May 15, 1874: Harvard and McGill Invent American Football

 

May 15, 1874: American football is invented.

What's that? You thought that happened on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton? Well, that was the 1st football game played in America. But that was essentially a soccer game, 25-a-side. In 1870, these 2 schools in New Jersey were joined by Columbia University, of New York City.

In 1872 came another New Jersey school, the Hoboken-based Stevens Institute of Technology; and Yale University, of New Haven, Connecticut. In 1873 came Harvard University, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston; and the 1st game in the South, between Washington & Lee University and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), which are practically next-door to each other in Lexington, Virginia.

So what happened on May 15, 1874?

Essentially, McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, is Canada's answer to Harvard, right down to the use of Crimson red as the school color. Both Harvard's men and McGill's men believed themselves to be sporting gentlemen, in the tradition of the Victorian Era that was pretty much at its peak in the 1870s.

As citizens of the British Empire, McGill's men believed themselves to be honest, brave, and examples for the youth of the world to follow. The University's motto is Grandescunt Aucta Labore, Latin for "By work, all things increase and grow."

As citizens of the United States of America, Harvard's men believed the same things of themselves, with the added touch of being the inheritors of the American Revolution. The University's motto is simply Veritas, Latin for "Truth."

Having heard that Harvard had one the best football teams in America, McGill started its football program in 1874, and challenged Harvard to a game of "football." It would be the 1st-ever "football" game between American and Canadian teams. Wishing to maintain their appearance as honorable sportsmen, Harvard happily accepted.

But when the McGill men got to Harvard's Jarvis Field on May 14, they discovered that the game Harvard thought they'd been invited to play was soccer -- which got shortened to "assoc." and eventually to "soccer." The McGill men expected that they would be playing rugby (which has frequently been called "rugger").

Being "sportsmen" and "gentlemen," the team captains met to discuss the discrepancy with civility. There may have been tea involved, or perhaps a stronger beverage.

They came up with a compromise: They would play a game under Harvard's "Boston game" rules, and another game under the "code" of "rugby union," the version of football most familiar to Canada at the time. (Indeed, the predecessor to the CFL, the Canadian Football League, was the CRU, the Canadian Rugby Union.)

At least, that's the story I'd been led to believe. But, as Richard Hershberger, a historian who specializes in the post-Civil War period, points out, an article in The Boston Globe of May 11 suggests that the teams already knew ahead of time about the discrepancy, and that the compromise was worked out, by either mail or telegram. (The telephone was invented 2 years later, also in Boston. Note that, just as baseball was often spelled as 2 words at the time, or hyphenated, "base ball" or "base-ball," so, too, is "foot-ball" hyphenated here.)

On May 14, Harvard won the soccer game 3-0. The following day, they met for the rugby match, which ended 0-0. As Hershberger puts it:

This is the most important game in the history of American sport. I write this with no exaggeration. This is the game that converted Harvard to the rugby rules. Harvard then went forth and explained to the other schools that Harvard is Harvard and you other schools are not, so that is that. Next year, rugby will be adopted as for intercollegiate matches. From there they will immediately begin fiddling with the rules, and by 1880 will have distinctive features of American football. Most schools in 1874 favored a kicking game. Were it not for today's game, college football would be soccer, or something very close to it.

The Harvard men liked the rugby version, including the "try." Later in the year, their officials met with officials from the other football-playing schools, and the rules were combined with those of the soccer generally considered "football" in America, and carrying the ball was officially allowed, and the "try" became the "touchdown."

So if you want to know why America plays the gridiron game instead of the sport that most of the rest of the world calls "football" or some variant, blame Harvard and McGill.

Like St. John's University in New York City's Queens, McGill used to call their team the Redmen. Despite the Indigenous heritage of Canada, it had nothing to do with the people then usually called "Indians": University founder James McGill, like many Scotsmen, had red hair. The name was used from 1927 to 2020, when it was changed to Redbirds.

"Redbirds" was chosen as a match for the name for their women's teams, the Martlets. Their women's sports department was founded in 1976, and their women's teams were named for the birds shown on the McGill family crest.

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May 15, 1874 was a Friday. There was another notable sporting event that day, a game played in the 1st professional baseball league, the National Association. The Boston Red Stockings beat the Brooklyn Atlantics, 8-2 at the Union Grounds in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn remained a separate city from New York until 1898. By that point, the Atlantics had folded, and the Borough of Brooklyn was home to the team known today at the Los Angeles Dodgers. When the National League was founded in 1876, the Boston Red Stockings were admitted, and are known today as the Atlanta Braves.

April 1, 1950: The Death of Charles Drew

April 1, 1950: Dr. Charles Drew dies as the result of a car crash in Burlington, North Carolina. He was only 45 years old.

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904 in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, playing football and running track. He put himself through medical school by teaching biology and chemistry, and serving as the football coach and the 1st athletic director, at Morgan College, a historically black school in Baltimore, now known as Morgan State University.

He graduated from medical school at McGill University in Montreal, going there because Howard University, in his hometown, and known as "the Black Harvard," thought he hadn't met their academic standards. But after his graduation from McGill, Howard offered him a teaching position. He accepted, but later left to earn his doctorate at Columbia University.

He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces' lives during the war.

As the most prominent African-American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950 -- too late for him, as it turned out.

In 1939, Drew married Minnie Lenore Robbins, a professor of home economics at Spelman College in Atlanta. They had 3 daughters and a son. In 1944, the NAACP awarded him its annual Spingarn Medal, for an outstanding achievement by an African-American, for his work in supplying blood for the Allied war effort.

Beginning in 1939, Drew traveled to Tuskegee, Alabama, to attend the annual free clinic at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital. For the 1950 Tuskegee clinic, Drew drove along with 3 other black physicians. Drew was driving around 8:00 AM on April 1. Still fatigued from spending the night before in the operating theater, he lost control of the vehicle. After careening into a field, the car somersaulted 3 times. The 3 other physicians sustained minor injuries. Drew was trapped in the car with severe wounds. His foot had become wedged beneath the brake pedal.

When reached by emergency technicians, he was in shock and barely alive, due to severe leg injuries. He was taken to Alamance General Hospital in Burlington, North Carolina. He was pronounced dead a half hour after he first received medical attention -- ironically, from massive blood loss.

A myth arose, repeated on an early episode of the TV show M*A*S*H, that he died because an all-white Southern hospital had refused him admittance because he was black. It wasn't true: The hospital's white doctors examined him, but knew there was nothing that could be done. If there had been a black hospital, or a white hospital, closer to the crash site, they couldn't have saved him, either.

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April 1, 1950 was a Saturday. Samuel Alito, later to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was born.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There was 1 game played in the NBA, between teams in Indiana: The Anderson Packers beat the Indianapolis Olympics, 67-65 at Butler Fieldhouse (now Hinkle Fieldhouse) in Indianapolis. The Packers advanced to the Semifinals, where they lost to the Minneapolis Lakers. Those would be the last games played by the Packers, while the Olympians hung on for 3 more seasons.

The Stanley Cup Playoffs were underway. The New York Rangers beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-2 at the Montreal Forum. And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 2-0 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. But the Wings would win that series, and then beat the Rangers in the Finals.

And, in English soccer, Arsenal defeated Manchester City, 4-1 at the Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, in North London.