Today's Tidbit... Only Fools Rush On
We have seen a recent spate of publicity, and fines have been levied due to fans rushing the field in victory. Such behavior illustrates how kids these days no longer respect authority, think only of themselves, and do not consider how their behavior potentially endangers the players and coaches on the field.
Back in my day, we knew our place and did not venture onto the field following a victory or a loss. We knew better than that. However, let me tell you a story or two of fan behavior before the forward pass entered football.
Back then, large and small school teams often played games on fields with limited grandstands. For big games, especially the rivalry games played in late November, the crowds far exceeded the capacity of the stands, so the proprietors roped off the field, expecting the crowd to stay on the side of the rope opposite the playing field.
An article from April 2022 describes field roping and includes seven images of crowds more or less behind the ropes.
Crowds remained orderly in most cases, but that was not always the case when the gales of November made ‘em surly.
Take, for example, the Orange YMCA-Passaic game. Since fans came on the field during the previous contest and interrupted play, they planned to have extra police on duty for the next game.
Likewise, those snot-nosed brats from Georgia Tech got in the way and interrupted play near the end of their victory over Georgia one year.
Then there was the game between Kentucky (aka State) and Transylvania (aka Kentucky University), which was the top rivalry in the Commonwealth. Not only did fans come onto the field, but a Wildcat cadet also came onto the field to tackle Yancey of Transylvania with five yards left on an 80—or 85-yard touchdown run.
And who can forget the Cal-Stanford game when the cable that held back the crowd broke, requiring the constables on horseback to keep things orderly?
Bad behavior was evident at the Big Game and smaller ones, like the Augustana-Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) game.
This story began by mentioning that there has been a spate of field rushing lately, but there was a lot more of it back in the day, and fans more often interfered with play. If you don't believe me, check the dates of the five newspaper articles above. Each article is from November 1902, and several are from games played on Thanksgiving Day. There are more where those came from, so fans on the field are nothing new, and, in many respects, crowds today display better behavior than did their grandparents or great-grandparents.
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The constable should have been designated as the twelfth man.
Ropes show up in the earliest prints, newspaper illustrations, the work of Remington et al. ..