Why is Football Brown? An In-Depth Exploration

Why is a football brown when a baseball and soccer balls are more of a white color and basketballs are orange?

Why is our games sports ball a different color of brown?

We're going to try to answer these questions and more as we go through the evolution of the football, the basic essential game piece itself that we love of our favorite sport.

We're going to My name is Darren Hayes, everybody, and I am from pigskindispatch.com I've been doing football history for decades now, trying to bring you the preservation of the game and help have a better understanding for the enjoyment of the casual fan and the historians to appreciate those who have come before us and the events, the people and the games and events that really make this game so special.

And today, talking about this football itself is really quite interesting.

Now, we've talked about this multiple times.

We've had Timothy p. Brown@footballarchaeology.com Join us to talk about the ball.

We've had other guests talking about the football, but we want to know in this case, why is it the difference in color from these other sports that are also made of traditional leather application, just like the football?

Why is the football brown and these other ones different colors?

So I guess, first of all, let's answer the question of why is a baseball white?

Well, back in the 19th century, baseballs, when they first came out, they were also brown because the brown leather that comes, you know, like you see on your leather shoes, it's naturally a brownish color when it's tanned properly.

You know, the tanning processes are all different and they can change the colors of them, you know, at will.

But that was sort of a traditional thing, was a brown leather thing.

You think about saddles for cowboys, they're mostly brown.

Or baseball mitts, in the old days, they were mostly brown.

Those were just tanned leathers.

You know, the leather jackets that your, your parents or your grandparents might have had, most of the time they were a leather, you know, a dark brown or a brown.

But baseball, with that being brown, it was hard for the batters and the fielders to see the ball.

You know, you have a small ball that's moving, you know, 90 to 100 miles an hour.

You want to see where that sucker is.

So the, our ancestors in sports were smart enough to know they had to change that color a little bit.

And they were all day games back then in the 19th century.

So eventually they ended up making them white.

Whether they bleached them or painted them or however the process was to make that white covering, we're not going to get into the history of the baseball here too much.

But they made them white and they had white stitching.

They played around with the different colors of stitching.

That way that you can see the strings, see which way that ball was turning.

When you're a batter, see if what spins on it.

Is it a curveball, Is it a fastball?

If you can see it that fast when it's come something projectiles coming at you nearly 100 miles an hour.

I don't know that I can.

But there probably is some talented batters out there that can.

And obviously there are, because there are some good hitters out there.

But that's how that baseball became white, for the visibility of it for its players.

Night games started to come in and it brought a whole different, you know, feature to it, including the practices in the late afternoons when they were playing under the lights.

And Timothy Brown was on a previous episode and he has this to say about it.

So, you know, Chicago's a pretty tough school.

Guys were in class till late, and so he had that practice late.

So he installed lights fairly early on and used a white football for practice.

And then, you know, typically when people were played early night games, they.

They used either a white or a yellow painted ball.

And the.

And.

But that wasn't because of night game.

It was because

they were kind of

arguing over whether they should use a white ball when one of the team, when BYU is going to wear white jerseys and Northern Colorado was going to wear brown pants.

So they didn't want to wear.

Use a brown ball.

So they agreed on a brown ball with white stripes.

And because otherwise, you know, they were concerned about hidden ball tricks and those kinds of things.

Right.

Something we just don't, you know, don't really think about anymore.

Yeah, some.

Tim has a great book by the way on the history of the football as well as other books.

But his history of the football book we have, when down in the show notes you have a link directly to that with our Amazon Associates account.

So, you know, Tim makes a, gets a good sale on the book.

It helps pigs can dispatch out a little bit and we appreciate your patronage and so does Tim.

But check that book out on the football history.

It's a really great book.

And you know, so we started getting into the night games right about the time of, you know, when all this was going on.

These different colors of ball and you know, as, you know, as far as the white ball and the yellow ball, it sort of takes me back and reminds me of, you know, my high school science teacher.

You know, think about it, a classroom full of high school students, you know, you're already a little bit giddy and thinking everything's funny, especially certain words.

And he was teaching us about the solar system and you know, called out the word, you know, the planet Uranus.

Well, of course that brought laughter and everything else, you know, the young, young people do and laugh at and still do to this day, I'm sure.

So he decided to correct it and say, no, we're not going to call it that anymore.

We're not going to call it Uranus.

We're going to call it Uranus.

And I'm not sure, so sure that that helped matters anyway because that was kind of a funny word to say it too.

Maybe you should just told us to call it Charlie or something like that.

Who knows.

But.

And anyway, that's sort of the way the football is.

When you have a yellow and a white football or discolored football and you know, you have some of the leagues that have come up over the years have had some different colored panel balls.

It's not the same.

We are traditional game.

We are football.

We love the brown football.

Different tints of brown and tan and orangish colors.

But basically we love that football color and that's all part of it.

So the football shape, you know, as Tim has told us multiple times, you know, it came from a rugby football that came from Europe in the 19th century.

And the ball there was that ball where it's a pig's bladder covered in a calf skin, you know, and Imagine, you know, you can't get that to be round.

You can't get it to be perfectly oval.

It's going to be something in between.

And that's basically what you had.

So every game was a little bit different.

The ball deflated all the time.

You had to unlace it, you know, pull out the end of the pig's bladder you could blow into.

Some brave soul would have to, you know, put their lips on that rotten piece of flesh and blow it back up, tie it up, put it all back together.

You know, probably the ball's deflated by the time you get to that point.

But that's the way the ball was until the evolution of science and technology to galvanize rubber, that you can make a rubber core, a bladder, rubber bladder that could fill up with air, but you still had to blow that up by mouth, as Tim has told us multiple times, and tie that up and then lace it all back up in the ball.

We have a scene in there with Joe Zacko, the longtime sports salesman, sporting goods salesman, who sold the uniforms and the balls and everything else, the equipment to the possible Maroons and other teams around eastern Pennsylvania.

Well, he would assemble the game balls.

And he would, you know, get it.

It came disassembled.

You got a rubber bladder, you got the case leather and you got the, the laces, and you had to sort of stuff them all together.

And it was an art form to put it all together, lace it up, blow it up, inflate it to thing, take it to the game.

And you play the football game with that.

Well, that was the way it was for, for many, many years.

It wasn't like buying them out of the case.

You know, like we get today, you know, where you get this ball coming out, you know, looking fresh and almost ready to play.

Maybe you got to pump it up a little bit, put a couple psi into it.

But that's the way football's come now.

We're spoiled.

We.

We have the modern world, everything's put together for us.

You couldn't put your, your hands around too many people, couldn't get their hands on that giant watermelon shaped football that they had back in the early 20th century, first few years.

So they, they slimmed the ball down a little bit so somebody could get their fingers on it and start throwing some semblance of forward pass.

You know, Tim's talked multiple times about how they were trying to figure out how to throw it, you know, grenade launching and underhanded and, you know, basket throws and everything like that.

And you know, finally we got to the point where the ball was shaped and slimmed even more to increase the velocity that you could get in the accuracy of the passing game.

And became the prolate spheroid standardization of the ball that we know so well.

That's the technical term, that's what the scientists call it.

You know, we call it, you know, the football shape and that's the way it goes there.

But the, you know, the leather itself is interesting.

And Tim had this story to tell us about, you know, a couple of brothers and how they made their leather footballs that see on the NFL and college football games today.

And he had been a tanner in, back in the Ukraine, or Ukraine, I think it's not the.

But anyways, he was a tanner and so he gets, you know, he gets involved in that business here in the states.

And he ended up, after, you know, maybe five, six years, he ends up starting his own tannery.

And I think pretty much immediately built a reputation for providing, you know, just high quality tanning goods, you know.

And so, you know, it's kind of this guy shows up in Chicago and if you remember the jungle from your half, you know, high school reading, you know, Chicago had all these stockyards and so therefore they had a lot of leather processing, you know, with tanneries and whatnot.

Isore ends up producing a successful business, right?

He's running a really nice shop.

He's able to send his sons to high quality school in the Chicago area.

And then he may have had other family, you know, other children, but he had two sons, one Ralph and the other Arnold and they end up being, you know, really good athletes.

They play high school football and then they end up both going to Harvard and playing football there.

It's really a classic American story, you know.

Right.

I mean, it's just like, just great stuff.

So, you know, this immigrant guy and his kids are playing at Harvard and they're team captains and all this kind of stuff.

I mean, they're really, you know, excellent players.

So then they finish their careers and they go back to Chicago and that's when the NFL is getting started.

So they end up playing for the Chicago Cardinals.

They play like two years for them and they apparently had to keep they're playing professional football hidden from their parents and, and especially their grandmother apparently.

And just because that's not something that gentlemen did.

And.

But then Arnold ends up becoming the player coach for the Cardinals in like 23.

Then, you know, they couldn't play under the assumed names that they played under before.

And Arnold, he went back to Harvard and was their head coach for five years.

And then he returns to Chicago and basically got.

Kind of took over the business and yeah, successful business.

They're producing leather for some of the finest shoe manufacturers in the country.

And that's still the case today.

It's an active business.

They produce the leather for Wilson in the NFL balls.

They produce the leather for all the NBA balls.

They produce a lot of the leather that's used in major league gloves and then, you know, Timberland and you know, I mean, there's all kinds of brands of, you know, foreign and, you know, really fine shoes that use Horween leather.

So anyways, part way through, I think it was in the early.

So they had a bunch of leather contracts, you know, to provide leather to all kinds of different, you know, sporting goods manufacturers.

But they didn't have the Wilson contract.

And George Hallis at one point was complaining about the leather that the NFL used.

I mean, no one had really good leather for the balls is what it came down to.

You know, they got waterlogged and it.

Yada, yada.

So he, he basically asked Arnold, hey, can you do something about this?

Can you come up with a system or a new form of leather?

And so, you know, maybe it took a little bit of time, but Horween ended up creating initially what they call grip tight.

And now I think it was just a branding thing.

But then they switched to using the term tanned intact.

So the tackiness is tanned in.

Whereas at the time, and maybe still for other people, the other manufacturers, they sprayed the ball with some kind of substance to make it tacky.

So anyways, you know, they.

Then that leather became the leather that was used by Wilson.

And I want to say it was like 52 is when that happened.

So anyways, you know, that's when the, the Duke football came along, all that kind of stuff.

And so then they've been the sole supplier of leather to, to Wilson for NFL footballs ever since.

I mean, that's just fascinating stuff that the family business is still going strong after all these years from those two brothers that played the game of football and, you know, did it well and even coached in the NFL, for God's sakes.

And played in the NFL.

Well, no, but.

So how did the football get to be this orangish tannish color or darker brown as we get into the games now how did all this happen and why is that?

Well, there's, you know, some things that I've read and seen are, you know, there's different techniques.

So after the horween leather is cut and sewn and put together in footballs in Ava, Ohio, at the Wilson factory, they ship the balls to another place and they get conditioned and part of the conditioning is, you know, they have these guys go out and get some mud out of a certain river in New Jersey.

Lord only knows what the hecks in the river is in New Jersey.

But it colors of football, what we like to see.

And they take this ball and they take and they rub the mud in and massage it and do all these crazy things to the football to get that color.

Even putting some lotions and ointments and salves or whatever to, to moisturize the leather and to give it, you know, that not only the tacky appearance that they're already putting some tackiness into the horween leather process, but they're also putting it into and making some weatherproofing into this in the colorization as all as well.

That makes the football that special color that basketballs are not baseballs or not, soccer balls are not.

And that's the way we like it.

That's the game of football.

And that's why the color brown is the color of football.

Hope you learned a little bit something today.

Hope you enjoyed us.

Catch us on more on YouTube, our podcast Pigskin Dispatch, on your favorite podcast provider and on pigskindispatch.com till next time, everybody.

Have a great gridiron day.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our

website pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football with our many articles on the good people of the game as well as our own football comic strip cleat marks comics.

Pigskindispatch.com is also on social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and don't forget the Big Skin Dispatch YouTube channel to get all of your positive football news and history.

Special thanks to the talents of Mike and Gene Monroe, as well as Jason Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

This podcast is part of the Sports History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear of your favorite sport.

You can learn more at sportshistorynetwork.

Com.