By Jay Jamison
In the fall of 1869, two teams met on a field in New Jersey in what would become the first inter-collegiate football game. There were no stands for spectators, no fancy scoreboard, no cheerleaders, no marching bands. The Rutgers University squad beat the Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) team 6 to 4. That was 155 years ago. On October 19 of this year, the University of Illinois played Michigan in Memorial Stadium in Champaign, and the home team was celebrating the centennial of the stadium. Even though the Fighting Illini wore helmets that simulated leather ones worn by players a century ago, they were in fact standard protective headgear for football players in the twenty-first century. How times have changed.
College football is just one example of how Americans tend to take games, events or holidays, and then expand them beyond all recognition to their origins. Just imagine someone from the late 1860s attending a football game at a major university today.
“Who are those people over there?”
“They’re cheerleaders.”
My time traveler looks at me, puzzled. He points out to me, in hushed tones, that the women are hardly wearing anything at all. In his day seeing a woman’s ankle was enough to cause palpitations.
“And who are those people in uniforms? Is that a marching band? I thought this was a football game?”
We’ve come a long way from a game played in front of about 100 spectators in 1869. Today, huge, multimillion dollar stadiums are filled with tens of thousands of spectators. Today, one half of a football game is wedged between the pre-game show and the half-time show, followed by the game’s other half and the post-game show. Big-time college football has grown to be more of a spectacle than a game, and I haven’t even mentioned the NFL.
In April 1941, an organ was installed at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Over time, every other major league ballpark followed suit. Beer in the stands I can understand, but what does organ music have to do with baseball?
A small religious observance celebrated on the eve of All Saints Day, All Hallows Eve, better known as Halloween, has evolved into a month-long celebration of death and creepiness in America. I’ve often wondered what factory workers in foreign countries, where much of the Halloween stuff is made, say to each other as they ramp up production of another 10,000 plastic skeletons with bleeding eye sockets. I wonder what they think of us. What kind of country has such an insatiable demand for these decorations? Like college football, the holiday has expanded beyond recognition from its humble beginnings.
Then there’s Christmas, a religious holiday that has been Americanized into a gigantic commercial spectacle.
I was once part of this American passion for bigness. Part of my job in the advance for Carson & Barnes Circus was to ballyhoo the immense size of the show, performed under the “Biggest Big Top on Earth!” More elephants! More horses! A bigger menagerie! More flying trapeze acts! Five rings, not three! We were bigger and better than our competitors.
I’m not casting aspersions, nor am I proclaiming these trends to be either good or bad. But I think we can agree that the push to make games, events and holidays bigger and more lavish, is an aspect of American culture that sets us apart. We not only have come to expect such excesses, many of us think of it as normal.
