Posted on 06/17/2002 11:04:11 PM PDT by SoCal Pubbie
Excerpted...
Why has the world's most popular game failed to excite Americans in the way it has excited generations of Europeans? What were the processes as a result of which the Americans developed their own, nationally distinct, form of football? In a nutshell, what are the social roots of American exceptionalism in sport? It is these questions which form the focal point of this paper.
One explanation offered by some historians for the relative failure of soccer, not just in the United States but also in countries such as Australia, South Africa, India and Canada, is based on an implicit - and therefore unexamined - assumption that in each society there is a limited amount of "space" for sports, and that once this "space" has been "filled" by one sport, there is no room for other sports...
...However, this argument ignores the fact that the Americans did take up football in a big way, though it was not, of course, the Association game which they took up. During the 1870s, most American colleges played a game based on the rugby version of football but, as is well known, the Americans subsequently developed from this game their own, distinctively American version of football in the form of the grid iron game. A properly sociological analysis, rather than suggesting that soccer did not develop because baseball "got in first", would seek to explain why it was that, in the first place, the Americans opted for a game based on the rugby rather than the soccer version of football and why, having done so, they then developed that game in ways which took it further and further away from rugby, resulting in the distinctively American version of football. Some of these questions are taken up, and some tentative solutions offered, in the remainder of this paper.
The two most popular sports in the United States today, at least at the senior/professional level, are of course baseball and American football. The latter is derived from the rugby code of football which, like soccer, has its modern roots in the nineteenth century English public school system. Baseball, on the other hand, developed in the early nineteenth century in New England and is probably descended from an ancient English game called "rounders", which also involves running between bases of the type found in baseball. However, a distinguishing and very important quality of both baseball and American football is that, notwithstanding the fact that both sports resemble games which had earlier been played in Europe, baseball and American football draw upon and express - or at least, and no less importantly, are commonly believed to draw upon and express - a set of values and characteristics which are uniquely American...
...The development of both soccer and rugby was closely associated, as we have noted, with the development of the English public school and university system. In the United States, too, the colleges were one of the most important sources for the development of modern sport. Prior to the Civil War there were already some 250 colleges in the United States and by 1904, some 250,000 Americans were in higher education, roughly twelve times the number enrolled in colleges and universities in France and in Germany. Moreover, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sport came to play an increasingly important part in the American college system, a part which, at least in some respects, was not unlike that played by the "games cult" in the English public schools...The growing importance of sport in the second half of the nineteenth century culminated in the so-called "sports craze" on American college campuses in the 1890s, a process which was reflected in the development of baseball, rowing, and track and field but, above all, in the development of American football...
...Variants of football were played throughout the colonial period and down to the Civil War. After the war, it was the elite eastern universities which were most culturally receptive to the English game, with the game between Princeton and Rutgers on November 6, 1869 - won by Rutgers by six goals to four - being generally regarded as the first intercollegiate football game in America. It was at about this time that the bifurcation of soccer and rugby was taking place in England, and it seems that the Princeton-Rutgers game was more like soccer than rugby.
It was of course rugby rather than soccer which was the parent of American football - indeed, rugby provided the foundation for all the fundamental aspects of the American game down to the introduction of the forward pass in 1906 - and it was not until May 15, 1874, that the first intercollegiate rugby match took place, when a team from McGill University in Montreal travelled to Cambridge to play Harvard. Two years later, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard and Yale met at Springfield, Massachusetts, in an attempt to agree a set of rules for a game which still had many local variations (Guttmann,1978, p.128). From that time on, the rules and the structure of the game began to move in a direction which took the American game further and further away from its origins in rugby, with perhaps the really decisive break coming with the introduction of the forward pass, which is still illegal in rugby.
Although soccer - or at least a game which more closely resembled soccer rather than rugby - appears to have been played in some American universities, it is clear that by the middle 1870s, most colleges had opted for a game based on the rugby version of football. It is possible that in some universities, this preference may have been associated with circumstances which were particular to individual institutions. It is claimed, for example, that at Yale, which was certainly one of the early and very influential leaders in the development of football, the preference for the handling version of the game was due in large measure to a student called Schaft, who had formerly been a pupil at Rugby School, and who entered the class of '73 at Yale. Schaft is reported to have popularised the game among his classmates, and formed an association which offered challenges to other classes... Without in any way seeking to deny the efforts of the young Schaft, it is more plausible to assume that there were broader social processes in American society which help to account for the American acceptance of the rugby rather than the soccer version of football.
In this connection it is important to note that the early development of both soccer and rugby in the English public schools involved a number of processes, including the imposition of stricter restrictions on the kinds of physical force that it was legitimate to use, so that, at least by comparison with the earlier forms of folk football, both soccer and rugby were beginning to develop as relatively non-violent sports. However, it is clear that, of the two, it was rugby which allowed the greater use of physical force. During the early meetings of the fledgling Football Association, for example, the advocates of the rugby code objected strongly to the introduction of the rule which prohibited "hacking" - that is, kicking the shins of one's opponents - claiming that "hacking" was essential if an element of pluck was to be retained in the game, and that the prohibition of hacking would "emasculate" football (Dunning and Sheard,1979, p.110-11).
The fact that it was rugby which allowed the greater use of physical force - in a word, that rugby was a "tougher" or more violent game - is an important clue to understanding why it was that rugby rather than soccer came to form the basis of the American game...
...Given this situation it is perhaps not surprising that it was rugby rather than soccer which was taken up in America, for rugby almost certainly had a greater degree of consonance with the dominant norms and values regarding masculinity - and in particular the then prevailing aggressive aspects of masculinity - in American society in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it is significant that the game which was developed within the American college system provided even greater opportunities than did rugby - and considerably greater opportunities than did soccer - for the expression of violent behaviour by males, not in the form of unlicensed or uncontrolled violence, but in the form of socially sanctioned violence as expressed in violently aggressive "body contact". This was, perhaps, particularly the case in the early years of the development of American football, when not only tackling and blocking but also "slugging" - that is the punching of opponents - were apparently accepted as a legitimate part of the game. Other relatively violent tactics such as the "flying wedge" also formed part of the game at that time. This tactic involved two lines of players joined to form a V, each player except the foremost hanging on to the one in front and charging at full speed with the ball-carrier protected in their midst. Opponents would often bounce off the flying wedge when they tried to halt its progress, and sometimes received serious injuries. In 1905, no fewer than eighteen college players were killed and a further 159 were seriously injured in American football matches (Gardner, 1974, pp.99-100). That the American colleges generated a concept of masculinity which involved the acceptance of levels of violence in sport which were not always acceptable within the wider society is indicated by the fact that after a particularly bloody game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore in 1905, President Roosevelt threatened to prohibit the game by national decree. One response to this presidential intervention as the introduction of the forward pass, a move which not only moved the American game decisively away from its English roots, but which, in the words of Riesman and Denney (1951, p.313), "gentled and at the same time speeded" the game by eliminating the bulldozing of the mass plays. Although American football today is a much less violent game than it was in the late nineteenth century it remains, at least by British standards, a relatively violent sport and indeed the relatively high level of violence which still characterises the modern game is recognised by both proponents and antagonists of the game. Even today, proponents of what is now a relatively pacified form of American football list amongst what they see as the positive features of the game its bellicosity and its similarities to actual warfare and the pain and self-sacrifice which it requires, whilst injury becomes what Guttmann (1978, p.121) has called "a certificate of virility, a badge of courage". American football remains the arena par excellence in which a young man can demonstrate his masculinity. What is true today was even more so in the eastern colleges in the late nineteenth century.
It was, then, rugby rather than soccer which was adopted in the American college system. However, as Riesman and Denney have pointed out (1951, p.313), it quickly became clear that American players "either did not want to, or could not, play rugby according to the English rules". Drawing upon Walter Camp's and Lorin F Deland's Football, published in 1896, Riesman and Denney suggest that one reason why the game changed in the course of its development in America was that there were a number of ambiguities in the English rugby rules of the time and that these gave rise to problems of interpretation, especially as the Americans had no relevant traditions or more experienced players to whom they could turn for guidance.
One such problem of interpretation concerned English rule number nine, which stated that a touchdown is when a player, "putting his hand on the ball in touch or in goal, stops it so that it remains dead, or fairly so". The ambiguity of the phrase "fairly so" was, they suggest, increased by the preceding rule which stated that the ball is dead "when it rests absolutely motionless on the ground".
A further problem, according to Riesman and Denney, was that the English rules included what was in effect a legal fiction. They note that an offensive runner was allowed to carry the ball, but only if he should happen to be standing behind the scrum at the moment the ball came back out to him. A deliberate "heel out" of the ball was not permitted, and the English rules appear to have assumed that the difference between an intentional and an unintentional heel-out would be clear to everyone...
...Americans responded to this situation by seeking to define the rules more precisely and, in so doing, they began to reshape the game along American lines. Thus, for example, players were assigned to the legalized task of picking up and tossing the ball back out of the scrimmage. This led to the development of the role of the centre, and the centring operation. This in turn led to other problems, such as defining the situation as one of "scrimmage" or "non-scrimmage", as well as the question of the legality of passing the ball back to intended runners. These developments led to the abandonment of the English "set scrum" and the construction of a line of scrimmage across the field, with play being set in motion by snapping the ball.
Riesman and Denney also suggest that the Americans became impatient with the fact that it was possible for a team which was ahead to adopt tactics which would ensure that it retained possession of the ball until the end of the period. This, they suggest (1951, p.316-7), ran up against "a pronounced American taste for action in sports", with the problem being resolved by the introduction of the minimum yardage-gain rule in 1882 which ensured the frequent interchange of the ball between sides...
...The Americans, in order to solve the heel-out problem, set in motion a redesign of the game that led ultimately to timed centring from a temporarily fixed line of scrimmage. Emphasis completely shifted from the kicking game; it also shifted away from the combined kicking and running possible under Rugby rules; it shifted almost entirely in the direction of an emphasis on ball-carrying. Meanwhile, to achieve this emphasis, the game made itself vulnerable to slowdowns caused by one team's retention of the ball ... There is evidence that even if players had not objected to such slowdowns, the spectators would have raised a shout. The yardage rule was the way this crisis was met (1951, p.316-7)...
...it is necessary to take into account the peculiarities of the relationship between Britain and America. Of particular importance in this regard is the fact that the United States was not only an ex-colony of Britain, but it was also the first colony to gain independence from Britain. This close but particular relationship with Britain no doubt helps to explain why the English game of rugby was initially played in the eastern colleges, but it is also an important consideration in explaining why the rule changes introduced by the Americans resulted in a game which became progressively unlike the English game in which it had its origins. In other words, it is suggested that status rivalry with the former colonial power was one of the key processes which lay behind the development of a game which eventually came to have nationally distinct rules which marked it out not only as distinctively American but, by the same token, as distinctively non-British.
It is interesting to note that a similar process can be observed in relation to baseball, another sport which is often considered distinctively American but which, as we noted earlier, probably has its origins in the English game of rounders. In order for the game to come to be seen as distinctively American, it was necessary for those involved in developing the game to sever any possible link with the English game, and also to establish an American origin. Within this context, it is not difficult to see the function of the still widely held myth that Abner Doubleday created the game in Cooperstown, New York; as Markovits (1990, p.246) has noted, the Doubleday myth "was to squelch forever the British claim that baseball was a descendant of rounders". Similar considerations underlay the announcement by the President of the National League in 1889 that "patriotism and research" had established beyond doubt the American origins of baseball, an announcement that was greeted by three hundred prominent baseball enthusiasts, including Mark Twain, with chants of "No rounders" (Cited in Markovits, 1990, p.246). One can only adequately understand such developments by locating them within the very particular context of Anglo-American post-colonial relationships...
...In the last years of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries, therefore, the centre of power in American football was beginning to shift away from the eastern universities towards the Middle West, whilst the game was also being opened up to a growing number of players whose social origins were in the working class and who came from a growing variety of ethnic groups. In other words, the early domination of the game by eastern, higher class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants was increasingly being challenged. It may be significant that it was precisely at this time that we see the introduction of the rule which allowed the forward pass, a rule which is normally regarded as a landmark in the development of the game since it not only made what is perhaps the decisive break between American football and English rugby, but also made the game recognizably football in its modern, American, somewhat paradoxical sense, ie football in which the foot plays virtually no role. We know that this rule was introduced following the particularly violent game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore in 1905, following which President Roosevelt insisted on reform. Significantly, the President called together representatives from Yale, Princeton and Harvard, that is, from precisely those elite eastern schools whose control of the game was increasingly being challenged. It is perhaps reasonable to hypothesize that the unexpected intervention of the President provided an opportunity for the eastern colleges to reassert their former dominance and that, in the light of the growing threat to their power, they used the opportunity to mould the game in a decisive way, ie by pushing the game in a direction which expressed its distinctively American character, but an American character as defined not by recent and lower class immigrants from southern or eastern Europe, but by the old Anglo-Saxon elite.
As we have seen, American football in the early years of its development was a relatively violent sport, at least by comparison with English soccer and rugby. Moreover, and despite the fact that it is now less violent than it once was, it remains a relatively violent sport today. Insofar as the socially sanctioned violence which is associated with the game meets certain emotional needs of both players and spectators, then it is probably reasonable to argue, as Guttmann does (1978, p.125), that this particular emotional function of the game is "primitive and even atavistic". However, American football is also a modern game which expresses distinctively American concerns in its modern as well as in what we might call its "primitive" aspects. In what, then, does the game's modernity consist?
According to Guttmann (1978, p.15-55), modern sports may be differentiated from pre-modern sports by a number of characteristics, including a relatively high degree of specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification and the quest for records. It is clear that, in terms of all these criteria, American football is a highly modern game. In its social organization, for example, football has come to resemble, at least in some respects, other industries, for the production of a team involves a complex organization and staffing structure not dissimilar to those of many other highly bureaucratized industries. Centred on the team is a highly complex network of specialized relationships involving not just the players but also owners, managers, coaches, trainers, scouts, doctors, referees, groundstaff, spectators, journalists and many others.
The play itself also typically involves a high degree of specialization. Thus in contrast to traditional European folk games where there was little division of labour among the players - indeed, there was often no hard and fast distinction between the roles of player and spectator (Dunning and Sheard, 1979, p.33) - in modern American football the players are divided into twenty-two positions, not counting the "special" teams, which are restricted to place-kicks, kick-offs, kick-off receptions and so forth...
... The high degree of specialization and rationalization of American football is also evident in other aspects of the play. Riesman and Denney, for example, have drawn attention to the highly organized structure of many set-plays in American football, and have contrasted this with the less highly structured, more open play characteristic of English rugby. "If we look ... at England" they say, "we see a game in which shouted signals and silent counting of timed movements are unknown - a game that seems to Americans to wander in an amorphous and disorderly roughhouse. Rugby, in the very home of the industrial revolution, seems pre-industrial, seems like one of the many feudal survivals that urbanization and industrialization have altered but not destroyed" (1951, p.321)...
...There is one other respect in which, in terms of Guttmann's criteria, American football may be said to be a particularly modern game, and it is also a further respect in which it may be said to be particularly American. We refer here to the high level of quantification which is characteristic of football. Although, as Guttmann notes, the stress on teamwork is rather greater in the case of football than it is in the case of baseball, for example, so that it is difficult to attribute the result of a game to the actions of a single player, there are nevertheless numerous opportunities for the compilation of statistics in football. Thus football statistics routinely include information on yards per carry, total passing yardage, total running yardage and so forth. Books on successful teams invariably include won/lost records and team standings, while biographies of outstanding players provide lists of individual records, making it possible to compare the records of different players. Although the structure of the game probably allows for less quantification than is the case in baseball, where the process has been taken to extremes - and in this way, suggests Guttmann (1978, p.219), football may be less modern than is baseball - it is nevertheless the case that football, like baseball, involves a relatively high degree of quantification, and this, it might be noted, appears to be not only a general index of modernity, but also a particular obsession with American sports fans...
In this paper, we have examined some of the social sources of American exceptionalism in sport, and the way in which the Americans took the rugby code of football and developed from it their own nationally distinct game...
...However, in 1994, the United States hosted the soccer World Cup Finals... Alan Rothenburg, President of the United States Soccer Federation, was moved to state that "Before long, soccer will take its rightful place among baseball, basketball, football and hockey, as the fifth professional sport in America" (Newsline, July 1994, p.2). It will indeed be interesting to see to what extent the situation changes as a result of this development.
Have at it sports loving Free Republicans!
Only talkin' about Schaft!
U.S. soccer fans celebrate after their team's 2-0 victory over Mexico in their second round World Cup Finals match in Chonju, June 17, 2002. The U.S. soccer team's upset victory drew robust American TV audiences in both English and Spanish, despite the predawn hour of the telecasts, according to ratings released June 18, 2002. Photo by Shaun Best/Reuters
I too root for our USA team, though I'm not a big fan of the sport. My title refered to America in the 1800's.
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