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The history of American football is its always been something for "other" people to play, coming from ivy league rugby teams after the civil war which is roughl
by VLM 9y ago
The history of American football is its always been something for "other" people to play, coming from ivy league rugby teams after the civil war which is roughly 0% of the population. Much like car racing it was always a spectacle other people performed, almost like theater. Baseball, for contrast, was very bottom up growth.
If it were not for the short term fetishization of "everyone must go to college" and therefore intensely celebrate everything related to college, plus the broadcasting industry, football would still be some weird traditional thing a couple boys at Harvard played against a couple boys at Yale occasionally.
Will be interesting to see, after the edu bubble pops and the sportsball broadcasting bubble of boomers pops, if the current football regime survives. It may go back to an ivy obscurity.
- cafard 9y agoHardly. My father grew in western Pennsylvania in the 1930s, when not a lot of people went to college--this was before the war and the GI Bill. The annual high school football game between his town and the next one over was heavily patrolled by the police the keep brawls from starting. And from the same period you will find a sandlot football in the novel The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan--fiction, but presumably plausible.
- VLM 9y agoWe're not really disagreeing. That anecdote is a couple decades after the radio era began and 75 years after the ivy league stuff. Football was already "big entertainment" eighty years ago.