By Mark F. Bernstein '83
In the 129 years of Princeton football, the Tigers have never
played in a more improbable venue than they did in an
unofficial, postseason game on March 7, 1889,
when they struggled to a scoreless tie with the University
of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia's venerable Academy of
Music. There, on a stage once graced by Jenny Lind, the
"Swedish Nightingale," a bunch of college boys led by a
fellow called Snake beat each other senseless as
entertainment for the cream of Philadelphia society. The
Carrier Dome it wasn't.
Philadelphia's grand opera house had hosted
nonmusical events before, most famously the Republican
National Convention in 1872, but football, obviously,
was something different. The sport itself was only 20
years old, the indoor variety a much more recent novelty.
Indeed, the contest at the Academy appears to have
been only the second football game ever played indoors. A
few weeks earlier, Penn had defeated Rutgers inside New
York's Madison Square Garden.
To accommodate the spectacle, the Academy's stage
was extended outward, covering all the seats in the
parquet circle, as it routinely was for balls. Newspaper
accounts disagree as to the exact length of the field; some said
it was 200 feet long, others only 150 feet -- the length
of the field in the indoor "arena" football played today,
but at only 50 feet wide, considerably narrower. Goal
posts were erected at either end. Rules also were modified;
the teams had only three downs instead of four, which
one paper said "gave greater diversity to the game."
Over the wooden boards was spread "cocoa
matting" padded with three layers of cotton, a makeshift,
19th-century form of Astroturf. White strips of muslin
served as goal and yard markers. Nevertheless, the
Philadelphia Inquirer remarked, the carpeting was "a poor
substitute for the grassy fields on which the lads were
accustomed to play, and as a natural consequence falls were the
rule and not the exception." Footing, in other words, was
terrible, making "promiscuous kicking," as the
Daily Pennsylvanian put it, "out of the question."
Penn was represented by members of its 1888
varsity. Their opponents, who called themselves the Riverton
Club, were mainly current Princeton players or recent
graduates. During the regular season of the previous fall,
the Tigers had compiled an 11-1 record, including a 69-0
defeat of Penn, and overall they had outscored the
opposition 609-16 (the sole loss was to Yale, by 10-0). The
most celebrated member of that formidable team was a
future Hall of Famer, Knowlton L. "Snake" Ames 1890,
whose moniker derived from his sinuous open-field running.
It was Ames who inspired a Harvard player to compose
a take-off entitled "The Ghost of Poe's Raven," an
allusion to Edgar Allen Poe 1891, the poet's grandnephew,
who would become Princeton's quarterback that fall:
Once upon a field momentous, while I faced that team portentous,
The contest began at 8:15 p.m. under the flickering
gas jets. Princeton took the ball first and as one account
noted, "with a V built of brawn and muscle ... forced a
breach" into Penn's front line. There was little room to
maneuver, and play was sloppy. Someone fell over a canvas
fence on the stage. As painted cherubs smiled down from
the ceiling, one Penn player described as a "wrestler" "caught
a Nelson" on a Princeton rusher, L. E. Price 1888, "and nearly twisted his head
off." A Penn receiver made a break for the goal, according to The Philadelphia
Press, but "catching somebody's toe turned a somersault on his head." The
ball squirted loose, and in the ensuing pileup, players "rolled over the
floor...in indiscriminate confusion. Caps flew in every direction, ...twisting,
turning legs and arms mingling together without the slightest regard for
proprieties of physical fitness and equilibrium."
The game was unusually rough, even by 19th-century standards. As the
Philadelphia Public Ledger graphically put it, "time upon time there
was an ominous thud as the head or shoulders of some plucky half-back was
hurled against the infielding boards or projecting stage scenery that formed
the background." The North American wrote: "The playing...kept the
audience properly elated. One big athlete would pick up some smaller human
being and slam him down and then all the other players would pile on. It
seemed to be heaps of fun. In a few minutes it turned out to be heaps of almost
dead men."
Far from shocking the patrons, such brutality was part of the attraction.
Proper Philadelphia was in attendance, including many of that season's
debutantes, all of whom seemed to be having a marvelous time. "Each brilliant
play," the Inquirer observed, "was met with the bringing together of
daintily gloved hands, and fair maidens, attended by chaperones, so far forgot
their reserve as to stand up to witness the individual efforts of the players."
The scene must have been almost medieval, the young men in their uniforms,
crashing against the gilt-edged balustrades and tumbling into the red velvet
boxes while the ladies cheered them on.
Medieval perhaps, but something new in American sport. According to historian
Benjamin Rader, until "the advent of college football, women had usually been
forbidden by the dictates of Victorian decency from attending the more
disreputable sporting spectacles. Football was different." Here was an event
where debs and dames could, in all propriety, shout themselves hoarse.
The game also exemplified a more important social trend then taking place on
campuses. College athletics exploded in the 1880s as the sons of the Civil War
generation sought glories of their own. In what social historian Christopher
Lasch called the "rehabilitation of the ruling class," they found on the football
field and baseball diamond a tonic to Gilded Age lives of idle dissipation.
Championed in the coming decade by Theodore Roosevelt, himself an avid football
fan, this "muscular Christianity" as it came to be called, celebrated the
manly virtues, but in a setting that reinforced the social distinction of
both the participants and spectators.
Halftime featured different displays of athletic prowess. There were tugs of
war and a field-goal kicking contest featuring several of the best players in
the country, including Ames and Samuel King 1888. Drop kicks were attempted
from 15 and 25 yards out, and place kicks from 20 yards. One cringes for the
Academy's grand chandelier, hanging overhead.
The teams switched sides for the second half, with the Tigers now facing the
audience. Play was described as "desperate," the two teams fighting "like
maniacs." The Inquirer drolly observed that "London prize ring rules
prevailed...and the wrestling was of the catch-as-catch-can order." Momentum
shifted to Penn, which kept the ball in Princeton territory for much of the
30 minutes of play. Penn actually took the ball across the goal line,
but the rules at the time required that it be "touched down," as in rugby,
for the points to count. Someone knocked the ball loose, and the Tigers
recovered to preserve the shutout.
Although the game was declared a "great success," the Inquirer seemed
to pronounce the general verdict. "All the players were winded," it wrote. "All
were bruised. Some had their clothes torn. One had a black eye. Two were
scratched on the faces. Twenty-two voted in-door foot ball a failure."
Mark F. Bernstein '83 is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.
A different version of this article (along with Arnold Roth's illustration)
appeared a year ago in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
When Princeton played Penn in the Philadelphia Academy of Music
Making many a slug and tackle followed by a flow of gore,
While the prejudiced ascetic, jaundiced, glum and unpoetic,
Damned all manly sports athletic; suddenly I heard a roar,
And a ball went whizzing past me, whizzing as I'd seen before,
Only Ames, and nothing more.