Coaches like Knute Rockne became celebrities in their own right, with highly paid speaking engagements and product endorsements. And he explains the reforms of 1910, which gave official approval to a radical new tactic traditionalists were sure would doom the game as they knew it-the forward pass.As college football grew in the booming economy of the 1920s, Watterson explains, the flow of cash added fuel to an already explosive mix.
He describes the kicks and punches, gouged eyes, broken collarbones, and flagrant rule violations that nearly led to the sport's demise (including such excesses as a Yale player who wore a uniform soaked in blood from a slaughterhouse). With a historian's grasp of the context and a novelist's eye for the telling detail, Watterson presents a compelling portrait rich in anecdotes, colorful personalities, and troubling patterns.He tells how the infamous Yale-Princeton "fiasco" of 1881, in which Yale forced a 0-0 tie in a championship game by retaining possession of the ball for the entire game, eventually led to the first-down rule that would begin to transform Americanized rugby into American football. When they finally totaled up the proceeds, they found that the revenues amounted to $30,000-a fair haul for a game that had to be temporarily postponed because no one had thought to bring a ball!"-from College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, Chapter ThreeIn this comprehensive history of America's popular pastime, John Sayle Watterson shows how college football in more than one hundred years has evolved from a simple game played by college students into a lucrative, semiprofessional enterprise. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and silver coins. The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not."In March Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco.
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