JRN 589 - The American Collegiate Model of Amateurism

Amateurs No More
JRN 589 / 450
The American Collegiate Model of Amateurism
The Impact of Walter Camp and Muscular Christianity
Prof. Hanley

Walter Camp was born in 1859,
two years after the publication of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays in
England.
Charles Darwin published Origin
of Species in 1859, too.
Both works would be deployed by
Camp to formulate football.

Camp’s father, Leverett, was a
proponent of Muscular
Christianity, a phrase originated by
clergyman and novelist Charles
Kingsley to promote physical
development of males within the
Church of England.
English boys had become
effeminate, Kingsley believed.

Thomas Hughes published Tom
Brown’s Schooldays in 1857, and
within a year, Americans would
buy 225,000 copies. Hundreds of
thousands more would be sold in
the 19th century in the U.S.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of
the American boys who read it, as
did Walter Camp.

In 1873, Camp witnessed the
impact of the book when students
of Eton visited New Haven to
introduce Yale students to English
rugby.
“To an impressionable boy, these
Englishmen were the walking
embodiments of gentlemanly
sport,” Camp recalled.

At the time, the gap between Yale
students in New Haven and the
locals was immense. Local
firefighters and Yale
undergraduates fought.
Camp recalled that even though
he was in prep school, he thought
organized competition would
reduce tensions in the city.

Camp first saw a primitive game of
football in 1875 when Harvard
played Yale in New Haven in a
game that mixed association
football – kicking and dribbling
but no tackling – and the Boston
game – tackling permitted.
He was among 1,200 who
watched.

During that period, intercollegiate
competition grew, starting with
the Yale-Harvard regatta in 1852.
Baseball, too, emerged as a
collegiate sport.
College men in the East, inspired
by Muscular Christianity,
transformed sport into team
competition, a test of strength
inspired by the ideology.

Camp competed in baseball, track,
crew, rugby and, eventually,
football at Yale.
He saw moral lessons in
competition.
“Be each, pray God, a gentleman,”
Camp would write about athletes.

That meant Camp was adhering to
the concept of athletic
amateurism as expressed at
Oxford and Cambridge in England
and popularized in Tom Brown’s
Schooldays.
The English, after all, reflected the
ideals of ancient Greece.

“Camp embraced this myth as
timeless truth. Sanctimoniously,
he held that gentlemen played for
glory, not compensation,” wrote
the scholar Julie Des Jardins in her
biography of Camp. “He
articulated his gentleman’s code
in everything he went on to write,
including the Book of College
Sports in 1893.”

But there was an important
distinction between the English
amateur and the American
variant.
In England, how mattered more
than the result.
In the U.S., the outcome meant
everything.

Camp became captain of the Yale
football team and, as such,
attended meetings of the
Intercollegiate Football
Association, where Princeton,
Harvard (which had played McGill
in Canada in 1874-1875),
Columbia and Yale reps gathered
to refine Rugby Union rules.

Camp, however, “envisioned a
game played by a more physically
tuned variation of the gentleman
athlete, one equally decorous to
his British counterpart but more
virile because he had more
poundage and physical force,”
wrote Des Jardins.

Camp “justified his deviations
from British rugby, emphasizing
the importance of developing
competitive intensity ‘more suited
to American needs’,” wrote Des
Jardins.
That meant “prioritizing physical
force,” she wrote, ,”manipulating
weighty bodies over the goal line,
rather than the demure flicking of
the foot.”

Camp also wanted to privilege
speed and room to move to create
more sophisticated plays, and he
proposed reducing the number of
players from 15 per side to 11.
After years of debate, the IFA
finally agreed to at proposal in
1880.

What’s more, Camp wanted to
eliminate the rugby scrum.
In October 1880, Camp proposed
a line of scrimmage to turn
chaotic scrum play into a skilled
possession, giving the game a
sense of control.

The line of scrimmage permitted a
more tactical approach to the
team game.
Camp determined that the line
meant the need for a field general
he called a quarterback to put
plays in motion. The formation?
Seven men on the line, four in the
backfield.

Camp also invented the system of
downs for possession to eliminate
a team from simply holding on to
the ball for each half.
The football rules, Camp
concluded, should not “become a
refuge for weaklings.” And it
should be attractive to spectators.

Teams had to advance the ball five
yards after three plays or lose
possession.
Camp marked the field with cross
lines five yards apart from each
other.

In 1883, the committee
authorized Camp to copyright and
publish football rules in an annual
guide to circulate among colleges.
That meant Camp would be
viewed as the preeminent expert
on football, and for 47 years, he
filled that role.

And Camp would use that role to
promote the moral code of
football based on the ideology of
Muscular Christianity and
amateurism, with values
seemingly extracted from the
ancient Greeks.

When Camp finally stopped
playing football at Yale (he
enrolled at the medical school and
played for two years for a total of
six years), he left his position as
captain. He appointed himself as a
team advisor, because there “is no
place in amateur sports for
salaried players or consultants,” as
Des Jardins pointed out.

Camp remained attached to
intercollegiate athletics, helping to
organize the first intercollegiate
tennis tournament, forming Yale’s
golf team, and establishing a
committee to oversee the
purchase of training gear.
He began writing books and
magazine articles for boys.

Camp’s articles mimicked the
narrative material he had written
in his annual rules guide to
football.
Embedding moral codes based on
amateurism, he “sold football as
more than a game, but also as an
antidote to male degeneration in
modern life,” wrote Des Jardins.

The New York Athletic Club
represented the permanent sense
of Muscular Christianity when it
built a five-story clubhouse for its
1,500 members and hosted
amateur athletic events.

Camp’s Yale connections (he was a
member of the exclusive Skulls
and Bones Society and position as
an executive with the New Haven
Clock Company presented
opportunities to join elite clubs in
New York, including the National
Association of Amateur Athletes
of America, that were stuffed with
wealthy alpha males of the Gilded
Age.

By 1889, the New York Athletic
Club had formed the Amateur
Athletic Union (AAU), which
oversaw the amateur movement.
In short, the New York clubs
presented as reflecting the English
attitude of athletic purism
through amateurism that
nominally barred the lower
classes from competing.

As it turned out, this structure
was as fictional as the ancient
Greek amateurism embodied in
19th century England.
Camp recognized that. He had
served as an official at various
amateur games after joining the
New York clubs and knew who
was who.

Camp knew that working-class
men would masquerade as elites
when needed to produce victories
for the gentlemanly clubs that
competed.
“A gentleman never competes for
money, directly or indirectly,”
Camp wrote, knowing full well he
was participating in a charade.

Football play likewise undermined
the gentlemanly fiction.
“In every (game), there were fist
fights and men had to be
separated by other players, or by
the judges and referee, or by the
by-standers and the police,” the
faculty-led Harvard Athletic
Committee reported.

John Heisman, who played at
Brown and Princeton, confirmed
the nasty and brutish play.
Football in the 1880s, Heisman
said, was like the outlaw west.
Men fought “hammer and tongs,
tooth and nail,” he wrote.

Camp’s solution to the growing
problem of violence and
lawlessness on the field? Pay
officials.
This violated the traditional
amateur code as formulated in
England, but Camp finessed the
issue: football was more technical
than rugby and required
specialization and expertise.

Still, the influence of England’s
Muscular Christianity deepened in
the U.S.
The Young Men’s Christian
Association, founded in England,
became lodged in 1851 in the U.S.
Basketball (1891) and volleyball
(1895) were invented at YMCA’s in
Massachusetts.

Camp was influential, too, in the
YMCA’s expansion to colleges,
particularly at Yale and with a
student, Amos Alonzo Stagg.
Stagg played football and baseball
but declined to pay pro baseball
to preserve his amateur standing.

Whenever Stagg spoke at prep
schools to promote Yale, he would
display stereopticon images of
classical athletes.
But when he started to coach
football at the University of
Chicago in the 1890s, pretenses of
amateurism faded, securing
under-the-table fellowships for
athletes he wanted.

Camp and sports journalist Caspar
Whitney clashed in the late 19th
and early 20th century over the
definition of amateurism even
though they often worked
together, with Whitney as editor
for several magazines.

Whitney was an old-school
Anglophone who believed
profoundly in the version
promoted in England: a member
of the white aristocratic elite who
competed for honor and joy, not
money.
Camp, while agreeing to a point,
promoted a steely democratic
version where effort mattered.

Camp, for example, named Black
center William Henry Lewis of
Harvard and Native American
players who competed for the
Carlisle Industrial School to his All-
America team.

The two also differed on the credit
for the reformulation of rugby into
football.
Whitney saw football as English in
origin, and above the type of
American football played in mill
towns by migrant workers.
Camp interpreted football as
based on a moral value linked to
work.

By the 1890s, civic and
neighborhood associations
likewise saw the value in the game
and formed teams, paying players
for the first time.
Yale’s great Pudge Heffelfinger
became the first pro player in
1892 when the Allegheny Athletic
Association paid him $500 to play.

Heffelfinger’s decision to play for
pay revealed the contradiction in
Camp’s Muscular Christianity-
based faith on amateurism.
Camp named Heffelfinger to his
All-American team three times
and considered him to be the
greatest player of all-time.

Camp put Heffelfinger at the
center of his print layout of his
first all-time All-America team
even though he knew Pudge had
played for pay for decades.

Still, Camp, as he had written in
1889, held other paid athletes in
disdain.
“Make no mistake about this. No
matter how winding the road may
be that eventually brings the
sovereign into the pocket, it is the
price of what should be dearer to
you than anything else, - your
honor …

“… If a man comes to you and
endeavors to affect your choice of
college by offers of a pecuniary
nature, he does not take you for a
gentleman or a gentleman’s son,
you may be sure. Gentlemen
neither offer nor take bribes.”

Camp developed a moral code
that he reinforced in narratives
published in his annual football
guides and works of fiction and
non-fiction.
The code references unfair play
and unsportsmanlike tactics, each
borrowed from the code of
amateur athletes established by
wealthy elites.

The code reflected Camp’s
concept of Muscular Christianity
in that it accepted violence within
a framework of rules designed to
promote a gentlemanly manliness.
And that code, based on
amateurism, would rescue
football from calls to ban it earlier
in the 20th century.

By the turn of the 20th century,
football’s violence and its
centrality to college life under the
rubric of amateurism as based on
the English model with some
American sensibilities toward a
meritocracy came under
widespread criticism.

The mounting toll of injuries and
deaths chipped away at football’s
self-selected role as the building
of character in boys and young
men.

By 1905, the pressure to change
the game and modify rules to
control violence grew too intense
to ignore.
Some 19 players died by October
1905.
Thousands more were injured.

President Theodore Roosevelt –
who Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a
youth - convened a meeting in
October 1905 among football’s
rule authorities, including Camp
and Harvard coach William Reid.
Roosevelt, a Harvard alumni who
loved football, wanted to curb the
deaths and injuries.

Roosevelt told Camp and the
others that he wanted to endorse
football as an important
character-building sport played
under a moral code.
Roosevelt said, “I demand that
football change its rules or be
abolished. Change the game or
forsake it!”

A series of meeting among
football rules committee members
and others connected to the game
changed rules, instituting the
forward pass for one in 1906.
They also established a body that
would be later named the
National Collegiate Athletic
Association (1910) to oversee
college sports.

At the same time, Yale faculty
completed an investigation that
revealed that Yale athletics had a
huge $100,000 slush fund that
had been used to tutor athletes,
give expensive gifts to athletes,
purchase entertainment for
coaches, and pay for trips to the
Caribbean, according to historian
Ronald Smith.

Criticism persisted, particularly
over what seemed to be the
growing professionalism of college
football and the intrusion of the
“masses” on the game.
In January 1906, Frederick Jackson
Turner, a historian, was among the
critics who saw college football as
incompatible with collegiate life.

“The public has pushed its
influence inside the college walls,”
said Turner, thus “making it
impossible for faculties and for
the clean and healthy masses of
the students to keep athletics
honest and rightly related to a
sane university life.”

In November 1905, Collier’s
magazine published by reporter
Edward S. Jordan.
Under a headline a series “Buying
Football Victories,’ Jordan
asserted that Wisconsin’s football
team included professionals paid
to play.

At a time when universities were
growing rapidly, reformers sought
to “regulate intercollegiate
football because they saw it as a
venue in which the pursuit of
money, fame, and pleasure held
the power to corrupt,” scholar
Brian M. Ingrassia wrote in a
recent study of the 20th century
progressive movement and
football. Press coverage fueled
the corruption, critics claimed.

The commercial nature of the
college game – tickets were sold
after all – eroded its purity,
reformers argued.
And that purity was threatened by
a move away from amateurism.

Turner agreed, describing players
as “gladiators” and “mercenaries,”
who were “experts fighting for
victory on a football field,”
recruited because of their
strength and skills.

College football, Turner wrote,
had “become a business, carried
on far too often by professionals,
supported by levies on the public,
bringing in vast gate receipts,
demoralizing student ethics, and
confusing the ideals of sport,
manliness, and decency.” (Italics
added).

University of Chicago president
William Rainey Harper, who
formerly was a divinity professor
at Yale and who hired Amos
Alonzo Stagg as the school’s
football coach, likewise thought
football ““would become in a true
sense a gentleman’s sport” if it
could build an endowment to
sustain it without the need for
ticket sales.

The plan never materialized, but
the criticism was initially deflected
for two reasons, among others:
For one, football was grounded in
the “institutional fabric of
Christendom” – eastern colleges,
as sociologist Thorsten Veblen
argued in 1918.
And Camp had hard-wired
Muscular Christianity into the
game.

Still, the concept of amateurism,
rooted in a misinterpreted
account of ancient Greek athletes,
reinforced by an impulse to keep
immigrants at bay and the need to
reinforce elite economic and class
status, was at times too powerful
to overcome.

Jim Thorpe, described by Olympic
historian Bill Mallon as “the
greatest athlete of all time. Still.
To me, it’s not even a question,”
felt the power of that fictional
concept arguably more than any
other individual athlete.

When Thorpe (far right in stance)
played for the innovative coach
Pop Warner at Carlisle Indian
Industrial School in Pennsylvania,
he scored all of Carlisle’s points in
a stunning 18-15 victory at
Harvard in 1911.
In 1912, he led Carlisle to the
mythological national
championship, as calibrated by
the polls.

Camp named Thorpe to his 1911
All-America team, the only player
not from Army, Harvard, Navy,
Princeton or Yale to be selected.
Camp selected Thorpe again in
1912 after a season in which he
rushed for 1,869 yards on 191
attempts. That total doesn’t count
two games, meaning he probably
was the first 2,000-yard back.

That same year, Thorpe won
Olympic gold medals in the
pentathlon (five events) and
decathlon (10 events) at the
games held in Stockholm.
But the International Olympic
Committee stripped Thorpe of
his medals and records.

The IOC claimed that Thorp
violated his status as an
amateur by playing minor-
league baseball in 1909-10.

“The IOC’s decision in 1912 to
strip Thorpe’s medals and strike
out his records was not just
intended to punish him for
violating the elitist Victorian codes
of amateurism. It was also
intended to obscure him—and to
a certain extent it succeeded,”
Sally Jenkins wrote in Smithsonian
Magazine in 2012.

Jenkins added: “Countless white
athletes abused the amateurism
rules and played minor-league ball
with impunity. What’s more, the
IOC did not follow its own rules
for disqualification: Any objection
to Thorpe’s status should have
been raised within 30 days of the
Games, and it was not.”

Ironically, Thorpe might have been
the truest amateur at the games
that year.
“I played with the heart of an
amateur—for the pure hell of it,”
he said.

That attitude reflects the NCAA’s
official definition of amateur
proclaimed in its 1916
constitution and bylaws:
“An amateur athlete is one who
participates in competitive
physical sports only for the
pleasure, and the physical,
mental, moral, and social benefits
directly derived therefrom.”

College football coaches and
athletic department
administrators adopted a
campaign against football
players who turned pro in the
1920s, ironically and
unintentionally, because of
looming threats of athletes
overtly turning pro.

Over the first two decades of the
20th century, post-graduate, or
pro, football was played almost
entirely in the football crescent.
Teams from towns such as Canton
and Massillon, Ohio, and other
places would pay players to show
up and play scheduled contests,
usually on Sunday.

In 1913, Thorpe played with a pro
team in Indiana, the Pine Village
Pros.
Two years later, the Canton
Bulldogs signed Thorpe, to play
against the Massillon Tigers, for
$250.

Thorpe led Canton to
championships of the Ohio League
in 1916, 1917 and 1919, making
the team the unofficial world
champion of professional football.
An ad, in fact, proclaimed the
1917 game as the first world
championship of football.

Thus, Thorpe set the stage for a
larger professional league that
would eventually range outside of
the crescent to field teams in the
urban centers of the east and
midwest.
And college football leaders in the
1920s would do all they could to
stop that from happening.

In 1919, only two pro football
leagues of note – the Ohio League
and the New York Pro Football
League – existed.
Both leagues were pinned tightly
to the football crescent, and both
had teams that played against
each other in exhibition games.

Team owners and representatives
of the two leagues set up a
meeting in August 1920 to discuss
a merger to counter rising salaries.
On September 17, 1920, the
teams agreed on a combined
league - the American
Professional Football Association -
named Thorpe to the post of
league president.

The league followed the
contour of the football crescent
under the Great Lakes.
Here, in both the industrial
heartland and coal country of
America, pro football took root.
And colleges were not happy.

Over the next two years, some
original teams would fold, and
new ones added.
A team headed by Thorpe, the
Oorrang Indians, of LaRue, Ohio,
the smallest town ever to host a
NFL team, joined in 1922 but
folded after the 1923 season.

College coaches were strident in
their criticism of the pro game as
they sought to protect the holy
ground of amateurism.
During a December 1921 meeting
of the American Football Coaches
Association, college football – and
Walter Camp who attended the
meeting as an honorary member –
struck back.

Pro football, the coaches stated,
was “detrimental to the best
interests of American football and
American youth” among other
things.
The group voted to revoke varsity
letters from undergraduates who
played in pro games and ban
officials who worked the games.

The great Stagg joined in,
channeling his inner Walter Camp
about the dangers of playing for
pay.
His caustic remarks revealed
deepening animosity between the
formally organized but still upstart
National Football League and the
college game.

“ … to patronize Sunday
professional football is to co-
operate with the forces which are
destructive of interscholastic and
intercollegiate football, and to add
to the heavy burden of the
schools and colleges in preserving
it in its ennobling worth,” Stagg
wrote.

“If you believe in preserving
interscholastic and intercollegiate
football for the upbuilding of the
present and future generations of
clean, healthy and right-minded
and patriotic citizens, you will not
lend your assistance to any of the
forces helping to destroy it,” Stagg
concluded.

Stagg’s fear of the menacing
influence of professional football
was evident in a 1921 game
between players from Illinois and
Notre Dame in Taylorville, a town
in central Illinois.
Taylorville was a semipro team
that had beaten another semipro
team from Carlinville in 1920.

Seeking revenge in 1921,
Carlinville planned to hire college
players from Notre Dame, then
coached by Knute Rockne.
Carlinville rooters bet heavily on
their team to win, knowing they
had the Notre Dame players.
Taylorville heard about it, hired
players from Illinois and won 16-0
as 10,000 watched.

The action shook college football
to its core and led to severe
actions:
- The Notre Dame players
were expelled.
- Nine players from Illinois
were suspended
- The Big Ten hired its first
commissioner.
- The NCAA revised
eligibility rules.

Notre Dame’s Faculty Athletic
Board chair Father William Carey
sent a letter to 70 Midwest
colleges, calling attention to the
threat of pro football.
“The only salvation for the
colleges is to meet the threat of
professional football fairly and
squarely,” he wrote.

College football was rocked again
in 1925 when Red Grange – the
greatest player of his generation –
signed with the NFL’s Chicago
Bears immediately after his final
game at Illinois.

"I'd have been more popular with
the colleges if I had joined
Capone's mob in Chicago rather
than the Bears," said Grange,
whose signing gave the NFL
credibility among fans and, most
importantly, amateur players who
learned they could pay for play.

The American Football Coaches
Association recommended that its
members not hire anyone
connected to pro football.
The group also banned members
from naming all-American teams
out of fear those players would,
like Grange, seek pro contracts.

Camp admired Grange but didn’t
live long enough to see him sign
with the NFL. He died in March
1925. Would Camp be upset?
Camp did not refrain from naming
Heffelfinger to his all-time All-
America team even though the
end signed a pro contract – the
first ever – in 1892.

By the early-to-mid 1930s, college
players routinely joined the NFL
and regional pro leagues such as
the Pacific Coast League and the
Dixie League in the south.
Colleges knew they would have to
defend the amateur status of
players even while accepting that
some would eventually turn pro.

In 1936, the line between the
amateur and the professional
became clear in the form of the
NFL draft.
College players who exhausted
their eligibility could be drafted.

Also in 1936, the SEC permitted
schools to offer scholarships for
athletics, becoming the first
conference to openly do so.
The American amateur model was
thus born, based not on a
misinterpretation of amateurism ,
but to guarantee competitive
equally among schools.

In America, the joy of
participation – the amateur ideal -
had long been surpassed by the
necessity of victory.

JRN 589 - The American Collegiate Model of Amateurism

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JRN 589 - The American Collegiate Model of Amateurism