exception, the United States was in good company. We'd been incubating our own versions of football on town greens, sandlots, and college campuses since the Pilgrims landed. By the time professional soccer arrived on U.S. shores in 1894 with the formation of the short-lived American League of Professional Football Clubs, it was too late. For soccer to have then found its way into the hearts of Americans, it would have had to fight its way past sports that were already deeply enshrined in our national culture. Baseball was our summer game and national religion. Basketball was the new winter game, serving the sporting needs of our struggling masses. And we already had a game we called football, thank you very much, played with hands and feet and an oblong ball.

J
ohn Heisman, who along with Walter Camp inhabits American football's pantheon, pioneered many cherished features of the game, including the dramatic pregame locker-room oration. With kickoff minutes away and the fight songs echoing down the stadium tunnel, Heisman was known to pace in front of his men, waving a football in their faces.

“What is this?” he'd ask, quickly answering his question before anyone dared to propose the obvious.

“It's a prolate spheroid. An elongated sphere in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly up over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.”

He'd pause for effect as the definition sunk in, the players wondering perhaps whether they'd be expected to recite it back.

“Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”

That Heisman should have thrown around a term like “prolate spheroid” in the tense moments before a game is less unlikely than it might appear. He had, after all, relentlessly pressured Camp as the head of football's rules committee to legalize the forward pass in 1906. And it was the forward pass, and the need for an aerodynamic ball that could spiral effortlessly through the air toward its distant target, that drove the evolution of the ball toward its signature bullet-shaped form. It was the prolate spheroid that made the genius of the modern game possible, and Heisman wanted his players to appreciate the weight of that genius every time they handled the ball.

For much of sports history, people simply played with whatever they had available. The Egyptians made balls of papyrus, the same material they used to make boats and sandals and to wrap the occasional mummy. The Aztecs and Maya were lucky enough to have natural rubber—and human heads—in considerable supply. The French relied on beard hair and wine corks, both also in considerable supply, for their tennis balls. And the English had their livestock. The first footballs were pig bladders inflated by mouth and tied at the end like balloons. These “pigskin” balls were irregular in shape, somewhere between oval and round, and easily punctured. Local shoemakers made leather covers that laced up to protect the pigskin bladders.

One such shoemaker was Richard Lindon of Rugby, England, who, along with shoeing the town and students of Rugby, served as the local ball maker. Lindon's wife was stuck with the unenviable job of inflating the fresh “green” bladders, a hazardous task given the prevalence of diseased swine. She eventually contracted lung disease from too many bad bladders and died.

Charles Goodyear saved football, and presumably many lives, in 1844 with his patent for vulcanized rubber. The significance of his new invention for the world of sports was immediately apparent. Goodyear soon after introduced the first balls with rubber bladders. It's been suggested that the new, more responsive rubber balls helped transform soccer from a power-kick game to one focused on dribbling and controlling the ball. From his small shop in Rugby, Lindon ran with the new invention, perfecting the design for an eight-panel “India Rubber” ball and inventing a brass pump to spare future wives. The boys of Rugby soon came to him asking for a ball that better suited their unique carrying game, so Lindon created an egg-shaped, four-panel “Big-Side Match Ball,” direct ancestor to Heisman's prolate spheroid. Thus began a productive dialectic as the ball adapted to match the game and as players exploited the physical properties of the ball in ways that opened up new possibilities for play.

T
he distance from Lindon's quaint shoe shop to the Wilson football factory in Ada, Ohio, is vast in nearly every sense—temporal, cultural, geographical. If Rugby, England, is on one end of football's history, Ada is on the other. With a population just under 6,000 and a tidy 10-block Main Street that gives way to endless fields of corn and soy, Ada's about as close as you can get to the warm, beating heartland of football. Though American football was born in the Ivy League colleges of the Northeast, it came of age in the towns and small cities of the Midwest—and in Ohio in particular. In the early years of the 20th century, the Ohio League became one of the first professional football leagues, giving rise to such legends as Jim Thorpe. In 1920, the direct predecessor of the National Football League was conceived on the floor of an auto dealership in Canton, just 150 miles due east of Ada. Fourteen managers from 10 professional teams in Ohio and surrounding states sat on the running boards of cars and drank beer out of buckets as they cooked up the most lucrative business venture in sports history.

As deep as Ohio's football roots run, the most intimate connection between the game and the Buckeye state is to be found right here in Ada. I arrived in town on a cool September day to trace the path of the football, from the feedlot to the gridiron, and to meet the modern-day heirs to Lindon's legacy. There was a buzz of cheerful anticipation in the air. Students at Ohio Northern University, Ada's other anchor institution, were arriving for the fall semester—“the onslaught,” as the waitress at Little Mexico Café cheerfully described it. Football season was about to kick off and the Ada High School Bulldogs were coming off a 12–1 season as Northwest Ohio Conference Champions.