American History Reform

University Press of Kansas

Chapter Title: Coaches: In the Disciplinary Arena

Book Title: The Rise of Gridiron University Book Subtitle: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football Book Author(s): BRIAN M. INGRASSIA Published by: University Press of Kansas. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ch79ct.10

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C H A P T E R 5 Coaches: In the Disciplinary Arena

When Thomas Moran spoke at the IAAUS annual meeting in 1909, professional coaching was not an entirely new idea. Coaches were al- ready working to present themselves as reputable teachers of physical education, a field that had been initiated in the mid-1800s. In the 1890s, they began writing and publishing football manuals that—be- sides providing play diagrams and tips for athletes and other coaches—stressed sport’s pedagogical potential. Through such writ- ings, which flourished in the 1920s, coaches tried to create discipline in multiple ways. First, they strove to show that sport taught self-con- trol to players, students, and spectators. Second, they started to claim a quasi-disciplinary university space by arguing that they were ath- letic experts and educators, not agents of popular culture or mere en- tertainers. Nevertheless, despite some resemblances, there were cru- cial differences between football coaches and physical education instructors. Early 1900s intercollegiate sport was, in fact, a popular spectacle that attracted hundreds of thousands of paying spectators and millions of dollars to arenas throughout the nation. While coaches strenuously cultivated public personas as teachers of discipline not in- terested in personal gain, by necessity they also created close ties to the cultural marketplace.

Physical culture, as we have already seen, first became important in antebellum colleges and grew in prominence after the Civil War, when students clamored for relief from the intense mental work of modern higher education. At that time, the field had few clearly defined pa- rameters or methodologies, so the men hired to teach physical educa- tion created them. Gymnasium directors such as Amherst’s Edward Hitchcock and Harvard’s Dudley Sargent contributed to the develop- ment of anthropometry, a post–Civil War physiological science that measured students to calculate median body types.1 To standardize pedagogy and theory within their field as well as attain professional status, early physical educators also published textbooks: Hitchcock’s Elementary Anatomy and Physiology (1860) and Sargent’s Handbook of Developing Exercises (1889) were two of the earliest. Jay Seaver of Yale,

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who wrote Anthropometry and Physical Examination (1890), argued that for physical education to be science, it needed a gradable curricu- lum—a system to “[mark] physical excellence or deficiency in a nu- merical way that shall in some way correspond with the mark that is given on examination for intellectual accomplishments.” Like psychol- ogists, Seaver noted that the stress of modern life caused nervous dis- orders. Without exercise, Americans’ “nerve fibres” and health would deteriorate, thus negating eons of evolutionary development. Since physical education was so important, it needed intelligent direction— by professional gymnasium experts—to be effective.2

But physical educators also ran into obstacles. Early gymnasium classes were optional; to keep students enrolled, teachers had to bal- ance the curricular need for discipline with students’ desire for recre- ation or enjoyment. In addition, gymnasium directors could not escape the fact that both real and perceived ties existed between physical cul- ture and entertainment. Even Harvard’s physical education displays at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, which included nude statues of anthropometrically ideal college students, may have appeared similar to the exotic bodies displayed on the Midway.3 Pioneer physical educa- tors, therefore, had to assert that they were professionals with high standards uninterested in making money or exploiting popular desires. They also had to overcome the taint of their eclectic training. For exam- ple, Dudley Sargent, hired in 1879 to direct Harvard’s Hemenway Gym- nasium, was a former circus gymnast who held a Yale medical degree and had directed Bowdoin College’s gymnasium. This hybrid back- ground initially helped him thrive both as a Harvard professor and as head of a profitable summer school for physical education teachers, but it eventually came to haunt him. Despite his assertions that his courses, including his patented physical culture apparatus, were purely scien- tific, some Harvard professors doubted Sargent’s professional status and called for his removal. As athletic committee chair Charles Eliot Norton observed in 1884, Sargent’s presence on the faculty was “obvi- ously irritating” to some members. Harvard rescinded Sargent’s profes- sorial standing in 1889, yet he kept teaching there and his affiliation at- tracted many students. He even unsuccessfully argued that his prominence was a reason for reinstatement.4 Sargent, even without fac- ulty status, maintained an apparent association with popular culture

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that continued to raise eyebrows in Cambridge. In 1892, he incurred scrutiny by examining famous boxer John L. Sullivan and publishing an article about him. Critics implied that Sargent’s willingness to be as- sociated with the working-class art of prizefighting kept him from be- ing a teacher or scientist. Sargent justified his actions by claiming that he had examined Sullivan (whom he called “a splendid animal”) to fur- ther scholarship, not to promote spectatorship or aid gamblers. After all, Sargent had “made no allusions to the coming fight” and did not discuss Sullivan’s odds of winning. As a physical trainer, Sargent’s job was to understand the human physique and seek out “rare speci- mens”—even if they were famous pugilists.5

Responding to such challenges, physical educators like Sargent and Seaver eventually created a niche within universities by founding de- partments of physical culture. Coaching soon also entered the picture, although its relationship to physical education was not quite so clear (and there was often a tension between coaches and physical educa- tors). In 1891, Chicago’s President William Rainey Harper—in order to facilitate his goal of hiring the best faculty while also promoting the new university through intercollegiate sport—appointed his former Yale student Amos Alonzo Stagg as the nation’s first tenured professor of physical culture and athletics. Hiring Stagg, though, was not easy. After lengthy negotiations, in which he hinted that a larger salary would help him forget more attractive offers from Yale and Penn, Stagg agreed to work at the raw campus next to the Midway.6 Although Stagg ultimately accepted the lower salary at Chicago, he used this conces- sion as leverage. He warned that if he tried to do too much work, it would “drain” his “nervous energy” and weaken his own health. So he would need more assistants and better equipment if the university ex- pected him to direct the men’s and women’s gymnasia while simultane- ously maintaining research in the quickly growing fields of physical culture and anthropometry. Despite being head of a physical culture department, however, Stagg served primarily as a coach and trainer for the intercollegiate athletic teams in baseball, football, track, and crew. His job was more publicity agent than physical education instructor. Stagg observed that if Chicago fielded a team to compete with rivals like Michigan or Northwestern, “it must be a winning team or one which will bring honor to the university.” By combining physical cul-

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Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, widely recognized as America’s first tenured professor of athletics and physical education, circa 1912. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

ture and intercollegiate athletics in one department, Chicago had bridged education and popular culture. Other colleges, especially state universities in the Midwest, soon followed this model. As early as 1892, Stagg reported that Michigan was hotly pursuing Henry “Harry” Williams, another former Yale athlete. If Ann Arbor hired Williams, fretted Stagg, the Wolverines “would lick us almost certainly.”7

Aspiring coaches often employed the rhetoric of science and peda- gogy in an attempt to mask the language of victory and promotion.

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Like academic scholars, they had to display impeccable credentials; universities, in turn, had to ensure that they were hiring profession- als, not showmen cleverly posing as experts. For example, in 1909, candidates for Wisconsin’s athletic director position displayed their character and earnestness as a way to win the position. Emmett An- gell, head of the physical education department at Oregon Agricul- tural College (now Oregon State University), listed studies at Harvard, Yale, the YMCA school in Springfield, Massachusetts, as well as in Germany. He even mentioned his book manuscript then in press at Lit- tle, Brown. Angell and other aspirants insisted that athletic training was not a lark. It was a “profession” to which they had devoted their lives.8 Since physical culture was equal to academics, they claimed, su- pervising athletics was not a job for a gymnast or a baseball player. It was a career for a disciplined professional. Candidates who asserted temperate habits underscored this assumption. One Spanish-American War veteran, a former Sargent student, even claimed that his students learned discipline in military-style drills.9 Taking such factors into ac- count, Wisconsin ultimately offered the job to the University of Mis- souri’s Clark Hetherington. Luther Gulick called Hetherington a “scholar, a gentleman and a man of extraordinary executive ability”; Sargent considered him “one of the best qualified men” in America.10

Such traits were important for Wisconsin, which hoped to consolidate athletics and physical culture in one department. Hetherington’s aca- demic expertise, especially his psychology training at Clark Univer- sity, was also appealing. G. Stanley Hall wrote that Hetherington pos- sessed “an unusually wiry, nervous, muscular organization” that prepared him “to stand any amount of work”; he was the only physi- cal educator Hall knew who had a broadly “scientific” perspective on the field. While Hetherington was an athlete, said Hall, he was also able “to appeal to the intellect of students” and wanted to be a “pro- fessor” who taught degree candidates. Hetherington, who ultimately declined the position, added to Hall’s view by noting the need for a rigorous physical education “curriculum” to train “experts.”11

The duties of a turn-of-the-century athletic director or head coach—to supervise physical education, lead teams, build a depart- ment, and advertise a university—apparently required a great deal of energy. Or at least this seems to be the case if we examine coaches’

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salary demands. In 1905, Stagg requested a raise to $6,000, which he justified by noting that his year-round work was “extremely wearing nervously [and] physically.” The university expected him to produce consistently victorious intercollegiate teams with reputable amateur athletes, a task that was especially difficult, considering the strict eli- gibility requirements. In addition, the recruiting of quality players was “a continuous moral as well as nervous strain.” Such work was both stressful and never-ending. Stagg complained that he continually felt pressure from both the university and the public. He even worked during his vacations and received unpaid assistance from his wife be- cause he was expected to do tasks for which other colleges might pay several men. With a significant salary raise to acknowledge his great efforts and sacrifices, his physical and mental condition would im- prove, and he could continue to oversee his department’s growth.12

Stagg made his plea at a time when many universities were placing sport within a single department in order to make it conform to re- gional or national mandates. In the Northeast, where many colleges still proclaimed amateurism, some institutions quietly hired profes- sional coaches and established athletic departments. In 1914, for exam- ple, Yale reorganized its Board of Athletic Control, hired a new coach, and joined the NCAA. Such reforms would apparently make sport re- spectable and place it on an equal footing with the rest of the univer- sity. Yale dean Robert Corwin (who called the athletic field a “great laboratory of clean living and clear thinking”) wrote that athletics should command “the same constructive thought and attention” as other university departments.13 This process happened even more openly in the Midwest. Before 1910, Ohio State University separated intercollegiate athletics from physical education, but it had to place both within the same department in order to join the Big Nine. Profes- sor H. Shindle Wingert compared this transformation to reforms at progressive state universities like Wisconsin, Missouri, and Nebraska, where athletics inhabited “a regular department” and was treated like any other university department. This idea closely followed the 1910 NCAA recommendation that athletics maintain the same standards as other academic units. Coaches should be part of the instructional staff, said the NCAA, not mavericks without clearly defined status. Dissatis- faction surfaced, though, when it became clear that physical educa-

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tion and intercollegiate athletics fulfilled very different goals. Wingert later complained that big-time sports only benefited “strong, robust, perfectly healthy” men and had become overtly commercial. This was unlike physical education, which sought to instruct all students, espe- cially the physically deficient. Health was its main goal, not entertain- ment.14 The coexistence of these two disparate aims was difficult to maintain, but coaches eventually learned to minimize this tension by theorizing spectator sport as a public activity with virtually unlimited pedagogical possibilities.

Early 1900s coaches found numerous ways to claim that football could teach self-control to students, athletes, and spectators. The career of Harvard’s semiprofessional coach, William T. “Bill” Reid, illuminates the process by which amateur coaching was associated with physical education before it became professional coaching. Before 1908, Harvard experimented with arrangements that might yield gridiron success without compromising a genteel reputation for amateur sport. Engi- neering professor Ira Hollis, who served on Harvard’s athletic commit- tee and later helped design its concrete stadium, stated in 1899 that by hiring professional coaches, universities risked exposing young men to the taint of commercial culture. Yet he conceded that if the coach was a respectable man chosen “by a responsible committee,” he could be a positive influence no matter his rate of pay.15 In 1905, two years after constructing the stadium, the university hired Reid, a recent alumnus and star baseball player, to coach the Crimson eleven. The university paid the ostensible amateur coach $7,000 per season for his ability to mentor young men. Reid aided this notion by stating his intention to build a winning team “cleanly.”16 Reid’s father, William T. Reid, Sr. (a former University of California president), agreed that his son could lead efficient squads and build “a healthful and virile . . . sentiment” at Harvard by leading precise and efficient football squads. Yet the elder Reid only supported the vocation as a temporary one and expected his son to return to California, eventually, to teach.17

Reid, ultimately, did abandon coaching to teach at his father’s acad- emy near San Francisco. But before leaving Harvard he outlined his ra- tionale for professional coaches. First and foremost, said Reid, the game must be conducted as a business. Harvard’s team could not suc- ceed if it had to continue relying on a mix of seasonal, journeyman

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coaches. Harvard had to either hire “a paid coach of the right type and self-respect” or settle for “charity coaching” and disrespect in the world of college sport.18 Reid disliked journeyman coaches, but for different reasons than those Thomas Moran would offer in 1909. While Moran thought that temporary coaches corrupted universities, Reid thought they were unsuccessful. Also, Reid lived the lonely, itin- erant life of a journeyman for several years and did not like it very much. But even though his coaching stint at Harvard was brief, Reid did help reform football. Besides meeting with Roosevelt, Camp, and others at the White House in 1905, he belonged to the Harvard com- mittee that recommended reforms such as the neutral zone and the for- ward pass in January 1906. Formerly, said Reid, many offenses went undetected because they occurred when the action on the field was “hidden from the eyes of the umpire.” The neutral zone and forward pass would help officials to see the players clearly and thus keep ath- letes from evading the rules. While a few critics thought the forward pass would make football worse, by leading to more injuries, some, such as Harvard’s President Charles William Eliot, conceded its value in making the game more sportsmanlike.19

Even with the forward pass—which did not take its ultimate form until after 1910—reform was not yet complete. Later rule makers im- plemented other changes designed to stop teams from cheating. In 1911, for example, Stagg, based on the suggestion of a coach in Kirksville, Missouri, proposed a rule that would prevent one team from gaining an advantage by using an underinflated ball.20 By World War I, moreover, teams began numbering uniforms, a reform seen as a way to track and restrain unsportsmanlike players or coaches. Parke Davis, an attorney, writer, and amateur statistician who operated a “Record Office of American Collegiate Football” out of his home in Easton, Pennsylvania, promoted uniform numbers in 1913 because the previous season several teams had been charged with improper player substitutions. He favored an 8- to 10-inch number “sewn securely upon the back of the jersey.” Others thought numbers would help spectators prevent dishonest or incompetent referees from “discredit- ing” athletes. Herbert Reed, author of Football for Public and Player, noted that uniform numbers were common in Australian rugby, a sport that many saw as purer than American football. Reed argued

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that in order to keep the game honest, spectators should know all pun- ishable rule infractions and their penalties, and they should also watch in a disciplined manner that would help them better enjoy, un- derstand, and profit from football. In this way, spectator sport could be universally accessible and educational, teaching ethical self-control to all of society—not just developing a few bodies or providing enter- tainment for the masses. Reforms like uniform numbers might help everyone in the arena see the game and enforce sportsmanlike con- duct. In this way, they could enhance football’s pedagogical potential and keep it corruption-free.21

Football proponents did not typically see the irony in the need to legislate against corruption in a game that was supposedly ideal for in- stilling self-control. Rather, they steadfastly argued that sport taught disciplined behavior by making athletes internalize rules. For some, including Amos Alonzo Stagg and Minnesota’s Henry Williams—who quoted the Gospel of Luke when preaching athletic perseverance and “strict training” to his Gopher football players—this brand of disci- pline was based on Muscular Christianity. Along with Stagg, Williams was a prime example of how sport could assume a religious tone that was becoming less common in academic departments at the turn of the century.22 But while some tied discipline to Christian ideals, others connected it to whiteness. In 1914, a Boston attorney informed Har- vard’s president that athletes should act like civilized gentlemen; after all, he said, Americans admired “the man who plays the game white.”23 In colleges where most (if not all) students were white males, proper athletic conduct represented normative racial and gender stan- dards. Yet players and spectators did not always exhibit gracious be- havior toward minorities, especially the few black athletes at northern universities in the early 1900s, such as Paul Robeson of Rutgers and Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard of Brown. Only through athleticism and hard work did these black players earn grudging respect from coaches, teammates, and opponents. Even then, the All-American Pol- lard withstood game-day taunts and backhanded compliments. Later in life, he reflected that his college experiences had, in his words, “niggerized” him.24

Even though football invited less than gentlemanly behavior, coaches stressed their ability to teach moral, mental, and physical dis-

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cipline. But in truth, coaches were different from physical education instructors. Coaches trained a few men to perform with athletic preci- sion before the crowd and publicize alma mater through victories. They earned their livelihood by winning, but to justify positions lo- cated in a space perched precariously between the academy and popu- lar culture, these men created a quasi-academic community of dis- course, the professional identity of which coalesced around the idea that athletics taught discipline to all. This pseudo-scholarly field— which, like academic disciplines, was based on specialized expertise and discourse—found its fullest expression in the didactic football manuals that first appeared in the 1890s and became common in the 1920s.25 While early manuals stressed football’s ability to discipline athletes, later books stressed spectatorship’s effects upon the crowd it- self. In the 1920s, when college football became a staple of American popular culture, famous coaches regularly touted sport’s pedagogical potential at the same time they rose in the profession and made money through product endorsements and the mass media.

Walter Camp, not surprisingly, pioneered the didactic manual with play diagrams and reflections on the meanings of sport when he pub- lished American Football in 1891. Ever the rational manager, Camp noted that players must be disciplined, and he posited that self-control could be imposed from the outside, through strict training and obedi- ence to the rules. He even listed fouls and penalties in a chapter for spectators. Two years later, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Henry Williams published a Scientific and Practical Treatise on American Football for Schools and Colleges. This book followed Camp’s precedent of stressing the importance of skilled spectatorship. It ordered readers to learn the game’s rules first before delving into training, strategy, or play dia- grams. Not to be outdone, Camp coauthored an 1893 volume, Football, with Harvard’s Lorin Deland. They argued that if players did not learn “strict discipline,” a team would degenerate into a leaderless mob. They explained the importance of spectatorship and told readers where to find the best seats in the grandstands. Football was so com- plex that only well-prepared viewers sitting in the right place could “appreciate its real worth, both as a sport for sport’s sake, and as a means of developing character.”26 Despite its authoritative tone, Foot- ball was not an unqualified success: by 1901, Camp and Deland agreed

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to allow Houghton Mifflin to sell discounted remainder copies. But lackluster sales did not augur hardship for the authors, businessmen whose livelihoods relied neither upon university salaries nor upon book royalties.27 This would change, though, in the 1900s, when many football authors were professional coaches.

One early 1900s coach who wrote a successful football manual was Fielding Yost, whose Michigan Wolverines team included the “point- a-minute” squad that won the first Rose Bowl in 1902. Football for Player and Spectator, an illustrated volume published by the Univer- sity of Michigan’s press in 1905, went further than Camp, Stagg, or Williams in discussing the ways that spectators could benefit from football—not just the ways that they could assist players in learning discipline. Yost claimed that football developed a seemingly endless list of traits (“self-reliance, moral courage, ‘sand,’ determination, en- ergy, discipline, judgment, self-restraint”), and he also argued that it taught moral and physical lessons to thousands of spectators. The players’ disciplined example “extend[ed] in most surprising ways to the entire student body,” and even mere viewers could be “moved to habits of temperance and regularity.” In turn, football might benefit the whole university by helping spectators absorb the same lessons as the players, and thus forging “a spirit which reaches out from the ath- letic field through the campus and into the very recitation room.”28

This argument was novel. In the 1820s, Charles Beck had written that only members of the public with a vested interest in teaching students disciplined behavior could watch gymnasium work; in the 1890s, Camp also argued that spectators helped teach players discipline. Yost, though, claimed that watching sport could actually discipline specta- tors. He was turning the arena into a classroom of morality by saying that football’s influence extended to everyone. This claim was both new and self-serving, insofar as it justified Yost’s professional exis- tence as a teacher who was not a popular entertainer. Also, it could not be proven false. Whether or not Yost’s claim possessed a shred of truth, there was no way to ascertain whether thousands in the stands—who subsidized sport at the same time they formed a bond with the universities who sponsored the contests—actually learned discipline by watching football.

Football for Player and Spectator was a success. Michigan students

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crowed that Yost’s “Text-Book,” packed with play diagrams, photo- graphs, and training tips, was essential reading. Quickly selling out its 3,000-copy first edition, it soon entered a second printing. The vol- ume seemed certain to make both Yost and the university nationally known.29 Practically speaking, this was Yost’s last book, but the popu- lar coach of the Michigan Wolverines neither stopped making peda- gogical claims nor ceased portraying himself as an authority on both sport and education. In later speeches he stressed the importance of discipline, arguing that teams could only gain victory through honest means, with players who lived “clean” lives. Played properly, team sports were the best way of inculcating “good citizenship” and manli- ness. Sport was an important part of education, said Yost, but only if the crowd was disciplined and backed the referees who supervised the game and punished rule breakers. Yost even sounded like Eugene Richards and other turn-of-the-century football proponents when he stated that sport, like eugenics, could play a part in racial improve-

Fielding H. Yost, top left, with his famed “point-a-minute” 1902 Michigan Wolverines squad. Three years later, Yost would publish Football for Player and Spectator, which argued that college sport could teach discipline to spectators. Rentschler’s Studio (Ann Arbor, Michigan) records, Box 47, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

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ment. Football, he said, would remain the “national autumn sport . . . as long as Anglo-Saxon blood flow[ed] in the veins of the young American.”30

Football’s popularity grew tremendously in the 1920s, and coaches like Bill Roper, John Heisman, and Percy Haughton capitalized by pub- lishing manuals with titles like Winning Football, Principles of Football, and Football and How to Watch It. This genre, by disclosing the way to produce winning teams and by asserting authors’ mastery of the art of teaching discipline, served a practical purpose. Coaches, depending on their ambition, could use these books to attain professional status or monetary reward. Some so-called football mentors (especially in the Big Ten) parlayed their coaching expertise into stable faculty chairs or ath- letic department positions. Others used publications to secure lucrative contracts. Either way, they created a professional identity located at the crossroads of commercial culture and the academy.

Princeton’s Bill Roper wrote one of the first 1920s manuals, Winning Football. In it, the well-known “Biff ” coach called football “a splendid . . . preparatory school for life.”31 Legendary Georgia Tech coach John Heisman, whose resume included stints at half a dozen colleges, stressed a similar message in Principles of Football (1922), published while he coached at the University of Pennsylvania. Heisman called the athletic field “the best laboratory known where the young man can get the training, the discipline, [and] the experience” he needed. While many might perceive self-control as a “Sunday School” quality, Heisman saw it as a Saturday afternoon trait. In a dubious syllogism, Heisman reasoned that since football tempted players to cheat, and since temptation was the best way to learn discipline, football was a practical way for a player to learn “how to govern, to control, [and] to conquer” himself. Like physical educators, however, Heisman was careful to point out that this process required supervision by trained experts. The ideal coach was a “man of education and culture,” not an unschooled brute seeking fame or fortune. He did not allow players to engage in “muckerism” (defined as cheating or profiteering). Heisman even claimed, extravagantly, that a coach could build character more successfully than the majority of ministers and fathers—or even pro- fessors.32

While Heisman professed anti-muckerism and discipline, state-

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ments made earlier in his career indicate that he may not have always held himself to such high standards. Heisman began coaching at Ober- lin College before moving to Buchtel College (now the University of Akron), Auburn, and Clemson. Until his 1899 arrival, Clemson was a football lightweight. But the Atlanta press explained that Heisman turned Clemson’s team into winners by 1903 by expecting players “to take desperate chances” and training them in the ways of trickery. Se- wanee, Georgia, and other colleges protested that Clemson violated the rules and did not play “clean” football. Heisman denied the charges, claiming that his practice field was unequaled in “order” and “decorum.” But he also defended himself by proclaiming the virtues of pigskin legerdemain and by redefining the terms of the debate. Heisman said that he did not plan to abandon his “tricks,” since they helped “to run up the score and aid the team in many ways.” While some saw tricks as dishonest, Heisman believed that football was just like war, “where all kinds of tricks go by the name of strategy”; he liked to call his style “strategical instead of trickery.” Opposing teams who disdained Heisman’s strategy must have also been impressed by it, because soon Heisman was entertaining offers from several south- ern schools. He went to Georgia Tech in 1904.33

Although Heisman apparently employed any means necessary to gain victories, he—like other coaches—claimed that sport was a disci- pline-building exercise for the whole university. Percy Haughton, a former Harvard coach (1908–1916) who published Football and How to Watch It in 1922, argued that team leaders had “to supervise the scholastic work” of all potential athletes. Surveillance ensured play- ers’ academic eligibility, and it also ensured proper decorum. To en- force proper ethics, each match required the presence of officials who maintained “law and order” on the field. Spectators could aid officials by watching closely and by knowing all the rules. Haughton wrote that spectators could learn the same mental habits and discipline as the quarterback, but only if they were serious and diligent. Although he conceded that some spectators were men who did not properly “study” the game, Haughton particularly criticized women who at- tended games for entertainment and were unaware of both football’s “higher technique” and “simplest rudiments.” Attention to detail and mental discipline, traits coded as male, were more important than en-

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joyment or relaxation—less demanding activities coded as female. Haughton told spectators to sit high in the stands, where they could see all the action. Removed from the social butterflies and the tempta- tion to enjoy the game without learning from it, said Haughton, atten- tive spectators could concentrate on developing their minds.34

Heisman insisted that all students, not just athletes, had a sacred duty to report players who broke training rules. Not only did players have to follow a strict training regimen, but thousands of other stu- dents needed to follow the rules as well. This idea echoed an argument that Roper posited in Winning Football. Princeton’s coach said that the proper campus “atmosphere” was necessary to keep players physi- cally, mentally, and morally sound. Any student who aspired to partic- ipate in intercollegiate athletics had to “stand well in his classes and behave himself outside of them” throughout the whole year. In some

John Heisman (holding dog) with the 1906 Georgia Tech team. Just two years earlier, Heisman had come to Tech from Clemson College, despite having been accused of using trickery to win football games. Permission of the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center, Archives and Records Management Department.

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cases, said Roper, only “public” pressure could have any effect on re- calcitrant athletes. He argued that the efforts of the entire student body helped create respectable teams, and these efforts, in turn, taught all students. Roper contended that his main goal was to instill a “winning football spirit” among all students in the college. While this claim may seem outlandish or fanciful, in 1927, James Harrison, a New York Times sportswriter, bought it. He recalled Roper’s assertion that he taught the entire college. Princeton’s coach had claimed “to make his domain not only the gridiron but the entire campus; to arouse col- lege spirit; to get the whole university behind the thirty or forty or fifty young men [on the field].” While some “modern young sophisti- cates” might reject such claims, Roper had thoroughly demonstrated his skills. Harrison claimed that if he were in control of a university and sought a football coach, Roper would be his first choice.35

At least one coach apparently employed this logic by using his book to build a reputation and gain employment at a university that wanted a coach expert at both winning and instilling discipline—or at least at promoting his ability to instill discipline. Percy Haughton be- gan his successful run at Harvard in 1908, but he left in 1916 to be- come president and part-owner of National League baseball’s Boston Braves. By November 1922, the same month Frank J. “Buck” O’Neil re- signed as Columbia University’s head coach, Haughton had published Football and How to Watch It. Four months later, after reviewing ap- plications from “America’s greatest football mentors,” Columbia ap- pointed Haughton as O’Neil’s successor. The New York Times wrote that Haughton’s name was universally known and that his recently published book showed he was skilled at “teaching” football. Colum- bia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler seemed to agree, and he ex- pressed his pleasure with the appointment. He wrote that Columbia saw sport “as an integral part of the training and discipline” received by undergraduates. Butler was sure that Haughton would assist the university in this regard, and he wished the coach success in his “im- portant post.” For his services, Haughton was well compensated. The terms of the contract were not revealed, but the press reported that Haughton would be one of America’s most highly paid coaches—al- though, as it turned out, he was not successful in his brief tenure at Columbia, which was cut short by his death.36

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Lavish salaries were available for master coaches in the 1920s be- cause, as the decade unfolded and Americans became wealthier, col- lege football became more popular than ever. Universities drew mil- lions of spectators to the huge concrete arenas they constructed on campus, as well as to massive public sports palaces like the Los Ange- les Coliseum, Chicago’s Soldier Field, or Birmingham’s Legion Field. Radio also helped increase the game’s popularity. As the market for successful coaches and their books grew, midwestern football experts like Howard Jones, J. W. Wilce, Knute Rockne, and Bob Zuppke pub- lished their own manuals, in which they relied less on the rhetoric of surveillance and discipline than had Yost, Roper, Heisman, and Haughton. The football manual, it seemed, was becoming a standard genre. Coaches had a model from which to work and so they did not need to work quite so hard to develop pedagogical theory justifying their university positions. The manual, like college football itself, was becoming less a means to an instructional end and more a means unto itself. Soon, football’s educational meanings would be subordinated to its proper execution and entertainment value.

Howard Jones, Iowa’s head coach and athletic director from 1916 to 1923, published How to Coach and Play Football in 1923. The pub- lisher bolstered Jones’s status by stating his position on the title page (other football books, like Haughton’s, included a similar tagline). Jones also indicated his achievements and credentials throughout the text, including his summer football courses at Iowa and the unde- feated Big Ten champion teams he led in 1921 and 1922. “Successful coaching of football requires thought, and judgment,” wrote Jones, “based upon as much knowledge of the game as it is possible for the coach to acquire.” Most of the book just explained how to produce winning teams, yet in the final pages, almost as an afterthought, Jones dutifully asserted that football taught “sacrifice” through rigorous training rules and required “quick clear thinking”; only through “clean” and “fair” play could players learn character. Jones (or his ed- itor) also felt the need to assert that college football was not a money- making activity. He warned that “boys who attempt to commercialize their athletic prowess” would not learn discipline.37 At a time when the first professional football leagues were forming, and shortly before student-athletes started playing in them after graduating or quitting

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college, such anti-commercialism, although explicitly pedagogical, hid an essential truth of college sport: athletes were not supposed to play for money, since professionalism could corrupt education—but it was acceptable for universities or coaches to profit from intercollegiate football.

Whether or not Jones seriously believed the notion that he was a teacher of discipline, it is hard to tell. Nevertheless, he certainly was one of his generation’s best coaches and successfully built a career. In 1924 he left Iowa City to become athletic director at North Carolina’s Trinity College, which was then using tobacco money to transform it- self into Duke University. According to several newspapers, Jones lived in Denver and only wanted to be in Iowa City during the season, but some Iowa faculty members opposed this arrangement. The Duke contract, supposed to last five years, was more flexible. But soon Jones received an offer that was even more appealing. In 1925, he signed with the University of Southern California (USC), whose president, Rufus B. von KleinSmid, eagerly used sport to build the university’s reputation. This approach had mixed results. Before Jones, the dubi- ous methods of Elmer “Gus” Henderson had tainted the program with scandal. USC tried to recover by buying out Henderson and luring Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne to Los Angeles, but Rockne would not bite. So USC instead hired Jones to lead the Trojans. Duke could not believe that its new coach had jumped ship after just one season in the North Carolina Piedmont, but the Los Angeles press was delighted. Jones, a former Yale athlete (his brother, Tad, was a noteworthy coach at Yale), was known as a stellar football “tutor” and “a believer in the highest college ethics.” Jones claimed that money did not lead him to accept the USC job, but one might wonder. Reputedly, his salary would be $10,000 per year, the same amount the university offered Rockne.38

Even though he did not accept USC’s offer, Rockne dominated 1920s football. Like the era’s other premier coaches, he also published a manual, Coaching: The Way of the Winner (1925, revised 1928). In this book, Rockne echoed other coaches by observing that a coach needed to teach “fair play,” be “a strict disciplinarian,” instill “sports- manship,” and not tolerate “muckerism.” Sounding like early 1900s social scientists, he noted that coaches, as educators, were important

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to society, since they could shape citizens by teaching sportsmanship. Most of the book, though, was dedicated to play diagrams and game- day advice. Rockne also cowrote Training, Conditioning and the Care of Injuries (1931), in which he took a potshot at his rival Glenn S. “Pop” Warner by deriding Warner’s practice-field equipment as “contrap- tions” that only served to puff him to admiring “players, faculty, alumni, or townspeople.”39 While this accusation may have been true, one might level the same criticisms at Rockne, who conducted a simi- lar publicity campaign via his (often ghostwritten) publications, as well as his manipulation of local boosters and the regional and na- tional press. Rockne was the prototypical big-time coach, a pop-cul- ture celebrity who probably profited more from college football and consumer endorsements than any other person in the 1920s. He was pitchman for South Bend’s Studebaker automobile company, signed an endorsement deal with Wilson sporting goods, and was flying to Los Angeles to sign a movie contract when he perished in a 1931 plane crash.40

Coaches, though, could not appear as though they were just inter- ested in money. They had to stress their professionalism, honesty, and openness. Rockne’s foil, Pop Warner—who had built his prodigious reputation as a football mentor by leading the “Redmen” at the Carlisle Indian School, a paternalistic boarding school intended to as- similate Native Americans—published Football for Coaches and Play- ers in 1927 while “Director of Football” at Stanford. Twenty years had passed since his first book, which had sold out its press run, so it was time “for a new textbook on the game.” Warner portrayed himself as a true professional writing an authoritative, trustworthy text—not a trickster selling useless books to an easily duped public. He aimed to show that he was a respectable teacher, not a confidence man, by as- serting that everything in the book was based on his own experience, and he had not hidden from his readers any play that he had “found to be practical and effective” on the gridiron.41 Such claims were essen- tial, for without them coaches like Warner might just look like show- men out to make a quick buck.

Another 1920s coach who used this rhetorical flourish was Illinois’s Bob Zuppke.42 Zuppke only played football as a scrub at Wisconsin around 1905, but like other coaches, he professed that the teaching of

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disciplined young men was his career goal. His books echoed such no- tions. Football Technique and Tactics (1922, revised 1924) was based on Zuppke’s popular summer course at Urbana, which he boasted had trained 1,500 football coaches from thirty-seven states. Although Zuppke stressed sport’s educational value, including its ability to teach sportsmanship, his books focused almost exclusively on play di- agrams and coaching tips.43 He even argued that it was acceptable for sport to entertain, as long as it did so in a “clean” and “sportsman- like” way. Yet while Zuppke mastered the rhetoric of discipline, he also embraced the consumer marketplace and the popular media. He endorsed a line of football products, including helmets, pads, and a new, aerodynamic football, for Rawlings.44 He also wrote a newspaper column called “Follow the Ball.” In one 1925 piece, Zuppke said that football was “one of the most potent educational factors in school life,” since it represented the cultivation “of virility, of courage and of character.” Football heroes like Illinois’s Harold “Red” Grange, said the Illini coach, modeled the right way of living and inspired young men to form healthy habits, such as eating spinach. Zuppke claimed that football was socially important because, as G. Stanley Hall had shown, physical and mental health were equally important. Football, therefore, did not only benefit players. It also benefited spectators, since it was a “mental stimulant.”45

Zuppke was not the only coach to claim in the 1920s that football was good because it stimulated spectators’ nervous systems. In 1923, Ohio State head coach J. W. Wilce admired the forward pass because it “cause[d] more thrills and tingles up and down one’s spine than any other play.”46 Such statements enabled coaches to make football’s ben- efits for spectators even more expansive. While Yost had argued in 1905 that football was good for spectators because it taught discipline, Wilce and Zuppke contended that the game was beneficial because it was a stimulant. Around 1900, coaches could only argue openly for sport by citing its ability to cultivate discipline. But by 1925, football was an established part of American culture. Moreover, the field of psychology, influenced by Freud and his American disciples (like H. Addington Bruce), had changed by becoming more focused on the subconscious workings of the mind.47 In the mid-1920s, Zuppke, who had majored in psychology at Wisconsin and was renowned for his

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practical mastery of sport psychology, discussed football’s effects on spectators by making an argument about mental stimulation, not ped- agogy. While Zuppke cited G. Stanley Hall in 1925, he was actually promoting an idea that mixed Hall’s words with Freud’s ideas.

Even though their rationale kept changing, coaches could always find ways to claim sport’s benefits for both the university and the public. Yet it was becoming evident that the arena provided tangible rewards for coaches, benefits that easily surpassed the mere satisfac- tion of having taught players discipline or stimulated minds. This fact was not lost on players. In retrospect, it is ironic that Zuppke praised Red Grange’s morals in 1925. Just two months later, the “Galloping Ghost” flouted traditional notions of amateur athletic purity by sign- ing, moments after his last college game, a professional contract with the National Football League’s Chicago Bears. Although Grange wanted to finish his degree, Zuppke assured his star player—and the public—that graduation was not an option. Grange saw such hatred of professional sport, which was common among older coaches like Stagg in the 1920s, as hypocritical. When Zuppke tried to talk his star player out of the decision to play pro sports, writes Grange biographer John Carroll, the football player reportedly “replied that Zuppke made a liv- ing out of teaching and coaching football, ‘so what’s the difference if I make a living playing football?’”48

Red Grange had a point. In the 1920s, college coaches found multi- ple ways to profit from college sport. One way was through salaries, which steadily rose throughout the early 1900s. This was particularly evident in the career of John Heisman, an ambitious coach unafraid to move from university to university in search of a better job or a bigger paycheck. Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, Heisman held a se- ries of increasingly lucrative positions. One biographer even notes that Heisman composed a “self-promotional pamphlet” in 1899 to land the Clemson post. Later, at Georgia Tech, Heisman negotiated several lucrative contracts. For example, a 1904 agreement paid him a base salary of $2,250 per year, plus 30 percent of Grant Field gate receipts. Perhaps to maintain a façade of respectability, the athletic association lowered his share of the gate receipts when it later raised his salary. Heisman built a successful team at Tech, but in 1920 he signed a three- year contract to coach at his alma mater, Penn, which was then a pre-

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mier college football program. Heisman coached at Penn until 1922, when he published Principles of Football. After Penn, he briefly moved to Washington and Jefferson College, where he coached in 1923. In 1924 he became “Director of Athletics” and coach at Hous- ton’s new Rice Institute, where he received higher pay than any tenured faculty member: a five-year contract at the princely sum of $9,000 per year.49 This high level of compensation might have seemed outrageous to some, but to many coaches and administrators it made perfect sense. Heisman had already promoted the dubious yet self- serving idea that a football coach was the college’s single most impor- tant teacher of character, and administrators knew that successful coaches could very effectively advertise higher education institu- tions—even if they were not necessarily teaching discipline to all of the players and spectators in the arena.

Coaches at other universities, especially in the Midwest, forged a different path to reward and respectability. In 1923, Fielding Yost, then Michigan’s athletic director, gained appointment as “Professor of the Theory and Practice of Athletic Coaching” in the university’s col- lege of education.50 Meanwhile, other Big Ten schools created athletic departments that made sport a permanent part of the university struc- ture. Ohio State established an athletic department (the one H. Shindle Wingert eventually criticized) that placed intercollegiate athletics un- der faculty control. It was led by athletic director Lynn St. John, “Pro- fessor of Competitive and Recreative Athletics” (and namesake of St. John Arena), from 1913 to 1947. In 1924, Iowa established a “Division of Physical Education” and provided “faculty ranking, tenure and salary” to all coaches. This unit resembled other departments, insofar as its faculty possessed professional status. But the relationship of Iowa’s physical education division to the university was complicated by the fact that it served separate masters. In matters of physical edu- cation, it reported to the College of Liberal Arts, but in regard to inter- collegiate athletics it reported directly to the university administra- tion. In 1932—shortly after the Carnegie Report (discussed in chapter 7) and the reforms of President Thomas Gates at the University of Pennsylvania, who created a “Department for Health, Physical Educa- tion, and Athletics”—Illinois created a School of Physical Education that included physical culture, health, and intercollegiate athletics.

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But athletics, not truly physical education, was also placed under the supervision of the Athletic Association.51 In such arrangements, ad- ministrators tacitly acknowledged big-time college athletics’ unique role as a generator of publicity and revenue. Although coaches might gain professional status, in reality they occupied a much different po- sition than other professors, including physical educators. Sport en- abled the university to engage the public in the lucrative, high-stakes arena of popular culture. It was convenient and necessary to place reg- ulation of college sport in the hands of athletic professionals, but the money and publicity it generated were too great to remain unsuper- vised—or to be placed directly in the hands of men renowned for tricky plays or for their willingness to depart quickly for a contract with more favorable terms.

Opinion came down on both sides of these new departments. Some praised the structure for providing autonomy and status for athletic experts. Fielding Yost compared coaching to dentistry and engineer- ing, two of Michigan’s most successful professional programs. A major advantage of “departmentalized” universities, he claimed, was that they put “every faculty man . . . on more or less the self same plane.” The expectation of equality was reasonable, he said, since athletics furnished an essential service. Athletic “departments are just one of the many departments of the modern university,” Yost stated, “wherein all contribute in some manner to the betterment of those studying in them.” These words echoed a prophecy that James Murfin, a Detroit attorney, athletic committee representative, and future Uni- versity of Michigan regent, had made in 1907. Murfin predicted that he and athletic director Charles Baird would “live to see the day when the athletic department will be conducted the same as the department of Greek, the department of Physics or any other department on the campus. The parties having athletics in charge will be bound in honor to conduct their department and themselves honestly and as gentle- men.”52 Similar wisdom prevailed at Harvard. LeBaron Briggs, who later served as NCAA president, noted in 1922 that professors gladly placed sport in the hands of an athletic director with “legal training and . . . excellent business capacity.” Such men were important, but they should not break the bank. In 1927, Harvard’s Athletic Associa- tion frugally urged the university to engage “intelligent experts” at

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reasonable salaries, so as to keep the athletic budget in line with other departments.53 Athletic expenses, of course, would later become a per- sistent problem, as coaches’ successes—measured in victories and ticket sales—dictated their market value.

By the 1920s, athletic experts had established a permanent space within the academic structure. Athletic departments, though, flouted the intentions of progressives who had hoped to eliminate popular in- fluence. In fact, they made commercial sport a permanent part of the university. This permanence became clearer when colleges built large arenas to accommodate the thousands of spectators who bought tick- ets and, supposedly, benefitted from the athletic spectacle. The pro- cess of stadium building began at the turn of the century, but it accel- erated after World War I, when dozens of universities constructed reinforced-concrete arenas. Often dedicated as memorials to national- ism and spaces for training manly discipline, these structures were also places for popular spectacle and interinstitutional competition. Ultimately, though, stadiums proved to be dubious places for melding academic ideals with popular desires—or for teaching the multitude of students and nonacademic spectators lessons of discipline or self- control.

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