The Savagery of Sport

"Football, during years when relatively few readers of the daily newspapers actually saw any games, was invested with the meanings and resonance of heroic myth" (109). Or so goes Michael Oriard's general argument in Reading Football. Certainly his account of the popular's press role in shaping a national fascination -- if not obsession -- lends logic to these observations, but I think what is often even more interesting in his work is the way football, and sport in general, becomes a site of cultural assimilation and national allegory.

Here's an example: 190 miles or east of our fair city of Pittsburgh lies the city of Carlisle, PA, currently home of the United States Army War College, but formerly the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an all-native boarding school used between 1879-1918. Carlisle I.I.S. was the United States government's (infamously failed) attempt to provide an institution that might take charge in assimilating and "Americanizing" American indians during this time period by means of its mantra, "Kill the indian and save the man." Its students were, of course, not brought to Carlisle willingly, but forcibly removed from homes on reservations. There were disastrous results at Carlisle: hundreds of native students died, either from malnutrition, diseases formerly unknown to native populations, or extreme physical and sexual abuse. Many were killed for trying to escape.

But, in addition to a record of death and disaster, Carlisle is famous for another reason: its football team. Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, a legendary coach, headed up the Carlisle Indians (aptly named) and their rise to glory: to this day, they have the best winning percentage (.647) of any defunct college football team. Lending even more credit to football at Carlisle, however, was Jim Thorpe, now a major name in the sport. The Thorpe-Warner relationship caused Sally Jenkins, writing in 2007 for Sports Illustrated, to name Carlisle "The team that invented football." What's interesting, and very troubling, here is, of course, that football was for Carlisle likewise the sport that invented America in the bodies of these young American indians. Lars Anderson's 2007 book Carlisle vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotton Story of Football's Greatest Battle casts the three characters mentioned in its titled into a narrative of nationhood, popular culture, and the development of American media. The historic 1912 scuffle, in which Eisenhower was playing for Army, ended with Carlisle trouncing the army 27-6 thanks to Eisenhower's hurt knee (the result of wrangling with Thorpe on the field) and Thorpe's famous 97-yard touchdown.

I thought this was interesting valence to add to the narrative constructed by Oriard, and an apparently oft "forgotten" one. The relationship between the popular press and football has likewise always been a relationship between individual and nation: sport is too often an allegory for the "battles" of nationhood, and too often an excuse for similarly constructed false loyalties at home.