Coming to America: The Canadian Rugby Exhibition of 1909

Most football fans know that Teddy Roosevelt called for football reforms in 1905, and his intervention encouraged 1906 rule changes that included legalizing the forward pass. A host of other safety-oriented rule changes came in 1906, but proved inadequate, requiring more tweaking of the rules in 1907, 1908, and 1909. Yet, at the end of the 1909 season, the newspapers reported that thirty-two Americans died from football injuries during the 1909 season, including a West Point cadet in a game versus Harvard. While we would not attribute all those deaths to football today, football was an exceedingly rough game, and the headgear and pads of the time were inadequate. Looking for input to make American football safer, the editors of the New York Herald invited two top Canadian rugby teams, the Hamilton Tigers and the Ottawa Rough Riders, to play an exhibition in New York City.

By 1909, American football and Canadian rugby had evolved along distinct paths from their common parent, English rugby. Broadly, Canadian rugby used downs and striped fields as in football, but the action remained rugby-like, so there were fewer significant injuries than American football, and deaths were almost unknown. 

The teams met at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on December 11, 1909. The crowd, estimated at 5,000 to 20,000, included key authorities in the American football community, including Walter Camp, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Percy Haughton, and coaches or athletic directors from Army, Navy, Penn, Brown, Williams, and others.

Other than the New York-based Canadians in the crowd, most spectators were unfamiliar with the Canadian game's rules and nature of play. For example, American football allowed the center to snap the ball using his hands starting in 1892, while the Canadian game still heeled the ball. 

The alignment in Canadian rugby was more like football than rugby. Play started when the center pushed the ball back to the quarterback using his foot, as occurs in a rugby scrum.

A key difference in the sports was that American football had allowed interference (aka blocking) since the mid-1880s while Canadian rugby would not do so until 1920. Canadians moved the ball using multiple laterals on rugby-style sweeps, and by punting and drop kicking from anywhere on the field of play. The sweeping laterals and punting mid-play appealed to the crowd because the combination led to open play and long runs.