[Ed. This piece on FDR Course Architect appeared in Golf Journal back in 2002. Published by the USGA (without advertisement), this was a fine magazine — one of many print outlets to fall by the wayside later in century. But this one really stung. It paid well and the editor there, Brett Avery, shared my love of quirky, often historical pieces. For years I had kept my GJ story clips in hard copy form, but they all perished in my 2016 barn fire. Time to start archiving them here.]
By Hal Phillips One is taken aback by the photograph. It’s encased in glass and big as life, the first thing one encounters upon entering the Visitor Centre at Roosevelt Campobello International Park. There’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt, young and turn-of-the-century attired, posing at the finish of what appears to have been an elegant swing.
FDR played golf? I had seen that written somewhere, but this photo
speaks to a level of proficiency that surprised me. Fluid. Relaxed. Confident.
Beside the photograph, inside the exhibit case, is further testimony to his
skill: a medal, earned by winning the August 1899 members’ tournament at
Campobello Golf Club.
There’s a book in the case, too, detailing the results of these competitions staged between 1897 and 1920. But it’s the photograph that hogs all the intrigue, as it contrasts so markedly with those more familiar images of the man: the new president, waving from his convertible Stutz; the four-time candidate addressing boisterous crowds from the stump; the solemn slayer of fascism, posing with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. All of them iconic, these photographs are burned into the public consciousness.
Yet all depict a much older Roosevelt, aged beyond his years by lengthy struggles with polio, global economic depression and world war. The American mind’s eye invariably pictures the man seated, or perhaps standing stiffly while leaning hard on the arm of his young naval officer son. To see FDR so youthful and athletic, swinging a golf club at Campobello Golf Club, is startling.
It’s more startling still to learn that the would-be president laid out the nine holes at CGC.
FDR, Golf Course Architect. Wait, what?
A visit to Campobello, this small Canadian island off the coast of Maine, is replete with enlightening discoveries. It was settled in 1770 by Welsh sea captain William Owen, who remained loyal to King George following the American Revolution. Indeed, island tax records show that Benedict Arnold maintained a residence here, at Snug Cove, in 1786.
The Roosevelts, from the Hyde Park section of New York’s Hudson Valley region, summered here in the province of New Brunswick for nearly 50 years, beginning in 1883, when FDR was just a year old. He learned to sail here on the frigid waters of Passamaquoddy Bay. It was on what he called his “beloved island” that he secretly proposed to his future wife, Eleanor. While visiting Campobello during the summer of 1910, he resolved to run for the New York State Senate, thus launching one of America’s most remarkable political careers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. was born on Campobello in 1914, and it was here, in 1921, that his father and namesake contracted the disease that would cripple him.
The nine-hole layout at Campobello Golf Club is long gone. A thick forest now occupies the site and further envelops the 34-room Roosevelt “Cottage” and the Hubbard Cottage next door. At the turn of the century, when FDR and his fellow colonists whiled away their summers here, this portion of the island was treeless. In 1881, the Boston-based Campobello Land Co. had cleared these properties in hopes that wealthy families would be enticed by unimpeded ocean views. They were indeed, and many of the noblest clans in the U.S. soon built rambling estates on the gently sloping terrain above Friar’s Bay.
The Campobello Land Co. also built a pair of summer hotels on this high ground, the Tyn-y-Coed (Welsh for “house in the woods”) in 1882, and the Tyn-y-Mays (“house in the fields”) a year later. Both were gone by 1910, but it was beside these grand, American shingle-style hostelries that Campobello Golf Club was laid out. No photographs of the course survive, though in the photo of FDR swinging his club, a corner of the Tyn-e-Coed is visible in the background.
“The course was there beside the hotels, opposite Hubbard Cottage,
across the road,” recalls Mrs. Howard Hodgson, 74, a resident of nearby
St. Andrew’s, N.B., and a Hubbard by birth. “I spent all my summers [on
Campobello] in the cottage, from 1925 to 1941. My grandfather was treasurer of
the golf club and James Roosevelt, the president’s father, was the one who
started it.
“Nobody played any golf on the island when I was growing up, so I
don’t remember the course, per se; it was just a cow pasture when I was there.
Once the [First World] war ended, the colony just sort of fizzled. But I
remember going blueberry picking with my father in that field. We used to find
these funny old golf balls there.”
The Visitor Centre at Roosevelt Park is modest in size but its displays thoroughly recount the family’s aristocratic-but-vigorous island existence via museum-style text, complemented by oversized black-and-white photography. There’s a tiny theater, wherein a short film, entitled “Beloved Island,” further documents the picnics, hikes, sailing and golf FDR enjoyed. About halfway through the film, the screen fills with the photograph from the lobby: FDR, no more than 20 years of age, following-through (“posing” if you will) with his driver.
“FDR,” the narrator explains, “served on the Governing
Committee at Campobello Golf Club and laid out the course …”
Wait, what? FDR laid out the course? This notion is perhaps more startling than the photograph. Could it be that FDR, Architect of the New Deal, was also an amateur golf course architect? For buffs of history and golf, this is an extraordinary prospect, one that warranted further investigation.
HOUSTON, Texas (Oct. 11, 2019) — There’s a reason China has long referred to itself as The Middle Kingdom. Daryl Morey, the NBA and frankly much of Western Civilization is beginning to understand what that meant and what it means today.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Morey is the general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. Until last week, he was known primarily as one of the league’s most savvy operators, an early and successful adopter of advanced hoop metrics and a keen innovative judge of talent in a league turning inside-out. Read: He gets the NBA’s new, stat-backed reliance on 3-point shooting. Morey’s also politically aware, apparently, something he exhibited last Friday when he tweeted his support of Hong Kong protesters in their running battle with China’s central government. “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” he wrote.
With that seemingly innocuous digital bromide, Morey has himself pissed off that central government, in Beijing. In the process, he may have inadvertently clued a big hunk of America into the fact that the unilateral, post-Cold War Era is over.
Morey has since taken the Tweet down but he, the Rockets and
the NBA have reaped the 21st century whirlwind.
Middle Kingdom Lowers the Economic Boom
In response, the Chinese Central Government has announced that Rockets games will no longer be broadcast by Chinese state TV or partner Tencent, which recently agreed to a $1.5-billion deal with the NBA to stream games in China. During the 2018-19 season, some 600 million Chinese watched an NBA game in this fashion.
The Rockets themselves just happen to have been the most popular team in the country — mainly because Yao Ming, China’s most successful NBA product, played his entire career in Houston. Today Yao is head of the Chinese Basketball Association. On Monday he severed the CBA’s relationship with his former team.
Behold, The Middle Kingdom, which does note accommodate. Others accommodate it.
China so named itself circa 1,000 BCE, when the reigning Chou people, unaware of advanced civilizations in the West, believed their empire occupied the middle of the Earth, surrounded by unsophisticated barbarians. For the ensuing 3,000 years China has occupied the center of the Asian universe, such has it dominated economic and cultural affairs in this region .
In Asia, over this long arc of history, China’s military whims were routinely indulged. Its culture effortlessly spilled over into countless neighboring nations. Its outsized market (always a function of its outsized population) routinely bent foreign states to the Kingdom’s economic will.
Chinese Dominance has no Analogue
North Americas and Europeans have a difficult time grasping this Middle Kingdom concept — the enormity of China’s economic and cultural power — because, for Europeans, Africans, Middle Easterners, South or North Americans, this long-term dominance has no analogue. What’s more, recent history doesn’t bear this primacy out. Starting in the mid 1800s (when the English first acquired Hong Kong and its holdings in the Pearl River Delta), and ending with Mao’s victory over nationalist forces in 1949, China was something of a geopolitical and economic patsy.
Here’s the way I’ve always thought of it: China had a bad century. The Chinese call it a “Century of Humiliation.” But one or two bad centuries out of 30 isn’t such a terrible batting average. But that blip is over. Its recent “rise” is merely a reinstatement of a longstanding status quo.
My 40something dad, his kilties well and truly shorn, in the 1980s
[August 12, 2019] — Recalling my father, one should know that he abided by few fashion trends and set even fewer. However, on the 8th anniversary of his pasing, l will claim on his behalf one initiative to which he proved an early and canny adopter: He depised kilties. His aversion to those oddly fringed, seemingly vestigial, lace-obscuring flaps — which, for decades, adorned all manner of golf shoes — would prove well ahead of his time. For us, it’s a portal down the Golf Shoe History rabbit hole.
My nephew’s boots, complete with kilties
I was reminded of my dad’s rare fashion-forward stance when my 20-something nephew recently visited at Christmas. Nathan graduated from college a few years back with a degree in fire-suppression engineering. The job he obtained in this field quickly bored him. Living in suburban D.C. further depleted his life force. So today he’s out West fighting forest fires with a crew of badass, axe-wielding Latinos. In any case, he arrived in Maine for the holidays wearing a pair of high-laced, black-leather firefighting boots that, to my surprise, featured small kilties down by their steel-tipped toes. If Dr. Martens made golf shoes, this is what they’d look like.
What’s with the kilties? I inquired of young Nathan.
“Is that what they’re called?” he replied. He went on to explain that when one is tramping about the forest floor, these fringed swatches of leather prevent sticks, leaves, pine needles, mud and other bits of underbrush from lodging between one’s tongue and boot laces.
In the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to kilties (and to golf, for that matter), this description of their historical utility was never advanced, not to me anyway. I knew my dad didn’t care for them. Beyond that, they were more or less understood to be yet another whimsical affectation specific to golfing attire, along with Sansabelt slacks (from the French apparently: sans belt, get it?), bucket hats and polo shirts.
Golf Shoe History: A Field Little Explored
The evolution of golf shoe fashion is not a popular avenue of exploration. Though it must be said: Any research into the subject inevitably leads one down a rabbit hole of pleasingly arcane information.
For example, it’s possible (quite logical to assume even) that kilties predate golf spikes in that evolution. Spikes emerged only in the mid-19th century when Scots started hammering nails through their boot soles in order to gain better purchase on dewy fescues.
More recent history tells us that my dad and his cohort of 40-somethings spent much of the 1970s dispatching with all manner of societal expectations. They fled corporate America, experimented with drugs and divorcef in record numbers. This helps explain why my father looked so dimly upon kilties as an impractical, foppish tradition worth chucking. And so, from my earliest recollection, he would immediately remove them from new golf shoes.
Why did they become traditional? Mid-19th century links were hardly the manicured landscapes we know today. At best they were meadows, managed lightly (and largely) by herds of sheep. The centuries prior featured even more rugged/primitive golfing environments. In short, as Nathan pointed out, during these early, less formalized days, anything that kept the prominent undergrowth from mucking up your shoes and bootlaces made a world of sense for golfers — and their caddies. So kilties did in fact, at one time (for quite a long time actually), serve a purpose.
I can’t remember any trip of mine so richly affected by so many formal art exhibits. In the space of five Central European days in October 2018, my family took in shows featuring Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, Alfons Mucha, the Maine-trained Donna Huanca, Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo. Only the Klimt, long a favorite of mine, had been planned. The others we happened upon more or less by chance, as apparently one does in Prague and Budapest. European art observations include:
Ethnography Matters: Austrians naturally claim Klimt for their own; he headlined the Secessionist Movement based in his native Vienna, so it’s no surprise his most famous works remain permanently on show at the Belvedere, an 18th century palace built by the Habsburg Prinz Eugen. Sharon and I went there straight from our morning plane, checked our bags in the cloakroom, and gadded about the grounds before meeting our son Silas and his girlfriend Rene, who’d been backpacking about the Continent since Sept. 7. We treated them to lunch then went back across the strasse to see the Klimt, who didn’t disappoint. The Belvedere curators require tourists (and the place was teeming with them) to roam through 2.5 full floors of oversized Romantic Era shite before getting to the Secession stuff, which included some Munch and Von Gogh I’d never seen. Our hosts knew exactly whom we’d come to see; the entire experience was built around it. There was even a special room where folks could take selfies with an oversized poster version of The Kiss — some 50 feet from the real thing.
In Prague, later that week, we were further struck by the way Slovaks studiously maintain a different sort of claim (but still a legitimate one) on Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, the son of immigrants from Eastern Slovakia. In the various placards his mother was repeatedly referred to as Ruthenian, a reference to Greek Orthodox Slavs who live outside the Rus. This show occupied the third floor of GOAP, the Gallery of Art Prague. The more intimate, dormered fourth floor concentrated solely on Warhol’s young life and his parents’ early days in Pittsburgh where so many Slovaks, Slavs and Poles landed (remember the wedding scene from The Deerhunter?). This was wholly appropriate — the attic is where old family stuff is meant to be stashed.
WELLESLEY, Mass. (Aug. 28, 2018) — So, I try to write each August about my father, the original Hal Phillips, who passed away seven years ago this month and all too soon. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him in some way, shape or form. Many times, that moment comes when I open the refrigerator door and see my collection of hot sauces.
My father was an enthusiastic eater and devotee of exotic, spicy and otherwise full-flavored food. Growing up, we used to kid him that he had essentially deadened his taste buds, such was the relish with which he applied not just hot sauce but relish, salt, butter, condiments and dressings of any kind. He took this ribbing as he took most efforts to curb his foundational behaviors — with good-natured indifference — then went ahead and treated his pig knuckle with another dollop of blazing-hot mustard.
My paternal, Jersey-based grandmother was not an enthusiastic or particularly skilled cook. Whenever we went there to visit, she would serve us the same thing, in great quantities: steak, corn and a black forest cake from Sara Lee. I gather that American cuisine in the 1940s and ’50s — in private homes, in restaurants — was pretty bland. My dad’s reaction to this cultural upbringing was to find himself a wife who, among other things, appreciated and was equipped to prepare a wide variety of food.
For her part, my mom, Lucy Dickinson Phillips, was raised on the West Coast. Because it was still America in the ’40s and ’50s, her exposures were similarly staid on the food front. But Californians did have good Mexican, not to mention proper Chinese. What’s more, my maternal grandmother occasionally cooked things like (gasp!) curry. This proved foundational enough to foster food experimentation all through my parents’ marriage. In this and so many other ways, my mom proved the woman of my father’s dreams.
Perhaps on account of their relatively white-bread upbringings, older American couples today are often satirized for this single-mindedness. How was your trip to New York? “Oh, we found the most wonderful northern Italian restaurant near Washington Square.” My parents routinely answered travel questions in this fashion; mom still does. As a good cook, she grew annoyed when my father would salt or spice food before tasting it. But their 50 years together were a more or less an uninterrupted, gleeful quest for good eats. As such, it has fallen to their children to react in kind — to try and restore some level of sanity and moderation to the food-intake process.
Our actual driveway in The NG (1998-2021), and our actual dog, the estimable Gov. Brody
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (March 12, 2018) — As a Masshole, I have not earned (and will never earn) the right to publicly complain about winter weather here in Vacationland. Lest I be called out by some actual Mainer as “a damned flatlander” who doesn’t “even know what winter is”. My redemption, I’ve come to learn, is our 750-yard dirt driveway.
March is traditionally the most difficult month for my flatlander/Michigander wife and me. Down in Boston and out in Kalamazoo, March may bring a late-winter storm or two but signs of spring still abound: the inevitable melt, up-creeping temperatures, budding trees. Here in New Gloucester, 40 minutes north of Portland, we don’t see those things until April, and with each passing year that proves a harder pill to swallow.
There is one advantage to this annual winter extension, however: The generous slather of ice and snow keeps our dirt driveway smooth and comely. It never drives so well as during the months of January, February and March. It’s supposed to snow another foot tonight (March 12), meaning we can expect to enjoy burnished, aesthetically pleasing driveway conditions throughout the month. When we thank heaven around here, this is what passes for a small favor.
Reared in the suburbs, I knew nothing of dirt driveways and their upkeep prior to our landing here in the spring of 1998. Like any new homeowner, I learned these ropes on the job. And if I talk about he weather in terms of the driveway, the real Mainers (the folks born here) tend to treat me like one of their own.
Dirt Driveway Construction Matters
Come April in Maine, when the snow melts and the driveway goes all boggy and pitted, we arranged to get the driveway “dragged”. This is a misnomer of sorts. Once dry enough, our driveway is normally treated with something called a York Rake, an oversized metal apparatus rigidly affixed to the front end of a pick-up, as a plow would be. Five or six passes and all the potholes are smoothed out. They eventually come back, of course, but not until fall. Then it snows, the plow fills all the holes with what becomes ice, and our ribbon of dirt drives like a dream.
Our driveway wasn’t built properly, or so says the guy who built it, the former owner who sold me this place. The subgrade construction was dashed off, apparently, meaning there isn’t enough soil and materials to allow for a proper re-grading, which would better fight the pothole issue. Short of rebuilding the whole thing, we just have to live with it.
I didn’t know all this at the start. When we first moved here, I did a lot more work on the driveway. I was younger and stronger. This is what responsible Maine homeowners did, I thought. Once a pile of gravel was located off in the woods — another legacy of the former owner, a landscape contractor — I would periodically mine it, to fill potholes. Prior to that, I had undertaken a fairly ambitious corduroy regimen, i.e. the laying of short logs in boggy potholes, perpendicular to traffic, thereby creating a series of ad hoc, inlaid wooden boardwalks/buttresses. Eventually they are mushed into the soil and stay there, at grade.
This corduroy strategy was first hatched the day we moved to NG: April 1, 1998, almost exactly 28 years ago. It was unseasonably warm that day, some 88 degrees, and our new driveway was a mushy spring mess. (It would snow a foot 5 days later.) In any case, on moving day, there was one spot in particular where the moving truck would surely have become mired. In something of a panic, I recalled British General Edward Braddock, who oversaw the building of several so-called corduroy roads through the swamps of Maryland and Northern Virginia during his French and Indian War campaigns. Several modern roadways down there are still known as “Braddock Road” — State Route 620 in Virginia and Maryland Route 49, for example. It’s also a subway stop on the D.C. Metro, in Alexandria.
Cocktail-Party Fodder
At any rate, armed only with this flimsy, cocktail-party handle on the actual engineering of corduroy roads, I built one in the 30 minutes before the moving truck showed up. Worked like a fucking charm. It’s still there, sunken completely and solidly into the dirt road, exactly at grade, just at that low spot where each spring water gathers and would otherwise bog down all through traffic. I turned this same trick again, a few years later, in a different spot.
Never underestimate the power of a liberal arts education.
Some 7 years after we moved in and still flushed with this success, I resolved to essentially corduroy the whole driveway, or at least all the places where potholes traditionally turned up each spring. Our 10 acres there were well wooded; I had plenty of raw materials at hand. I spent two weekends doing the entire thing, all 700 yards of it.
Turns out the pothole genre is more diverse than this cocktail-sipping aesthete had realized. What’s more, there’s an important difference between the two primary types of pothole here: While mushy depression potholes are perfectly suited to the corduroy treatment, hard-matter potholes — where dirt hollows out to a layer of gravelly rock into which logs will not settle — are not. Or so I came to learn.
With some of the larger potholes of this hard-matter type, I pivoted to an experimental method whereby I dug a channel for a medium-sized log right down the center of the pothole — aligned with traffic. Then I filled in around it, smothering the bastard with gravel, not unlike a chili dog. That spring and all that summer, the driveway improvements proved a mixed bag of obstacles, too many of them protruding and not ever settling to grade, an issue that came to a head the next winter when snow/plowing recommenced.
An Eventual Shift in Focus
Ironically, just as my children grew to an age where they might have represented a useful road crew, I turned my attentions away from the driveway to more pressing matters, like the beating back of an encroaching forest and the serial capture/murder of home-invading squirrels. The driveway and its potholes were left to their seasonal cycles, basically. We plow in the winter, drag in the spring, and try to take pleasure in those rare moments when passage is both smooth and comely. On mid-March days like today.
What of Braddock, you might ask? His road-building acumen was initially hailed as a significant military advance — a way for big, traditional armies to campaign and maintain supply lines in a virgin North American wilderness. In July of 1755, having used these roads to pursue his French and Indian enemies into the Western Pennsylvania backcountry, Braddock and his men were ambushed at Fort Necessity, near what would become the frontier hamlet of Farmington. The general was mortally wounded and borne from the field by his aides de camp, Col. Nicholas Meriwether, and a 21-year-old major in the Virginia militia, George Washington. Braddock left the young colonial his battle sash, which Washington is said to have deployed as part of his formal battle dress throughout the Revolutionary War. It remains on display to this day at Mount Vernon.
In 1804, human remains believed to be Braddock’s — on account of dress buttons particular to British major generals — were found buried, west of Farmington, by a crew of (wait for it… ) road workers. They were exhumed and reburied on a nearby knoll, though some of the bones were said to have found their way to the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, before P.T. Barnum purchased all its contents and moved them to his own museum in New York City. An 1864 fire destroyed that building, and all the curiosities therein, though a section of Braddock’s vertebrae reportedly (!) resides in the Walter Reed Hospital Collection at Bethesda, Maryland.
Back in Farmington, atop the General’s final resting place, a formal marker was erected and dedicated to Braddock in 1913. The walkway surrounding the monument, I can’t help but notice, has been paved.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Feb. 22, 2018) — I have the distinct memory, among my very earliest, of my mother describing a new television show about to debut on Public Television. “It’s for kids exactly your age,” she told me, and so it was. Sesame Street first aired in late 1969, when I was 5. In a home where screen time was highly restricted — our boxy Sony Trinitron representing the only screen at that primitive time — Grover, Ernie, Bert, Maria, Mr. Hooper, Kermit, Gordon, Guy Smiley & Co. proved staples of my early cultural sentience. It occurred to me recently that without the enthusiastic approval of kids my age, of this founding Sesame Street cohort, the show might not have survived or become such a thing.
And what a thing it has become: 50 years old and counting.
While channel surfing through the upper, premium reaches of my cable guide, I never seem to happen upon Sesame Street. Yes, today the show airs on HBO. You may have read about this arrangement whereby first-run episodes can be found there on Saturday mornings; eventually, they cycle back onto PBS in a post-modern form of syndication. I never see it there either, to be honest. My kids are way too old. My viewing habits are primarily nocturnal. The show made this transition to HBO 2 years ago and I gather the show continues to wear extremely well.
Buoyed by the idea that this hugely influential, 50-year old show retains “the brassy splendor of The Bugs Bunny Show and the institutional dignity of a secular Sabbath school,” I’ve been conducting an experiment these last few weeks: I’ve been mentioning Sesame Street to folks generally my age and paying attention to their mood in reaction. If it generally brightens, I know they are fellow members of my cohort, Generation X. However, if I make a Cookie Monster or Roosevelt Franklin reference to someone just 4 years older, the reactions differ quite markedly. Often they don’t get it, or they will roll their eyes and make it clear they didn’t really watch Sesame Street. This makes sense: When the show debuted, these elder folks (Baby Boomers, primarily) had already aged out.
Sesame Street: Ultimate Generational Marker
More and more I realize that members of my generational cohort (what cultural historians and demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe call “The 13th Generation”, what the rest of us call Generation X) possess a unique relationship to this show and to American culture frankly. We weren’t just the first to watch and appreciate Sesame Street; we staffed the damn thing. Remember those little ditties they did, spelling out various numbers and letters with the bodies of other 5- and 6-year-old kiddies? Wesleyan, where I went to college during the 1980s, was full of Manhattanites who played those “roles” on the early shows. A dozen years on, we took great delight in catching Sesame Street some afternoon after class and spying our friend Ben Irvin forming the cross section of the letter A.
Another favorite SS gag of mine, as a kid, was the chef who’d emerge from some doorway, at the top of a small stairwell, bearing a huge tray of ice cream sundaes. He’d invariably appear there at the close of some peppy-but-educational music video extolling the virtues and qualities of, say, the number 7 — and when he did, he’d sing out, “Seven! Chocolate! Sundaes!!” Whereupon he’d trip and fall down the stairs, making a huge mess. I found this side-splittingly hilarious and remember rooting to see the 7 video (as opposed to 5 or 8) because I knew it would result in the largest, most gratifyingly splattered chaos.
In my relative dotage, and in wake of reading Strauss & Howe’s important 1991 book, “Generations: A History of America 1584-2054”, I continue to come across these cultural touchstones that more definitively separate myself from (and more finely hone my ambivalence toward) Baby Boomers, our feckless, navel-gazing next elders in the culture. Sesame Street is one such marker. If you’re an early 50something like myself and you knew the words to “Rubber Ducky”, you’re clearly a member of the 13th Generation — for Boomers had by then put away such childish things.
Here’s another music-based, but hardly fool-proof way to separate Boomers from Xers: The Grateful Dead. If you’re way into The Dead, you’re likely a Boomer.
Boomers don’t have the same need to parse things in this way, of course. Their cohort is so big, so culturally domineering, they assume (quite rightly) that most of the American society we now occupy was created for or by them, but certainly to their benefit. Culturally, Boomers are too big to fail. Meanwhile, we in Gen X must poke around a bit for examples where our own identities weren’t completely overrun or ignored.
Pod Explains America
Eventually I would outgrow Sesame Street, too, graduating as it were to The Electric Company, a companion PBS show also produced by the Children’s Television Workshop that more strongly emphasized the development of reading skills, or that’s the way it seemed to me at the time. Rita Moreno of all people hosted that enterprise, or so I was recently reminded when listening to a fascinating podcast/interview with her.
If you’re never heard Mark Maron’s WTF, here is yet another example of why the long-form pod is so fabulous: Where else might one hear Moreno, now 86, so engagingly but casually discussing West Side Story, public TV in the 1970s, and her navigation of the decaying MGM studio system as a young Latina in the late 1940s? And here’s another reason I dig WTF: host Maron is exactly my age.
Over and over again I find his conversational interviews revealing of a generational attitude that syncs up with my own, from movies and television shows that made big impressions on us both; to the particular drug culture that pervaded when we arrived at college in the early 1980s; to an ambivalence toward Boomers, in whose wide-ass shadow we have lived our entire lives; to attitudes of broad tolerance and political skepticism that Strauss & Howe tell us are trademark of 13ers (and other Reactive generations that inevitably follow Idealist cohorts like Boomers).
A more amorphous but still compelling argument can be made that this immediate post-Boomer, 50something cohort of ours remains a sui generis cultural product of Sesame Street and its distinct moral universe. Even if we weren’t, the show was unabashedly urban and diverse, never judgmental (but never cloying either), assertive when pushed but generally interested in getting along with others. We could throw Mr. Rogers into this mix, too. His show debuted nationally in 1968 and would bear equal cultural heft, though it was aimed at even younger kids and could be pretty cloying, in my view — though I did like the trains and Daniel the Stri-ped Tiger.
Boomers were raised on a different sort of television, a more commercial, pre-PBS brand of programming that reacted to the 1960s in a completely different way — by glorifying bland conventions that seemed to come from previous decades (My Three Sons, Gunsmoke). As such, my next elders in the culture reacted differently: They either rebelled against these hidebound and nostalgic traditions, or they clung to them with the fervor of a Trump voter, which all too many of them grew up to be. We in GenX have our own issues, of course. But I daresay we don’t carry around THAT sort of baggage — and Sesame Street is one reason why.
PHILADELPHIA (Feb . 18, 2018) — When we learned my daughter Clara would matriculate at the University of Pennsylvania, naturally her dad was thrilled. Ivy League pride? Nah. Here was my chance to make a proper pilgrimage to The Palestra, the most storied college basketball venue of the 20th Century.
As I’ve written here before, while my hoops allegiance today favors the overtly professional NBA. Yet there was a two-decade period starting in the mid-1970s, just as John Wooden’s run at UCLA came to end, when I was a far more fervent college basketball junkie. The Palestra was central to that emerging fandom, which just happened to coincide with the sport’s surge into the national sporting consciousness.
College basketball and the NCAA Tournament are so popular today, so ubiquitous on television, it’s easy to forget their dual ascension is relatively recent. For all intents and purposes, UCLA and its 10 NCAA titles from 1962-75 effectively stunted the sport’s broader popularity. When certain teams/programs utterly dominate an underexposed sport, big cultural awareness only comes when some ridiculous win streak is snapped. Think UConn, whose dominance has similarly stunted women’ college basketball. It took the rise of South Carolina, LSU and Caitlin Clark to get the sport out from under.
Men’s college basketball should have taken off in the 1960s, but it didn’t because the only time anyone paid attention was when UCLA got beaten: first by Houston (1968’s famous Astrodome game), then by Notre Dame in 1973. These losses proved to be mere blips; the Bruins eventually won national titles both years. But someone finally did beat them when it counted — NC State, in the 1974 national semifinal. Then Wooden retired with one last title, in 1975. Suddenly the field was open and seeded. Take it from someone who was there: The idea that some team other than UCLA could win it all each year was novel and beguiling (!). Only then did the sport truly take off.
The Palestra: TV Take Notice
The Palestra (bottom right) sits directly beside historic Franklin Field, home of the Penn Relays and where Santa got booed in 1968. It also hosted the Philadelphia Eagles’ last NFL championship (1960). We visited Feb. 3, 2018, one day before the Eagles did it again.
Growing up in New England at this time, our interest had already been piqued by a Providence College team led by Ernie D, Kevin Stacom and Marvin Barnes. The Friars went all the way to the Final Four in 1973 — that year WJAR Channel 10 out of Providence started televising a bunch of PC games. The following year, rival WPRI Channel 12 took the talented University of Rhode Island teams, led by Sly Williams, under its broadcasting wing.
Soon the national networks and their affiliates in Boston got wise and started televising big regional games every Saturday afternoon. Here is where I got to know The Palestra. Hoop-rich Philadelphia was home to The Big 5, a city series featuring local rivals Villanova, Penn, St. Joseph’s, Temple and LaSalle. Every Big 5 game was played at The Palestra and these were the games I watched with manic intensity each weekend, starting in the mid-1970s.
These were the memories dislodged to glorious effect earlier this month, when daughter Clara, wife Sharon and Philly-born, erstwhile golf freak Mike Sweeney watched the Quakers beat Yale, 58-50.
When the 10,000-seat Palestra opened in 1927, it was among the largest indoor sporting venues on Earth. The name is derived from the ancient Greek term palæstra, a rectangular space attached to a training facility, or gymnasium, where athletes would compete in public, before an audience. Today it’s a bandbox but still all I could have hoped for: seating stacked steeply with front rows right on the baselines/endlines; vaulted ceilings filled with banners; exposed brick everywhere. Pretty much exactly as I remember it from the mid to late ‘70s.
But there was more to our Feb. 3 visit. Quite a bit more.
The Cinderella Narrative
James Salters, point guard on Penn’s 1979 Final Four team, glides across The Palestra hardwood one more time.
One of college basketball’s enduring appeals is the Cinderella narrative, an unlikely NCAA run that propels some unlikely team deep into the tournament, perhaps all the way to the Final Four. Providence in ’73, for example. Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores, who came within a game of going undefeated and winning it all in 1979. Later, any sort of unlikely tourney run qualified for Cinderella status. Starting in the 1980s, hoop junkies would go gaga every time Penn’s great rival, Princeton, would almost beat some highly-seeded team in the tournament’s opening round; Tiger coach Pete Carril became something of a folk legend based on this run of compelling near-misses.
Well, as a student of the game (and father of future Penn alum), I’m obliged to point out that back in 1979, an Ivy League team went all the way to the Final Four! Yeah, the Quakers were summarily bludgeoned there by Magic Johnson, Greg Kelser and Michigan State, 101-67. But still. This was a great team. The year before, it lost to national runner-up Duke in the regional final.
Guess who was honored at halftime of the Penn-Yale game earlier this month? That’s right, this very Quaker cohort. They were all there: James “Peanut” Salters, the silky, sinewy point guard; Ronnie Price, the 6’5” scoring machine who seemed way too good for the Ivy League; Matt White, whose awkward-but-effective 6’10” frame allowed Penn to truly play with (and beat) the big boys. To think that I would see them all again, 40 years later, at The Palestra, because my own daughter was a student there? Pretty fuckin’ cool.
The Palestra, I would learn, isn’t famous just for being old, à la the original Boston Garden, a rat-infested dump where I covered many games as a young sportswriter. The University has done a formidable job keeping the place up: squeaky clean and not a brick out of place. But the history is inescapable. For many years, the same outfit owned both The Palestra and Madison Square Garden; in order to play MSG in NYC, teams were often obliged to schedule games in Philadelphia, as well. Penn would acquire the facility in 1939, and Philly would soon develop a storied basketball tradition of its own. Even today, when there’s a big college or high school game to be played, The Palestra serves as host.
This long, diverse, illustrious history doesn’t merely waft about in the rafters. It is scrupulously catalogued by a series of pictorial exhibits located all around the concourse. There are life-sized images of all the great college stars who played here through the ages, from LaSalle’s Tom Gola and Michael Brooks to Princeton’s Bill Bradley; from Villanova’s Rory Sparrow and Easy Ed Pinckney to Temple’s immortal Mark Shakin’ Bakin’ Macon.
All the Penn greats get extra attention, of course — not just the cagers, but the wrestlers and volleyball players who starred here, too. The high school exhibit features a bunch of guys I’ve never heard of, but several anybody would (Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe Bryant). And lest we forget, a whole raft of famous coaches cut their teeth or made their bones at The Palestra: Dr. Jack Ramsey (at St. Joe’s), Chuck Daly (Penn), Jon Chaney (Temple) and Rollie Massamino (‘Nova) are but a few to earn oversized pictures on the concourse.
All Hail the Immortal Dick Weiss!
There was even a displaying honoring notable Philly sportswriters, the ink-stained wretches who labored here at courtside, including the immortal Dick Weis. He covered hoops for The Daily News but also, in the early 1980s, single-handedly produced Eastern Basketball magazine. Further warmed to the college basketball phenomenon by emergence of the Big East Conference in 1979, I subscribed to this publication in the early 1980s, at college. I recall that my housemates couldn’t believe anything so arcane even existed — frankly, neither could I. Accordingly, Dick Weiss would become one of my sportswriting heroes and role models. I never had a clue what he looked like until Feb. 3, 2018.
Ironically, The Big East — for all its successes — would eventually overshadow and ultimately diminish eastern basketball in general and The Palestra in particular. When the league hijacked St. John’s, Syracuse, Providence and UConn from the old ECAC and Yankee conferences, each of these lesser leagues splintered into even weaker sisterhood, or extinction. When The Big East plucked Villanova from the old Eastern 8 conference (which then became the perennially outgunned Atlantic 10), the Wildcats used their new riches to build a fancy, new, on-campus gym. In this diversified, enriched media/conference universe, the Big 5 would lose much of its cachet. Today, only a few rivalry games are played here. In many ways, The Palestra in 2018 is simply Penn’s home court.
It seems as though Penn is content with this evolution — eager to tout The Palestra’s broader history but just as happy the old barn still so ably serves the university’s many athletic programs. As the Big 5 has ebbed, Ivy League games have taken on more importance — they are one’s ticket to the NCAA tournament, after all. At this writing, the Quakers are 19-6 overall, 9-1 in conference, poised to earn yet another bid. After many years of holding out, the Ivy will conduct its first conference tournament in 2018, with the winner advancing to the Big Dance. More important perhaps: Penn swept archrival Princeton this year. The Tigers are 3-7 in the league and the Quakers are loving it.
Out on the concourse is yet another display, this one a simple tally board that tracks this long and bitter rivalry between the Ivy League’s two traditional powers. Following the Quakers’ win on Feb. 6, it reads, “Penn 126, Princeton 113”.
What’s wrong with this picture? Stefon Diggs (14) scored a winning, last-second touchdown on Sunday because Marcus Williams (43) went for the hit, not the traditional tackle…
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (Jan. 17, 2018) — Minnesota Vikings wide-out Stefon Diggs may go on to do many more spectacular things during his career. For now his miraculous walk-off touchdown to win last weekend’s playoff game vs. the New Orleans Saints remains his claim to fame. However, when we widen the scope on this play and connect a few dots, we link the signature moment of these 2018 playoffs to football evolution and the NFL’s most pressing issue.
Look at the picture that accompanies this essay (or watch the video of the play here). Examine with me what New Orleans Saints safety Marcus Williams (43 in white) was thinking as time expired.
We should first take a moment to pity Mr. Williams, a rookie, whose coaches consigned him to a god-awful position — “on an island,” as they say — by obliging him to defend half the field when the situation clearly called for the Mother of All Prevent Defenses. Still, even in this highly vulnerable position, all Williams needed to do was play center field and keep Mr. Diggs in front of him. Instead, Williams did what most American footballers tend to do in the 21st century: He went for the “spectacle hit.” Head first.
Competitively, as we’ve seen, the results were disastrous. Williams even managed to compound his misfortune by comically whiffing on Diggs entirely. In doing so, he took out his own teammate — the only guy in a viable position to chase down the wide receiver once the ball was caught. What’s more, according to rules taking effect for the 2018 regular season, Williams’ head-first attempt should have earned him a 15-yard personal foul penalty.
However, if we step back a bit, we see here yet another consequence of football’s troubling evolution on the defensive side of scrimmage. Despite a litany of league-wide initiatives to curb head-first tackling — the result of mounting evidence linking repeated football-related head trauma to brain injury (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE) — the NFL’s hit culture remains firmly in place. Even in a situation like Williams’, where old fashioned, rugby-style tackling was called for, the defender acted on the instinct that football today engenders.
Football Evolution? This ain’t Perfection
NFL football in the here and now is plenty good fun, the most popular and culturally dominant game in 21st century North America. Minnesota’s unlikely victory — indeed, three of the four games contested over the weekend — showcased exactly why this is so. NFL games can be hugely entertaining.
Yet it would be a stretch to consider the game “perfected”. Any sport played at the elite level exists as a moving target, a work in evolutionary progress, because the salient factors affecting that evolution — rules, tactics, substitution pattersn, equipment, geography, fashion, even the size and skill of the players involved — continue to shift and evolve. All this change transforms the way a game is played over the course of time, sometimes by design, sometimes organically without much guidance at all.
The idea that former Patriots tight end and convicted murder suspect Aaron Hernandez might have committed his violent crimes while experiencing advanced-stage CTE adds to this potent mix the elements of irony and the macabre. Did you know that a class-action lawsuit, brought on behalf of current and former NCAA student-athletes, remains pending before Judge John Z. Lee of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois? Me neither. Class actions naturally have their own online portals these days. Visit this one and be prepared for the following greeting: “Welcome to the NCAA Student-Athlete Concussion Injury Litigation Website.”
Bit by bit, the forces of change would appear to be gathering over football, as they have continuously for more than a century. No game, it seems to me, has evolved so far, so quickly or so dangerously.
The Common Ancestor
Football’s robust evolutionary dynamics, when viewed in an historical context, have done more than change the game we know today. They have splintered a single organized athletic pursuit and set its various branches on separate, distinct paths around the world. In the early 19th century, the word football referred to a single, entirely English sporting engagement. Today it can be used to describe soccer the world over, two forms of rugby (Union and League) in British Commonwealth nations, Gaelic football in Ireland, Aussie Rules down under in Oz, and American football (what Brits and other folks call “gridiron”) here in North America. Canadians have their own, fairly distinct brand of gridiron.
Time and geography tend to obscure this shared heritage, but Michael Munger’s excellent NYT column from early in 2017 reminds us how some athletic pursuits, once knit closely together and occupying the same exact cultural and geographic space, can diverge.
Munger also suggests the sanguine extent to which one game can perhaps learn from its distant cousins.
He asserts that rugby, for all its inherent brutality, doesn’t really have a concussion/CTE problem. Not on the scale the NFL has. Why? He argues that helmets in particular and excessive padding generally have needlessly and ironically transformed American football into an ever more dangerous, head-first hitting game. Munger’s key argument is this: Athletes wearing helmets will attempt and ultimately adopt more dangerous tackling techniques (dangerous even to their own heads) than someone lacking a helmet would ever dare attempt. By eschewing helmets through the decades, rugby has better avoided this particular evolutionary outcome.
The Peltzman Effect
At first blush, Munger’s point would appear a bit squishy and anecdotal. But we see this sort of behavioral tick all the time, and it has a name. “They call it the Peltzman effect, after the economist Sam Peltzman,” Munger explains. “The feeling of safety, it seems, induces us to be less careful. A famous illustration of the Peltzman effect is that the better sky diving gear becomes, the more chances sky divers take, keeping the fatality rate from sky diving roughly unchanged over time.”
This dynamic hits home with me. I rode bikes without a helmet my entire childhood and never once went over the handlebars. As a generally risk-averse adult, trying to show my young children a good example, I strapped on a helmet — and went over twice in the space of 18 months.
Stepping back a bit further, we also recognize how the common history of rugby and American football lends a new level of credence to Munger’s argument and observations. In another, less associative context, this idea would carry less weight: It is one thing for the NHL to borrow some in-game strategy from, say, international soccer. But it’s altogether more valid (and intriguing) to think that sister sports have the very real option of reaching back into their shared DNA in order to produce a more safe or otherwise more compelling state of play.
Because this much we know: There was a time when these two games were nearly identical. Like humans and chimps, they will always share a common ancestor. Munger has demonstrated for us how one sporting species so removed can still borrow, learn and perhaps benefit from another — if only the powers that be have the good sense to thoughtfully examine their own past.
Shared Sports Lineage is Commonplace
This blood-thick linkage between sports is hardly uncommon. Neither are the bonds and vestigial characteristics that remain, panda’s thumb-like, in spite of divergent evolutionary paths.
Most baseball fans recognize intellectually that cricket and its more schoolyard incarnation, rounders, ultimately begat baseball. Yet, as John Thorn makes clear in his wonderful book, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” modern fans would be amazed at just how similar cricket and baseball remained as recently as 1915. That’s when baseball’s “powers that were” recognized that fans were beginning to go ape-shit for Babe Ruth’s long-ball displays. In reaction, the two major leagues quickly hardened the balls, created fences to hit them over, and so baseball was changed forever.
Up to that point, a softer ball and no outfield fencing rewarded contact and placement over power and distance. Wee Willie Keeler was famous for “hitting ‘em where they ain’t,” but that’s what every Major League Baseball batter did or tried to do throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th.
This shouldn’t surprise us: Finding the space between fielders had for centuries been, and continues to be, the singular goal of any cricket batsman. What’s more, many shared elements between the two sports remain timeless and completely unbroken. Bring a Brit to a modern baseball game and the thing they appreciate first and foremost? Fielding. For a cricket fan, that game aspect still computes directly and straightforwardly.
American football, too, is a fundamentally English game, though no sport has splintered away from the mother pursuit to such diverse effect. Geographic isolation and subtle changes in rules, tactics, equipment and fashion — over time — have accounted for the separate and distinct growth of these footballing offshoots, which will nevertheless share a common ancestor for all time.
Comparing Concussion Rates
Are concussion rates among former rugby and NFL septuagenarians relevant? Maybe they are. Munger is a former rugby player and when he compares his chosen sport to American football, he accurately cites a far lower concussion rate today among elite rugby players, who don’t wear and have never worn protective headgear. Some ruggers do wear a small cap to protect their ears from being mangled in the scrum. Many old school types still wrap their heads with tape, thereby pinning, securing and protecting their outer ears.
Gridiron players in America wore helmets for the same reason as early as the 1890s. But helmets as a means of meaningful cranial protection never caught on or evolved in the rugby context.
As generally hard bastards, rugby players are famouslyl dismissive of American football and its players, citing the candy-assed nature of today’s massively evolved headgear — and the proliferation of head-to-toe body padding.
Yet Munger’s nuanced argument moves well beyond this prejudice. The relative paucity of concussions in rugby speaks persuasively to the fact that its equipment and fashion choices, not just today but over the course of decades, have resulted in a safer game, cranially. His point is further buttressed when we take into account the distinct evolution of American football itself.
Do yourself a favor, flip over to the NFL Network sometime and watch anew some extended NFL Films archives from the 1950s and ‘60s. All manner of things will jump out at you, but I’m confident you’ll be most struck by the extent to which tackling still resembled the waist-down tackling of rugby. And do keep the unlucky Marcus Williams in mind: There is remarkably little hurling of one’s body at ball carriers, head first or otherwise. It was a fundamentalist’s dream.
Helmet Technology
Leather helmets were introduced to American football in the 1920s but this was mere window-dressing, a lingering attempt to shore up safety rules first introduced earlier in the century. More on that shortly. But honestly, what would a single layer of hardened leather really do to affect the way people tackled? Not much, vintage football footage reveals. Helmet technology didn’t truly affect the evolution of tackling until the 1970s, when the players recognized their heads were actually being protected. Prior to that era, the best way to bring down a ball carrier — the way coaches taught tackling, for decades, up to and including my own pee wee football days — was to get your head out of the way, wrap the guy up from the waist down, and drive those legs. In the open field, one wrapped him up and simply held on for dear life.
Hardy Brown was a linebacker for the 49ers and Redskins during the 1950s, and he is the subject of one such NFL Film. Just 6’1” and 190 pounds, he perfected a sort of drop-shoulder body blow that every once in a while caught some crossing flanker off balance and sent the poor guy flying. Brown was famous and somewhat notorious for this outlying maneuver, which illustrates just how rare his approach was at the time.
Yet even Brown ducked his head away from the runner, in the traditional rugby style, when administering his signature hits. Neither Brown nor anyone in the NFL dared deploy their noggins as part of the tackling process at this time. Helmet technology back then would not allow it. By that time helmets were made of hard plastic, but I’ve seen more sturdy headgear holding soft-serve ice cream at minor league baseball parks.
It was self-preservation, salted with decades of traditional coaching method, that obliged defenders to tackle in this traditional way — the way rugby players still tackle in the 21st century.
When helmet technology improved, starting in the 1970s, American football players grew more and more reckless — as the Peltzman Effect would predict — and the game’s culture changed accordingly. Go watch something as recent as the first two Super Bowls, from 1967 and ’68. Then go watch any 21st century Super Bowl archive. What you will see is a completely different attitude toward tackling, the byproduct of 40 years’ evolution in the art of defending, which, in large part, evolved on account of four decades of improvement in helmet technology.
These dynamics spill over film editing, of course. They also affect officiating. Put helmets and pads on NBA players. Let them play that way for a while. Eventually the game and its rules will evolve.
Technology-enabled ‘Hitting’
Changes in rules and equipment eventually influence technique, too. American football coaches all the way down to the pee wee level have adopted such changes in light of improved helmet technology. At all levels, the rugby-style tackling tradition still exists, but only side by side with a more dangerous, technology-enabled “hitting” tradition that fans, coaches and fellow players just happen to LOVE.
As with baseball and home runs, fans and media have further influenced and reinforced this evolution of the tackling ethos. “Lighting a guy up”, or merely laying him out, is not judged solely for its efficacy in stopping a runner’s progress, in bring a man to ground. It’s the spectacle of these hits that is met with hoots of delight, even if some might be followed by hushed tones of concern, fleeting chagrin, and polite applause as some casualty is wheeled off on a gurney.
For several decades, beginning in the 1970s, National Football League poobahs and programmers basked in this new strain of tackling. It made for undeniably great television. Players were (and remain) more or less dispensable and interchangeable. The fans loved Big Hit Culture. Today, in light of concussion tallies and CTE diagnoses, in light of revelations re. the long-term effects of multiple head trauma, even in kids as young as 12, attitudes appear to be modifying once again. The pendulum of change has swung back to a position football has not been obliged to occupy since 1906, when the collegiate game claimed several lives.
After years of public denial, today’s NFL is attempting to bolster that back-swing. Kickoff returns have been strongly discouraged, if not eliminated, by moving kickoff points further up the field, resulting in touchback after touchback. Why? Because they were judged to be highly and needlessly conducive to high-speed collisions.
Under a new ruling taking effect for the 2018 regular season, helmet-to-helmet tackles now draw maximum, 15-yard penalties. Multiple infractions will get you thrown out, suspended and fined.
Folks like Dr. Munger, a professor of political science at Duke, suggest doing away with helmets altogether. It’s an interesting proposal. Yet football has evolved in other ways that contribute to the modern frequency and severity of concussions. We need to recognize and better understand them before we fixate on any single response, lest the game descend (further) into some perverse, barbaric, bread-and-circuses delivery system. This sort of nuanced exploration is necessary because I fear that if American football continues unchecked on its current evolutionary course, no high school in the country will play it in 20 years’ time. The liability, the insurance policy premiums for public school systems, will simply become too high.
Conditioning and Tackling
Tackling technique isn’t the only fascinating antiquity served up by your typical late-night, half-in-the-bag, vintage NFL Films festival. You’ll notice that players are uniformly smaller, more wiry and whiter. The first two factors surely contribute to the fact that few in 1958 worried about an epidemic of concussions. The players weren’t big or fast enough to hurt each other in the same way, to the same degree, at the same speed, with the same troubling frequency they can and do today. What’s more, tackling techniques had yet to change by 1958.
But there’s something else going on here, in terms of velocity: Old-time football players were clearly engaged in something they considered a marathon, not a sprint.
By the early 1960s, the game had specialized to a point where nobody played both offense and defense anymore. Chuck Bednarik was the last fellow to play both ways on a consistent basis; he retired in 1962. Even once old-time players started specializing in offense or defense, however, game films show us something else: a lack of substitutions deployed from play to play. Clearly substitution tactics have evolved over time, as well. Today there are third-down tailback specialists, run-stopping specialists, pass-rushing specialists, nickel backs, etc. As many as 20 separate defensive guys might participate in any one set of downs.
Back in the day, as NFL Films illustrate, it was largely 11 v. 11 for long, long stretches.
What is the connection between specialization and increased exposure to head injury?
Specialization places a reduced onus on player fitness. Today’s American football players are, of course, superbly conditioned athletes in their own way. But they are built and conditioned to go very hard, very fast, in short bursts. Then they rest, in a huddle, or on the sideline, when any particular set of downs has concluded. Modern substitution patterns — alongside an astounding number of TV timeouts — provide modern players significant rest between bursts.
Well rested players think nothing of hurling themselves at runner and receivers. Conserving energy is not what the modern game is about. Whereas, conservation of energy was very what two-way players were about. Through the 1960s, prior to specialization, NFL players were far less likely to expend the additional energy it takes to hurl one’s body at opponents headfirst — not when a simple rugby-style tackle would do.
NFL fan, media and team culture might remain strongly supportive of today’s all-out hitting culture, from a competitive standpoin, from an entertainment standpoint. But if NFL teams started playing 22 guys only — 11 on defense, 11 on offense — the hits and the concussions would diminish. Meanwhile, every 6’1″, 320-pound, run-stopping nose tackle would submit to obsolescence — or a diet. If each team played 11 men only, on offense and defense, the resulting concussions would diminish still further.
Spectacle Hitting at Odds with Endurance
On account of fan and media bloodlust, we can agree that showmanship also plays a role in today’s NFL’s hit culture. Football players in the 1950s and ‘60s did not play to the cameras in this way, at all, because, while the sporting culture was more reserved and conservative (read: whiter), there were also comparatively few TV cameras. Most games weren’t televised at all, which meant way less preening and precious few TV timeouts — perhaps the central, serial source of play stoppage that de-emphasizes the modern need for endurance.
NFL Films are often highly edited game tapes, but still — one can plainly see that play proceeded more or less uninterrupted. Go to a high school or small college football game: That’s what the NFL used to be like. Naturally, this sort of uninterrupted play, combined with a lack of substitution, asked even more of players physically. This emphasis on endurance limited players’ ability and willingness to administer potentially concussive hits. They still had to tackle the opponent. But as the game went on, they did so while conserving their energy as best they could — not expending that energy in superfluous ways.
These historical observations bring us back to the side-by-side evolutions of football and its sporting cousins. Rugby is a 15-a-side game that has traditionally frowned on substitution. This has been true of a third cousin, Association Football (or soccer, for short). For decades, neither game allowed substitutions at all. That was essentially the way American football was played into the 1940s. Only recently have substitutions been introduced to rugby. Still, it’s not unusual for a team’s best dozen players to play the entire 80 minutes.
Soccer at the international and professional levels today allows three substitutions per game. (Post Covid, international soccer has gone to five substitutions). In both the soccer and rugby contexts, once you’re off, you can’t come back on, meaning that 6 of 11 soccer players are expected to “go the full 90” without any sort of rest/substitution. In this way, ice hockey, where willy nilly substitution has most markedly reduced energy conservation, is the better comp for American football.
It’s a simple but critical point: As the game of American football changed, standards of fitness changed. Modern football players simply aren’t in the same kind of shape compared to guys in the 1950s. Manic/tactical substitution and the commercial broadcast of every game mean today’s players don’t require the same type of endurance. Today, a player’s value to his team relies far less on endurance and far more on bulk, strength and speed.
Bulk, strength and speed. These are the qualities so obviously lacking when we, equipped with our modern sensibilities, watch game film from the 1950s and ‘60s. Not surprisingly, these are the qualities — along with mature helmet technology — that make running backs, wide receivers and quarterbacks so very vulnerable today.
American Football has been Here Before
The game’s modern reckoning tends to obscure the fact that American football has been here before. At the turn of the 19th century, the game’s inherent dangers provoked similarly widespread anxiety and heated public outcry. After all, participation wasn’t just concussing young men with dire long-term consequences; it was killing them outright, more or less immediately. In 1905, at least 18 college students died on the field, playing football. According to the Washington Post, some 45 football players died between 1900 and October 1905, “many from internal injuries, broken necks, concussions or broken backs.”
President Theodore Roosevelt, a noted fan of football and rigorous manly pursuits of all kinds, was inevitably drawn into this fray. Early in 1905, he used his bully pulpit to call for reform and ultimately summoned to the White House coaching luminaries from three big-time football factories of the day: Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Nothing concrete came of that skull session. Later that year, in November, when Union College halfback Harold Moore died on the field — of cerebral hemorrhage, after being kicked in the head while trying to tackle a New York University opponent — a meaningful cultural tipping point had arrived. Columbia, Duke and Northwestern all suspended their football programs summarily, and Roosevelt called his patrician Big Three back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This meeting did have an effect. Several important new rules were introduced for the 1906 season. One followed Munger’s formula, i.e. borrowing something back from rugby — at that time, not so distant a cousin. This rule change allowed teams to cede possession, at any time, by punting the ball downfield. Up to that point, American gridiron teams had been obliged to simply run the ball into the line four times, absorbing 25 percent more punishment, before turning the ball over downs.
Another change stopped and reset the game when a player went to ground with the ball. This mitigated the mayhem inherent to pig-piling and incessant ball-prying. In rugby there remains, to this day, no such stoppage. Ball carriers must instead relinquish the ball once tackled to the ground.
Implementation of the forward pass is another fairly direct outgrowth of the 1906 anti-violence reform effort. Not until 1913 did anyone figure out how to actually win games using this novel tactic. Notre Dame made its earliest reputation turning that trick. However, the mere threat of forward passing changed the game immediately. It spread defenses and drew men away from the line of scrimmage, where most of the mangling, mauling and maiming had been perpetrated.
On-field fatalities all but disappeared in wake of these changes. It took 70 further years of evolution to bring us Jack Tatum’s head-first paralyzing of wide receiver Daryl Stingley. That tragic hit was leveled on Aug. 12, 1978, the height of Pittsburgh center Mike Webster’s Hall of Fame career. Today he is dead, a victim of CTE — one of hundreds and hundreds. One imagines that Munger isn’t the only rugby fan who looks across the ages at its sister sport and says to himself, “Dearie me. That’s not cricket. Not at all.”
See below a 1996 article from The Harold Herald, the world’s first blog, which I invented in the early 1990s. Yeah, you heard me right… The act of composing at the keyboard is so ingrained today, one can forget when and how that started — and just how many technological eras our lives have spanned since. This essay is an ode to the machine that made all that happen.
PORTLAND, Maine (June 15, 1996) — As I prepare to discard the computer on which I truly learned to type, compose at the keyboard and play video games, I’ve come not to bury the ol’ ATT 6300 but to praise her. After doling out the praise, however, it’s headed straight for the scrap heap.
For 11 years, this IBM PC knock-off served various housemates and myself extremely well under the most trying circumstances. I dare say, no unit still operating has endured more moves, more beer-dousings and more random acts of neglect than has our intrepid ATT 6300.
Harold Herald Virtual Editor Dave Rose was the original owner, having purchased the machine via a special Wesleyan University discount deal prior to our senior year. Today, its game graphics would pale by comparison beside, say, those of any Fisher Price product. Back in 1985, however, this baby was state of the art.
In the years preceding Dave’s monumental purchase, I had no PC experience whatsoever. Hardly anyone did. For the first two and a half years of college, for example, I would write papers long hand. It was imperative that I produce a finished draft two days in advance, leaving me an entire evening to hunt and peck the final product via my enormous, ’50s-era electric typewriter, which my dad found at the dump and refurbished. These “typing” sessions were trying times for my housemates and me: evenings laced with self-loathing and profanity born of frustration and pungent Wite-Out fumes as disorienting (in their own way) as Thai stick.
Behold, Digger: This would be Screen 3, I think. Back in the day, I progressed as far as Screen 12…
Late in my junior year I took to typing-up papers on the university’s main-frame computer, which was painfully slow and inconvenient as it was located in the Science Library — not our off-campus housimng. All this changed senior year when Rose bought the computer, thereby opening up a whole new world to the residents of 8 Warren Street.
The video games, crude though they were, proved the ATT 6300’s most enduring legacy. Sure I wrote my thesis on this machine but, more important, I also shattered the world Digger record some 10 separate times! I am not a talented nor particularly ardent gamer but I made myself the all-time Digger champion through relentless dedication. This involved repeatedly drawing myself a draft beer (we were on tap 24 hours a day, 7 days a week my senior year), going upstairs to the tiny suite Dave shared with Dennis Carboni, and “Digging” until I went off to read Xenephon or Melville.
Digger was a sort of Pacman knock-off. Space Vades, a thinly disguised copyright infringement of Space Invaders, was another 8 Warren Street mainstay. There were innumerable Star Wars-inspired, fighter-jet “shooter” games, several of which made their marks as the next late-night obsession of the future Dr. Rose and his perennial roommate Mr. Carboni. Come to think of it, I associate much of the computer’s nocturnal use with Dennis, a.k.a. The Bone, That Bone, Bonish, El Carbón and my personal favorite, You Goddamned Fuckin’ Bone.
Hall of Fame Procrastination
That Bone was one of the world’s great procrastinators. He never started a paper until 3 a.m. the morning it was due. Invariably, I would get up for class, poke my head into the computer room and Dennis would smile back, his eyes bleary but lit pale green by the monitor.
“How’s it coming, you goddamned Bone?”
“Oh, hey … No problem: 11 o’clock class.”
Obsessive nearly to a fault, Dennis and Dave would often become utterly engrossed in some new DOS-based computer game via the 6300 — in the same way they became engrossed in things like mail-order blow guns, palindromes, or the album art of David Bowie. Invariably, they would play new video-game pursuits late into the night. Rarely, however, would Rose outlast the Bone.
One night the two secured some flight simulator software, which enabled them to “fly” virtual Piper Cubs, in real time, with functional control panels. After watching Rose navigate his way from Boston to New York City, I went to bed. It was interesting but quickly became tedious as the screen went a dull, blank green when one cleared Greater Boston. Such primitive graphic cards didn’t show any topographical detail at all, not until one approached Laguardia.
I saw Dennis the next morning and he looked like hell.
“Bone, you look like hell,” I told him.
“Yeah. After you went to bed I flew to Salt Lake City!”
“How long did it take you?”
“Seven hours.”
Post-Graduate Personal Computing
Upon graduation, the ATT 6300 went with Dave Rose to Somerville, Mass. There the computer continued to serve a communal function — meaning Rose owned it and I sponged off him. I composed my first resumes and cover letters on that PC. I tapped out on it my first freelance project, for the New York Times Selective Guide to Colleges, on its keyboard. In the days before CADD, Rose and I actually laid out several golf holes with the old girl. Somerville Golf Club was a unique design, winding its way through the city landscape and featuring several dinosaur hazards (we were drunk, okay?).
Our greatest collaborative effort, however, was the now-immortal Consumer Junk Food Index, a comprehensive list which ranked foods, candy, soda and beer on the dual bases of thrift and inherent lack of food value. At the time of its formulation, Rose and I thought this index to be the most hilarious thing ever written, by anyone, spawning as it did some of the greatest beer-soaked prose ever committed to floppy disk. See an excerpt here, and pleast note that back in the dark, pre-craft years of 1987-88, Corona was considered fancy, expensive beer:
Beer: Let’s begin by saying that if you’re eating junk food, you’re not drinking Corona. No limes here. These are affordable beers with panache. Expensive beer is expensive and thus unattainable. There is no “bad” beer. Light beer? What are you even thinking about?!?
Budweiser: Let’s face it: Still the king. Everybody drinks it.
Black Label (bar bottles): “The Beer of Kings.” Cheap and plentiful. Let’s face it, nobody drinks it, but they should.
Rolling Rock: Not as trendy as everyone thinks.
Haffenreffer Special Stock: “Green Death.” A good beer with more than a little spunk. And rebus caps. Strangely, the first cap is always pretty easy to solve.
Blatz: A lot like water, only more expensive. But still very, very cheap.
Schmidts: A very dependable beer. In every package store.
Mickey’s Malt Liquor: “The Mean Green.” That’s the official name for it. We didn’t make it up. Wide-mouth bottle ensures excessive consumption.
Red White & Blue/Wiedermans (tie): Are you an American, or a Nazi? For $4.99 a case, fascism doesn’t seem all that horrible.
Special consideration is here given to “the” Matts Beer Ball: portable and potable.
Selling the PC — to pay for a Mac
Alas, the passage of time has not been kind to the ATT 6300. The ever-technologically-current Rose sold it to me in 1991, to help pay for his new Mac. I overpaid to make up for years of sponging. The old machine made the trip to Maine a year later, but my subsequent Macintosh indoctrination at Golf Course News has rendered the 6300 essentially obsolete, despite the occasional Dig down memory lane.
As a parting gesture, Rose traveled to Portland late last year to help me sift through a mountain of old floppy disks. We were hoping to unearth a few gems, like college term papers, love letters, or long-forgotten drunken rants. Unfortunately, floppy disks weren’t built to last.
Even Rose’s turbo pascal program — designed to mimic restriction enzyme analysis, a vital lab process the simulation of which might have made us rich! — wouldn’t run. Every time we inserted an unlabeled disk in the drive, the monitor was clear: System Error 23: Bad Disk or File Name
And so, with a heavy heart I bid the computer, my first computer, adieu. Perhaps it’s fitting the ATT 6300 is retired this year, 1996, the 10-year anniversary of my graduation from college. It’s time to move on, with my life and the technologies that might enhance it. There will be no headstone, no physical memorial to my first PC. But some things will survive: My memories, the few things I had the presence of mind to print out, and my standing as the undisputed Digger champion of all time.
PHILADELPHIA (Feb . 18, 2018) — When we learned my daughter Clara would matriculate at the University of Pennsylvania, naturally her dad was thrilled. Ivy League pride? Nah. Here was my chance to make a proper pilgrimage to The Palestra, the most storied college basketball venue of the 20th Century.
