Football History As Told By Sporting Goods Catalogs: Cleats and Shoes

Among the sources that best document the state of football at any given time are sporting goods catalogs. Those catalogs tell us the products manufacturers, great and small, offered for sale to high schools, colleges, and, later, professional teams across the country. Short of products still in the testing process, catalogs provide a freeze-frame of top-of-the-line materials -often touted by famous coaches- and the lesser and far lesser goods available to different market segments.

With that premise, this is the second of a series of posts, each of which reviews a few items offered for sales during football's history. In addition to images from period catalogs, I'll use each item to explain elements of football at the time of each catalog's publication.

Part 1 of this series mostly covered footballs and the equipment to repair them. We open this article with a final nod to footballs by looking at white, rather than the brown or tan, footballs we typically associate with the game. When Daylight Saving Time became a thing in 1918, coaches in some locations found their team practicing in the dark, so a few painted a football or two white to enhance their visibility. A few years later, teams played the first modern night games under primitive lighting systems. They also used white footballs so the teams and crowd could spot the ball in the air.

Early striped footballs often had stripes located closer to the middle of the ball than became the norm. (1941-42 Rawlings Catalog)

Over the years, sporting goods manufacturers offered white or yellow footballs, white footballs with black stripes, and, more commonly, brown footballs with white stripes to enhance the ball's visibility for games played in poor lighting conditions. High schools, colleges, and the NFL all used white balls at one time or another. The NFL removed the white stripe from its brown ball only after improved lighting conditions made the stripes unnecessary.

With that, our focus turns to players' equipment, and specifically, their shoes. Early American football players used rugby shoes imported from England. Made of kangaroo leather, they were the top-of-the-line equipment for decades, but domestic manufacturers came to dominate the market with shoes made of good ol' cowhide. Like their British predecessors, American football shoes had rectangular, laminated leather cleats set in various patterns. Critically, those cleats were tacked onto the bottom of the shoe, and replacing them required the town cobbler's services.

The leather laminated cleats of the early 1920s were conical or trapezoidal in shape, but all were tacked to the sole. (1922 House-Hasson Hardware Company, Knoxville)

Along came John Riddell, the football coach at Evanston High School in Illinois during much of the 1920s.