“In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!” In 1903, the president told an audience, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. As New York City police commissioner, he helped revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series after it had been canceled for two years following the violent 1894 clash that was deemed “the bloodbath at Hampden Park.” His belief that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his fellow Rough Riders who were former football standouts. The sport reached such a crisis that one of its biggest boosters- President Theodore Roosevelt-got involved.Īlthough his nearsightedness kept him off the Harvard varsity squad, Roosevelt was a vocal exponent of football’s contribution to the “strenuous life,” both on and off the field. “The once athletic sport has degenerated into a contest that for brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats in the arena in ancient Rome,” opined the Beaumont Express. Newspaper editorials called on colleges and high schools to banish football outright. ![]() Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season. ![]() The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. With little protective equipment, players sustained gruesome injuries-wrenched spinal cords, crushed skulls and broken ribs that pierced their hearts. Gang tackles routinely buried ball carriers underneath a ton and a half of tangled humanity. Players locked arms in mass formations and used their helmetless heads as battering rams. ![]() The college game drew tens of thousands of spectators and rivaled professional baseball in fan appeal, but football in the early 1900s was lethally brutal-a grinding, bruising sport in which the forward pass was illegal and brute strength was required to move the ball. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killing fields.
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