SIAP, but the last time a football team from East Lansing traveled to Kalamazoo to agitate a bag of wind was in football's watershed year of 1905.
That was the year Teddy Roosevelt threatened to shutdown college football if it refused to clean up its act. At least 45 participants lost their lives playing the sport between 1900 and October, 1905, and Roosevelt and the rest of the country was horrified in November when a player at Union College died of a cerebral hemorrhage after he was kicked in the head while attempting to tackle an NYU player.
Roosevelt liked the "idea" of football as a proper test for young men of vigor, but he had a personal issue with its actual practice after a son had been reduced to a bloody pulp while playing the sport as a Harvard freshman. The president found himself at odds with the president of his own alma mater -- Harvard's renowned education reformer Charles Eliot -- who denounced football as more brutal than cockfighting and wanted its complete elimination, and it was T.R.'s personal lead that began the reformation of football into the game we know today.
Into this pressure cooker 110 years ago, two teams came together in Kalamazoo. Take the time to read the text of a Kalamazoo newspaper's report of the physical war fought in 1905 between the young men of K-College and Michigan Agricultural College which ended in a 30-0 victory for M.A.C. Unfortunately it's reproduced in three photographs which you'll have to expand to read, but the sparse prose leaves you shaking your head about the three Kalamazoo players and one Aggie who were damaged over and beyond what was then obviously considered normal "wear and tear" from a 70-minute game of "unnecessary roughness" played in minimal protective gear. Kalamazoo's quarterback, who seems to have been his team's lone shining light, went down on three occasions which led to questions about his further participation while the lone fallen Aggie was carried off completely unconscious. Amazing.
Makes you wonder how many of these guys ended their lives drooling in their pablum in some county home or asylum, doesn't it?
http://www.mlive.com/sports/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/09/michigan_state_football_game_a.html
That was the year Teddy Roosevelt threatened to shutdown college football if it refused to clean up its act. At least 45 participants lost their lives playing the sport between 1900 and October, 1905, and Roosevelt and the rest of the country was horrified in November when a player at Union College died of a cerebral hemorrhage after he was kicked in the head while attempting to tackle an NYU player.
Roosevelt liked the "idea" of football as a proper test for young men of vigor, but he had a personal issue with its actual practice after a son had been reduced to a bloody pulp while playing the sport as a Harvard freshman. The president found himself at odds with the president of his own alma mater -- Harvard's renowned education reformer Charles Eliot -- who denounced football as more brutal than cockfighting and wanted its complete elimination, and it was T.R.'s personal lead that began the reformation of football into the game we know today.
Into this pressure cooker 110 years ago, two teams came together in Kalamazoo. Take the time to read the text of a Kalamazoo newspaper's report of the physical war fought in 1905 between the young men of K-College and Michigan Agricultural College which ended in a 30-0 victory for M.A.C. Unfortunately it's reproduced in three photographs which you'll have to expand to read, but the sparse prose leaves you shaking your head about the three Kalamazoo players and one Aggie who were damaged over and beyond what was then obviously considered normal "wear and tear" from a 70-minute game of "unnecessary roughness" played in minimal protective gear. Kalamazoo's quarterback, who seems to have been his team's lone shining light, went down on three occasions which led to questions about his further participation while the lone fallen Aggie was carried off completely unconscious. Amazing.
Makes you wonder how many of these guys ended their lives drooling in their pablum in some county home or asylum, doesn't it?
http://www.mlive.com/sports/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/09/michigan_state_football_game_a.html
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