Rutgers vs. Princeton, 1869: The Odyssey Begins
In 2019, America celebrated the 150 year anniversary of the first intercollegiate football game between Rutgers College and the College of New Jersey in front of a crowd of 100 spectators in New Bunswick, New Jersey. A century and a half later, the College of New Jersey is now Princeton University, and American football, once considered an inferior alternative to pastimes like baseball or boxing, has become the most popular collegiate sport in America.
But there’s no denying that the most drastic change since the inaugural game is the game itself, having been transformed from a meager yet vicious blood sport to a game of multi-dimensional strategy combined with intense physicality. Indeed, evolution has remained a fixture in football’s continuous history to the point that subsequent generations often times aren’t able to identify the game that was played by their predecessors.
And no such game would be more unrecognizable, and for the most part incomparable, than the match that started it all. This was a game that had no line of scrimmage, featured twenty five men per side and prohibited running with the ball, as well as passing the ball with the hands. In fact, the only method of scoring was to kick the ball into the opponent’s goal.
True, this is the first official intercollegiate contest played, but it was far from being the first football game ever played in the world, and certainly not the first game played in the Americas. Countries all around the globe possess a unique form of football that has been passed down for centuries, each containing their own origin story attached to legacy of their respective game.
Ancient China in the Han Dynasty, for instance, played a game called very similar to the rules of soccer called Cuju, in which teams could only kick the ball, and scored when the ball was kicked through a goal. The ancient Greeks played a game that was later adopted by the Roman Empire, in which a team was to drive the ball across their opponents’ goal line through running, passing and kicking, all while withstanding and evading hits and tackles from the opposition. This game came to be known as Harpastum.
In England, references to football began around 1175 in William' Fitzstephens’ book, Descriptions of London. Four hundred years later, football was used to describe two different forms of ball sports: the kicking game, and a violent and often lawless tradition of“mob football” in which two teams of an unlimited amount of young men carried the ball from one end of the village to the other side to achieve a goal, punching, kicking and shoving to create openings for the ball carrier.
The efforts by English educators to organize sports to train young men and keep them in shape when not studying resulted in a greater emphasis on the kicking game as opposed to the violent form of mob football. This tradition would allegedly be broken when a student named William Webb Ellis, a student at the Rugby School, picked up a ball during the game and began to run with it, giving inspiration for the game of Rugby football (though this tale has begun to be acknowledged as folklore among sports historians).
A variety of offshoots spawned from the kicking and carrying games, though only a handful of them were legitimately codified. Regardless, many of these games came to the United States as a result of English settlers pursuing an American education or seeking work, or from Americans bringing these games back after studying abroad in England.
One game in particular, “ballown” would gauge the interest of students at Princeton University, in 1820. Football historian Parke H. Davis points out in his book, Football: The Intercollegiate Game, that ballown means “batting of the bladder with the fist.” Originally, batting the ball with the fist was the only method of keeping the ball in motion, though there is no record of how points were scored. The kicking element was gradually adopted, and a scoring system was implemented and declared that the first team to six goals is the winner. The game grew in popularity in the Northeast before falling into obscurity in the wake of the Civil War.
Once the war had concluded, however, ballown resumed play at Princeton. Rutgers, meanwhile, was recorded as playing some code of football as well. Having become cross town rivals through baseball games, Rutgers wanted to take a stab at Princeton at their own game, and proposed a formal challenge the “men at Nassau Hall,” referring to what was at the time the largest building in colonial New Jersey that to this day resides on Princeton’s campus. Enthusiastic about this challenge, the men at Princeton accepted. The challenge was for a series of three games, the first and third played at Rutgers, and the second played at Princeton.
Princeton’s team captain was William Stryker Gummere, while Rutgers was led by William James Leggett. In his book, The Saga of American Football, sports historian Alexander Weyland describes each man as being an “unusually brilliant student in addition to being a capable all-around athlete.” Their dedication to academics would prove to serve them well, as Gummere secured the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, and Leggett became a distinguished council member of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Leggett and Gummere would meet to agree on a set of rules. As previously mentioned, carrying and throwing the ball were not permitted. However, this game was not soccer by any stretch. Though kicking was allowed, the teammates that didn’t have the ball would form a compact wedge around the ball handler to protect him from oncoming tacklers, and to clear a path to the goal. Players were also authorized to catch the ball on the fly, either from a kick or from the ball being batted with the fist. Princeton, however, allowed a player to fair catch the ball, which would then grant him the opportunity for a free kick. Rutgers did not acknowledge this part of this game, and it was agreed to only permit this rule for the second match at Princeton. Thus, the inaugural game was set to begin play on November 6 at 3:00 P.M. at the Rutgers campus.
The players arrived a few minutes before three, silently stripping off their hats and coats as spectators appeared to support their respective university ball clubs. A crowd 100 spectators came to watch the match, free of charge. Eye witness accounts comment on Princeton’s physical advantage, as they had taller and muscular players compared to the small Rutgers athletes.
Each team aligned identically; two men were selected by each team to play immediately in front of the opponents’ goal and were fittingly known as “captains of the enemies goal.” The remainder of each team was divided into two sections – the players of one section, known as the “fielders” were assigned to certain regions of the field, where they were to cover and not leave. The other section, the “bulldogs,” followed the ball up and down the filed, and would be responsible for creating a wedge around the ball handler to protect him from the opposition.
Princeton kicked off. An unnamed, agile Rutgers player hustled to the ball and proceeded to move it down the field on the ground with short, controlled kicks as his teammates formed a wall around him to prevent Princeton players from getting near the ball. Princeton could not keep pace with Rutgers, and the first goal would be scored in the first five minutes of play. Gummere instructed one of his fielders, “Big Mike” Edwards, to charge right into the heart of Rutgers wall to break up the blocking. Big Mike succeeded, sending the undersized Rutgers men flying and therefore losing control of the ball. A Princeton player gained possession and tied up the score with a long and accurate kick.
As the match continued, the contrast in strategy and personnel was serve the swift and nimble players of Rutgers well as they proceeded to use precision and timed kicks to score, where as Princeton’s methods of physical force to disrupt the ball handler’s protection would be diagnosed by Rutgers and neutralized. A careless mistake by Rutgers that resulted in kicking a ball through their own goal would close the cap, and after a Princeton tied the match, Rutger’s pulled away to victory with a final score of 6-4. The rematch at Princeton wasn’t as closely contested as the Tigers won 8-0 over Rutgers through the use of fair catches and free kicks. Due to discrepancies over location and facilities, a third game was never played. The rules of these two matches, however, would be codified and spread to other universities in the Northeast.
Though this brand of football would provide only a second hand impact on the development of the modernized game, ballown and the Rutgers-Princeton game holds a crucial spot in the history of American Football, for it established the concept of intercollegiate rivalry, and also displayed a as a primitive example of blocking that would become a distinct dimension in American football. This inaugural variation would eventually disappear into the 1870s, but had it not been for this game, perhaps the odyssey wouldn’t have begun at all.
References:
The Saga of American Football, Alexander M. Weyand, The Macmillan Company, 1955
Football: The Intercollegiate Game, Parke H. Davis, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911