Jun 21 2007
What If the Canadians Hadn’t Given Us Rugby?
Since I’m in kind of a “what if” mood this week, I thought I’d throw this one out there as a topic of conversation…
Most people don’t know that it was a group of Canadians that brought rugby to America. The first rugby match between Harvard and McGill in 1874 became the turning point for American football, and our modern gridiron game evolved from that.
But what if the Canadians hadn’t brought rugby to America? What if they had brought the Football Association game instead?
Yes, you’d have to go back even further and point to the British soldiers who brought rugby football to Canada in the first half of the 19th century, well before the first laws of either soccer or rugby had been finalized. Perhaps if those soldiers chosen to play the FA’s game instead, Harvard and McGill would have played by those rules instead, and American football might never have become today’s gridiron game.
Imagine a world where soccer takes hold on campuses in the 1870s, and American universities adopt the FIFA laws for football in the early 20th century. Imagine a world where this brand of football sits atop the American sports landscape, rather than the gridiron game we see today. Sure, Dr. Naismith might still give us basketball, and baseball would still be our national pastime, but football would become our national obsession — the boys of winter standing in contrast to our boys of summer.
In a world where our American football heroes kicked goals rather than catch touchdowns, how many of the biggest names in baseball might have chosen to play football instead? Would Jackie Robinson have broken the color barrier in football, rather than baseball, and would that have changed the game? How about, say, Mickey Mantle on the pitch, or Rickey Henderson? How about some guys that went on to become NFL stars? Jim Brown? Joe Montana? Lynn Swann? Barry Sanders? Archie Manning & Sons? Mike Ditka?
Better yet, imagine a world where the USA football squad was filled the nation’s most elite athletes and was a World Cup contender every four years…
Yeah, I guess it was never meant to be, was it? We’re Americans, after all. We just have to do things differently, and we always have to believe those differences make us better than everyone else. Plus, without American football, we’d never be able to sing “Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life.”
Still, it’s fun to ponder alternate worlds. If it weren’t, Sliders would never have survived its first season…
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If the American universities had stuck with association football rules, it still isn’t certain that they would have agreed to abide by the rules set up by the FA, or later, the International Football Board (FIFA came much later). So we still might have ended up with our own “American only” football code.
What’s more interesting to imagine is, say, a USA where the US Civil War did not happen and each state pretty much goes its own way in cultural and sporting terms (ie, you don’t have the Northeastern Yankees creating a national mythology that the USA began with a bunch of Pilgrims eating turkey with the Indians in the first Thanksgiving). So the fact that Harvard or Yale adopted a particular code wouldn’t mean squat outside of New England, for instance.
In such a situation, you’d have the USA looking a bit more like Australia: sports competition based at the intra-state level, rather than inter-state, with some football codes being dominant in some states and almost nonexistent in others.
The ironic thing about that song is that thanks to the forward pass and the pointy ball, no one drop kicks field goals in gridiron anymore.
As I mentioned in your earlier thread about gridiron players playing rugby, we actually did have different states adopting different codes for a while, back in the late 19th/early 20th century when rugby, not gridiron, was dominant in California.
Dave: I saw that comment about California rugby, actually. I’m going to look into that one after I get back from my big beach trip this weekend.
I’ve thought about this too before, imagine if the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears and the rest of the early teams were actually soccer clubs? I wonder what the old footage of those games would look like in those days with soccer goals and the bears and packers logos on the jerseys instead of on the helmets. We would’nt have had to change the name of the sport either.
Hey guys, I’m really looking forward to the Tri Nations Series. I was looking around the web for a place to watch rugby online (I’m in the US, no rugby on TV here), and I found this great site with a blog.
The blog is - http://mediazonerugby.typepad.com/
Streamed Rugby is - http://www.mediazone.com/channel/rugby/jsp/2006/trinations.jsp\ Check it out guys
Or a much better result would have been miners from the Aussie Gold rushes of the mid-late 1800s bringing back Aussie Rules (possibly called Victorian Rules at that stage). Oh what a wonderful world that would be……
@Dave: I might have overstated the case a bit about rugby being “dominant” in California in the late 19th century, but it was the first football code played by the University of California.
@Ronald Dale: there’s almost zero chance of mid- to late-19th gold miners returning to the USA and having any influence on the development of football in the USA. Whichever code captured the universities was going to be dominant in the USA, and I doubt any gold miners ever matriculated into a 19th century Ivy League university.
Interesting. I had no idea rugby had been introduced to us so long ago. It definitely makes you wonder. I wouldn’t want to square off against Bo Jackson or Jim Brown in any sport, but think of all the players with purely pro football skills that would have been left out of the cold. Take Dan Marino. I can’t see him having the same impact in Rugby (or any sport really) as he did in the NFL, where he was one of the best ever.
I think Marino would have chosen a different sport and done well at it. For example, Joe Montana probably would have been a Steve Nash-like point guard. He actually turned down a basketball scholarship at NC State to play QB at Notre Dame.