The 1900s Sports: Topics in the News

BASEBALL: THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME

The game of baseball evolved along with the United States, for games similar to the modern sport had been played in America since colonial times. In the mid-nineteenth century, New York businessman began forming baseball clubs and establishing the rules of the game. Alexander Cartwright (1820–1892) is credited with standardizing baseball rules: He set the bases ninety feet apart on a diamond-shaped playing field, limited each teams to nine players, and outlawed throwing the ball at the base runner. Baseball's popularity spread throughout the nation during the Civil War (1861–65), and by 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings (now the Reds) were organized as the first professional team. In 1876, the National League was formed with eight original teams. The National League faced numerous troubles during the 1890s, such as team debts, poor attendance, and increased competition from other forms of popular entertainment.

At the turn of the century, baseball was a game in transition. One of the sport's most significant developments occurred in 1900. Byron Bancroft "Ban" Johnson, president of the minor-league Western Association (WA), renamed his organization the American League (AL) and announced it was now a major league operation in direct competition with the National League (NL). Bancroft immediately established franchises (teams) in Cleveland, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., which are all cities that had been abandoned by the National League. He then began to lure established NL players with promises of better pay. By 1902, the American League boasted a higher attendance than the National League. The following year, the AL founded a team called the New York Highlanders, which later became the Yankees. Soon AL teams could also be found in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, and St. Louis. Another of the decade's most important baseball milestones occurred in 1903 when the American and National Leagues joined together to boost the profits of all teams by limiting competition and agreeing to recognize each other's rules for signing players. They also established a National Commission to govern the game.

No one team dominated baseball in the early 1900s, although several teams won league pennants during consecutive years. The Chicago Cubs claimed three consecutive pennants from 1906 to 1908 and were the first team to win two consecutive World Series titles. The Boston Beaneaters, renamed the Red Sox in 1904, were a powerhouse team led by renowned pitcher Cy Young (1867–1955). Ty Cobb (1886–1961), another legendary player of the era, led the Detroit Tigers to three consecutive AL pennants from 1907 to 1909.

Major league baseball in the early 1900s was a racially segregated sport (which meant that the races did not play together). African Americans and other minorities were seen by a majority of whites to be inferior socially, intellectually, and physically; thus, blacks were barred from the game. Segregation was not unique to baseball. In fact, it was widespread throughout most American social institutions. Blacks were first barred from participating with whites in baseball in 1867, when the National Association of Base Ball [sic] Players (NABBP), a leading amateur organization, ruled blacks were unable to uphold the "gentlemanly character" of the sport. Still, some early professional teams continued to hire qualified black players to improve their chances of winning a pennant. In the 1880s, Moses Fleetwood Walker (1856–1924) became the first African American major league player. Many white fans were disgusted to see a black on the baseball diamond. They heckled Walker and even threatened his life. African Americans were formally barred from baseball in 1887. Team owners agreed to release all their African American players and sign no more blacks to their professional teams.

Baseball Attendance

African American players responded to this discrimination by forming leagues of their own. The Cuban Giants, the first black club, was formed in 1885. They referred to themselves as Cuban in the belief that whites would treat them more hospitably if they thought they were foreigners. In 1887, the League of Colored Baseball Clubs was established, with teams in New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Washington, D.C. The league failed after only one season, however, since many teams could not afford to pay their travel expenses. Baseball's racial segregation continued well into the twentieth century.

Although black players could not compete against their white counterparts, they did field some outstanding teams and players within their own leagues. Two of the decade's top black teams were located in Philadelphia: the Philadelphia Giants and the Cuban X-Giants. The leading black ballplayer of the era was Andrew "Rube" Foster (1879–1930), a pitcher who won fifty-four games and lost only one during his 1903 season with the Cuban X-Giants.

BASKETBALL: AMERICA'S NEWEST GAME

At the turn of the century, many Americans were becoming more aware of the nation's newest form of athletic competition: basketball. Developed in 1891 by James Naismith (1861–1939), an instructor at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, the sport started when Naismith was asked by his boss to develop a new indoor game for the winter months. Naismith thought up his game while watching rugby players training by throwing rugby balls into boxes for exercise. Unable to locate any boxes, Naismith found some peach baskets and hung them from a railing ten feet above the gymnasium floor. The game was such an immediate success that the first players wanted to name the new sport "Naismith ball."

Basketball, as the game came to be called, was an immediate sensation, and soon spread across the country. The YMCA used the sport as a promotional tool to boost membership. The program was so successful that the YMCA was nearly overwhelmed by players interested in learning Naismith's game. In 1896, the YMCA sought assistance from the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in an attempt to better regulate basketball. The AAU helped establish basketball's rules, leagues, and championships.

The 1890s also saw the rise of basketball at the college level. On February 9, 1895, the Minnesota School of Agriculture and Mining defeated Hamlin College 9-3, in the first intercollegiate basketball game. In that first match, each team was comprised of nine players. The five-man team was implemented a month later. By the early 1900s, basketball was an extremely popular activity on many campuses across the nation. The decade saw the founding of the Eastern League, composed of teams from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Princeton. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which was organized in 1905 to reform college football, entered the basketball arena in 1909 to standardize the game's rules.

The early 1900s also saw the beginnings of professional basketball leagues. The rise of professional leagues was the result of several Philadelphia amateur teams objecting to rules imposed by the AAU to limit rough play. The Philadelphia teams, which specialized in roughhousing, formed their own organization, the Eastern Amateur Basketball Association (EABA), to promote pro ball. In 1899, the EABA became the National League of Professional Basketball (NLPB). The NLPB collapsed in 1903 due to its inability to control contract problems between team owners and players. Basketball remained popular at the college level during the early 1900s, but it would be years before a professional version gained mass acceptance with the American public.

BOXING: THE BRUTAL SPORT

Boxing in the early 1900s was very much as it had been during the nineteenth century: brutal, bloody, and surrounded by controversy. Prizefighters fought with their bare fists and continued to beat each other through endless rounds until only one man remained standing. Furthermore, the "sport" was a focal point of crime, gambling, drinking, and prostitution. Many areas made boxing an illegal activity, but it continued to thrive in the back rooms of saloons, on riverboats, and in many frontier towns. In 1890, New Orleans became one of the first cities to legalize boxing under rules formulated in 1867 by the Marquess of Queensbury, an aristocratic English sportsman. In an effort to reduce boxing's brutal reputation, the sport initiated several new regulations, such as the use of gloves, the limiting of rounds to three minutes, and the implementation of ten-second knockouts. The first heavyweight championship bout fought under the new rules occurred in New Orleans in 1892, when James J. Corbett knocked out John L. Sullivan in the twenty-first round. Despite attempts to reduce the violence in boxing, the sport remained illegal in most of the United States until the 1920s.

Like other sports of the era, boxing was a racially segregated activity. Although many African Americans had gained fame as bare-knuckle fighters, white prizefighters refused to meet them in the ring. Many whites were shocked in 1908 when an African American named Jack Johnson defeated white opponent Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to become the first black heavyweight champion. Many whites found it intolerable that a member of a supposedly inferior race could defeat a white man. Boxing promoters and spectators then began searching for a "Great White Hope," a white boxer who could beat Johnson. Johnson, however, remained undefeated for years and held his title until 1915.

FOOTBALL: THE OTHER BRUTAL SPORT

During the early 1900s, football was primarily a college sport. The game's popularity began to spread across America in 1869, after the first

collegiate football game in which Rutgers University defeated Princeton University, six goals to four. The northeastern U.S. Ivy League schools dominated college football of the early 1900s. Teams from Yale University, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania repeatedly captured national titles. Soon, however, Midwestern colleges began to gain national attention for their superb level of play. The University of Michigan and other nearby universities formed the Western Conference (later called the Big Ten) in 1895 as the first intercollegiate organization to supervise college athletics.

Michigan became a football powerhouse during the early 1900s largely due to the contributions of Fielding Yost (1871–1946). Yost coached the Wolverines from 1901 to 1926, attaining a career record of 165 wins, 29 losses, and 10 ties. Yost was noted for his "point-a-minute" teams, which outscored opponents by 2,821 to 42 points from 1901 to 1905. The University of Chicago fielded another Midwestern college football team of great renown during the decade. Under the leadership of coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, a professor and the first coach on the faculty of a major university, Chicago went undefeated in 1905. Stagg was a true innovator of the game as he introduced the center snap, the huddle, the lateral pass, the man-in-motion, the outside kick, the T-formation, the placekick, and the fake kick. College football spread beyond the Midwest, becoming popular in the American South and West by the end of the decade.

Professional Football

Professional football teams were first organized in the United States in the early 1890s. Many star college players found employment in national and regional football leagues. Ohio was a site of much professional football innovation. The Massillon Tigers and the Canton Bulldogs battled repeatedly for the state championship. In 1906, a scandal occurred when the Massillon team accused Canton coach Blondy Wallace of throwing the championship game. The scandal nearly destroyed professional football in Ohio for the following decade.

Despite its growing popularity, college football was confronted by many serious challenges during the decade. Some complained that the game was no longer an enjoyable student-based activity, but had become a brutal competition with an overemphasis upon winning at any cost. Following the serious injuries and deaths of several players, several politicians, journalists, and college presidents demanded the game be abolished While the majority of the population did not agree with this extreme position, they did agree that the game needed to be reformed.

The tactics of professional coaches, who often received greater salaries than university professors, was a focus of much concern. Coaches like Pop Warner of Carlisle College and Percy Haughton of Harvard University were stern taskmasters who demanded that their players follow strict training regimens that frequently interfered with academic studies. Many college football coaches also participated in questionable recruiting practices. Players' passing and kicking skills were more highly regarded than their academic achievement. The desire to win was so strong that the fact that a good player was not enrolled as a student often did not disqualify him from playing on the college's football team.

The Army-Navy Game

One of the greatest rivalries in college athletics is the annual Army-Navy football game, which has been held nearly every year since 1890. During the first decade of the 1900s, Army was victorious in five of the nine games.

While the activities of college coaches was of great concern to many, football's fiercest critics argued against the violent nature of the sport. Beginning in the 1880s, football introduced the line of scrimmage and emphasized gaining the greatest number of yards in a limited number of plays. Teams developed mass-momentum offensive formations in which a tight group of players protected the ball-carrier. The "flying wedge," in which linemen entered into a "V" formation to shield the runner, was blamed for many injuries and even a player's death, since players wore little or no protective equipment. In 1905, The Nation magazine quoted the dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School as stating football was a "boy-killing, educationprostituting, gladiatorial sport." That same year President Theodore Roosevelt held a football summit at the White House where alumni, faculty, and coaches were encouraged to reform the rules of the game. A resolution was agreed upon and called for the elimination of unnecessary roughness, but it proved to be ineffective. During the 1905 season, 18 football players died and 159 were seriously injured. Following that bloody season, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (IAA) was founded in December 1905 and charged with finding a solution to the crisis of violence gripping football. The following year, the IAA created a set of rules that were designed to reduce football's brutal nature. They reduced the number of attempts used to gain a first down and approved the forward pass, but restricted its use. Their goal was to discourage mass-momentum plays for short yardage gains. The rule changes resulted in a more conservative style of play, but they did little to curb the game's violent aspects. Player death and injury rates did not dramatically decrease until the introduction of protective gear in the 1910s.

THE OLYMPICS

Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), a French aristocrat, revived the Olympic Games in the 1890s. The Games, which had last been held in 776 B.C., were updated by the newly formed International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC determined that the Olympics would be held in a different city every four years, that only modern sports would be contested, and that only amateur adult males would be allowed to compete. By the year 1900, however, women were also allowed to participate in several of the events. That same year the United States began its decade-long domination of the track and field competitions, winning twenty of twenty-three events. Multitalented American Alvin Kraenzlein was a standout at the 1900 Paris Olympics, where he earned gold medals in the 60-meter dash, 110- and 200-meter hurdles, and the long jump.

The Olympic Games were first contested on American soil in 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri. Again, the Americans bested the world in track and field events. The U.S. athletes also were especially strong in boxing, gymnastics, rowing, tennis, and wrestling. The St. Louis games also increased the popularity of running in the United States. The sport had been gradually gaining recognition since the first American marathon was held in New York in 1896. During the early 1900s, the Boston Marathon earned just as much attention as the New York race; runners traveled from the northeastern United States and Canada to compete in the grueling event.

Although the Olympic Games were designed to promote international unity and sportsmanship, they were not without controversy. At the 1904 Olympics, spectators were invited to sideshows featuring "savage" Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, who were presented to demonstrate their racial "inferiority." Politics marred the 1908 Olympics when British and Irish athletes clashed. American shot-put champion Ralph Rose created international headlines with his refusal to lower the Stars and Stripes before the king of England. He shocked the British public with his statement that "This flag dips to no earthly king!" Rose's action set the precedent for all future American flag bearers at Olympic ceremonies; the American flag never has been lowered to any head of state, foreign or domestic.