New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Camp’s legacy still going strong
‘Father of football’ has storied history in state
Editor’s note: This is the 18th part in the Register’s Top 50 Project as we roll out the stories through this year.
Walter Camp remains synonymous with football.
Almost 100 years since his death, in a New York City hotel room following a meeting of the intercollegiate football committee, Camp is still considered the Father of American Football.
“Football has lost its father,” Michigan football coach Fielding Yost was quoted in stories that appeared across the country on March 16, 1925, including in the Pittsbugh Post-Gazette under the headline “Walter Camp’s Death Blow to Sports.”
“He gave football its high place in amateur athletics. He wrote its rules. He taught its uses. He made it a dominant factor in American youth,” Yost said.
Whether at an annual black-tie dinner honoring the nation’s best collegiate football players, or at Quinnipiac University for The Story of Football, a popular class which just completed its sixth year, Camp’s rules and ideals of a game ingrained in American culture persist.
Camp’s contributions to the game include 11 men to a side, the line of scrimmage, the quarterback position, offensive signal calling, and the downs system. He also secured numerical values for scoring by touchdown, point after touchdown, field goal, and safety in 1883. All remain integral parts of the game today.
“The passing of Walter Camp is a great loss to athletics both in schools and in colleges,” Henry Pennypacker, Chairman of the Athletic Committee at Harvard in 1925, told The Harvard Crimson. “He retained in middle life the vigor and the enthusiasms of youth to a remarkable degree. His influence was wide and significant and was always exercised in the
best directions.”
But Camp, who was 65 when he died of a heart attack, did more than create rules and regulations. He created a culture of American football.
“Camp created a moral argument that has survived more than 100 years,” said Rich Hanley, associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac, who has taught “The Story of Football” for six years. Hanley noted how Camp created a philosophy of teamwork, dedication and character building through football; how he reinforced in newspaper articles, as well as books, both instructional guides as well as fictional stories, often depicting the underdog becoming victorious following principles developed through the game of football. “And that morale universe is what continues to defend it as it is attacked for its violence to this day.”
Born in New Britain in 1859, Camp moved to New Haven as a young boy. He attended Dwight School, where his father, Leverett, was principal. Walter Camp then enrolled at Hopkins School, graduating in 1876, before being accepted at Yale, where he would study medicine and become active in athletics. Camp competed in track, tennis and crew, played baseball and was a member of Yale’s fledgling football program.
Football would become his passion. A two-year captain, Camp was on the field for
Yale’s first game with Harvard in 1876. Over his four years as a player, Yale lost only one game. After graduating from Yale, Camp would take a job with the New Haven Clock Co., eventually progressing to chairman of the board.
The job at the New Haven Clock Co. also allowed him to return to serve as Yale football coach, where in five seasons his teams won 67 of 69 games, and were recognized as national champion three times. Hanley noted Camp’s wife, Alice, has been recognized as an important part of the team’s success. She was known to take notes on individual players. In fact, in 1888, after Yale’s undefeated season, members of the team listed Alice as an assistant coach. Camp would also coach at Stanford (1892, 1894-95).
Camp would spend the rest of his life playing an influential role in the development of the game.
“He always had the capacity to adjust rules to meet spectator demands and appease the critics,” Hanley said. “When Harvard used the flying wedge (1892), it led to a more violent game. Camp recognized this and banned the flying wedge in 1894. He opened the game up, but kept intact physical test of strength. He organized the game with rules fans can understand. He documented everything. He took minutes of the rules committees. It leaves an evidence of his ability to change and go with the flow. He was quick to change the rules due to the demands of changing cultures. He always tinkered with the game to make it safer and more appealing.”
Bill O’Brien, a past president of the Walter Camp Football Foundation and member of the organization for 45 years, recalls coming across letters at Yale’s Sterling Library addressed to Camp from President Theodore Roosevelt. The year was 1905. Football was in danger of being banned across the country with the reports of 19 deaths and 137 serious injuries. Even Roosevelt’s son, a freshman at Harvard, suffered a broken nose against Yale.
Camp, along with representatives from Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, were called to Washington, D.C., for an intercollegiate meeting that would eventually lead to the formation of the NCAA. Radical changes were made to the game.
O’Brien also would find a letter from Notre Dame to Camp asking how to start a college football program.
“It was then I truly understood how important he was to the game,” O’Brien said.
Camp was a great promoter of sport. He had more than 30 books published, mostly about sports, including “American Football” (1891), “Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports” (1893), “The Book of Foot-Ball” (1910), “Football for the Spectator” (1911), and “Training for Sports”, as well as Spalding’s Football Guides, which spread Camp’s rules and philosophies through the Midwest and eventually to the West. He even wrote “Condensed Bridge for the Busy Man.”
The Daily Dozen, an exercise routine he created and later published, was used by the American armed forces during World War I, then later became a phenomenon across the country for all, from athletes to businessmen just looking to stay in shape.
Hanley, whose class focuses on the historical development of football as a game and culture, said he is most impressed with how Camp applied the principles of industrialization in 19th century factories such as the New Haven Clock Co. into sport and fitness.
“He was a tactician,” Hanley said. “Coming up with plays. But he adopted the logic of the factory, to have specialization and precision in sports and positions. He was much more than a formulator of rules. His level of sophistication was extraordinary. It’s easy to tell (football) was not just a hobby for him.”
Camp’s biggest promotion of the game of football came through the selection of AllAmerica teams.
He and friend Caspar Whitney began picking an AllAmerica team in 1898, recognized as the official team until Camp’s death in 1925.
“His loss to the sporting world is irreparable,” Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne said on the day of Camp’s death. “He was not only one of the leading figures of football, but of all college sports and physical education as well. He has done more for college football ... than any other man may ever do.”
Shortly after his death, donations were sought to build a lasting monument to Camp at the entrance of the Yale Bowl on Derby Avenue in New Haven. Donations from 224 colleges and 229 preparatory and high schools led to the
$300,000 Walter Camp Memorial Gateway. It was dedicated prior to the Yale-Dartmouth football game on Nov. 3, 1928. The names of those schools are engraved on bronze plaques on the Gateway, which remains a lasting tribute to Camp to this day.
Famed sportswriter Grantland Rice selected Camp’s All-America team for Collier’s magazine until his death in 1948. Camp was elected as part of the inaugural class to the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame in 1951.
For 20 years, there was no one to pick the team. It had become a consensus of other All-America teams. And in that time, Camp’s legacy began to fade as well.
O’Brien, who has always considered himself a fan of sport, recalls knowing the name Walter Camp growing up, and associating the name with college football. But not much more. Even years after being associated with the foundation, O’Brien stumbled across Camp’s gravesite one New Year’s Day. He was walking through Grove Street Cemetery, looking for (former Yale president) Bart Giamatti’s grave. O’Brien had read Camp was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, so he was dumbfounded to see Camp’s marker.
“It hit me that I was standing six feet from the man who kept college football going,” O’Brien said.
After speaking to representatives at Evergreen,
O’Brien learned the family had moved Camp to Grove Street in 1928 because they wanted him closer to Yale and what was considered the more prominent cemetery.
The Walter Camp Football Foundation revived the tradition of the Walter Camp AllAmerica team in 1967, starting an All-America dinner in 1968 that continues today. Its team is introduced each December nationally on ESPN.
“The foundation has done a tremendous amount to promote who he was and what he stood for,” O’Brien said.
The Walter Camp Football Foundation’s All-America dinner is a New Haven institution, bringing the top college football players in the nation to Yale for the last 51 years.
Each winter, many of the top college football players in the country fly in early to visit area schools and children’s hospitals for what has become the Walter Camp All-America weekend. Several alumni return each year, too. All are introduced and reminded of the legacy of Walter Camp, the father of American football.
The idea for the creation of the Walter Camp Football Foundation was spawned by Jimmy Coogan, then 73, a retired parks and recreation director in New Haven.
“He wanted the city to have some way of remembering Walter Camp,” former Register Sports Editor Bill Guthrie told columnist Rick Odermatt in 1992.