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Revisiting the Crescent Athletic Club in Football History · Sports History Network

• 0:47
  In American football history, there's a first time for everything.
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  And it's really special when somebody digs in and finds a first time that maybe we hadn't heard of.
• 0:56
  Timothy p.
• 0:56
  Brown of FootballArchaeology.com has found another first in football.
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  It's significant, and I'm gonna let Tim tell you all about it.
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  Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.
• 1:06
  Darin.
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  Look forward to chatting and just want to say that Allison Danzig was a writer who struggled with his prose.
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  Oh, boy.
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  Oh, gosh.
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  We might have to take a station break here after that one.
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  We might be banned.
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  But.
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  But Tim has written a tidbit recently on the author Allison Danzig, and a great football historian.
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  It's called Allison Danzig and the Crescent Athletic Club.
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  So, really, you got two great pieces of history here and just in the title, and we'd love to hear what this story is about.
• 1:47
  Yeah, well, so, you know, we talked about some of this last week where, you know, there were the way football has evolved.
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  People in an earlier period could not have imagined that happening.
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  They.
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  They could not have foreseen the evolution.
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  You know, last week you talked about penalties and how those evolved.
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  But here the issue is.
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  So Allison Danzig was, you know, a top sports writer, wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle and New York times for, like, 45 years.
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  You know, so.
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  But he was probably best known for tennis, but he covered a lot of football, too.
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  And, you know, he wrote an article that caught my eye.
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  Just, you know, one of these I stumbled upon.
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  It was like, 1921, and he wrote an article arguing for somebody to revive the Crescent Athletic Club.
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  So.
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  And because he wanted college, you know, post college players to be able to continue playing football, you know, in 1921.
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  This is right after World War I.
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  So there had been a lot of former college players who'd played, you know, military ball, you know, during the war.
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  So, you know, maybe that had something to do with him raising this issue.
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  But, you know, he was going back to the day 18, mid-1880s through the 1990s, and, you know, maybe a little bit further where the Crescent Athletic Club was, you know, maybe the top football team in the country.
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  And, you know, they had.
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  They won their league, and it was like the American Football League or something like that.
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  I can't remember the name of it, but.
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  And then.
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  Then it kind of faded away.
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  Right.
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  But it was.
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  The Crescent team was mostly made up of former Yale players who were, you know, working on Wall street or whatever they were doing in the New York area.
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  But they had a bunch of Princeton Guys too.
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  And then the Orange Athletic Club was their rival and they were over in New Jersey.
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  And then, you know, they, but they play Harvard and Yale and other teams, Princeton sometimes, Penn sometimes.
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  So they, they play a very competitive schedule.
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  Typically they'd lose to the college teams and at the time they, they kind of, I think the guys just weren't in as good a shape as the college players was part of it.
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  They didn't practice as much.
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  And you know, so, you know, that kind of led to this belief that, you know, football's a college game.
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  You're never really going to have guys continuing to play for all that long because they're just, they get too old, right.
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  They get 25 or something.
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  And so anyway, so he writes this piece in 21 kind of said, wouldn't it be great if somebody would develop, would recreate the, you know, the Crescent AC and some other team, you know, because they got to play
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  somebody.
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  But it would be so cool because these former college greats would have a chance to play.
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  And so he wrote that piece and it's just very clear that he could not have conceived of professional football developing.
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  But you said this is 1921 though.
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  So this is the second year of the NFL.
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  Yeah, APFA is going on and, and.
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  It's a rinky dink little.
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  So there's a lot of professional teams though, you know, a lot of localized teams, especially on East Coast.
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  And let's look at the, where these teams are because, you know, they had, they had teams in big markets.
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  But among the teams in the NFL in 1921 were Akron, Canton, Dayton, Evansville, Green Bay, though they were suspended.
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  And Green Bay was a rinky dink little town then still kind of is Hammond, Indiana, Onawanda and Muncie, Indiana.
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  So, you know, these are not thriving metropolises, right?
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  I mean, there was a lot of rinky dink outfits, guys moving from team to team and just, you know, they, they wouldn't practice during the week because they all had jobs and they'd show up Saturday afternoon or something,
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  maybe run around a little bit, you know.
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  So anyways, you know, the point is that here's this a guy who's as well informed as anybody in the football world.
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  If he's a writing about football for the New York Times.
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  He's, you know, he's got, he's got a sense of the game and he just can't conceive that this, you know, this AAPC or NFL or whatever it was called that year was ever going to amount to apfa yeah,
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  whatever, you know, so I mean, but that's, I mean to me that's the interesting story that he just cannot conceive of it, you know, because at that time you had, you know, you had these early NFL teams, you
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  had other Pennsylvania, Ohio League teams, but like on the west coast the best football post college was, you know, Athletic Club teams.
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  You know, you had.
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  What's the guys in now?
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  I'm blanking on the name.
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  The guys in, in Portland you had the Olympic Club.
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  In San Francisco, you know, there were others but you know, those were the best.
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  And then a lot of military teams still, you know, they'd, they draw sell out crowds for the Armistice Day games and for the President's cup games.
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  And those are in big, you know, big time cities, you know, so 50, 60, you know, thousand people for, for some of those games.
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  Anyways, I just think it's so, you know, it's like even into World War II there were still people who discounted the professional game.
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  And, and it's really not until the 60s where it really takes off and supersedes, you know, the college game.
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  You know, I mean, as much as we talk about stars of the 50s, you know, in, in the NFL, it was, you know, I mean, go look at newspapers and see the coverage of NFL games in their home
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  cities.
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  And a lot of times they don't get tremendous coverage, you know, you know, even like Chicago with the Bears, I mean they go look through the papers of the 1950s and half the time that, you know, it's not
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  like it's leads the headlines for the, you know, for the sports page.
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  So anyways, I just, you know, to us the NFL is such an impressive, you know, enterprise and it's just, you know, it definitely is the leading, you know, source of football today, but it.
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  Definitely got catapulted by television.
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  You know, the 1958 championship game, you know, going to overtime and being publicized and the AFL and their contracts and the NFL competing and you know, that, that definitely stirred up the interest and generated money and revenue and
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  I think that's really what put it over the edge against the College in the 60s.
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  But yeah, yeah, yeah, the colleges were, they were just too, too afraid to embrace television because it took away from paid attendance and they love it now a little bit.
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  TV revenue now.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah, They've had a change of heart.
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  Right, and change of checkbook too, and savings account.
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  All right, well, that is some great stuff.
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  You know, that's something that I would never have imagined that even somebody with, with the NFL.
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  You know, I understand it was, wasn't too much on the east coast, but still there was a lot of professional teams, but especially somebody reputable like Allison Danzig stating that.
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  And you find these little, you know, trinkets of, of history that have been long forgotten and you bring them new life and bring them to our modern ears.
• 9:59
  And how can people take in some of this information that you, you put out there?
• 10:03
  Yep, just go to footballarchaeology.com it's a substack site so you can, you can subscribe, in which case you'll get an email every time I publish a story or just bookmark it.
• 10:14
  Come visit when you want, use the search function.
• 10:16
  And then and also, you know, I've got books available on Amazon too, so if you want to do a deep dive on a couple of selected topics, so.
• 10:27
  All right, Tim.
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  Well, we appreciate it and we would love to talk to you again next week about some more great football history.
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  Look forward to it.
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  That's all the football history we have today, folks.
• 10:38
  Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.
• 10:43
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• 10:56
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• 11:09
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  History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear.
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