"How Football Explains America" Book Review

by Nancy Mehegan
I stumbled upon this book and found it fascinating.  The title is "How Football Explains America" by Sal Paolantonio.

Restless America Seeks a Sport

Rugby was the first game played by major college athletes in America, prior to football.  Rugby was a primitive Old World game, sleepy, with a mass of humanity in movement.  But rugby didn't fit America.

Sleepy Rugby too Slow

The 1800's was the time of the Wild West and the U.S. thirst for new territory.   The rugby rules forbade anyone picking up , carrying the ball.  Not enough happened -- just a mass of people moving.

The college boys at Harvard made the "first move"  They modified the game -- called it the "Boston Game", which allowed running & carrying the ball.  Harvard & Yale adopted the new game.  Princeton & Univ of PA still played the old "sleepy" game.  In November 1876 they held a conference and all schools adopted the new game. 

Hero Needed

Now there was a "hero" -- a man singled out who carries the ball.  And America loves heroes.  The wetern expansion offered America the rugged individualist and many heroes:  Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, etc.

Manifest Destiny & the "First Down"

The concept of the "first down" in football came from a conference in 1882. 

Capture territory.  Hold it.  Advance.  It's now all about possession.

The Huddle -- the Sacred Circle

RIGHT TO ASSEMBLY:  The huddle reflected Americans right to assembly.  Peacable Assembly is uniquely American. 

Football because of its brutality lends itself to the need for a huddle, a place to regroup -- to find patterns within the chaos.  There is almost something 'sacred' about the huddle -- a kind of 'religious congregation' -- where players make a plan and promise to keep the faith to the plan and each other.  A way of fostering teamwork -- in a game that had been tarnished by violence of the old world soccer & rugby.  Something magical happens -- in the huddle men become brothers.

History of the Huddle

The modern-day circular huddle, was invented by Gallaudet University quarterback Paul Hubbard in 1892. Gallaudet was the first school intended for the advanced education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. When quarterbacking, Hubbard realized that his hand signals could be read by opposing players.  To remedy this, he had his players form a circle so that his sign-language signals could be sent and received without anyone on the sidelines or on the opposing team seeing.

The huddle began to appear in more and more football games.

Comments

[Brian Cunnie]

Loved that review. It's especially interesting because I play on a rugby team. And, up until now, I had but little knowledge of the history of the two sports (i.e. football and rugby).

I find it especially interesting that football was originally invented because rugby was too slow. Nowadays things have changed: rugby is the more fluid game, football is more stop-and-start.