Penn State superfans: Get exclusive, in-depth Nittany Lions news, analysis and recruiting updates every day. Become a PennLive Sports Insider. Only $7.99 a month. Learn more.
If you’re wondering as I am if college football should or even can be played during an age of pandemic and upheaval such as this one, well, it’s already been done before. How successfully is up for debate. But there was a substantial if abbreviated football season 102 years ago.
It was played amid the most lethal pandemic in American history during the final year of a world war. And it was played with college-age players but not necessarily representing colleges, rather military bases and divisions.
The year was 1918. American troops were flowing in a steady stream to and back from Europe on crowded ships. Many of those same soldiers or those training to be were playing college football on makeshift teams constructed around bases of our various Armed Forces.
And for what you might expect to be patchwork pickup ballclubs thrown together, they were not only pretty damned competitive, one of them won the 1919 Rose Bowl.
Scenes of that season have been pieced together recently from various archives and printed accounts of the era. I was recently amazed by a photograph taken of the crowd at a Georgia Tech game in Atlanta – many in the stands wearing masks ostensibly to protect them from the “Spanish Flu” that was in the midst of taking 650,000 American lives and somewhere between 20 and 40 million worldwide.
Not that the pandemic didn’t have an effect on football. It absolutely did, according to author Chris Serb:
“The Spanish Flu really put a dent in the college football season. Some schools canceled football entirely because the flu hit there early.
“The college teams were already on a shoestring anyway because so many players had enlisted or had been drafted. You’re using young players and reserves. Then, you have the double-whammy when the flu knocks half of your team out for three weeks or a month.”
Harvard, Yale and Princeton all dropped the sport after America entered the war in 1917.
“But it didn’t destroy the season,” said Serb. “Most teams curtailed their schedules. In those days, most teams played about a 9-game schedule. Typically, those were trimmed to 4 or 5. Michigan and Pitt claimed national championships that year. Michigan went 5-0, 2-0 in the Big Ten. Pitt was 4-1 and there one loss was to a military team.”
Nobody was more prepared to discuss that season this year than Serb. Uncannily prescient simply because the topic fascinated him, the graduate of Holy Cross and later Northwestern’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism last year published an account centered considerably on that 1918 season – War Football: World War I and the Birth of the NFL.
On Thursday, he spoke to me from Chicago about his book. It documents particularly the period between 1916 and 1920 which includes all of the United States’ participation in “The Great War” as well as its first encounter with a major pandemic.
"War Football: World War I and the Birth of the NFL" is Serb's examination of how college football patched together a schedule in 1918 during the final year of the horrific trench war and the Spanish Flu pandemic by using military-based teams.
In it, Serb makes a compelling case that the seeds of the eventual sprouting of the National Football League in 1920 were first sown when it was proven fans would come out to see football teams made of their favorite college players – even if they no longer played in their old college colors. Until then, as Serb states in his book, pro football was “something that much of the public viewed as seedy and tainted.”
The Armed Forces teams built around players stationed at wartime Army, Navy and Marine bases did exactly that. Not only did fans swarm to see them even during the height of the pandemic, these first all-star teams posted impressive records and some gaudy scores against their college competition.
In Europe, the American Expeditionary Forces held regular games, mainly in France, and held an elimination tournament – maybe the first hybrid version of the College Football Playoff – to name a champion.
Here at home, the Rose Bowls capping the 1917 and 1918 seasons were played not between Eastern and West Coast university teams as they had been in the game’s first three editions (Michigan-Stanford, Washington State-Brown, Oregon-Pennsylvania) but instead pitted the Mare Island Marines of San Francisco Bay first against the Camp Lewis Army base team from Tacoma, Wash., then the Great Lakes Naval Training Station team of Chicago. Most of the college teams were too depleted by World War I or hesitant to travel during the pandemic to field their own.
Chicago Bears patriarch George Halas, at that time barely graduated from Illinois where he’d been a star on the Illini’s Big Ten baseball and basketball champions but not much of a football player, saw the promise in pro football before anyone. And after becoming a star for Great Lakes Naval Station, he became a founder of the NFL.
Serb connects the dots of perception:
“You had these college-educated military veterans returning whereas, before the war, maybe 20 percent of pro football players were college-educated. Now the majority of them were and they were clean-cut military veterans. A lot of the looking down on pro football players as roughnecks and hooligans that you had before the war, those barriers fell.
“Then, you had these great networking effects where you’re combining great players from all over the country – this guy’s from Harvard, this guy’s from Michigan, this guy’s from Illinois, this guy’s from Texas and they’re all together. Now you can call on guys from all over the country when you’re trying to start your own pro team, which is exactly what George Halas saw.”
So, you can confidently cite this period as the genesis of the NFL. But what also fascinates me about 1918 is the relative nonchalance with which teams competed amid the Spanish Flu. Attitudes about survival and death a century ago were wholly different than today. Many more Americans were locked in a daily hand-to-mouth existence. Medicine was only relatively beginning to develop as a reputable science. And within little more than the previous half-century, the U.S. had suffered through a civil war that nearly tore it apart, then a world war that threatened to do the same to Europe. You could say premature death was part of everyday life.
Which is where Serb’s day job comes in. He has been intimately involved in the nation’s recent upheaval as a Chicago Fire Department captain. He’s the boss of Truck 11 housed at the Chicago Fire Station at 35th and King Drive. So, you can imagine what his life has been like in the wake of the George Floyd protests of the past two weeks.
“We had a protest march that started next to the station last week that was really peaceful. We’ve been lucky.”
Chicago Fire Department captain Chris Serb trained as a journalist at Northwestern's prestigious Medill School.
In general, it’s been hectic:
“Our fire volume is up four times what it normally is. We had two fires on [last] Sunday, one big and one small, and we were tied up at the big one for five hours. We probably would have been involved in a couple of others outside our area that we weren’t available for. But just listening to the radio, our call volume was three or four times greater than on a typical busy day.”
But he trained as a journalist and received his Masters at one of the most prestigious J-schools in the nation. He was a working journalist the entire time he waited to be called up by the CFD. So, ink is still in his blood. Even as a firefighter, he had written freelance stories before tackling War Football.
When I asked Serb what he learned during his research for the book about how crowds behaved during the Spanish Flu pandemic, he immediately mentioned that well-posted photo I referenced earlier of the crowd at the Georgia Tech game at the old Grant Field in Atlanta.
It’s the site of Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium today. I’ve actually sat in the stands at the same venue, watching a South Carolina @ Georgia Tech game in 1988 when my brother-in-law was an offensive assistant on the Gamecocks’ staff.
In that old photo re-published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month, there are a lot of people wearing masks, but also just lots of people. The place seated 5,304 people then and the bleachers appear packed for what was in 1918 a very good Georgia Tech football team coached by none other than John Heisman.
AJC researchers believe the game was probably one against Furman in October of that year, but nobody is sure, not even Andy McNeil, the great-grandson of Thomas Frederick Carter, the Tech mechanical engineering student who took the photo. He gave it to McNeil sometime before he died in 1998. McNeil found it remarkable then and had it reproduced for framing, never dreaming such a scene could be replayed today.
But Serb doesn’t believe such precautions were commonplace then:
“I’ve seen pictures where folks are were wearing masks in the crowds. But I didn’t encounter much of that in my own research in The Chicago Tribune. You had pictures of game action in there, but I never saw a picture of the crowd at one of these Midwest games where the folks were wearing masks.
“Certain places took [the Spanish Flu] seriously and others certainly didn’t. The Mare Island team stayed almost totally healthy until a couple of guys got sick right before the Rose Bowl.
“I can think of a couple of instances where the games went on, but they were behind closed gates. Which is what we might have in college football this fall.”
Serb cited a game between Illinois and the undefeated Chicago Naval Reserve team in Champaign with no crowd admitted by health authorities. Ohio State was prohibited from traveling to play a game by school authorities and substitute opponent was subbed in within days.
But Great Lakes Naval Training Station traveled almost everywhere it played. It didn’t really have a proper home field, per se. So, before that 1919 Rose Bowl, the Bluejackets traveled to play at Iowa, Illinois and Notre Dame. With a team that featured future Pro Football Hall of Fame members George Halas, Paddy Driscoll and Jimmy Conzelman, Great Lakes ripped to an unbeaten 6-0-2 season capped by that win over Mare Island.
Five years later, the Spanish Flu and military base teams were distant memories. The NFL had just completed its third season.
And the Tournament of Roses’ annual contest, originally called the Tournament East-West Game and played in Pasadena’s Tournament Park, had become so popular and crowds so dense that a stadium was deemed necessary.
It was called the Rose Bowl, as a twist on the Yale Bowl. And it was christened in 1923 when Southern California and Penn State met, the Trojans beating Hugo Bezdek’s Nittany Lions 14-3. And by then, a 1918 season that had so pivoted and changed football at all levels was already fading into the annals. Only to be copied by an odd facsimile a century later.
FREE Nittany Lions news! Sign up now to receive our Penn State Today newsletter in your email inbox every morning. No charge.
More PennLive sports coverage:
• Basketball has changed, so they don’t make players like Wes Unseld anymore – but maybe they should.
"football" - Google News
June 07, 2020 at 04:02PM
https://ift.tt/2UjjaUs
How the 1918 wartime college season changed football, was precursor to our year of pandemic - PennLive
"football" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ST7s35
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How the 1918 wartime college season changed football, was precursor to our year of pandemic - PennLive"
Posting Komentar