Sport: Footballiana

No one is quite so heavily sentimental as an old college athlete, especially an old footballer. To Manhattan’s Dean Hill (Georgia Tech ’12), football is the old-time religion. He helped found New York’s Touchdown Club to foster good-fellowship among Varsity lettermen, takes flying tackles at journalists who refer to an “All-American” instead of an “All-America” footballer. For 13 years Dean Hill has rummaged through old bookstores and trunks, clipped yellowed papers and magazines, assembled one of the world’s finest collections of footballiana.

This week Collector Hill published his glorified football album. Football Thru the Years (Gridiron Publishing Co.; $2.50) depicts the history of U. S. football—from Rugby’s Bigside and Eton’s Wall Game (British-born ancestors of U. S. football), through the white-canvas-shod, stocking-capped era of the ’80s, down to the latest award made by the Touchdown Club—with turn-of-the-century photographs, cartoons and illustrations by such artists as the late great Arthur B. Frost and Frederic Remington. Among its outstanding illustrations : Artist Frost’s sketch of the Yale-Princeton game (see cut) played in Hoboken on Thanksgiving Day 1879—memorable because 1) it resulted in a scoreless tie; 2) Yale’s Captain Walter Camp flabbergasted the referee by asking permission to put in a substitute, though no player had been injured; 3) the cane-carrying referee, who had to arbitrate a free-for-all as well as a game, was Robert Bacon, common-enemy captain of the Harvard team, later U. S. Ambassador to France.

Other Hill treasures-trove:

> Yale was the first U. S. college to play football with eleven men on each side.

> The U. S. football was round, before 1896.

> Harvard built the first U. S. football stadium, in 1903.

> Princeton introduced long hair, canvas jackets (called “smocks” because they were invented by a student named Smock) and the famed V formation, forerunner of the momentum mass plays of the ’90s.

> Not until 1904 did a touchdown score more than a field goal.

> The forward pass was written into the rules in 1906, after President Theodore Roosevelt shook his Big Stick at bone-crushing mass plays.

> Michigan was the first college to be invited to play in the Rose Bowl, drubbed Stanford 49-to-0 on Jan. 1, 1902.

> One of football’s few rules that have remained unchanged in 64 years: the distance between the goalposts (18 ft., 6 in., with crossbars 10 ft. from the ground).