Intro -- Contents -- CHAPTER I: The English Background of Early American College Sport -- CHAPTER II: Sport, the Extracurriculum, and the Idea of Freedom -- CHAPTER III: The First Intercollegiate Sport: Crew and the Commercial Spirit -- CHAPTER IV: Crew: Internationalism, Expansion, and the Yale-Harvard Pullout -- CHAPTER V: The Rise of College Baseball -- CHAPTER VI: From the Burial of Football to the Acceptance of Rugby -- CHAPTER VII: The Americanization of Rugby Football: Mass Plays, Brutality, and Masculinity -- CHAPTER VIII: College Track: From the Paper Chase to Olympic Gold -- CHAPTER IX: Student Control and Faculty Resistance -- CHAPTER X: The Early Failure of Faculty Inter-Institutional Control -- CHAPTER XI: The Rise of the Professional Coach -- CHAPTER XII: Amateur College Sport: An Untenable Concept in a Free and Open Society -- CHAPTER XIII: Eligibility Rules in a Laissez-Faire Collegiate Scene -- CHAPTER XIV: Brutality, Ethics, and the Creation of the NCAA -- CHAPTER XV: The Swarthmore Case: An Addendum on Freedom -- EPILOGUE A Twentieth-Century Meaning of American College Athletics -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

Perhaps more than any other two colleges, Harvard and Yale gave form to American intercollegiate athletics--a form that was inspired by the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry overseas, and that was imitated by colleges and universities throughout the United States. Focusing on the influence of these prestigious eastern institutions, this fascinating study traces the origins and development of intercollegiate athletics in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Smith begins with an historical overview of intercollegiate athletics and details the evolution of individual sports--crew, baseball, track and field, and especially football. Then, skillfully setting various sports events in their broader social and cultural contexts, Smith goes on to discuss many important issues that are still relevant today: student-faculty competition for institutional athletic control; the impact of the professional coach on big-time athletics; the false concept of amateurism in college athletics; and controversies over eligibility rules. He also reveals how the debates over brutality and ethics created the need for a central organizing body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which still runs college sports today. Sprinkled throughout with spicy sports anecdotes, from the Thanksgiving Day Princeton-Yale football game that drew record crowds in the 1890s to a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt on football violence, this lively, in-depth investigation will appeal to serious sports buffs as well as to anyone interested in American social and cultural history.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.