3 weeks ago  ·  

"OVER 320 CONFIRMED DEAD" is a headline that would normally attract some attention, but not when the casualties are spread over twenty-odd years and they occurred more than a century ago. That's the confirmed number of deaths from playing football 1877-1910. We've spent the last year combing through thousands of news accounts and can confidently offer this as a conservative estimate. We've traced almost 280 victims to specific grave sites. (see www.findagrave.com/virtual-cemetery/991918) Undoubtedly there are more, but this is close. They range in age from 5 to 50, represent every race and religion, and come from every region of the country. One was playing for a school for the deaf, another an orphans' home. There's even a young girl. . . everyone loved football! Eleven were from Iowa; one from Marion, John F. Snyder. Every one bore the hopes and dreams of their family and community.

The annual totals climbed higher, and faster than previously known, years before the leading national and regional newspapers started publishing year-end tallies. The sum is approximately 50% higher than experts had previously suggested. Autopsy results are frequently questionable given medical understanding at the time, and sometimes bizarre, but the point is, authorities believed all 320 were linked to football. It begs the question, "Why wasn't more done to reduce the carnage?" While critics blasted the game's brutality, which often devolved into 11 simultaneous slugfests on the field, defenders worried that rule changes would turn us into a nation of sissies. It's not unlike today's concussion debate.

The earliest victim we found is Dr. John Franklin Currey, a 4th-year medical student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He died in April, 1877, and was buried on his graduation day. Initially, physicians assumed he was suffering from an infection caused by a cut in dissection lab, but an autopsy uncovered a small rupture of his aorta, presumably the result of rough play in a Thanksgiving Day match. The exact incident in the game was unnoticed; his medical care and the misdiagnosis gives one pause. Currey's death was deeply mourned, but it didn't spark a call to end the sport . . . none was free from occasional fatal accidents. Just two years passed, however, before there was another.

The 1880's and 90's were the era of "club" football. Educational institutions didn't sponsor sports then and any college fraternity or club could form a team and claim to be the "official" representatives of the school. The club-members coached themselves, arranged their own schedules and managed their own finances. Occasionally a club went bankrupt, leaving debts linked (unofficially) to their school. That risk of public embarrassment played a role in the University of Iowa's decision to clamp down on clubs in 1897. (Marion Pilot; February 4, 1897) But, that didn't prevent the death of Wilfred Stephenson, 22, in Nov. 1899 in an inter-class game in Iowa City. Others say the schools were motivated to take over football by the desire to capture its rapidly swelling income stream. (W. Burlette Carter, Indiana Law Review, 2002) In any case, college administrators asserted their right of in loco parentis, citing the risk of sports to student morals and safety. However, if saving lives was uppermost on school administrators' minds, hiring coaches and trainers to raise the level and intensity of play, forming conferences to expedite scheduling, extending the season, increasing the number of games played and building giant stadiums had quite the opposite effect.

1879 brought the death of Samuel B. Kearney, 19, in Fayette County, Ohio. Sam had injured his hip playing three years before and never recovered. He was bed-ridden after 1877, and ultimately succumbed to scrofula, or swollen neck glands caused by the TB bacillus, in June, 1879. The exact link of TB to his football injury is indeterminable. The game may have gotten a bum rap on this one, but there are undoubtedly other deaths that went unreported in this period by parents hoping to avoid scandal.

In Dec. 1881 Isaiah Goodfellow, 7, of Reading, PA died from a concussion after striking his head in a game at the Mt. Airy Lutheran Orphans' Home. Incidents like this were all too common in the first decades of the sport, as youngsters sought to emulate their older siblings. Isaiah had probably heard adults talking excitedly about the game and witnessed older boys playing. He may have read vivid descriptions of the game in one of the popular children's magazines. Children easily learned the basic rules--chase the person with the ball, drag him down and pile on top! Another child perished in Nov. 1883, John Daley, 13, of Middletown, CT. He died from a "bad kicking," in a pick-up game with some local toughs; there are few other details.

The next fatality we found was also the youngest, William A. Moore, Jr., the 5 year-old son of Major W. A. Moore, Sr., a Civil War veteran, Ordway, SD attorney and mining magnate. Willie was accidentally kicked in the stomach in the course of play in Mar. 1885 and something ruptured internally; he died from an infection 10 days later. His football was probably a Christmas present.

A tragedy like Willie's, Isaiah's or Dr. Currey's, or any of the others, rarely leaves a family untouched, and such was the case here. We can never separate cause and effect, but catastrophe piled upon tragedy in the W. A. Moore family. Willie's brother, Howard, died in an ice skating accident in 1896, he was just 12; his sister Bessie ran way from home with a Barnum & Bailey circus peanut-vendor in 1893 and again, two years later, with a piano salesman more than twice her age (married with three children no less!); she was just 15 years-old ("but looked 16"). Nina (Gilbert) Moore, his mother, obtained a divorce and opened a piano store in her hometown of Dixon, IL. Bessie eventually settled down and married, but threw herself off a bridge in Portland, OR in 1916, likely in a state of postpartum depression, leaving a husband and three young children.

John Currey was slightly older than the average football victim, and unusual in being married and having children (3), including an infant daughter, Mabel, born just days before his fatal injury. His widow, Emma (Atchinson) Currey never remarried, and died herself in 1900.

Isaiah Goodfellow had been placed in the orphan's home after his father, David J., died of spinal meningitis in Feb. 1880 and his mother, Clara (Nagle), found herself unable to support their seven children. An uncle, himself adopted, took in four, but Isaiah and his two older brothers, David (12) and John (8), drew the short straws and were sent away. Isaiah died less than two years later; John before he was 16.

So who is to blame for all the pain and suffering? Not the NFL--professional football was a decade or more in the future, though we did pick up a couple of semi-professional casualties in our search, including the great Michael J. ("Moxi") Keegan. The NCAA can't be entirely faulted either; they didn't do much to solve the problem, but they didn't organize until 1906, long after the fatalistic pathway was well established. The bulk of the responsibility may rest on a few Ivy League schools--Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc., where football began and wealthy and powerful alumni demanded the sport continue for the income it brought in, the prestige and publicity it generated, the higher enrollment it fostered and the donations that ensued. The schools were aided and abetted by newspaper publishers, who boosted the game to increase circulation. Harvard and Georgetown debate today the issue of paying reparations for the role slavery played in their early history, so why not to football players and their families, in compensation for the price they paid to build the schools' billion $$ endowments? Or for benefits to modern college and H.S. concussion victims? Football is a great game and much safer today, but we shouldn't forget the martyrs who helped make it so.
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4 weeks ago  ·