FOOTBALL.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 26, 28 June 1911, Page 8

FOOTBALL.

’AHY THEY KILL PLAYERS IK AMERICA. PUNCHING AND KICKING. Twenty-six killed and 208 badly injured, a number being maimed for life. That was the casualty list of the American football season for the six weeks up to the end of Novenber last. November sees the end of football in the States. Later on the weather is too hard. In 1908 only 18 were killed and 135 badly damaged, so it is plain that the game becomes steadily more strenuous every year. American football, as a matter of fact, is a far more brutal sport than prizefighting. No wonder, then, that several of the largest 'and most important' Universities have taken the strong step of banning the game entirely.

SEVENTEEN CARRIED OFF IN ONE MATCH. For it is not in professional matches that these terrific accidents occur. On November 9 last there was a match between Harvard University and the Government Military College of West Point, an institution resembling the British Army College at Sandhurst. In the second half of the game, Mr. E. A. Byrne, one of the West Point team, went' down unsonseious. His father, who was among the spectators, rushed up. His son was dead. His neck hud been broken. In another game—this, if you please, between the Wesleyan University at' Schenectady and the Union College—l 7 players in all were carried off the field unconscious. Five were very badly injured, and had to be taken away in ambulances. Every scrimmage, said one onlooker, was a scene of indiscriminate punching and kicking, against which even the stout armour worn by all American footballers was powerless. An American football team, when they enter the field, resemble nothing so much as a company of divers on dry land. They wear huge head protectors with ear guards, and steel pads to save the nose. They have their armour over the chest, the abdomen and legs, with wrist guards and wooden splints round the ankles. They wear also boots with spikes, the sight of which would throw the average British referee into a fit. Of course, football came to America originally from England, but no one would ever recognise the present code of American football rules as having anything whatsoever to do with the original British one.

Some say this is because the whole American football season lasts only six weeks, while in England the game ambles on peacefully for nearly six months. Therefore, the Americans have to make up in violence what they lose in time. But the real fact of the matter seems to be that nothing would ever induce the average American football player to accept and abide by that most vital of all the rules of true footbll, namely, the offside rule. At first the British off-side rule was left in, but as every American who could possibly play off-side without being seen insists upon doing so, the American football legislators were at last reduced to legalise certain kinds of offside play. Here was the beginning of trouble, and since then the football law-makers in America have lieen adding rule after rule till the code is almost as formidable as the much-debated British Budget Bill. The Americans after they took to teams of only 11 aside, tried the extraordinary experiment of having eight’ men in the “rush line” and only three backs. The ball would be put in play by a man who passed it between his legs to the “snap back,” and so at once put all the forwards off-side. Wo have neither time or inclination to bore our readers with the complicated rules which attempted to put a stop to this sort' of thing, nor the endless dodges of American football lawyers to evade these laws. Sufficient to say that American football to-day is not a game, but a battle, a matter of flying wedges, of furious single-handed combats. Each captain directs his men by a set-

ies of secret signals, which are so difficult and complicated that the team must! spend days and nights of study and practice in acquiring them. The two worst features of the game are, first, the practice of allowing a member of one team to hold one of his opponents who has not got the ball, and, secondly, of permitting substitutes to take the place of injured players. There is no need to point out why these practices are so bad. Ever/ player will see for himself how ruinouj they are to true football.