The ball was typically clutched under the arm or lateraled underhand rather than hurled forward, and so it looked to many in the crowd as if it had been knocked out of the player’s hands by a defender rather than deliberately thrown. It happened so fast, amid such a flurry of chaos, that it was easy to miss it altogether, which was what happened to the official on the field in charge of recognizing such illegalities. Heisman watched the ball totter through the air from a few feet away and wondered if he’d just witnessed the thing that might save this sport, which had itself become a burgeoning American institution. P erhaps because of that, Heisman more fully understood the social and mechanical challenges football was facing, and he viewed the game through a more progressive lens as the nation reckoned with its own radical cultural and political movement. His name was John Heisman, and at age 26, he was 10 years younger than Camp. It was different because, unlike with Camp - who would go on to become the pre-eminent figure in the early history of football, and who would come to believe that the forward pass was a fundamental betrayal of the game’s central principles - this particular quirk in the historical continuum took place at just the right moment, in front of just the right person. This type of thing had been done before - it happened, in fact, in 1876, when a Yale football player named Walter Camp hurled the ball forward to a teammate as he was being tackled by a Princeton defender (in that case, the official tossed a coin to determine the result of the play and awarded a touchdown to Yale). This is how progress so often occurs in football: With an idea manifesting itself out of sheer necessity. It was neither smooth nor aesthetically beautiful, but it was a forward pass nonetheless, one of the first of its kind in competitive play, attempted without any real foresight at all. It moved both laterally (which was within the rules) and upfield (which was not). Instead, Whitaker took a few steps to his right, and then performed perhaps the most impactful ad-lib in the history of American sports: He tossed the ball. If he kicked the ball, it might be smothered and returned for a touchdown, and he in turn might be smothered along with it, potentially crushing his unprotected skull or shattering an unpadded limb in the process. The North Carolina player, Joel Whitaker, was trapped near his own goal line and driven largely by desperation. In that moment, in an industrial nation nearing the turn of the 20th century, the gospel of football had just begun to manifest itself nationwide, and yet at the same time the sport had become so oppressively violent that there was growing angst about whether it even had a future at all. It was not the same football we know today - it was heavier and rounder, with all the aerodynamic thrust of a ripe watermelon - but then, this was not the game we know today, either. 26, 1895, Atlanta: A University of North Carolina football player, besieged by a wall of Georgia defenders while preparing to punt, hoisted a leather-bound spheroid to his shoulder.
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