It’s hard to imagine the game of football without yard lines and fourth downs and organized teams of 11. But before New Havener Walter Camp, the sport was missing all of those elements and more.
The man who became known as “the father of American football” spent most of his life in the Elm City and left lasting impacts on his favorite game, including the creation of rules establishing “the play from scrimmage, the numerical assessment of goals and tries [and] the restriction of play to 11 men per side,” according to the Walter Camp Football Foundation, based in New Haven. He also innovated “set plays, sequences and strategy features which have led to the development of the fast, interesting, and organized game... we enjoy so much today.”
Camp was involved in choosing the first All-America team in 1889. “The lore is he did it all himself the first several years,” said Al Carbone, a longtime volunteer publicity chairperson for the WCFF, which is charged today, alongside other organizations, with naming college football’s All-Americans.
Camp the man was just three years old when he and his parents moved to New Haven from Meriden in 1862. He grew up at 595 Chapel Street and attended Dwight School, where his father was the principal, then Hopkins School, where he pitched for the baseball team and served as captain of the football team. Longtime Hopkins School archivist Thom Peters, who recently retired, said it’s possible Camp may have begun testing his new rules for football at Hopkins; as a freshman at Yale, he participated in intercollegiate gatherings to discuss the emerging standards.
They were a long time coming. During Camp’s childhood, the games of rugby and soccer were developing in England as two discrete sports. According to Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football, a 2018 biography by Roger R. Tamte, British troops brought rugby to Canada during the US Civil War, and the game traveled south from there. Rugby became Harvard’s game of choice; soccer became Yale’s. The two teams met for the first time on November 13, 1875. In order to play each other, they worked out some “concessionary rules,” which Tamte dubs “minor… such as using Yale’s soccer-type round rubber ball instead of the watermelon-shaped rugby ball.” Camp, who was a senior at Hopkins that fall but often hung out at Yale, helped set up the field for the historic game. Harvard trounced Yale, but Yalies were intrigued, and the seed of American football was planted.
Camp participated in many student delegations that met in those years to hash out the rules, which took a while. By 1882, the problem at hand was that the game had become “negative, a game of keep-away,” as evidenced by an 1881 Princeton-Yale contest in which Princeton controlled the ball for almost the whole first half, gaining only 10 yards, while Yale held the ball throughout the entire second half. Camp, then a Yale medical student, proposed a “radical” solution: marking the field in five-yard increments and allowing each team only three consecutive downs to advance the ball at least five yards, or give it up to the other team’s control “on the spot of the last down.”
The proposal was entirely unique in several ways, Tamte notes. It “allow[ed] a team to continue offensive play by satisfying a condition” (measured in yards and downs); it “introduce[d]… critical numerical distance measurements into a still primitive game”; and it “reconstruct[ed] the basic method of play in reliance on a steady repetition of such measurements.” Camp’s peers were skeptical, but when his “crazy and unworkable” idea was tested later that year, it actually worked. Football fans today will recognize Camp’s ideas as key components of the game.
Other rules were designed to address concerns about the physical “brutality” of football, raised by critics then as they continue to be today. In Camp’s time, Tamte writes, “trained college players experienced few serious injuries” and often played an entire game without substitutions. Camp had been involved in creating rules that limited “mass plays and other rough features of the game,” but he was more interested in the game’s positive qualities: “self-denial, discipline, obedience, unmurmuring pluck, and a good deal of patience,” as Tamte quotes him. Camp was opposed to the use of helmets, and even when others put them on, the Yale teams he coached played without them.
A 1905 meeting at the White House among President Teddy Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Root and two representatives each from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, including Camp, addressed the issue of rough play. A statement was crafted encouraging coaches to “carry out in letter and spirit the rules of the game of football relating to roughness, holding and foul play.” That was as far as any of football’s most powerful supporters were willing to go to suppress its “manly” roughness. But later that year, when players from Union College and a high school in Indiana died during games, protracted and sometimes heated negotiations emerged among football’s leading proponents about new rules for safer, “open play.” These included one of Camp’s suggestions: expanding the yards to be gained from five to 10.
While Camp made his living climbing the ladder at the New Haven Clock Company to become its president and CEO, he had a parallel life at Yale, as an athletic supervisor and a coach. Football was his first love. He was the author of numerous books and pamphlets on football rules and the game in general, as well as magazine articles, novels and the famous “Daily Dozen” exercise routine.
Perhaps fittingly, Camp died during a 1925 football rules meeting in New York City’s Hotel Pennsylvania, where his colleagues found him in his bed following an apparent heart attack. His legacy is memorialized in the names of the athletic center at Hopkins School and the Walter Camp Memorial near the Yale Bowl, as well as the names of numerous camps and awards including the Walter Camp Player of the Year award, one of college football’s premier individual honors. He’s buried at Grove Street Cemetery.
Today the Walter Camp Football Foundation keeps Camp’s legacy alive and rooted in New Haven. Carbone called Camp “the P.T. Barnum of football… He was the one who, with Yale, went across the country and started advocating the sport… outside of the Ivy League,” Carbone says. He points out that the growth of football can be seen as new colleges and universities appeared on successive All-American lists, spreading from the East Coast to the Midwest to California and Texas.
It’s been a long time since Yale and New Haven were the seat of the sport. But as a new football season gets underway, the college game’s best players will once more be building their cases, then looking to New Haven to find out if their names are forever linked with Walter Camp’s.
Written by Kathy Leonard Czepiel. In the top image, the first and second portraits of Walter Camp are part of the History of the class of 1880 Yale College 1876-1910 collection (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library). The third portrait is part of the Images of Yale individuals, ca. 1750-2001 (inclusive) collection (ibid). Images of the Walter Camp Memorial, as well as the Yale Bowl background, photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was originally published on December 12, 2018.
