Made In America - Bill Bryson [181]
Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable – and on the face of it more bewildering – recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song ‘Blue Bayou’, the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball ‘blew by you’.
During the long period that baseball was developing from a gentleman’s recreation to the national pastime, another sport was shaping up to challenge its unquestioned preeminence. I refer to the sport that Americans insist on calling football (an odd choice since kicking features only incidentally in its play). As a term football has existed in English since 1486, before America was even known about. In its early days it primarily signified an annual competition in which the inhabitants of neighbouring English villages would try to kick or shove an inflated animal bladder between two distant points. Eventually in a more organized form it evolved into two principal sports, rugby (after the English school of that name where it was first played in 1864) and soccer (from British university slang and current only since 1891).
In its earliest manifestations in America, football wasn’t so much a sport as legalized mayhem, very like the village sport of medieval England. Beginning at Yale in about 1840 it became customary for freshmen to take on upperclassmen in a vast, disorderly shoving match at the epicentre of which was a makeshift ball. After one such match, the New York Post fretted: ‘Boys and young men knocked each other down, tore off each other’s clothing. Eyes were bunged, faces blacked and bloody, and shirts and coats torn to rags.’ Appalled at the injuries and disorder, Yale and Harvard banned the sport in the 1860s.
Students turned their attention away from the annual brawls and took up rugby instead. At first they used the English rules, but gradually they evolved forms of their own – even if they kept much of the terminology, like offside fair catch, halfback and scrimmage (or scrummage, from an English dialect word for a tussle, and now shortened in the rugby world to scrum). Even with the imposition of some sense of order, play remained undisciplined and dangerous. In 1878 Walter Camp, a Yale student who appears to have been regarded as something of a deity by both his peers and mentors (and not without reason; one of the Yale teams he led outscored its opponents 482-2 over the course of one season and 698–0 in another), proposed several rules to bring a greater maturity to the game. The principal ones were that teams be limited to eleven players and that each side be granted three chances – or downs – to advance the ball five yards. This led to the painting of white lines at five-yard intervals, which by 1897 had inspired the term gridiron for a football field.
By about 1880 football and rugby had permanently parted ways in America, and by 1890 Yale was regularly attracting crowds of 40,000 to its football games. Some things had still to change. The centre didn’t snap the ball with his hands, but kicked it back to the quarterback with his foot. Not until 1904 did a touchdown score more than a field goal. The forward pass wasn’t written into the rules until 1906.35 Even then no one really understood its possibilities. When it was used, which was rarely, it involved a quarterback lobbing a short pass to a stationary receiver, who would then turn and run with the ball. Not until 1913 did Gus Dorais, the Notre Dame quarterback, and his team-mate Knute Rockne come up with the idea of hitting a receiver on the run. In doing so, Notre Dame beat