Jan 6, 2015 05:50 AM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...-football/
EXCERPT: [...] Prior to football’s postwar rise in popularity, antebellum Americans enjoyed sporting events like boxing, harness racing and early forms of baseball. According to the historians Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, however, the Civil War “engendered an ethos of sacrifice, of dedication to the heroic cause” in male soldiers who played a variety of organized sports on teams within military units. After the war’s end, universities took on the role of creating student athletes through organized sports initiatives that inculcated young men with the Victorian virtues of masculinity and sportsmanship. Educational institutions began to emphasize the importance of athletics; in 1872, The New York World remarked: “There can scarcely be any question … that the increasing impulse towards athletics in all our colleges is in itself a good thing.”
Football was one of the most popular of these new collegiate activities, and it developed rapidly. The first intercollegiate American football game occurred on Nov. 6, 1869, when students from Princeton and Rutgers faced off in an informal match. Rutgers confronted Columbia in 1870, and Harvard and Yale first battled in 1875. University football teams continued to multiply in number after Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Harvard established the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876.
A hybrid of early American folk football and British rugby, post-bellum American football was a violent sport that, according to the historian Allen Guttmann, appealed to young men hoping to “demonstrate the manly courage that their fathers and older brothers had recently proved on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.” Bravery was a prerequisite for players in an era preceding the widespread use of helmets. In 1905 alone, 18 players were killed and 159 sustained severe wounds, statistics that motivated several universities to shut down the sport on their campuses. Despite its rough nature, football continued to flourish at many leading institutions....
EXCERPT: [...] Prior to football’s postwar rise in popularity, antebellum Americans enjoyed sporting events like boxing, harness racing and early forms of baseball. According to the historians Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, however, the Civil War “engendered an ethos of sacrifice, of dedication to the heroic cause” in male soldiers who played a variety of organized sports on teams within military units. After the war’s end, universities took on the role of creating student athletes through organized sports initiatives that inculcated young men with the Victorian virtues of masculinity and sportsmanship. Educational institutions began to emphasize the importance of athletics; in 1872, The New York World remarked: “There can scarcely be any question … that the increasing impulse towards athletics in all our colleges is in itself a good thing.”
Football was one of the most popular of these new collegiate activities, and it developed rapidly. The first intercollegiate American football game occurred on Nov. 6, 1869, when students from Princeton and Rutgers faced off in an informal match. Rutgers confronted Columbia in 1870, and Harvard and Yale first battled in 1875. University football teams continued to multiply in number after Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Harvard established the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876.
A hybrid of early American folk football and British rugby, post-bellum American football was a violent sport that, according to the historian Allen Guttmann, appealed to young men hoping to “demonstrate the manly courage that their fathers and older brothers had recently proved on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.” Bravery was a prerequisite for players in an era preceding the widespread use of helmets. In 1905 alone, 18 players were killed and 159 sustained severe wounds, statistics that motivated several universities to shut down the sport on their campuses. Despite its rough nature, football continued to flourish at many leading institutions....