Read for a change
Finished reading The Way We Played the Game by John Armstrong. It's about a high school football team in 1903. It was a pretty good book. The story was based on real events and is mostly true. All of the dialog was made up and even some of the characters, but I guess if Hollywood can do it, why not an author?
The interesting thing to me was how much the game has changed. Back then the high school teams weren't really run by the schools and they even played some athletic associations and colleges. Forward passes were illegal. Substitutions weren't allowed, so if a player left the game, he was out. They even negotiated rules at the beginning of the games.
I read the author notes at the end of the book and he mentioned a couple of films showing early football. One showed University of Chicago against Michigan in 1904 and the other was Yale playing Princeton a year earlier. They're kind of interesting to watch, more like rugby than what we think of as football.
The interesting thing to me was how much the game has changed. Back then the high school teams weren't really run by the schools and they even played some athletic associations and colleges. Forward passes were illegal. Substitutions weren't allowed, so if a player left the game, he was out. They even negotiated rules at the beginning of the games.
I read the author notes at the end of the book and he mentioned a couple of films showing early football. One showed University of Chicago against Michigan in 1904 and the other was Yale playing Princeton a year earlier. They're kind of interesting to watch, more like rugby than what we think of as football.