JRN 362 - Lecture Ten

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Ten

Review
• How did college football reach the
point in the first third of the 20th
century when teams were more
important than the institutions they
represented?
• How had football transcended its
roots in educational institutions to
become a leading cultural marker?

Review
• Credit the media of the day: print,
radio, film and recorded music.
• Add the Rockne Factor to the mix.
• And what follows is a cultural
powerhouse that permeated
America’s Dream Life and even
shaped its literature.

Review
• Rockne earned substantially more
money from appearances in product
advertising, clinics, film consulting
and other off-the-field activities than
he did from coaching, even with the
raise from Notre Dame.

Review
• His celebrity, however, mattered little
to his current and former players.
• “It was a very, very sad day for all of
us, and it stayed sad for a long time.”
– Frank Hoffman, who played for
Rockne in 1929 and 1930.

Review
• To be sure, Rockne was as unique a
force as any era could spawn but he
was helped enormously by a deep
understanding of traditional
newspapers and magazines and the
emerging media of the time: radio
and film.

Review
• Rockne had already starred in a
series of short films about football
such as Flying Feet that were
screened in theaters before the
feature

Review
• In fact, Rockne was headed to Los
Angeles to advise on a film called
The Spirit of Notre Dame when his
plane crashed in Kansas.
• His death itself became part of a
media swarm, both reflecting and
foreshadowing football’s significant
role in culture.

Made for Modern Media
• By the 1930s, the American Dream
Life of football became the feature
attraction in popular mainstream
magazines delivered to families such
as the Saturday Evening Post …

• … and the pulp serials coveted by
boys and adolescents for stories of
heroic and sometimes mysterious
play.

• Trading cards also featured heroic
football players such as Red Grange,
effectively putting the stars in both
pockets and bicycle spokes.

• Books remained a key transmission
instrument for football’s place in the
American Dream Life as tales of
heroics continued to enter the homes
of millions, particularly at Christmas.

• Music, too, featured football themes
from time to time.
• Al Sherman, Buddy Fields and Al
Lewis wrote “You Gotta Be A Football
Hero” in 1933. The song underscored
gender roles associated with the
game from the start.

• College fight songs likewise were
popular even among people who had
never stepped foot on campus or
even attended a game.

• By the 1920s and 1930s, radio and
film joined the media swarm that
rushed to feature football games and
football stories.

• Football easily fit into the contours of
radio and film (and, later, television).
• It had action and noise, a perfect
combination to attract fans to the
vicarious Dream Life experience of
football heroics.

• Attempts were made to broadcast games in 1912 (telegraph from the University of
Minnesota) and 1919 (telephone from New York presenting accounts of the NYU v.
Wesleyan game.
• KDKA in Pittsburgh holds a claim to be the first to broadcast college football, with
coverage of the 1921 Pitt – West Virginia game.
• Of course, Yale needs to be in the debate, as an amateur broadcast contends in
covered the Yale – Princeton game from New Haven on his station, 1GAI.

• The first radio broadcast that historians tend to agree on took place on Thanksgiving
Day, 1921, when engineering students cobbled together amateur radio kits to call the
Texas A.& M. – Texas game at College Station.
• The first national broadcast occurred a year later in 1922.
• The Chicago-Princeton game was covered via Westinghouse network from Chicago.
It wasn’t live.

• From that point, college football games became a regular part of radio programming
schedules in the Fall.
• Notre Dame, Army and Navy each had games broadcast nationally and developed
national followings because of that.

• While radio presented live or
delayed-broadcast action, film had
the capacity to present the visual
spectacle of football on a grand
scale.
• Hollywood knew that and went to
work toward creating the mythology
previously reserved to books.

• The genre of sports films circulates
around familiar arcs, and football both
helped to launch and reinforce the
template:
- Underdog becomes champion
- Nerd becomes hero
- Hard work pays off

• It turned out that Walter Camp’s
moral code fit America’s desire to
root for the honest underdog who
overcomes obstacles to win the day.
• One of the greatest films in history,
Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, is built
on that arc, as this and the following
stills show.

• Through film, football became part of
what one scholar called the Athletic
American Dream, one that persists.

• Moreover, football movies came to
define – and idealize - college life in
the through the 1960s.
• Note that only 16 percent of
Americans attended college in 1940,
meaning the experience of college
was vicariously known through film.

• Between 1926 and 1941, Hollywood
produced 115 college sports movies.
• Some 89 of these works featured
college football, because the game
featured romance in a socially
acceptable sports setting – college
campuses.

• But films weren’t all about pom-poms
and heroics as social criticism
managed to infiltrate the screen.
• College Coach, for one, features a
coach who clashes with the school
president over the need to sell more
tickets and gives recruits money to
play.

• The president’s son – a chemistry
major - doesn’t want to play football.
• Although he eventually decides to
play and help win the big game, the
main character shows that the game
is corrupted because he has to
redeem under the agency of his
personal moral code.

• The Marx Brothers skewered football
with the satire, Horse Feathers.

• It featured the classic line from the
character Professor Wagstaff, played
by Groucho Marx:

• “And I say to you gentlemen that this
college is a failure. The trouble is
we're neglecting football for
education.”
• The film landed the Marx Brothers a
Time magazine cover, and now more
than 80 years later, the film still rings
true.

• In 1939, another electric medium –
television – joined radio and film in a
warm embrace of football.
• NBC telecast the Waynesburg –
Fordham football game on its
experimental station based in the
Empire State Building.

• The range of the broadcast was
approximately 50 miles to a potential
audience of about 100 TV sets.
• But that would change as football
positioned itself to conquer a new
medium and deepen its hold on
America’s Dream Life, athletic and
otherwise.

Monday Morning Quarterback
• First, its immense influence is evident
by the volume of cultural products
stemming from football films (e.g.,
Hold ‘Em Yale, The Freshman)
books, and magazines.
• Game attendance underscored this
popularity.

• By the end of the 1920s and into the
early 1930s, though, critics began to
ask fundamental questions about
whether college football had gone too
far.
• Howard Savage was commissioned
to study the issue.

• “Can it concentrate its attention on
securing teams that win, without
impairing the sincerity and vigor of its
intellectual purpose?” asked Savage,
lead author of American College
Athletics (1929).

• The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching sponsored
the study.
• It deployed the most sophisticated
survey techniques and data analytics
of its period to find the answer.
• The results were damning.

• The foundation decided to look into
college football in the mid 1920s after
noting success of Knute Rockne in
elevating the status of football and a
coach, as he personified the shift in
the game from campus event to
entertainment spectacle.

• Even as far back as 1905, college
faculty and administrators took sharp
notice of the latent corruption.
• This critique raged alongside
concerns over the carnage of on-the-
field deaths and injuries.

• In January 1906, a University of
Wisconsin history professor argued
that the game’s popularity made it
impossible to make athletics “honest
and rightly related to university life.”

• Collier’s Magazine published a series
on the corruption of college football in
November 1905 that alleged the
University of Wisconsin had paid
players and that some athletes had
worked to rig elections to guarantee
favorable funding and legislation.

• Princeton president, and later U.S.
president, Woodrow Wilson said
extracurricular activities had become
the “side show” that had “swallowed
up the circus.”
• Wilson would later credit football for
helping the allies win WW I.

• In his 1899 work, The Theory of the
Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen, a
professor at Chicago, described
college sports (particularly football)
as a form of “conspicuous
consumption” that reflected a form
strain of debauchery.

• The early 20th century critiques,
however, did little to halt the rise of
college football.
• These complaints, however, created
a template Carnegie and others
would use in the late 1920s as part of
a formal investigation into the game.

• The Carnegie Foundation issued the
Howard Savage report in 1929, and it
generated front-page news for the
abuses it documented.

• “In the United States, the composite
institution called a university is
doubtless still an intellectual agency.
But it also a social, a commercial,
and an athletic agency, and these
activities have in recent years
appreciably overshadowed the
intellectual life …,” Savage wrote.

• “College, the report stated, was
designed for one “conscious purpose”
and that was to teach and, “as a
teaching agency, to bring the college
youth to an understanding and
appreciation of the intellectual life – in
a word, to teach the boy to think.”

• But colleges, Savage wrote, had
taken a turn toward vocational
training, and that was reflected in
football.

• “It is under this regime that college
sports have been developed from
games played by boys for pleasure
into systematic professionalized
athletic contests for the glory, and too
often, for the financial profit of the
college,” Savage wrote.

Among other things, the report
concluded:
1. That college football made it it
difficult for players to also attend to
coursework because the demands of
practice consumed time that precluded
study;

2. Thrust naïve, poor students into a
world where they had access to robust
meals, fancy clothes and other
accessories of the life of the well-to-do;
3. Encouraged the recruiting of players
to guarantee winning teams to fill new
stadiums.

• Moreover, the report found that
colleges essentially provided free
content for media.
• “ … the blaze of publicity in which the
college athlete lives is a demoralizing
influence for the boy himself and no
less so for the college.”

• Overall, the report found schools
hired athletic administrators whose
experience suggested they had the
“ability to make athletics, especially
football, yield profits, to devise
schedules that please various
contingents, and to procure funds for
stadiums” more than academics.

• “The tendencies of the time, the
growing luxury, the keen inter-college
competition, the influence of well-
meaning but unwise alumni, the
acquiescence in newspaper publicity,
the reluctance of the authorities of the
university or the college to take an
unpopular stand.”

• Football transformed colleges from
centers of intellectual life to the
center of the entertainment industry,
the report stated.
• The solution? Return college football
and other sports to their rightful place
as the pursuits of amateurs.

• The report’s path to redemption led
through a recalculated concept of the
amateur athlete, imported from elite
English schools.
• To date, that concept – promoted by
Camp - had been largely ignored by
American colleges.

• The United States government used
the following to define amateur in the
1920s:

• “An amateur sportsman is one who
engages in sport solely for the
pleasure and physical, mental, or
social benefits he derives therefrom,
and to whom sport is nothing more
than an avocation.

• “The matter involves both the
presence or absence of material
considerations and also a body of
spiritual considerations, which accrue
to the amateur, but which in the case
of the professional are necessarily
outweighed by the material benefits
that he receives,” the government
wrote.

• Ironically, the media reflected this
ideal, describing players who turned
pro as “gold diggers.”
• Professional sports served as the
“antithesis” of amateurism in a
philosophical tension: material versus
spiritual rewards.

• Yet the evidence showed that the
amateur college players received
significant material benefit, in the
form of scholarships, publicity and
other things such as free clothing and
food.

• Historically, colleges sought to define
amateur in the negative by
composing a long list of prohibited
acts, which, if violated, make an
athlete a professional.

• But the report noted that human
nature would seek loopholes in the
list of banned acts, creating a
premium for violating the act itself.

• So it circled back to Camp’s code of
sportsmen as the animating
motivation to play by the rules.
• “It is important that the doctrine of
amateurism be preserved, whether
the college is regarded as an
intellectual or socializing agency,” the
report stated.

• Purdue University faculty concurred,
stating athletic that scholarships …
• “ … cannot do otherwise than result
in disaster to our educational
programs and to its standards of
scholarship.”

• In other words, the report noted, if
colleges permitted professionals to
play, the intellectual infrastructure of
higher education – the admissions
process, the application of grades,
etc. would be corrupted.

• “It unifies the student body and soon
brings other undergraduates to feel
that efforts to fulfill the intellectual
purposes of the institution avail
nothing if men are to be supported
merely for the sake of winning games
...”

• Professionals would undermine “ … a
guarantee on the part of the
American college that every
undergraduate shall have his fair and
equal chance to develop his physical
powers for the honor of his fellows,
his own self-satisfaction, and the
good of the nation.”

• Thus, the deployment of paid athletes
to represent college teams would
undermine the intellectual standing
and democratic nature of the college.
• For the “good of the nation,” the code
of amateurism needed to return to
college campuses.

• Savage and others anticipated that
they would be criticized by football
supporters who would assert – as
they had in each crisis ahead of this
one in 1929 – that the game’s moral
code developed character.
• They neutralized that claim.

• Qualities of courage, obedience,
unselfishness, and persistence “have
formed the theme of countless
eulogies athletes and athletics,” the
report stated.
• Yet no measurable evidence could be
found to support the media-triggered
mythology.

• In fact, the report noted, active
participation seemed to boost
dishonesty because of corrupt
practices involving recruiting and
professionalism.
• It stated:

• “The impairment of moral stamina
that such practices imply is the
darkest blot upon American college
athletics.”

• That called into question the nature of
whether the amateur ideal, based on
an honor code rooted in
sportsmanship, could ever exist in a
sport such as football. And running
alongside the report remained
concerns over permanent injuries and
deaths.

• The average player stood 5-foot-10
and weighed approximately 170
pounds in the late 1920s.
• That’s small relative to contemporary
football players yet that body at that
size generated considerable force.

• That force is evident in injury reports
from the period.
• At 22 institutions studied in the late
1920s, football caused an inordinate
number of injuries. At one school,
almost 75 percent of the players were
injured in all.

• During the same period, a study of
376 former football players revealed
that 44.1 percent had suffered
concussions.
• Another study found that up to 30
percent of all players on any given
team had suffered concussions.

• “The possible seriousness of
concussion is attested by the fact that
nearly one-half of the team
physicians … have observed that
concussion, once suffered severely,
tends to recur more easily,” the report
noted.

• Overall, at least 25 percent of all
football players suffered a serious
injury during the course of a season.
• It is difficult to conclude that
sportsmanship was uppermost on the
minds of players.

• In January 1927, a former Harvard
player named Wynant Davis Hubbard
wrote an article for Liberty magazine
that alleged dirty play by Princeton.
• His charges described football as a
dirty game.

• “Sprained knees and ankles, broken
legs, smashed noses, dislocated
wrists, scissoring, cursing and filthy
language, dangerous kicks and
wallops, kneeing, torn eyeballs and
eyelids,” Hubbard wrote.

• One player left a 1925 game with the
“clear imprint of a signet (ring) on his
nose,” he added.

• The charges were so inflammatory
that Harvard’s president urged
Hubbard not to go public with the
article.
• Hubbard told the New York Times he
wanted the article published because
he wanted to save the game from
itself.

• One passage struck at the very heart
of the notion of the amateur ideal as
expressed through sportsmanship:

• “That it is common knowledge that
Princeton players direct a constant
flow of filthy and abusive language at
the members of the Harvard teams,
with the express purpose of getting
their goats, making them angry, or
otherwise directing their attention
from the game.”

• Princeton vigorously denied the
charges but the atmosphere in which
Hubbard went public showed that
despite the exceptional popularity of
college football, the game had
significant issues.

• When combined with the Carnegie
Report of two years later, it seemed
football would be in trouble.

• But it was not. The game’s popularity
grew, particularly among the young.
• Former players, moreover,
vigorously defended the game,
including a Harvard quarterback
named Barry Wood.

• Barry Wood had just completed his
senior season at Harvard when he
spoke at a New England Association
of Colleges and Secondary Schools
meeting in Boston on December 4,
1931.
• Several speakers ahead of Wood
criticized football.

• Wood responded with a line that
swept through the sport and persists
within the game’s vocabulary.

• Wood said the problem with football
could be found in the stands, where
“the Monday morning quarterbacks”
stood ready to second-guess and
criticize everything about the game.

• A year later, Wood wrote What Price
Football: a Player’s Defense of the
Game.
• The book invited readers to learn
about the players’ perspective of the
game.

• “It would be absurd to criticize college
football for the fact that the American
people seem to have become football
mad,” he wrote.
• The figures bear him out.

• Football had survived yet another
existential crisis.
• It would grow even stronger in the
1930s and 1940s as the pro game
secured widespread acceptance and
finally reached stability.

• The fact that football survived crisis
after crisis suggested to some that
something much deeper than a game
was involved.
• Take the case of William Dennison
Clark, a Michigan back who played in
the 1905 “Game of the Century”.

• Clark was tackled for a safety with
less than 10 minutes remaining when
trying to return a punt, giving Chicago
a 2-0 lead.
• In 1932, he killed himself, claiming in
a suicide note that he hoped his “final
play” would atone for the safety. He
was 46.

• As the 20th century hurtled forward,
serious writers began to sense that
the game furnished a psychological
grip on America beyond its visible
and vicarious appeal.

• Among the first to see that would be
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a 1917 graduate
of Princeton.
• Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Robert Penn
Warren and J.D. Salinger wrote four
of the top works in American letters,
revealing a dream life of football gone
awry.

• Football fascinated Fitzgerald, who
played at The Newman School before
attending Princeton.
• Fitzgerald died, in fact, while reading
a Princeton alumni magazine about
the 1940 team.

• Fitzgerald biographers have pointed
out that he attended Princeton
because he admired the play of
Sanford White, who returned a
missed field for a touchdown and he
secured a safety to account for all
eight Princeton points in a win over
Harvard in 1911.

• In a 1927 essay on Princeton, he
wrote the following:

• “For at Princeton, as at Yale, football
became, back in the nineties, a sort
of symbol. Symbol of what? Of the
eternal violence of American life? Of
the eternal immaturity of the race?
The failure of a culture within the
walls? Who knows? …

• “ … It became something at first
satisfactory, then essential and
beautiful. It became, long before the
insatiable millions took it, with
Gertrude Ederle and Mrs. Snyder, to
its heart, the most intense and
dramatic spectacle since the Olympic
games …

• “ … . The death of Johnny Poe with
the Black Watch in Flanders starts
the cymbals crashing for me, plucks
the strings of nervous violins as no
adventure of the mind that Princeton
ever-offered …

• “ … . A year ago, in the Champs
Elysees I passed a slender dark-
haired young man with an indolent
characteristic walk ... It was the
romantic Buzz Law whom I had last
seen one cold fall twilight in 1915,
kicking from behind his goal line with
a bloody bandage round his head.”

• Fitzgerald thought Princeton’s Hobey
Baker to be the ideal American
athlete.
• He used Baker as the model for the
fictional Allenby in This Side of
Paradise, for example.

• Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled
“The Bowl”, a piece that focused
exclusively on football and the heroic
ideal.
• It was published in the Saturday
Evening Post on January 21, 1928.

• The story is centered on a Princeton
football player named Dolly Harlan
and a game at the Yale Bowl.
• Harlan’s love interest is named
Vienna Thorne, whose brother died in
a prep school football game as his
family watched.

• Fitzgerald also writes descriptions of
what it is like to play the game from
the perspective of a player even
though he did not play.
• This excerpt about a punt return
shows another layer of
understanding:

• “ … The minute I looked up, the sides
of that damn pan would seem to go
shooting up too. Then when the ball
started to come down, the sides
began leaning forward and bending
over me until I could see all the
people on the top seats screaming at
me and shaking their fists.

• “At the last minute I couldn't see the
ball at all, but only the Bowl; every
time it was just luck that I was under
it and every time I juggled it in my
hands."

• The excerpt that follows reveals that
Harlan really didn’t want to play
football, in fact hated the game, but
showed up for practice anyway,
something Fitzgerald’s narrator would
trade a portion of his life to do:

• “On the fifteenth of September he
was down in the dust and heat of
late-summer Princeton, crawling over
the ground on all fours, trotting
through the old routine and turning
himself into just the sort of specimen
that I’d have given ten years of my
life to be.”

• This excerpt shows that it is difficult
to match the sense of achievement in
victory on the college gridiron for
students and players who cared
about such a thing.

• “Our class—those of us who cared—
would go out from Princeton without
the taste of final defeat. The symbol
stood—such as it was; the banners
blew proudly in the wind. All that is
childish? Find us something to fill the
niche of victory.”

• Harlan and Vienna become a couple,
and he quits the football team
because of a broken ankle.
• But drawn by unseen forces, he
returns for the Yale game at the bowl
against Vienna’s wishes, as if in a
dream:

• “The actual day of the game was, as
usual, like a dream--unreal with its
crowds of friends and relatives and
the inessential trappings of a gigantic
show.

• “The eleven little men who ran out on
the field at last were like bewitched
figures in another world, strange and
infinitely romantic, blurred by a
throbbing mist of people and sound.

• “One aches with them intolerably,
trembles with their excitement, but
they have no traffic with us now, they
are beyond help, consecrated and
unreachable--vaguely holy.”

• Consecrated. Unreachable. Vaguely
holy.

• Harlan catches a pass late, and
Princeton scores a touchdown to tie
Yale.
• After the game, Harlan walks on the
field in darkness before going to New
York with the narrator and a
character named Daisy Cary, an
actress.

• Harlan leaves the group to meet
Vienna, but he returns in search of
Daisy Cary.
• He asks the hotel clerk to call her
room. Unlike previous fiction where
the football hero metaphorically
connects with the girl, Harlan seeks
her out.

• Fitzgerald closes the story with a
passage that defines the game itself
for players and how only they
understand the momentary sense of
ecstasy the game triggers.
• He describes the way Harlan walked
to Daisy’s room.

• “Dolly turned away, alone with his
achievement, taking it for once to his
breast. He found suddenly that he
would not have it long so intimately;
the memory would outlive the triumph
and even the triumph would outlive
the glow in his heart that was best of
all …

• “… Tall and straight, an image of
victory and pride, he moved across
the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate
ahead of him or the small chatter
behind.”
• He would go see Daisy in her room.

• A closer reading of the work shows
that Fitzgerald is operating within an
internal tension between the
appearance of the game for the
spectators and the reality for the
players.

• Jeff Deering, the narrator of the work,
is a spectator who “reveled in
football, as audience.”
• He describes a drunken fan yelling
“stab Ted Coy,” a Yale player from
the 1910s, as if, as one scholar
stated, the players were playing the
part of Coy.

• Dolly “imagined that a man here and
there was about to tear off the mask
and say, ‘Dolly do you hate this lousy
business as much as I do?’”

• Vienna called Dolly out on that:
“You’re weak and you want to be
admired. This year you haven’t had a
lot of little boys following you around
as if you were Jack Dempsey, and it
almost breaks your heart. You want
to get out in front of them all and
make a show of yourself … ’’

• As the scholar J. McDonald wrote, “ ..
Dolly, acting like a star on the field
despite his own trepidation, disgust or
the fact that he is really just a fair-to-
middling athlete, is a star in the minds
of the audience because of a single
performance … – and they grant him
social power accordingly.”

• McDonald concludes that the
“appearance may be fallacious in
terms of theory, value, or ethics, but it
does not change the reality of the
football player’s condition.
Performance is the key to
appearance, and persuasion in acting
the part of the talented player is the
means to success.”

• Dolly plays the part, and he accepts
the “image of victory and pride” – and
wins the day, with Daisy, an actress,
waiting for him.

• In The Great Gatsby (1925),
Fitzgerald shapes a former Yale
football player as someone who
represented the less-than-ideal
person whose best performance is in
the past.
• The character is Tom Buchanan.

• Buchanan is a football player
because he was born big and he
attended Yale because he was born
into wealth. He describes him thus:

• “ … arrogant eyes had established
dominance over his face, and gave
him the appearance of always
leaning aggressively forward … you
could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved …
It was a body capable of enormous
leverage—a cruel body.”

• “(Tom) peaked too early, playing
football at Yale. It's hard to be
satisfied with a normal life of playing
polo and yachting when you've been
a gridiron star. …(He) would drift on
forever seeking, a little wistfully, for
the dramatic turbulence of some
irrecoverable football game.”

• In short, Buchanan represented the
opposite of the mythic football hero.
He treated his wife, Daisy (Gatsby’s
crush), like chattel and cheated on
her, with Myrtle Wilson. And unlike
Harlan, he didn’t walk away with “his
head held high, oblivious to the fate
ahead of him.”

• The archetype of a football player
living off his performance is also
evident in Dodsworth by Sinclair
Lewis, published in 1929.

• The book’s central character is
Samuel Dodsworth, a “better than
average football” player at Yale,
Class of 18 96 who becomes an auto
executive.

• Among the passages is one that
underscores college football’s place
amid the glorious tableau of America.
• Prior to the excerpt, Lewis creates a
laundry list of all that is good and
great in America.

• “Proud cold sunsets in the last
minutes of the Big Game at
Thanksgiving-time – Illinois vs.
Chicago, Yale vs. Harvard – and yes,
and quite as aching sentimental and
unforgettable and lost sweetness,
Schnutz College vs. Maginnis
Agricultural School.”

• Still, Dodsworth wishes to escape
that tableau – and his past as a Yale
football player.

• “He was as beset by people … as in
his most frenziedly popular days at
college, when it had been his ‘duty to
old Yale’ to be athletic and agreeable,
and never to be alone, certainly never
to sit and think …

• “... Yet he liked to be alone, he liked
to meditate, and he made up for it on
these morning rides.”

• Dodsworth becomes particularly
depressed when his son Brent
references the life of the Yale Man.

• “Brent was bright with compliments
about Sam’s knowledge of Europe;
he remarked that Sam’s football
glories were still remembered at Yale.
And Sam sighed to himself that he
had lost the boy forever.”

• The next three works appear after
World War II, in the late 1940s and
early 1950s when, according to
scholar Kathryn Lay, "Sports heroes
were larger-than-life representations
of all that was good about American
society.“

• Miller’s Death of a Salesman was first
staged in 1949, earning the Pulitzer
Prize for drama and a Tony Award.

• Set in late 1940s New York, Death of
a Salesman revolves around
salesman Willy Loman and his family
– and football’s dream life

• Loman is haunted by the inability of
his son, Biff, to become a football
hero, as Gary Harrington of Salisbury
University points out. At one point in
the play, Willy states that Biff’s “life
ended after that Ebbets Field game,”
a reference to a high school
championship contest.

• Loman acknowledges that Biff’s
failure to be a college star has been
“trailing me like a ghost for the last
fifteen years.”

• Loman wanted stardom for Biff, at
one point comparing him to the
greatest running back up until that
point.
• “They’ll be calling Biff another Red
Grange. Twenty-five thousand a
year,” he exclaims.

• Willy’s neighbor, Charley, asks in
reply: “Who is Red Grange.”

• Scholar Mark Golden concluded that
“Willy believes that Biff's success as
a high school football player is proof
is his divinity.”
• To Willy, a football star is equivalent
to a god.

• Golden adds: “As [Willy] talks to Ben
about him, he points to Biff who
stands silently by them like a divine
presence. Biff wears his school
sweater, symbolic of his athletic
career.”

• “And that's why when you get out on
that field today it's important.
Because thousands of people will be
rooting for you and loving you.“

• According to Golden, Biff’s brother,
Hap, is an attendant to a god,
carrying Biff's shoulder guards, gold
helmet and football pants from high
school.

• In many ways, football could be
interpreted as the father of Willy
(whose own father abandoned him)
and even of Willy’s son Biff, who was
considered a failure because he
didn’t make it past high school
football as a result of a bad math test.

• Even Willy’s wife, Linda, treated their
son Hap as a second-class son in the
family because he did not play
football.

• Willy has had an affair with a woman
named Miss Francis in a Boston
hotel.
• When caught by Biff, Willy denies he
is involved with Miss Francis, but Biff
doesn’t believe him.

• Willy asks her to leave the room.
Miss Francis turns to Biff, asking:
''Are you football or baseball?’‘
''Football,'' he replies.
• ''That's me too,'' she says, revealing
her own American dream life of
vicarious ecstasy and violence.

• And as Maureen Dowd wrote in the
New York Times, the Loman family
cheats a little, lies a little and
fantasizes a lot about football and
what it could bring to them in material
goods and social status.
• Instead, it has a corrosive effect on
all it touches.

• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn
Warren was published in 1946 but is
set in the 1930s.
• The work is about Willie Stark, a
fictionalized character based on
political boss Huey Long of
Louisiana.

• Willie’s son, Tom Stark, is a college
football hero, a big man on campus
according to the expression of the
time.
• Tom, however, is hardly the clean-
cut, All-America type, as academic
Gregory Phipps reveals in his
analysis of the work.

• Among a list of scandals, he:
- Crashes a sports car while
driving while drunk.
- Is accused of getting Sibyl
Frey pregnant.
- Starts a fight with local
"yokels" (townies) at a bar, or
roadhouse.

• Willie Stark’s political connections
save Tom from himself – off the field.
• Willie sees a younger version of
himself in Tom and wants his son to
achieve the American dream just as
Willy Lohman did for Biff.

• “Back [in his youth] the Boss had
been blundering and groping his
unwitting way toward the discovery of
himself, of his great gift, wearing his
overalls that bagged down about the
seat ... Now Tom wasn't blundering
and groping toward anything …

• “… For he knew that he was the
damnedest, hottest thing there was.
Tom Stark, All American, and there
were no flies on him.”

• The scene for one of Tom Stark’s
games attended by his father
illustrates the tension between the
beauty of the field and uniforms and
the violence that occurs within that
tableau.

• A character describes the stadium as
a place where "men in red silky-
glittering shorts and gold helmets
hurled themselves against men in
blue silky-glittering shorts and gold
helmets and spilled and tumbled on
the bright arsenical-green turf like
spilled dolls."

• He later imagines Tom Stark as a
“cross between a ballerina and a
locomotive.

• During the game, however, Tom
Stark is injured as his father watches.
• The injury, at first, didn’t seem
serious, according to a character in
the novel.

• "There was nothing to it, the way
[Tom] did his stuff, it looked so easy.
But once after he had knifed through
for seven yards and had been nailed
by the secondary, he didn't get up
right away. ‘just got the breath
knocked out,' the Boss said."

• But Tom was paralyzed by the blow.
• Stanton predicts what comes next:

• "He'll be like a baby. And the skin will
be inclined to break down. He will get
infections easily. The respiratory
control will be impaired, too.
Pneumonia will be likely. That's what
usually knocks off cases like this
sooner or later." And Tom dies of
pneumonia.

• This sequence has been described
by critics as an “emasculation” of the
football hero, but it actually carries
heavier psychological freight for the
game.

• Phipps’ analysis states “for a sport
defined by gladiatorial, risk-taking
and the relentless sacrifice of one's
body for victory, the only appropriate
participant is a young man who is
already a reckless, chauvinistic risk-
taker … ’’

• In short, the football hero is a myth,
as is the football code of honor, under
a close reading of the text in relation
to football.
• The game brought death and
corruption, nothing less.

• It is no accident that the opening
sequence of J.D. Salinger’s canonical
American novel of the 1950s – The
Catcher in the Rye – includes the
main character offering a critical
appraisal of a football game.

• “… The game with Saxon Hall was
supposed to be a very big deal
around Pencey. It was the last game
of the year, and you were supposed
to commit suicide or something if old
Pencey didn't win.”

• Miller and Warren furnished definitive
critiques of football in the late 1940s
as did J.D. Salinger in his opening,
yet like the Carnegie Report and the
Liberty magazine article, a generation
earlier, the game didn’t suffer; it
became more popular than ever.

• And the game would continue to
accumulate more and more
prominence in an America marinating
in the ecstasy and violence of its
past, present and future, amplified,
mediated and mythologized in large
measure by the box in the living
room.

JRN 362 - Lecture Ten

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JRN 362 - Lecture Ten