Nogales International

The Rise Of Football

College football is still regarded as an amateur sport, in spite of the Carnegie Foundation's findings that in many institutions players are to some extent subsidized. But, regardless of what the players get out of it, college football has assumed the proportion of a business in which millions are involved.

As a recent writer declares: "It is played today by athletes as highly trained as steeple-chasers, in marble amphitheaters that shame the Roman Coliseum, before crowds that match in gate receipts the earnings of a Dempsey-Tunney prize fight."

The development of modern football from a casual sport to its present eminence seems remarkable when it is recalled that the first inter-collegiate game in the world was played in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers with 25 men on each team. Incidentally it may be mentioned that the captain of the Princeton team in that game is still alive in the person of Chief Justice William S. Gummere of the New Jersey Supreme Court, and that his team lost by the score of 6-4.

It is also interesting to note that the first play which gave rise to modern football is commemorated by a tablet at Rugby School, England, bearing this inscription:

"This stone commemorates the exploit of William Webb Ellis, who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game, A. D. 1823."

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