Three and Out Read Free Page B

right that the national parks are “America’s best idea,” our state universities—another uniquely American concept—might be a close second. The United States has spawned more colleges and graduates per capita than any other country in the world and created college towns rising out of cornfields, another American phenomenon.
    Ann Arbor’s founders, in an effort to attract settlers and make money on their real estate venture, first bid for the state capital—and lost to Lansing. Then they bid for the state penitentiary—and lost to Jackson. Finally, they bid for the state university—and won, the best bronze medal ever awarded a brand-new town.
    But as the university grew, Ann Arbor experienced problems common to all college towns. Put thousands of healthy young men in one place with little adult supervision, and all that testosterone has to go somewhere—which explains why the game of football was born and raised not in the city or the country but on college campuses.
    Football was already so popular at Harvard by 1860 that the school’s president felt compelled to ban it for being too violent. That, of course, only piqued the young men’s desire to play it. When Rutgers played the College of New Jersey—now called Princeton—on November 6, 1869, the game was a little different from the one Michigan and Connecticut would play in 2010. In the 1869 version, each team had twenty-five men who played the entire game and, because they hadn’t yet conceived the forward pass, engaged in a glorified melee.
    Rutgers actually won 6–4, marking the first time Rutgers was the nation’s top-ranked team—and the last. When Princeton beat Rutgers in the rematch a week later, Rutgers’s brief moment at the summit was over.
    The college boys that day could not have imagined that their wide-ranging scrum would become one of their nation’s most popular spectator sports—a billion-dollar American obsession worthy of stadiums holding over one hundred thousand people, with luxury boxes that would start at $55,000 per season. But that’s exactly what they set in motion that day. They also started something the students, the alumni, and the reporters would love—and the university presidents would hate just as much.
    Just two years after that first game, Andrew Dickson White—who had left his post as a history and English professor at the University of Michigan to become Cornell’s first president—received a request from a group of students to take the train to Cleveland to play football against Western Reserve (now Case Western). He famously replied that he would not permit thirty men to travel two hundred miles just to “agitate … a pig’s bladder full of wind!”
    But he was fighting a losing battle. Ten years later, in 1879, a group of Michigan students traveled to Chicago to play a team from Racine College in Wisconsin, in the first football game on the far side of the Alleghenies—or “the West,” as they called it then. The Wolverines won 1–0, starting a tradition that, 131 years later, would be described by athletic director and former regent Dave Brandon as the most prominent feature of Michigan’s “brand.”
    The college presidents responded to this relationship like fathers of debutantes who find their pristine daughters falling for hooligans. It was not simply a Hatfield marrying a McCoy. It was a Vanderbilt marrying a McCoy.
    If they could have annulled the marriage, they would have. But, conceding the impossibility of preventing this ungodly union of academics and athletics, Purdue president James H. Smart wrote to the presidents of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Northwestern, Chicago, and Michigan, inviting them to meet on January 11, 1895, in a wood-paneled room at the Palmer House in Chicago. If they were going to have to put up with this shotgun marriage, they at least wanted to