Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football

Walter Camp made the development of football—indeed, its very creation—his lifelong mission. From his days as a college athlete, Camp's love of the game and dedication to its future put it on the course that would allow it to seize the passions of the nation. Roger R. Tamte tells the engrossing but forgotten life story of Walter Camp, the man contemporaries called "the father of American football." He charts Camp's leadership as American players moved away from rugby and for the first time tells the story behind the remarkably inventive rule change that, in Camp's own words, was "more important than all the rest of the legislation combined." Trials also emerged, as when disputes over forward passing, the ten-yard first down, and other rules became so public that President Theodore Roosevelt took sides. The resulting political process produced losses for Camp as well as successes, but soon a consensus grew that football needed no new major changes. American football was on its way, but as time passed, Camp's name and defining influence became lost to history. Entertaining and exhaustively researched, Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football weaves the life story of an important sports pioneer with a long-overdue history of the dramatic events that produced the nation's most popular game. | Cover Title Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Beginnings, Known and Unknown 2. Given a New Era 3. Officially Under Way 4. "You Must Do Something" 5. Making It Their Own 6. Captain 7. The Extracurriculum and Beyond 8. Fourth Year 9. Moving on, Ready or Not 10. Still under Construction 11. The Main Invention 12. Birth Year 13. Impossible to Ignore 14. Besides Medical School 15. Career Realities 16. Not So Easy After All 17. Writer, Teacher . . . Director? 18. "Having Waited in Vain" 19. Father of Football 20. An "American" Game of Football 21. Headquarters on Gill Street 22. Rivalry Demands Rules 23. Why American Football Grew 24. All-Americans 25. Author for an Expanding Game 26. Second Most Important Man in New Haven? 27. It's Official: We Want to Win 28. "A Chief Charm of the Game" 29. "What Does Walter Think?" 30. The End of Student Rule Making 31. New Voices 32. Critics and Defenders 33. Breakup 34. Failure Achieved 35. The Future Foreseen 36. Pax Intercollegiata 37. Striving for More 38. More than a Game 39. Officially a Yale Official 40. Not Done Yet 41. "The Game I Have Worked So Hard For" 42. A President Involved 43. Tipping Point 44. Democracy in Action 45. Starting from Scratch 46. Football as We Know It 47. Besides Rule Making 48. Away with the Old 49. "I Will Give It Up" 50. Alternative Service 51. The Frankenstein of College Athletics 52. Unrecognized Legacy Appendix Notes Selected Bibliography Index | "Tamte has produced a well-researched account of Walter Camp's wide-ranging life and careers that particularly included his actively working on the early development of the game of American football, and his many years at Yale. This is an easy to read and valuable look at one of sport's amazing pioneers."—Raymond Schmidt, College Football Historical Society "Embedded in this biography is a fantastic narrative history of how and why football exploded in popularity on college campuses and in American popular culture. Superbly researched and well written, this book will appeal to sports enthusiasts and scholars alike. Highly recommended." — Choice "Tamte skillfully weaves myriad details of two interconnected stories. . . . A definitive study." — Journal of American Culture | Roger R. Tamte is a patent attorney and scholar of early American football who has studied Camp for many years. "No person was more responsible for converting English rugby into American football than Walter Camp (1859-1925). As a player at Yale, then a coach at Yale and Stanford, a sportswriter for Harper's Weekly and other major magazines, and an influential member of rules committees, he patiently and gradually transformed the sport into the football we recognize today. In this freshly researched biography, Roger Tamte follows Camp from infancy to the meeting of the rules committee in 1903. That meeting established the modern game, including scoring, play ending after a tackle, resuming on opposite sides of a line of scrimmage, plays beginning with a snap to the quarterback, and a system of downs and yardage goals for retaining or losing possession. The incremental changes that Camp introduced and championed did not come easily. In addition to the usual resistance to change, he had to confront academic, press, and governmental complaints about the brutality of the game. As the popularity of college football drew more spectators, games needed larger stadiums. Camp had to address questions of eligibility, officiating, and scheduling. And he had a personal life and a professional business career to maintain. His was a busy life, and one worth telling"-- Provided by publisher Existing football literature lacks an adequate history of the creation of American football, primarily because it fails to sufficiently examine individual human contributions. Walter Camp is the key person in American football's development, almost a solitary leader in the game's early years, influential in development of various component features of the game, and inventor of its most important rule, the downs-and-distance rule (today four downs to advance ten yards). Camp was closely involved in American football throughout his life, a generally positive experience until the game encounters a major crisis in the early 1900s, when American football and its rule makers are attacked because of the game's perceived brutality. Conflict develops over potential solutions, and Camp is partially defeated with the help of President Theodore Roosevelt, effectively forcing inclusion of forward passing in the game