[Later this week, we’ll be moving my younger son Kyle into his first-year dorm at Michigan. So this week, through proud Dad tears, I’ll share a handful of UMichigan contexts, leading up to a special post on some of Kyle’s plans there!]
Three
moments that help chart the rise of a perennial pigskin powerhouse.
1)
Pond’s score: One of the many innovations of
President Angell (for much more on whom see yesterday’s post) was to bring football
to the university, and in May 1879 the team played its first
intercollegiate game, against Wisconsin’s Racine College. Hosted at Chicago’s
White Stocking Park, the groundbreaking contest was, according
to the Chicago Tribune, “the first rugby-football game to be played
west of the Alleghenies.” Civil engineering major and future architect Irving
Kane Pond scored the team’s first
touchdown (and the game’s only one, as Michigan triumphed 1-0) on a long
running play, and the crowd—already die-hards, it seems—responded with cheers
of “Pond
Forever.”
2)
Birthing a rivalry: As that Tribune
quote indicates, Michigan was instrumental in extending this new collegiate
(and budding
professional) sport beyond its Northeastern
origins, and it likewise helped spread the sport to other colleges in the
area. Perhaps the most striking such moment took place in 1887: traveling to
another game in Chicago (this one apparently against a high school team—the pickings
remained pretty slim in the 1880s), the Michigan team made a stop in South
Bend, Indiana, and introduced
football to students at the University of Notre Dame. Apparently they
learned fast, as in November of that same year Michigan played its
first game against the Fighting Irish (winning 8-0, natch), inaugurating
one of the sport’s oldest and most fierce rivalries.
3)
A happy hire: In 1899 Michigan football went
8-2, and in 1900 they were 7-2-1; those might seem like perfectly acceptable
records, but only if you didn’t know Michigan fans. After the 1900 season, the
university’s first athletic
director Charles Baird wrote to one of the nation’s most famous young
coaches, Fielding Yost, noting
that “Our people are greatly roused up over the defeats of the past two
years” and offering Yost (then the head coach at Stanford) a job. Fortunately
for Michigan, Yost accepted, and the results speak for themselves: by the
1902 season Michigan was outscoring its opponents 644-12 en route to an 11-0
record, and the New
York Times would write of one of
its victories (a 128-0 trouncing of the University of Buffalo) that it was “one
of the most remarkable ever made in the history of football in the important
colleges.” Let’s just say that the fans haven’t been satisfied with much less
ever since.
Next
MichiganStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment