PAGE 11 BOOK REVIEW

Football: The Origins of an American Obsession by Mark F. Bernstein (: University of Press, 2001). Pp. xiii + 336, hardcover, endnotes, tables, index; $29.95.

Football is a splendid history, both in the popular sense and from an academic sense. The reader will get all the great games, the great coaches, the great players, and the great teams that the Ivy League schools are so rich in. But Bernstein, well read in the field of sport history, also brings in issues of governance, academic standards, commercialism, violence, corruption, racism, and class differences that so shaped the history of football from its very beginnings. Thus, for a reader who wants his sport history to be meaty with social context, Bernstein supplies the goods, but yet for the reader who breaks out into hives at the mere mention of the Carnegie Report, Bernstein keeps the story going with the telling of what was happening on the field.

Bernstein, ever the careful researcher, early on establishes the origin of the term, “Ivy League, tracing it back to sportswriter in 1933. The Ivy League, however, was not formally instituted until 1956, when eight northeastern schools--Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale--formalized a growing association.

For the first four decades of the sport, the history of football at the future Ivy League schools was virtually equivalent to the history of the game itself. Princeton, Yale, and Harvard--the --not only provided the most significant teams, players, and coaches, but it was these institutions that shaped the rules and guided the game’s evolution, from soccer-style football to the American game we know today.

Bernstein carefully delineates the many changes and innovations the sport underwent and in each case it is one of the “Ivy League” schools or their rule-making committee that instituted the change. The following are some of the most notable--offensive blocking (Princeton 1879), reduction of the number of players to 11 (rules committee 1880) replacing scrummage with scrimmage (rules committee 1880), establishing series of downs and horizontal yards markers (rules committee 1882), spring practice (Harvard 1889)--not to mention all the changes in scoring for field goals and touchdowns. Readers of the CFHS Journal are probably well aware that Yale’s , who led the rule-making committees for decades, is considered the “father” of American-style football.

Not so marvelous innovations in the game included the introduction of mass momentum plays, such as the V Wedge (Princeton 1889) and the Flying Wedge (Harvard 1892). The game became so brutal, particularly noticeable in the Ivy institutions, that in 1905 President felt compelled to call a conference on football reform (which was resisted by some diehards in the “Ivy League” schools). The ‘Ivy League” schools also led the country in commercialization of the sport with the adoption of training tables, full-time coaches, the Thanksgiving Day game, and the building of massive stadiums.

Some readers, like the reviewer, will appreciate Bernstein’s illumination of certain rule changes that we may have already read about, but may have long forgotten. For example, why do touchdowns not literally involve touching the football down? Bernstein answers that question, explaining that the rules committee abolished the “maul-in-goal” in 1889, because fighting in the end zone over the ball to prevent the player from touching down the ball had resulted in vicious fights and declarations of “no-game” rulings.

The bulk of Bernstein’s early history is naturally given to the exploits of the Big Three, but the author interjects occasional notices on what Cornell, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and PAGE 12

Pennsylvania were doing as well. Sometimes he is too sparse in his coverage, failing to mention how Wallie McCornack turned Dartmouth into a winner during 1901 and 1902. He fully covers these teams when they reached the top rank, as Pennsylvania did in the late 1890s.

Bernstein points out that generally most “everyone else was cannon fodder for the Big Three, and stresses that Yale, Harvard, and Princeton were the only good teams in the country in the early decades of the game. Beginning in the 1920s however, the Ivy League programs began an extended decline into second rank status. By the post-World War II years, only Pennsylvania was engaged in big-time football, and that did not last long. The Ivy schools’ diminished status was formalized in 1982 when they moved down to Division I-AA.

As the Ivy League schools become less important, the author’s history evolves into a narrow league history, but a league history that touches on important issues that have always confronted , most particularly the issue of governance, whereby he discusses the gradual evolution of the schools to the gradual joining together into a league through various agreements, mainly by the Big Three.

Bernstein has explored the archives of all eight members of the Ivy League, drawn from an extensive library of secondary literature, and made full use of an array of metropolitan newspapers, student newspapers, and alumni magazines. The book includes the requisite scholarly apparatus-end notes, bibliography, and an index-plus a photo section of 25 far-too-small images. Appendices provide listings of all the head coaches of each of the Ivy schools, school win-loss cumulative and league records, Ivy League champions, and Ivy school nominal national champions. Robert Pruter Lewis University SOLTAU’S 1948 KICKOFF WHIFF

By Jim Quirk

The Golden Gopher teams that coach Bernie Bier-man put together between 1946 and 1949 at the developed one of the great lines in the history of college football. Among the stars were and at ends, and Buster Mealey at tackles, Warren Beson and Floyd Jaszewski at guards, plus Clayton Tonnemaker and Howie Brennan at center, backed up by a youngster named Wayne Robinson This Gopher aggregation didn’t manage to win the national championships that Bernie’s 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, and 1941 teams had, but the line at least ranks with the best of those teams, as indicated by the sterling pro careers of so many of the 1949 Gopher linemen.

Movies of the games of the post-war Bierman teams which were taken by trainer Phil Brain are still available in the Archives of the University of Minnesota. The movie of the 1948 Minnesota- Purdue game has one of those plays that comes up once in a lifetime. Late in the first half, after the Gophers had scored a touchdown to put the game on ice, 27-7, Billy Bye, the Gopher halfback was the holder for Gordy Soltau’s following kickoff. The film (silent of course) shows Gordy taking his usual full leg kick, with the rest of the Gopher team running downfield with him But as the Gophers are running, they are turning this way and that, trying to find the ball, and the Boilermaker defenders are obviously as puzzled as the Minnesota players. Meanwhile, back on the 40 yard line, Billy Bye is scrunched up and lying all by himself. As it turns out, Bye has the ball, which never got kicked. The referee, Jay Berwanger of fame, huddled with the other officials and finally called a penalty on the Gophers for delay of game.