What did President Roosevelt say about football in 1905?

Answer 1

Roosevelt was quoted as saying:

" I believe in outdoor games, and I do not mind in the least that they are rough games, or that those who take part in them are occasionally injured. I have no sympathy whatever with the overwrought sentimentality which would keep a young man in cotton-wool, and I have a hearty contempt for him if he counts a broken arm or collar-bone as of serious consequence when balanced against the chance of showing that he possesses hardihood, physical address, and courage. "

He was also quoted as saying:

"It is a bad thing for any college man to grow to regard sport as the serious business of life . . . The college undergraduate who, in furtive fashion, becomes a semiprofessional is an unmitigated curse, and that not alone to university life and to the cause of amateur sport; for the college graduate ought in after-years to take the lead in putting the business morality of this country on a proper plane, and he cannot do it if in his own college career his code of conduct has been warped and twisted. . . . It is a better thing for our colleges to have the average student interested in some form of athletics than to have them all gather in a mass to see other people do their athletics for them."

I don't know that the words of the meeting have been kept for posterity, but in 1905 Roosevelt met with representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to persuade them to make football a less violent game. At Roosevelt's insistence, universities established the National College Athletic Association and the American Football Rules Committee. In 1906, the sport legalized the forward pass and banning the flying wedge and other mass formations.