Today's Tidbit... The Bumpy Road to Today's Shoulder Pads
Today's Tidbit... The Bumpy Road to Today's Shoulder Pads
I've covered various steps in the evolution of shoulder pads in Tidbits past, but here's another step in the journey that deserves treatment.
The linked articles show that shoulder pads started as simple leather or cloth pads stuffed with horsehair, felt, or fabric sewn on the exterior of football sweaters. The individual pads were sewn atop the shoulder, on the shoulder blades, or over the sternum and were used to prevent injury and cushion those that already occurred.
An advantage of early shoulder pads was their customizability. While Spalding and other purveyors sold the pads in standard shapes, they left it to the individual player or equipment manager to determine where to position the pads. Still, sporting goods manufacturers produced integrated shoulder pads by the turn of the century, with some slipping over the head like shoulder pads today. Others were little more than separate pads connected by a few pieces of string or rawhide.
Things changed by 1914 when Spalding offered several integrated shoulder pad systems that began to resemble the shoulder pads of today. The first set prioritized the joint where the arm bones connected to the shoulder bones, while felt and leather padding covered the collarbone and sternum. Although football players did not vary in size like today, the description tells us the model YF was adjustable.
The model LYS appears adjustable based on an image from another catalog page.
While the models YF and LYS were pretty snazzy, we'll use this opportunity to celebrate the current Paris Olympics by showing Spalding's pièce de résistance of shoulder pads. Given the unhealthy swimming conditions in the Seine, it's appropriate that Spalding referred to their top model as the BM.
The BM model had to look weird, even for 1914. Canvas vests were common attire at the time, and Spalding simply attached leather pads front, back, right, and left and offered them for $10, or twice the price of their best football and more than double the price of their best head harness (aka helmet). While players commonly wore their team sweaters or jerseys under their canvas vests at the time, players must have worn sweaters over their BMs since I have never seen one worn on the outside in period images.
These shoulder pads not only looked like BM but must have sold like it since they quickly disappeared from the Spalding catalog.
Despite Spalding's sidestep with the model BM, Reach's 1918 shoulder pad offering shows that the overall design of shoulder pads quickly shifted to the look they retain today, despite the cantilevered designs and use of plastics and space-age materials being decades away.
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