How we got football.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: TIMES PAST 1905

The game that exploded in popularity after the Civil War grew so violent it was nearly banned. Then President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to rescue it.

A football crisis was consuming America.

In 1905, at least 18 high school and college boys died playing the sport, and more than 150 were seriously hurt. At the time, protective gear was rarely worn, and the game's loose rules permitted gang tackles and pileups that led to countless concussions and broken limbs and spines. There were passionate cries to ban the sport, met with equally ferocious shouts supporting football and its virtues. One of the game's most powerful fans was President Theodore Roosevelt. A firm advocate of the "strenuous life," he believed in the game's ability to make men out of boys. But by 1905, he also understood that it would need to be reformed if it had any chance of surviving.

"Football is on trial," he told a group of Ivy League college presidents at the White House that year. "Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it."

To understand how football arrived at that crisis point in 1905--and how it has since evolved into America's most popular sport, with a record 114 million fans tuning in to the Super Bowl last January--it's important to first understand where football comes from. Some experts say the game is as old as humankind, with traces of it evident in prehistoric societies.

A 'Primal Game'

"Football is a primal game," says Sally Jenkins, author of The Real All Americans, which charts football's history. "It's existed ever since Celtic invaders* were kicking around the skulls of the defeated armies."

The more modern incarnation of football traces to early 19th-century England. Playing soccer with his schoolmates one afternoon in 1823, a 16-year-old named William Webb Ellis caught the ball and ran with it toward the opponent's goal. It violated soccer's rules, but it also gave birth to a new game called rugby--a direct ancestor of American football.

By the mid-19th century, rugby-like versions of "football" were sprouting up at Ivy League campuses in the northeastern U.S.--rough-and-tumble games with few rules and little uniformity among the various schools. It was the dawn of the industrial age, and the notion that sports trained young men to be strong physically and morally--an English concept known as "muscular Christianity"--was taking hold in the U.S. The idea became even more widespread after the Civil War (1861-65). In the absence of real combat, sports became a new proving ground for men, with baseball, boxing, and football exploding in popularity.

"There's sort of this pervasive anxiety about manliness from the 1870s through the Victorian era [1837-1901]," says Jenkins. "Football evolves partly because there's a big concern that young men are spending too much time in parlors, that the world is becoming too mechanized and urbanized, and that there needs to be some artificial means of training young men in games of power."

By the late 1870s, football had gained the reputation of a "blood sport," according to John J. Miller, the author of The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football. "Instead of helmets, the men went bareheaded or put on [ornamental] stocking caps," he writes. "They did not use pads.... Ordinary roughness frequently turned to violence as players heaved each other to the ground, threw elbows, and piled on top of one another."

A social and political movement to ban football, which began in the 1870s, reached a boiling point in 1905. The New York Times criticized...