Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football, by Roger R. Tamte

Walter Camp has been rightly described as the father of American football, but not too many players or fans today could tell you much about who he was or his role in shaping America's favorite game.  Roger R. Tamte's Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football will set the record straight.  This is a biography of Walter Camp, but it's also a biography of the game of football; the two cannot be separated.

As a football player at Yale, Camp was a part of the earliest games that we recognize as football.  As a student, and later as a graduate, coach, athletic director, and prominent alumnus, he sat on the rules committee that shaped the game out of its rough start as a modification of rugby into a form that more closely resembles what is played today.  To me it seemed remarkable that in the early days, Camp was among committees of students shaping the game.  There were no professional coaches or even advisors.  Students handled all the elements of training, coaching, scheduling, and planning, working together with students from rival schools to hammer out agreements about rules. 

Tamte marks the year 1882 as the year that "should be celebrated in American football--the closest the game has to a 'birth' year."  This is the year that Camp's down-and-distance rule, at that time 5 yards in three downs, was implemented, totally reworking the game.  Tamte writes, "the new rule infused the game with interest.  Each play became important, a limited opportunity to advance toward the needed five yards and contribute to game success."  This became Camp's deepest mark and most lasting legacy on how the game was played.

Football quickly gained in popularity, and Camp remained at the center of it, not only in rule making, but in the culture of the game.  He was arguably the first university athletics director, and had a hand in establishing the funding and promotion of football that resembles today's structures.  It is certainly interesting to see that the same issues that concern college football today were alive from the start: player eligibility, paying players, the dangers of the game, the game's importance to or distraction from the academics of the players, the game's popularity as a means of promoting the schools, etc.

Tamte focuses on Walter Camp, but Camp is so central to the development of football that this is an important book about the history of football, especially on the college level.  He doesn't touch the growth of the NFL.  I was a little surprised and disappointed that he doesn't touch the issue of race.  It goes without saying that no blacks were playing at Yale or any other major college in the late 19th and early 20th century, but I was left wondering how quickly black colleges picked up the game, whether they merely embraced the rules as set by the white colleges or made their own.  Perhaps that is for another book by another author.  Nevertheless, Tamte does football fans a great service by telling Camp's story.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!