Football Profiles: Teddy Roosevelt

I had presumed it was common knowledge college football (and thus must likely it’s descendant professional football) would not be with us today were it not for the meddling of President Theodore Roosevelt. As this is not the case, let me share the story.

It’s 1905. This year alone twenty-one young men have perished on the field. Magazines and newspapers are running sensationalist stories about the violence and sleaze frequently associated with the sport. Schools are beginning to ban the game. It’s unfavorable comparisons to being more sinful than cock-fighting are threatening what is to become America’s favorite past time.

This worries many presidents of the Ivy Leagues. Surely of some concern is their investment in not-insignificant coaches’ salaries and facilities, such as 50,000 seat stadiums. But their interest is more than pecuniary. The Ivy Leagues at this time are less concerned with academic pursuits as they were with athletic prowess. In 1881, Harvard president Charles Eliot went on record in favor of sports because they could change “the ideal student…from a stooping, weak, and sickly youth into one well-formed, robust, and healthy.” The culture of the Ivies and its feeder schools was one of manliness and machismo. President Roosevelt, a Harvard man himself, gave a speech inveighing “We cannot afford to turn out of college men who shrink from physical effort or from a little physical pain” because of the country’s need for men with “the courage that will fight valiantly alike against the foes of the soul and the foes of the body.”

In other words, good football players could become good soldiers.

So, President Roosevelt hosts a conference at the White House in October 1905, inviting representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (the equivalent of today’s Florida, Alabama, and USC) to affect reforms “relating to roughness, holding, and foul play.” Though this does not immediately revive some of the canceled programs, the President declares schools refusing to reinstate football or considering banning it are “doing the baby act” and being “mollycoddle[s]”.

Thus Roosevelt almost single-handedly saved college football from extinction and ushered it into the modern era.

(If you don’t believe me, check out The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel.)