Teddy Roosevelt helped keep football alive

The safety issues facing modern-day football may seem new, but they're actually as old as the game itself.

The first moment of crisis for football came long before self-inflicted deaths of men such as Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, or Kurt Warner saying he hopes his sons do not play football.

It occurred more than a century ago when, after the 1905 season, a large public outcry was heard that the barbaric sport of football should be banned.

"The parallels are striking," said John J. Miller, who wrote the book "The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football," which was released last year and has just come out in paperback at a time when its themes are startlingly familiar. "There's clearly a link between then and now, and football has an issue to deal with today."

Football always had been seen as a violent sport. As Miller recounts, in the 1890s the magazine "The Nation" fretted that colleges with football teams were becoming "huge training grounds for young gladiators."

The New York Times worried about the "mayhem and homicide" in football. In the fall of 1897, the Times ran an editorial under the headline "Two Curable Evils." One evil was the lynching of blacks. Football was the other.

The moment of truth for the sport came in 1905 when 18 players were killed while playing football, a striking number considering the much lower participation rate at the time. Many of those deaths were from head injuries that were not diagnosed, and there was concern for the other maiming and carnage taking place as the sport was in its formative years.

The president of Harvard, perhaps the most powerful person in a sport that was played almost exclusively at the college level, wanted football outlawed.

Roosevelt, then the president of the United States, intervened. "It is probably too much to call [Roosevelt] football's savior," Miller writes in his book. "Yet he may very well have been its most indispensable fan."

New rules were introduced to eliminate the most dangerous aspects of the sport such as the wedge blocks. Perhaps most importantly, the forward pass evolved as a way to spread the players out on the field.

As football looks at its latest crisis, Miller believes the same trait that football used to survive in 1905 will help it survive today. An ability to adapt, to embrace change, to encourage a re-thinking of conventions, separates football from a hide-bound sport like, say, baseball.

When Giants owner John Mara suggested this offseason that eliminating the kickoff could be a future consideration, he was following in that tradition. The moving of the kickoff 5 yards closer to the end zone, the elimination of blocking wedges, and other protective measures afforded to quarterbacks and other defenseless players also are steps along that same well-worn path.

"The league appears to be responsive and is trying to address the problem without taking away the fundamental roughness of the sport,'' Miller said.

It's that roughness that makes football so popular, after all.

Other "traditions" also have long been with the sport. Miller cites an article from McClure's Magazine in 1905 that quoted a Princeton player after a game in which a Dartmouth star player, Matthew W. Bullock, suffered a snapped collarbone that ended his career.

"We're coached to pick out the most dangerous man on the opposing side and put him out in the first five minutes of the game," the player said, a sentiment that has been echoed down through the years all the way to the current bounty scandal involving Gregg Williams and the Saints.

Roosevelt, the sport's "most indispensable fan," had his own difficulties reconciling his love of football with his parental instincts. In 1903, he wrote a letter to his oldest boy, who was a student at the Groton School for Boys.

"I am delighted to have you play football," Teddy Roosevelt told his son, Ted. "But the very things that make it a good game make it a rough game, and there is always the chance of your being laid up."

More than 100 years later, many parents still are dealing with the same conflicted emotions of pride and concern as they send their sons onto the gridiron. Football itself may have an inherent knack for change that allows it to evolve and thrive, but our perceptions of it and our struggle to balance its draw with its flaws seem to have rarely wavered.