Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football (ePub)

Walter Camp made the development of football—indeed, its very creation—his lifelong mission. From his days as a college athlete, Camp's love of the game and dedication to its future put it on the course that would allow it to seize the passions of the nation. Roger R. Tamte tells the engrossing but forgotten life story of Walter Camp, the man contemporaries called "the father of American football." He charts Camp's leadership as American players moved away from rugby and for the first time tells the story behind the remarkably inventive rule change that, in Camp's own words, was "more important than all the rest of the legislation combined." Trials also emerged, as when disputes over forward passing, the ten-yard first down, and other rules became so public that President Theodore Roosevelt took sides. The resulting political process produced losses for Camp as well as successes, but soon a consensus grew that football needed no new major changes. American football was on its way, but as time passed, Camp's name and defining influence became lost to history. Entertaining and exhaustively researched, Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football weaves the life story of an important sports pioneer with a long-overdue history of the dramatic events that produced the nation's most popular game.|
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Beginnings, Known and Unknown
2. Given a New Era
3. Officially Under Way
4. "You Must Do Something"
5. Making It Their Own
6. Captain
7. The Extracurriculum and Beyond
8. Fourth Year
9. Moving on, Ready or Not
10. Still under Construction
11. The Main Invention
12. Birth Year
13. Impossible to Ignore
14. Besides Medical School
15. Career Realities
16. Not So Easy After All
17. Writer, Teacher . . . Director?
18. "Having Waited in Vain"
19. Father of Football
20. An "American" Game of Football
21. Headquarters on Gill Street
22. Rivalry Demands Rules
23. Why American Football Grew
24. All-Americans
25. Author for an Expanding Game
26. Second Most Important Man in New Haven?
27. It's Official: We Want to Win
28. "A Chief Charm of the Game"
29. "What Does Walter Think?"
30. The End of Student Rule Making
31. New Voices
32. Critics and Defenders
33. Breakup
34. Failure Achieved
35. The Future Foreseen
36. Pax Intercollegiata
37. Striving for More
38. More than a Game
39. Officially a Yale Official
40. Not Done Yet
41. "The Game I Have Worked So Hard For"
42. A President Involved
43. Tipping Point
44. Democracy in Action
45. Starting from Scratch
46. Football as We Know It
47. Besides Rule Making
48. Away with the Old
49. "I Will Give It Up"
50. Alternative Service
51. The Frankenstein of College Athletics
52. Unrecognized Legacy
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index|Roger R. Tamte is a patent attorney who has studied Camp for many years. In 2013 he presented a paper on Camp at the annual convention of the North American Society for Sports History.