JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Ten

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Ten

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football


Review• Knute Rockne and his capacity to

coach winning teams at Notre Dame while serving as a promoter of himself, his school and the game reflected the U.S. turn to the modern.

• The massive, national outpouring grief in the wake of his death in 1931 revealed football’s cultural standing.


Review• “It was a very, very sad day for

all of us, and it stayed sad for a long time.” – Frank Hoffman, who played for Rockne in 1929 and 1930.


Review• To be sure, Rockne was as

unique a force as any era could spawn but he was helped enormously by a deep understanding of traditional newspapers and magazines and the emerging media of the time: radio and film.


Review• Rockne had already starred in a

series of short films about football such as Flying Feet that were screened in theaters before the feature.


Review• In fact, Rockne was headed to

Los Angeles to advise on a film called The Spirit of Notre Dame when his plane crashed in Kansas.

• His death itself became part of a media swarm, both reflecting and foreshadowing football’s significant role in culture.


Made for Modern Media• By the 1930s, the American

Dream Life of football became the feature attraction in popular mainstream magazines delivered to families such as the Saturday Evening Post …


Made for Modern Media• … and the pulp serials coveted

by boys and adolescents for stories of heroic and sometimes mysterious play.


Made for Modern Media• Trading cards also featured

heroic football players such as Red Grange, effectively putting the stars in both pockets and bicycle spokes.


Made for Modern Media• Books remained a key

transmission instrument for football’s place in the American Dream Life as tales of heroics continued to enter the homes of millions, particularly at Christmas.


Made for Modern Media• Music, too, featured football

themes from time to time, as songwriters reflected the public mood.

• Al Sherman, Buddy Fields and Al Lewis wrote “You Gotta Be A Football Hero” in 1933, and it was recorded by Ben Bernie who made the charts with it.


Made for Modern Media• By the 1920s and 1930s, radio …


Made for Modern Media• .. and film joined the media

swarm that rushed to feature football games and stories.


Made for Modern Media• Football easily fit into the

contours of radio and film (and, later, television).

• It had action and noise, a perfect combination to attract fans attracted to the vicarious Dream Life experience of football heroics.


Made for Modern Media• Attempts were made to broadcast games in 1912 (telegraph from the

University of Minnesota) and 1919 (telephone from New York presenting accounts of the NYU v. Wesleyan game.

• KDKA in Pittsburgh holds a claim to be the first to broadcast college football, with coverage of the 1921 Pitt – West Virginia game.

• Of course, Yale needs to be in the debate, as an amateur broadcast contends in covered the Yale – Princeton game from New Haven on his station, 1GAI.


Made for Modern Media• The first radio broadcast that historians tend to agree on took place on

Thanksgiving Day, 1921, when engineering students cobbled together amateur radio kits to call the Texas A.& M. – Texas game at College Station.

• The first national broadcast occurred a year later in 1922.

• The Chicago-Princeton game was covered via Westinghouse network from Chicago. It wasn’t live.


Made for Modern Media• From that point, college football games became a regular part of radio

programming schedules in the Fall.

• Notre Dame, Army and Navy each had games broadcast nationally and developed national followings because of that.


Made for Modern Media• While radio presented live or

delayed-broadcast action, film had the capacity to present the visual spectacle of football on a grand scale.

• Hollywood knew that and went to work toward creating the mythology previously reserved to books.


Made for Modern Media• The genre of sports films

circulates around familiar arcs, and football both helped to launch and reinforce the template:

- Underdog becomes champion

- Nerd becomes hero- Hard work pays off


Made for Modern Media• It turned out that Walter Camp’s

moral code – fit America’s desire to root for the honest underdog who overcomes obstacles to win the day.

• One of the greatest films in history, Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, is built on that arc, as this and the following stills shows.


Made for Modern Media• Through film, football became

part of what one scholar called the Athletic American Dream, one that is in play today and is stronger than ever.


Made for Modern Media• Moreover, football movies came

to define – and idealize - college life in the through the 1960s.

• Note that only 16 percent of Americans attended college in 1940.

• So the experience of college was vicariously experienced through film.


Made for Modern Media• Between 1926 and 1941,

Hollywood produced 115 college sports movies.

• Some 89 of these works featured college football, because the game featured romance in a socially acceptable sports setting – college campuses.


Made for Modern Media• But films weren’t all about pom-

poms and heroics as social criticism managed to infiltrate the screen.

• College Coach, for one, features a coach who clashes with the school president over the need to sell more tickets and gives recruits money to play.


Made for Modern Media• The president’s son – a

chemistry major - doesn’t want to play football.

• Although he eventually decides to play and help win the big game, the main character shows that the game is corrupted because he has to redeem under the agency of his personal moral code.


Made for Modern Media• The Marx Brothers skewered

football with the satire, Horse Feathers.


Made for Modern Media• The Marx Brothers skewered

football with the 1932 satire, Horse Feathers.

• It featured the classic line from the character Professor Wagstaff. Played by Groucho Marx:


Made for Modern Media• “And I say to you gentlemen that

this college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting football for education.”

• The film landed the Marx Brothers a Time magazine cover, and now more than 80 years later, the film still rings true.


Made for Modern Media• In 1939, another electric

medium – television – joined radio and film in a warm embrace of football.

• NBC telecast the Waynesburg – Fordham football game on its experimental station based in the Empire State Building.


Made for Modern Media• The range of the broadcast was

approximately 50 miles to a potential audience of about 100 TV sets.

• But that would change as football positioned itself to conquer a new medium and deepen its hold on America’s Dream Life, athletic and otherwise.

JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Ten

Education

Transcript of JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Ten