I teach a course on the intersection of sport and religion in North America, and I ask students if there is something in American society that draws us to the violence of football. Why, for example, despite the best efforts of the NFL, has American football failed to gain momentum elsewhere in the world, when by most measures it is the most popular in the United States?
Of course, violence erupts from time to time in other sports – the consequence of a beanball toss or an inadvertent collision in the heat of competition. Hockey certainly has its share of violence, but unlike the sport, the violence is written into the game of football itself, as we were reminded when we watched Damar Hamlin crumble in Monday night’s game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals.
Violence has always been part of the game. Almost every account of a 19th century football game I’ve read includes the words “brutal” or “brutality.”
American football, a military game focused on the conquest and defense of territory, evolved from English rugby in the years following the Civil War. Yale’s Walter Camp, widely regarded as the father of American football, disliked the chaos of the rugby scrum and sought to introduce more strategy into the game. He was eventually able to persuade his Ivy League colleagues to exchanging the scrum for the line of scrimmage, thus allowing for more strategic possibilities and, he argued, a reduction in the violence associated with the game.
Whether the latter worked is debatable. Separating teams between downs may have lessened the anarchy of the scrum, but it also allowed players to build momentum before crashing into their opponents. Bloodied bodies, displaced teeth, broken and amputated limbs were commonplace. The Journal of the American Medical Association counted 12 football deaths in 1902, and at the end of the 1905 season the Chicago Tribune counted the season’s “harvest of dead”: 159 seriously injured and 19 dead.
An injury to his own son while playing on Harvard’s freshman team prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to summon representatives from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard to the White House.
At the meeting, which even included the Secretary of State, Roosevelt bellowed, “Change the game or give it up!”
College officials responded by forming the Intercollegiate Athletic Association and eventually changing the rules. Among other changes, they eliminated the flying wedge and allowed the forward pass, which made the game slightly safer. However, the losses mounted again in 1909: two deaths, and the Navy quarterback was crippled in a game against Villanova University.
Violence is a big part of the game’s appeal then and now, and American football history suggests that fans and players alike are willing to tolerate injury for the game to continue. “It’s the violence of the sport,” Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman observed. “The violence of sport attracts us to the game.”
Which brings us back to the question of whether there’s something about American society that draws us — myself included, by the way — to football carnage.
By any measure, the United States is a violent society, a sighting confirmed in the daily and evening news with horrific stories of mass shootings and homicide data.
The emergence of the game of football coincided with the 19th century push to the West under the banner of Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and the Spanish–American War.
Early football matches reflected the military objective of annihilating the adversary. The big three in football – Princeton, Harvard, Yale – have regularly destroyed their appointments on the gridiron. In 1888, for example, Yale beat its opponents 698 to 0; two years later, Princeton beat four opponents: 50-0, 60-0, 115-0 and 85-0.
“Football appeals so strongly to the American public because it is a war game,” Charles Dudley Daly, Harvard quarterback and later West Point head coach, remarked in 1921. “The most remarkable similarity exists between the basic principles of combat in war and in football. »
Perhaps this American affinity with militarism is what draws us to football and allows us to tolerate the violence inherent in the game.
Randall Balmer is a professor at Dartmouth College and author of “Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America.”