Walter Camp
Biographical details | |
---|---|
Born | New Britain, Connecticut, U.S. | April 7, 1859
Died | March 14, 1925 New York, New York, U.S. | (aged 65)
Playing career | |
1876–1881 | Yale |
Position(s) | Halfback |
Coaching career (HC unless noted) | |
1888–1892 | Yale |
1892, 1894–1895 | Stanford |
Head coaching record | |
Overall | 79–5–3 |
Accomplishments and honors | |
Championships | |
3 national (1888, 1891, 1892) | |
College Football Hall of Fame Inducted in 1951 (profile) |
Walter Chauncey Camp (April 7, 1859 – March 14, 1925) was an American
Camp wrote articles and books on the gridiron and sports in general, annually publishing an "All-American" team. By the time of his death, he had written nearly 30 books and more than 250 magazine articles.
The annual Walter Camp Award is named in his honor, recognizing the best all-around collegiate football player.
Part of the American football series on the |
History of American football |
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Origins of American football |
Close relations to other codes |
Topics |
Life
Camp was born in
Playing career
In 1873, Camp attended a meeting where representatives from Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale universities created the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA). The representatives created the rule that each team is only allowed 15 plays per drive. Camp played as a halfback at Yale from 1876 to 1882. His primary sports where baseball and rugby football before it developed into American football.[4] Harvard player Nathaniel Curtis took one look at Camp, then only 156 pounds, and told Yale captain Gene Baker "You don't mean to let that child play, do you? ... He will get hurt."[5][6]
Family
On June 30, 1888, Camp married Alice Graham Sumner, sister of sociologist William Graham Sumner. They had two children: Walter Camp Jr. (1891–1940), who attended Yale as well and was elected as a member of Scroll and Key in 1912, and Janet Camp Troxell (1897–1987).[7] Camp is buried with his wife and children in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. He was an Episcopalian.[8]
Coaching career
Camp served as the head football coach at Yale from 1888 to 1892. In his time with Yale, the team won 67 games and lost just 2 games.[9] He then moved on to Stanford University, where he coached in December 1892 and in 1894 and 1895. On Christmas Day, 1894, Amos Alonzo Stagg and his University of Chicago Maroons defeated Camp's Stanford team 24–4 at San Francisco in an early intersectional contest.
Father of American Football
Camp was on the various collegiate football rules committees that developed the American game from his time as a player at Yale until his death. English
He is credited with innovations such as the
In 2011, reviewing Camp's role in the founding of the sport and of the
Writing
Despite having a full-time job at the New Haven Clock Company, a Camp family business, and being an unpaid yet very involved adviser to the Yale football team, Camp wrote articles and books on the gridiron and sports in general. By the time of his death, he had written nearly 30 books and more than 250 magazine articles. His articles appeared in national periodicals such as Harper's Weekly, Collier's, Outing, Outlook, and The Independent, and in juvenile magazines such as St. Nicholas, Youth's Companion, and Boys' Magazine. His stories also appeared in major daily newspapers throughout the United States. He also selected an annual "All-American" team.
By the age of 33, twelve years after graduating from Yale, Walter Camp had already become known as the "Father of Football." In a column in the popular magazine Harper's Weekly, sports columnist Caspar Whitney had applied the nickname; the sobriquet was appropriate because, by 1892, Camp had almost single-handedly fashioned the game of modern American football.
Camp was editor for several sports books published by the Spalding Athletic Library.
Eastern bias
The dominance of Ivy League players on Camp's All-America teams led to criticism over the years that his selections were biased against players from the leading Western universities, including Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Notre Dame.
The selectors were typically Eastern writers and former players who attended only games in the East. In December 1910, The Mansfield News, an Ohio newspaper, ran an article headlined: "All-American Teams of East Are Jokes: Critics Who Never Saw Western Teams Play to Name Best in Country -- Forget About Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois."[11] The article noted:
Eastern sporting editors must be devoid of all sense of humor, judging by the way in which they permit their football writers to pick 'All-American' elevens. What man in the lot that have picked 'All-American' elevens this fall, saw a single game outside the North Atlantic States? With a conceit all their own they fail to recognize that the United States reaches more than 200 miles in any direction from New York. ... Suppose an Ohio football writer picked 'All-American' teams. Ohio readers would not stand for it. But apparently the eastern readers will swallow anything.[11]
The Daily Dozen exercise regimen
Camp was a proponent of exercise, and not just for the athletes he coached. While working as an adviser to the
Walter Camp has just developed for the Naval of setting up exercises that seems to fill the bill; a system designed to give a man a running jump start for the serious work of the day. It is called the "daily dozen set-up", meaning thereby twelve very simple exercises.[15]
Both the Army and the Navy used Camp's methods.[16]
The names of the exercises in the original Daily Dozen, as the whole set became known, were hands, grind, crawl, wave, hips, grate, curl, weave, head, grasp, crouch, and wing. As the name indicates, there were twelve exercises, and they could be completed in about eight minutes.[17] A prolific writer, Camp wrote a book explaining the exercises and extolling their benefits. During the 1920s, a number of newspapers and magazines used the term "Daily Dozen" to refer to exercise in general.[18]
Starting in 1921 with the Musical Health Builder
Death
Camp died of a heart attack on March 14, 1925, in New York City.[21]
Head coaching record
Year | Team | Overall | Conference | Standing | Bowl/playoffs | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Yale Bulldogs (Intercollegiate Football Association) (1888–1892) | |||||||||
1888 | Yale | 13–0 | 1st | ||||||
1889 | Yale | 15–1 | |||||||
1890 | Yale | 13–1 | 1st | ||||||
1891 | Yale | 13–0 | 1st | ||||||
1892 | Yale | 13–0 | 1st | ||||||
Yale: | 67–2 | ||||||||
Stanford (Independent) (1892) | |||||||||
1892 | Stanford | 1–0–2 | |||||||
Stanford (Independent) (1894–1895) | |||||||||
1894 | Stanford | 6–3 | |||||||
1895 | Stanford | 4–0–1 | |||||||
Stanford: | 12–3–3 | ||||||||
Total: | 79–5–3 | ||||||||
National championship Conference title Conference division title or championship game berth |
See also
References
- ^ a b Bishop, LuAnn (18 November 2013). "11 Historic Tidbits About The Game". Yale News. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- ISBN 9780199925636.
Nicholas Camp, his earliest known ancestor, came to Massachusetts and settled in Connecticut in 1630.
- ^ a b c "Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University Deceased during the Year 1924–1925" (PDF). Yale University. 1925. pp. 1348–50. Retrieved March 24, 2011.
- ^ "Walter Chauncey Camp". 2022-01-24.
- ^ "Camp Curbed the Carnage". Spokane Daily Chronicle. September 8, 1962.
- ^ "Star-News - Google News Archive Search". google.com.
- ^ "Yale 'Taps' in rain amid great tension; Nervousness of the Marshaled Juniors Reflects Owen Johnson's Attack on the System" (PDF). New York Times. May 17, 1912. Retrieved 2017-01-24.[dead link]
- ISBN 978-0-19-992563-6.
- ^ "Walter Camp | American sportsman". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2020-05-20.
- ^ Branch, Taylor, "The Shame of College Sports," The Atlantic, September 14, 2011 (October 2011 issue). In 1905 in McClure's, Henry Beach Needham published two stories, "The College Athlete: His Amateur Code: Its Evasion and Administration." (July; 25:3 p. 260) and "The College Athlete: How Commercialism Is Making Him a Professional" (June; 25:2) with Yale content per "The early history of football at Yale: Contemporary sources" Archived 2012-04-26 at the Wayback Machine, Critical Sport Studies. Retrieved 2011-09-27.
- ^ a b c "All-American Teams of East Are Jokes: Critics Who Never Saw Western Teams Play to Name Best in Country -- Forget About Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois". The Mansfield News. December 8, 1910.
- ^ Ross Tenney (December 31, 1922). "Much Dissatisfaction Over Camp's All-American Team: Football Dean Is Accused of Favoring East; Walter Camp Soundly Scored For 'Poorest Teams Ever Foisted Upon Public'". The Des Moines Capital.
- ^ "Westerners Missed By Walter Camp: Football Wizard Puts Indian on 'All-American.'". The Decatur Review. December 7, 1911. p. 5.
- ^ Farnsworth, W.S. (1910-12-04). "Picking All-Stars Is No Easy Task: Backfield Men Show Greater Individuality Then Men on the Line and Are More Easily Chosen". The Billings Daily Gazette.
- ^ "A Daily Dozen Set-Up. Walter Camp's New Shorthand System of Morning Exercises", Outing, November 1918, p. 98
- ^ "Walter Camp, Father of Football," Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1920, p. 2D
- Boston Globe, July 11, 1920, p. 64
- ^ Lulu Hunt Peters, "Diet and Health: The Daily Dozens—Take 'Em." Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1927, p. A6
- ^ "Recent Acquisitions 2007", National Library of Medicine, Walter Camp Musical Health Builder (New York, 1921). Retrieved 2011-09-14. Archived 2015-10-06 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Getting the Radio News by Telephone". Popular Mechanics: 636–638. 1925.
- ^ "Walter Chauncey Camp". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2013-10-08.
Bibliography
- Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics, (1990)
- "Walter Camp Found All-American Eleven Selections and Originated the Daily Dozen." New York Times, March 15, 1925. p. 1.
External links
- Walter Camp at the College Football Hall of Fame
- Works by Walter Camp at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Walter Camp at Internet Archive
- Walter Camp at Find a Grave
- Walter Camp (1912). Condensed auction for the busy man. NY: Platt & Peck.