The History of Football

Being a football fan and not sharing similar feelings for baseball, I sometimes find myself a bit envious of fans of the sport-formerly-known-as-America's-pastime. While their sport is waning with slumps in popularity and PR crises involving performance enhancing drugs, you cannot deny the historical importance of baseball in American culture. Sure football is far ahead of any other sport in the US in terms of general popularity, TV viewership and revenue, it just doesn't bring with it the same tone of reverence when discussions of its past arise.

Quick, try to name ten all-time great baseball players. Follow that up with ten all-time great football players. You can fill the list easily for both sports (probably even for the non-sports fans among us). The difference comes in the historical composition of your list. If you're like me, your list for baseball included as many players who died before you were born as players still alive or even playing now. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Honus Wagner (as much for his megabucks card as for anything else), Jackie Robinson, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Hank Aaron all seem so much more important than any of the superstars from my lifetime. I'm pretty sure Hammerin' Hank is the only one of those fellows still alive and most died long before my birth. The football list, on the other hand has a much more contemporary slant to it. I'd be surprised if you named any players who weren't active in the 60s or later. Sure you've got players like Johnny Unitas, Jim Brown, and Dick Butkus, and even a great coach in Halas who was there in the beginning of what became the NFL. The only player I can think of from the leather helmet era is Jim Thorpe (greatest American athlete of all time). There's just no hallowed history from the early decades of the sports like there is for baseball.

For example, in the early years of the NFL (it began in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and changed to NFL in 1922) there was a team called the Pottsville Maroons. This team from the coal mining region of Pennsylvania was one of the greatest teams to ever take the field at that point in history (they were even able to beat college teams, which was a huge surprise back then). The team was stripped of its NFL championship in 1925 after a miscommunication between teams and league president led the team to play a game against Notre Dame in the territory of another club against league rules. The Cardinals (then in Chicago)
ended up with the championship and their owner blocked the trophy being rightly awarded to the Maroons leading to the "curse" that the Cardinals (now in Arizona) have suffered through ever since.

Great story, huh? Yeah, but you've probably never heard it before unless you know way too much about NFL history or spend too much time perusing the depths of ESPN.com (one of their authors is pimping his book about the team). But I will guarantee you know all about Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 in which players were paid to fix the World Series unless you really are just entirely clueless about sports. Sure, fixing the World Series is a little bit more sensational than a team being stripped of the championship for playing an unsanctioned game, but both involve the championship of a premier league. One story you know by heart. Another you just learned of for the first time.

I think part of the problem is the facelessness of football. Baseball is a really an individual sport played on teams. A single batter faces a single pitcher and a great player looks just as incredible on a crappy team as he does a great team. A-Rod wouldn't suck just because he played on the
Royals. Edgerrin James did start sucking when he left the Colts for the Cardinals. If your offensive lines stinks, the QB and running backs are going to look bad too. But the fact of the matter is that football didn't mean anything back then. The sport isn't much younger than baseball, although baseball was mostly recognizable in the late 1800s whereas football looked more like rugby until the early 1900s. There was something civilized about baseball and it appealed to the senses of time. There was order. Everything was in it's place and it was a very proper looking sport. Football, especially in the early days, was mostly a mass of confusion. Large numbers of players slammed into each other with no apparent order or plan. It was violent, bloody, and dangerous, a sport for the poor, a sport that was nearly banned in several states because of deaths it caused. It gradually was pared down, organized and safety was improved and its popularity increased at colleges, but for some reason while the pro baseball players were idolized, pro players in football were often reviled as mercenaries and often weren't as good as their collegiate counterparts. Those Maroon teams of the 1920s were some of the first to prove that pros could be as good or better than their amateur counterparts.

Basically football in the 1920s was to sports then what hockey is today; a niche sport not understood or followed by most, but with a cult-like following that kept it alive. It didn't become a big enough deal to bring with it the awe-inspiring quality that baseball had already possessed for decades until the '60s, really and I don't think it even peaked until recently.

There is a flip-side to this, however. While I may not get to revel in the historic and cultural importance of my favorite sport's past, I will get to have a unique perspective on it in the future. I was alive for much of the classic history of my sport. Many of the all-time greats who will be on the list in 50 years will be players from my childhood or only a little before. I'll be able to regale my grandkids with tales of watching Joe Montana, Tom Brady, Emmitt Smith, John Elway on TV. How I sat in the stands and saw Calvin Johnson come down with impossible receptions just yards from where I sat. How I saw Peyton Manning get made to look like a fool during the first half against the Falcons when I attended my first NFL game and then promptly engineer the inevitable comeback in the second half. How I watched the Patriots dominate their way through a modern-day dynasty despite the salary cap rules that were created to keep that from happening. How I watched upstart Boise State upset collegiate dynasty Oklahoma in one of the greatest games of all time.

Baseball fans don't have that to look forward to. Their heroes will remain in the past and the only stories they'll have to tell are the asterisk-branded baseball honoring Barry Bond's record-breaking home run and memories of declining ticket sales and TV shares.