The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. An interesting podcast at the link - which, I'll warn you, is right-leaning website, although less political than market-interested. The first fifteen minutes is an interview with John J. Miller, the author of a book about Teddy Roosevelt and the history of football. If you're interested in that sort of thing, it sounds like a book you'd want. If you don't have the patience to sit for 15 minutes to listen to the podcast, here's the 30 second summary: Apparently, Teddy Roosevelt was a huge football fan. He recruiting football players to fight beside him, and he was generally an avid fan of a game that, at that time, was little more than rugby. The sport was thought, in other circles, to be barbarism, and several academics sought to rid the world of this horrible game. Roosevelt summoned the coaches of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House and told them that if they didn't figure out some way to fight back against the anti-football movement, the game that they all loved would be extinct soon enough. They put their heads together and invented the forward pass. Later that same day, they built Dave Krieg out of sticks and mud, but misplaced him for several decades. That story is probably in the next book, though.
Really interesting. Foot-ball was incredibly brutal back then. Having 20 deaths in one season before the rule change is absolutely insane. Theodore Roosevelt would balk at the new stupid tackling rules being implemented today.
You might dig some of those other Coffee and Markets podcasts. Especially the ones with Francis Cianfrocca, which seem to pitch right into your wheelhouse.
thanks for the link jack... thanks also for the cliffs notes. and the dave krieg comment was hilarious.
