December 25, 1894: The 1st Intersectional College Football Game

Walter Camp

December 25, 1894: In a manner of speaking, the 1st holiday-season college bowl game is played on this day. Certainly, it was the 1st college football game, ever, between teams from 2 different parts of the country. And it was the 2 men most responsible for the development of American football who set it up and opposed each other in it.

Walter Camp had been one of the 1st great college football players, at Yale University in the late 1870s. In 1888, he became Yale's head coach, and one of his players on that great team was Amos Alonzo Stagg. Between them, they invented pretty much every feature that turned American football from a game resembling soccer and rugby to the game that became so popular in the 20th Century.

Amos Alonzo Stagg

Both men went West to start college football programs, Stagg at the University of Chicago, Camp at the newly-founded Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay Area. They played at the Haight Street Grounds in San Francisco. Chicago beat Stanford 24-4.

The Haight Street Grounds stood from 1887 to 1895. It was actually not at Haight Street, but at the southeastern corner of Stanyan and Waller Streets, in the Haight-Ashbury district that would become the seat of the Hippie movement in the 1960s, at the southeastern corner of Golden Gate Park, about a block from where Kezar Stadium would later be built.

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December 25, 1894 was a Tuesday. Baseball was out of season, hockey was all-amateur, basketball was a recent invention, and this was before college football was playing bowl games, let alone on Christmas Day.

But in England, soccer, or "football" as they call it, had a tradition: To keep traveling to a minimum, and thus families together, 2 nearby teams would play at one's home ground on Christmas Day, and at the other's on the next day, December 26, Boxing Day. This tradition began to die out in the 1950s, but Boxing Day games are still played.

On December 25, 1894, the London-based team which I would eventually support, then known as Woolwich Arsenal, played, but not against a nearby team: They hosted Burslem Port Vale, at the Manor Ground in Plumstead, Kent, later to be a part of Southeast London, and won, 7-0. Patrick O'Brien scored 3 goals -- not yet known as a "hat trick" in either ice hockey or association football.