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(Book for this Class!)

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11/12/2019 How Native Americans Changed Football

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11/12/2019 How Native Americans Changed Football

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(Listen to Ghosts of Football Past)

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[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today, just for kicks we're gonna start in a park. So let me set the scene.

JAD: Couple days ago, we gathered a bunch of Radiolab listeners in McCarren Park in Brooklyn.

ROBERT: This is a random set of listeners.

JAD: Random set of listeners. Whoever showed up as a result of a few tweets and Facebook postings. Got about 70 people. It was a super cold day. Park was covered in snow. And we had brought everybody there to help us make some noises that we would use in this segment. Like ...

JAD: Chanting. Or -- it was amazing. You'll hear them throughout the hour. But when people got there, we hadn't actually explained to them why we wanted them to make these noises. So just to start things off, I just asked them a couple questions.

JAD: Questions of the moment.

JAD: This was not a shocking revelation.

ROBERT: No. Kind of expected.

JAD: But these anti-football sentiments, I believe they say more about you and I and our fans than the game.

ROBERT: Although I -- in fairness, I mean there are a lot of people who -- I would even consider myself a -- a -- I watch for the ads.

JAD: Okay. Whether you watch for the ads like you or whether you love the game like I happen to, or loathe it like some others, football right now ...

ROBERT: It's massively popular. That's not the same as ...

JAD: I actually think it's massively interesting, also. Here's a way to think about it. Sally Jenkins, the author of the book The Real All-Americans, she puts it this way. Imagine a thousand years from now, maybe ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand years from now, we're all gone. All our history has been forgotten. All the silly trifling games we play have been lost to time. Imagine the future human beings looking back on us.

JAD: Okay, so here's the thing Radiolab listeners. We're gonna do an entire hour on the game of football. In part, because it just seems to be that there are a lot of questions in the air about football right now, about what it is and what that means about us. What it might or could or can't become.

ROBERT: Am I gonna like this?

JAD: Absolutely! This -- in a way, this whole hour is for the people like you who really don't care about football. And I am willing to wager that at the end they will care more. Particularly because of this first story which comes from Sally Jenkins who just heard. It comes from her book The Real All Americans This is a story, not about the game as you might think of it now, but about where it came from. It didn't come from the people you'd expect.

ROBERT: Okay, I'm folding my hands. And you see here, in my lap. I'm going to listen to this.

JAD: Okay, you want to get in the three-point stance?

ROBERT: 71! 71 Hike! We're ready to begin.

JAD: And this is a story about the beginning.

JAD: Basically she says, you had these kids whose parents had fought in the Civil War and then some of them had gone west to fight the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Apaches. And now those wars were winding down, which oddly enough created kind of an issue for young men at the time.

ROBERT: If you're a young student, say back east at a fancy school like Harvard, how are you gonna prove your own toughness? I mean, your older brother, your father they maybe fought at Gettysburg, Battle of Little Bighorn.

JAD: And so, according to historian David Adams who you just heard, those kids were desperate for opportunities to man up.

JAD: Around this time says David Adams, you see a bunch of violent sports take off. And in particular, for our purposes, you see these kids at Harvard and Yale getting together and knocking the snot out of each other in this game that's kind of like rugby, but just more violent.

JAD: Writer Chuck Klosterman, and before him historian. Dr. Conrad Crane.

JAD: There were formations and strategies and that kind of thing, but it was pure, like, right out of Napoleon's military playbook. I mean, where you -- you concentrate your force.

ROBERT: Yeah, my shoulder next to your shoulder next to his shoulder. It's like a line.

JAD: Yeah, you bunch up all -- all your men, and then pierce the other guy's army.

JAD: That was the basic idea.

ROBERT: And so you just end up with piles of guys.

JAD: Yeah, and inside those piles?

JAD: But then along comes this school, this tiny little school founded in 1879 in the middle of nowhere, that if you're a football fan or just a fan of American history kind of changed everything.

JAD: Big guy. Shock of white hair. Large nose.

JAD: And it was after winning a lot of those fights, too many of those fights really, we're talking 1870s now, that Pratt had a change of heart. And he -- he suddenly became concerned about the very people he had just been fighting.

JAD: His idea was to start a boarding school specifically for American Indian children that was kind of a radical experiment.

JAD: IE. they would be white-itized.

JAD: That's Barbara Landis.

JAD: We went up to Carlisle to talk with her and her colleague Kara Curtis. And they told us that Pratt basically made that pitch ...

JAD: ... not just to Congress, but directly to American Indian families all over the country.

JAD: We need to teach them how to communicate with the white man, so that when the white man comes and tries to get you to sign away the Black Hills you won't fall for it again.

JAD: Joe lives near the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He's Lakota. And he told us the story about his grandfather who was a famous Lakota chief. In the 1890s, his grandpa led a delegation of American Indians to Washington.

JAD: Joe says his grandpa had this moment where he was just stunned by how many white people there were. His phrase was, "They're like ants."

JAD: Basically, Joe says his grandpa just had this realization.

JAD: And it seemed to him Carlisle was the way forward.

JAD: As kids were admitted, here's how it would work. They would come in, and they'd immediately have their picture taken on arrival. Then they'd be given an extreme makeover which would also be photographed.

ROBERT: Barbara showed us a picture of a Navajo kid looking maybe 18 years old.

ROBERT: This is when he arrives. So he's got kind of dark skin, high cheekbones.

ROBERT: He's wearing an elaborate necklace. Looks like it might be made of bone.

JAD: And he's wrapped in a blanket.

JAD: In the second picture, his hair is very short. Not long.

JAD: He's wearing a three-piece suit.

JAD: Joe American Horse said his family saw that transformation firsthand.

JAD: But just think about this for a second. Just think about this. We spoke with one guy Professor Eric Anderson who teaches at Haskell, he's also part Pottawatomi. Just imagine the parents, he says, the first time they see their kids.

JAD: In any case, according to Sally Jenkins, after the kids were recropped and redressed, Pratt would run them through a bunch of drills.

JAD: I mean, we know that in the 39-year history of the school at least 200 kids died of disease or poor health or even homesickness.

JAD: And Sally thinks that one of those hires ...

JAD: This guy who had formerly taught at an Ivy League school. He showed the Carlisle Indian kids this game that the kids at Harvard were playing. Maybe he thought it would toughen them up, who knows? But suddenly they're playing football. Now keep in mind, this is, you know, at a point, we're talking 1882, where football's barely a thing. Not so many schools had teams.

JAD: But the Carlisle kids self-organized, level the field, start to play. They even start to scrimmage some kids across town. And at one of those games, according to Barbara ...

JAD: Because in his mind he was trying to civilize these kids, and football was doing the opposite. But a short time later, says David Adams ...

JAD: According to his memoir, Pratt was sort of bowled over by the eloquence and passion of the appeal. So he said, "Okay ..."

JAD: And at that early point in American football ...

JAD: Which brings us to October 24th 1896.

JAD: Apparently, there was about 4,000 people in the stands, including ...

JAD: According to David Adams in one paper ...

JAD: Because of course, that's what Pratt wanted. Now one thing that was immediately clear to everyone in attendance when they saw the Carlisle players was that they were physically outmatched.

JAD: Or at the very least, the odds are heavily against them. But three minutes into the game, in the midst of a big pile up. A Yaley fumbles the ball. It comes squirting out. Carlisle guy picks it up, and runs the entire length of the field, 63 yards, and scores the touchdown. Now, nobody had scored on Yale in seven games. They were furious. So what they do is they use their bulk to slowly push the pile down the field twice to take the lead. And with three minutes left, Yale is up 12 to 6, Carlisle has the ball. Carlisle running back charges the pile and gets clobbered. Falls backwards, And just as he's about to hit the earth, he laterals the ball to a teammate who grabs it, runs around the scrum the entire length of the field and scores!

ROBERT: And some of the Carlisle players said oh, we're gonna walk out of here. We are leaving this game. But according to David, at the last moment Pratt runs down from the stands comes onto the field and says, "Wait a second, wait a second. Wait. Don't forget rule number one. Be a gentleman."

ROBERT: So the Carlisle boys finish the game. And when they walk off the field ...

JAD: They get a standing ovation.

JAD: After another Carlisle-Yale game where something similar happened ...

JAD: The complicatedness of Pratt and of the whole Carlisle idea kept smacking us in the face as we were putting this show together. I mean on the one hand, there were clearly students who felt that Carlisle was prison. In fact, Barbara Landis, when she took us on a tour of the grounds of the former Carlisle Indian School, she said that kids would even set fire to the buildings.

JAD: On the other hand, when we started looking around for original archival recordings of some of the earliest Carlisle players, pretty much the only recording we could find ...

JAD: Was this oral history with a guy named ...

JAD: Albert Exendine. The interview was done in the early '70s when he was 88. He entered the school.

JAD: Can't really play you too much of this because the audio quality is really bad. But in the interview, Pratt comes up.

JAD: and Exendine talks about him with a great deal of affection and gratitude.

JAD: We call him the father of Indian education.

JAD: Now Pop Warner was an interesting guy.

JAD: Just to give you a visual.

JAD: Barbara and Karen showed us pictures. Looks kind of like Mike Ditka if Mike Ditka had Einstein's hair.

JAD: And that is exactly what he does in spectacular fashion when he gets to Carlisle.

JAD: Sure, they're fast, they got heart.

ROBERT: But Harvard did not take this lying down. Harvard retaliates by painting the footballs the same color as their jerseys. It's maroon everywhere. So when they held the ball against their chest, the ball basically, well, you can't see it.

JAD: At least initially, British football ran on the honor system. But with American football, the refs were there practically from the beginning. And she says it was largely a response to the brutality of the game, but also to the kind of rule-bending that you saw from Pop Warner and the Carlisle Indians.

JAD: And Pop Warner's greatest sleight of hand, and maybe the Carlisle Indians most soaring moment -- and I mean that literally, happened at a moment when the game almost disappeared. That's coming up.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And getting back to our story on the Carlisle Indian School and the birth of the modern game of football. One of the most important moments in this story happens at a time when football it was right on the edge of disappearing. Talking about 1905.

JAD: This was the most violent year in football to this point. 19 people died on the football field.

ROBERT: One death is a lot. But 19? That's crazy.

JAD: Yeah. Because what would happen is that Carlisle would try and do these things to sort of open up the game. The Ivys would consistently respond by making the game more about brute force, more about violence. And so you had all these deaths. And suddenly all the major programs were spooked. You know, Columbia pulls their -- their football team. Harvard even thinks about doing that.

ROBERT: And so, and this is kind of odd. Into the fray steps the President of the United States of America, Teddy Roosevelt. Because he was a fan, according to Conrad Crane.

ROBERT: And then there was his kid.

JAD: Broke his nose, slit his eyebrow.

ROBERT: In one game he got knocked out cold. So after the violence of '05, the President calls the presidents of all these colleges and so on to Washington. And according to David Adams, he basically tells them ...

JAD: And out of that we see a couple of rule changes. First, the schools decide in order to loosen up the pile so to speak, they're gonna tinker with the down yardage ratio.

ROBERT: Three downs to get ten yards or four downs to get ten yards?

JAD: Four would come a couple years later.

JAD: But the second rule change, which is maybe the most important for our story, is for the first time they legalized the ability to move the ball through the free-floating air that surrounds us all. Okay.

ROBERT: So where do we go -- what's the next ...?

JAD: So if I could -- if I could place you in a moment, unless there's a moment before this you'd like to hit. I believe November 23rd, 1907.

JAD: But not so fast with football, because when the rule committee had made that rule about forward passing they had also hedged a little bit saying if you throw a forward pass and your receiver doesn't catch it you are penalized 15 yards, which back in the day was a monster amount. So nobody threw the ball. It was too risky.

ROBERT: But, story goes as soon as that rule got passed, Pop Warner goes back to his garage. It's always a garage of course, with a ball. And he starts experimenting. And he started thinking okay, what would be the most efficient way to toss this thing?

JAD: Sort of imagine a deflated basketball.

JAD: And in 1906, there's a tiny bit of tape in Albert Exendine's oral history where he talks about this. In 1906, he says Pop called all the players together. He tells them ...

JAD: He says, "I think you're gonna have to learn to spiral the ball."

JAD: Because if you throw the ball on the spiral it gets 10 times less air drag than if you throw it end-over-end.

ROBERT: Plus it's easier to catch.

JAD: Which gets us to that game. November 23rd, 1907, Carlisle plays the University of Chicago. Last game of the season. We're in Chicago. And the Chicago team is arguably the best in the nation.

ROBERT: The best. I don't think it's even arguable.

JAD: Well, Carlisle's good at this point, though.

ROBERT: Yeah. But Chicago's like Stagg Field, whoa!

JAD: And there are 27,000 people in the stands.

JAD: And so Carlisle's greatest receiver, Albert Exendine, our guy, had been stymied the entire game, because the minute the ball was snapped the Chicago players would ...

JAD: By some accounts, this was Exendine's idea. But whoever thought of it, on the next play Albert Exendine as expected ends up out of bounds, but he keeps running.

JAD: Runs around the spectators, maybe around the band.

JAD: Right at that moment ...

JAD: Lets loose a vicious spiral.

JAD: This is Sally's description of that moment from her book The Real All Americans.

JAD: After we'd spent an entire day looking at pictures of, you know, Albert Exendine and Pratt and Pop Warner and Delos Lone Wolf and Tom Torlino and all these Carlisle players, Barbara and Kara took us to the field where they practiced.

JAD: And we just kind of walked around and tried to imagine all the stuff we'd just seen in photos.

ROBERT: It was a little bit like walking among ghosts.

JAD: Yeah. That's the sound of the flag blowing in the background. I remember standing on that field and having this thought that I couldn't quite articulate. But later, Eric Anderson, that professor from Haskell, who's a member of the Pottawatomi Nation, he sort of put his finger on it. And essentially said that, like, there's a lot of room on a football field. I mean, there's room for anger and war and violence, but there's also room for pride and a kind of coming together, that's not a Pratt coming together where one side gets erased, but it is a coming together.

JAD: A lot of people to thank for this episode. We had original music made for us for that episode from Morgan O'Kane. You can hear him right here playing the banjo. That's MorganOKaneMusic.com. Check him out. Also, we had original music from Austin musician Shaky Graves. And the Albert Exendine tape that we played is from the research division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

ROBERT: Thanks also to the Cumberland County Historical Society and the US Army Heritage and Education Center, where you can go and see tons of photos from both archives, or you can come to us.

JAD: On our website, Radiolab.org, we have a ton of old archival football picks, a ton of those before-and-after pictures from the ...

JAD: Really amazing. And we also have a link to Sally Jenkins's book, which is highly recommended. The Real All Americans. That's on our site Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Thanks also to Reggie Kathy and to Scott Graham. To Noah Robbins to Michael Chernus to Matt Della Pina, Cole Wimpy, to J.R. McCarthy to Nick Capodice.

JAD: Colin and Michelle Campbell.

JAD: And special thanks, very special thanks to our amazing volunteer cheer squad that came out and weathered the Brooklyn cold to scream and holler and bring this story to life. And speaking of that, very special thanks to Brenna Farrell who found the story and produced it with us. And production support from Damiano Marchetti.

ROBERT: Well, that's a lot of people to have thanked. But we will have -- we will have more to listen to and more people to thank in the second half of our program.

JAD: Yeah, we're gonna take a distinctly modern view on football coming up.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Still talking about football.

ROBERT: This is the second half.

JAD: And you know, in the first half we talked about where football came from. Now we want to look at where it's going. Which seems to be the big conversation these days. And as we were thinking about that, we ended up talking with one of our favorite sports writers, Chuck Klosterman.

ROBERT: You may know him from his Ethicist column in the New York Times. He also writes about sports for Grantland. And he recently wrote an essay about football and its inherent contradictions. And it recalled for us this sort of Carlisle versus Ivy freeflow versus traditional sort of thing, but in a newer sort of modern way.

JAD: Chuck says if you look at all the new formations that keep getting added and all the trick plays that are tried out every year, it is quite clear that football as a game ...

JAD: Those old Ivy fundamentals of power and might and tradition.

JAD: And Chuck's whole argument is that it is football's unique ability to be both at the same time: reactionary and simultaneously wildly inventive, so that you can think about it one way and feel about it another, that is what makes football ...

JAD: What he means is that the NFL's three times as popular as the next most popular sport in America. And the question we got to, just because it's a question you can't really avoid right now is, is it gonna stay that way?

JAD: Two separate streams in our collective unconscious.

JAD: Okay, so we got to be honest. Like, when Chuck was talking about the -- his whole idea of silos shooting skyward, cool idea, but we weren't really sure what that meant exactly.

JAD: That is until our producer Soren Wheeler met this woman.

SOREN: So Monet is a partner at a media production company. She lives with her husband and their four kids outside of Atlanta, Georgia. But I actually went to talk to her about her son Parker, because Monet says the very moment he was born ...

SOREN: Her dad is Mel Farr. He was a running back for the Detroit Lions, and actually Rookie of the Year in 1967.

SOREN: Her brothers Mel Farr Junior and Michael Farr both played football.

SOREN: And then another and another. And for a time, the Mel Farr Auto Group was actually the largest African American-owned business in the country.

SOREN: And then the season starts.

SOREN: Monet says she knew that, but when Parker's team would take the field ...

SOREN: The crazy part is that as all this is happening, as Parker's taking the field with his four- and five-year-old teammates ...

SOREN: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

SOREN: Symptoms include memory loss, sometimes bouts of anger. In this case ...

SOREN: And while Parker was playing, the part of her that did see what happens on the flipside, that -- that part would campaign to raise awareness of CTE with other parents.

SOREN: And her current solution to this quandary ...

SOREN: And at about this point in the conversation, Parker came home from school.

SOREN: I'm not exactly sure how an eight-year-old should look, but he's a pretty big kid.

JAD: Thanks to Monet and Parker Bartell for letting -- letting Soren invade their home and exhaust them on short notice. And by the way, when Monet went back and counted all the relatives that had been in the NFL, it wasn't 33 it was 13. But that's still -- that's a lot. In any case, here's a logical question that we felt like we should ask at least somewhere in this show. Given Tank's experience, you know, where football was practically his birthright, but he is opting out. Are there a lot of Tanks out there? Like, is football the sport tanking nationally? Generally? We asked Molly Webster to find out.

MOLLY WEBSTER: It's funny. One of -- one of my friends, we call him Tank, but that's because he can drink a lot. And my dad can't remember his name. He just goes, "How's Tank? How's that Tank fellow?" "Still drinking a lot." In any case, I started making some calls to high school coaches.

MOLLY: Winning teams, losing teams.

MOLLY: And to kind of get a handle on the bigger picture, I called this guy.

MOLLY: Okay. So in 2013, he was an intern at the Wall Street Journal's sports desk.

MOLLY: By the way, Pop Warner is no longer the person Pop Warner, but he is a youth football league.

MOLLY: When people saw these numbers they were like, "Oh, my God!"

JAD: Why, exactly? Five percent doesn't sound too bad.

MOLLY: Well I mean, if you assume that the five percent drop doesn't change, that's what it drops by every year, then in 15 years you're in the neighborhood of, like, 50 percent less kids playing ball.

MOLLY: The idea is you -- if you don't have the kids getting trained in, like, Pop Warner, then they're not going to middle school football. They're not going to high school football and they're not going to college football. So they're not going to the NFL.

MOLLY: Needless to say, everyone was like, "Oh, my God. Is this actually true? Or is there more to these numbers than meets the eye?" So Ryan starts digging into them.

MOLLY: And he doesn't look just at Pop Warner numbers, he looks at all the youth football leagues.

MOLLY: Your relief will be short-lived, because -- because there's a bigger story. When Ryan looked at participation across all youth sports, not just football ...

JAD: Is this an extension of the whole concussion thing?

MOLLY: Yes. Concussions were definitely part of the conversation. But so were, you know, budget issues, and kids specializing in sports and getting burnt out. Basically, everyone had their reasons and every school has their reasons, but the guys I talked to ...

MOLLY: They just kept coming back to land on this point that had nothing to do with safety.

MOLLY: That's J.T. Curtis, J.J. Woodward and George Salas. They're in Louisiana, California and Kansas. And I heard this refrain not just from them, but I heard this in Ohio, I heard this in Michigan. And by this point I was like, Jesus!

MOLLY: It's funny, because it's as if all the coaches all across the nation are reading the same book or going to the same bar or something, because literally everyone I've talked to has brought this up. Is it just that everyone's said it to each other so much that ...

MOLLY: So all these coaches I talked to were like, "You can't go hit reset. You can't hit reset. You can't hit reset." Like, these kids are used to, like -- I sound so old. They're basically saying that what they find is they feel like there's some -- some commitment issue now.

ROBERT: I only play if I win. I only want to win.

MOLLY: Yeah. So the interesting thing was is the coaches I talked to at the power house schools were like, "Well, we're not actually having trouble getting kids because we win." But the other schools in their conference, they know that coaches and athletic directors, and then I talked to some schools that had forfeiting teams, that ended up forfeiting games. They said like, "You just don't get the kids that will work their asses off and ride the bench."

ROBERT: Well, everybody wants to win. It just somehow sounds like they expect to win or it isn't worth the effort?

MOLLY: Or it's just that there are so many options, like, why would you choose the losing option?

JAD: All right. So whether it you think it's video games, or parenting, or fear of concussions, or whatever reason you want to choose, it seems to be the larger thing that happens in these conversations about sports like football, is it doesn't actually seem to be about football. It's like some kind of negotiation between the generations. Because, like, back in the 1870s, the Harvard kids they were using football as a way to say back to the previous generation like, "Look how tough we are. Look how manly we are." Maybe this generation is turning away from sports like football also to say something back to the previous generation. Something about the world they want to live in.

JAD: I mean, overt masculinity of any kind, it's not something that we're in the mood to celebrate these days. So it could be, if you believe writer Chuck Klosterman, it could be that some kids are choosing away from sports like football because to play football, it means that on some level you have to support or at least entertain ideas that you don't like, you know? Or at least you don't want to admit that you like. Except he admits it.

JAD: Okay, we're back. One last thing, one last thing. Okay, if you grew up on Inside The NFL as I did, this is for you. It's The Voice.

JAD: That was Mr. Scott Graham, voice of Inside The NFL. Thank you, Scott. You are the awesomest voice ever. And that was original music by Dylan Keefe. Bye!
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American Football | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

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RADIOLAB INTRO] ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. JAD: And today, just for kicks we're gonna start in a park. So let me set the scene. JAD: Couple days ago, we gathered a bunch of Radiolab listeners in McCarren Park in Brooklyn. ROBERT: This is a random set of listeners.

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https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html

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https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/plains-treaties-horse-creek/#preamble

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https://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/kapplers