Parke H Davis

One of the great inspirations of many generations of sports journalism and especially football history can be attributed to Parke Hill Davis.

I feel honored that fellow Sports History Network football podcaster and friend Aron Harris spoke to me a while back to collaborate on a Gridiron Historical bio-documentary on the legendary Parke H. Davis for Aron's Football Odyssey website and You Tube Channel. Here it is if you love it give it a thumbs up and subscribe to Aron's channel, and while your at it subscribe to the Pigskin Dispatch You Tube Channel as well because we have some more great video sessions on football history planned to share with you.

As data continues to evolve into being an integral part of a football team’s success, fans today are also utilizing this element of the game in a way that is unprecedented. Activities such as fantasy football and sports betting have increased the demand for precise player and team statistics to give themselves a competitive edge. Though the demand for statistics has never been greater, the concept of preserving stats and records is not a new endeavor, as it was pioneered by the great labors of Parke Hill Davis over a century ago.

Davis' connection to the game of football stretched over his entire life, having been a player, a coach, and a member of some of the early Intercollegiate Rules Committees, working alongside men such as Walter Camp and John C. Bell. His most valuable contribution to the game, however, was recording the game’s history, preserving the 19th and early 20th century stories of the men who played and pioneered the game of football that otherwise might have been lost to history had it not been for Davis. Many refer to this champion of sports knowledge as “the grandfather of football statistics,” as he had an immense impact on how the history of the college game was chronicled.

Parke Hill Davis was born on July 16, 1871, in the little town of Kiantone, in the Southwestern corner of New York state near the Pennsylvania border. He attended Jamestown High School before attending Princeton University where he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in law. It was at Princeton where Davis was first exposed to the rules of the gridiron, for Jamestown High, though one of the oldest scholastic football programs in the state, did not have an active team until 1893, long after Davis had graduated.

Davis was extremely active at Princeton, participating in physical extracurricular activities such as tug-of-war, boxing, and of course his newfound love, football. His pugilistic prowess and toughness made Parke one of the top boxers of his time at Princeton, once even receiving the opportunity to spar with World Champion fighter John L. Sullivan.

His education in football may have been on par with that of his studies, having been coached by a great leader of men, Woodrow Wilson who would go on in life to become the 28th president of the United States. Davis played on the line under Wilson’s helm, being one of the men in the trenches who had to be especially rough and tumble just to survive the assaults by opposing players across from Jim during this stocking cap era of pigskin play.

The tutelage of Coach Wilson inspired Parke Davis to get into coaching himself after graduation, securing his first job as the head man at Wisconsin in 1893. He moved to the same position at Amherst College the following season in 1894, and then took all he knew about football to coach the Lafayette Leopards from the 1895 through 1898 seasons, while also serving as the school’s athletic director.

Parke settled in comfortably at Lafayette in Easton Pennsylvania, showing that he was more than just a sportsman, even gaining the reputation of being somewhat of a Renaissance man for his many talents. During the year 1896 Davis was known to have had the lead acting role in a play titled “The Rivals” at the Easton Opera House. He also organized and founded Lafayette's Law Club; read poetry written by Longfellow at the Freshman Initiation gala, and during all this, guided the Leopard football program to its first national football championship.

After concluding his own six-year career as a football coach, Davis became a prominent attorney in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lived for the rest of his life. But his retirement from coaching didn’t mark the end of his connection to football. Rather, he dedicated his time to researching and documenting the historical records of the gridiron of yesteryear, becoming the first football historian.

In fact, he dedicated the last two decades of his life to this cause, starting with the first all-inclusive history book on football.

In his well-renowned Football: The American Intercollegiate Game first published in 1911 Davis wrote a preface that really spelled out his reasoning for penning such a work. In it, he states:

“The football historian who essays to reproduce the battles of the gridiron is more than ordinarily handicapped by the insufficiency of the records. Football, unlike baseball, has not yet evolved the official scorer or reporter. The data of the games consist simply of the contemporaneous accounts in the college and public press. The peculiarities of football, the swift and confusing intricacy of its plays, the substitutions and sudden shifting of players make the work of the reporter excessively difficult and at times more or less inaccurate.  ~ Parke H. Davis, Football the American Intercollegiate Game

As an author Davis took his readers on a magnificent journey through time, even tracing football’s ancestral military training games from biblical scripture, all the way through the Ancient Greek and Roman Empires:

“In all Greek lexicons may be found the word “hapaston” usually defined as a game with a ball. Antiquaries have supplemented this meager definition by asserting that it was a game strikingly similar to modern Rugby football …Hapaston was a favorite game at Sparta..played upon a rectangular field marked with sidelines, goal-lines, and a center line.” ~ Parke H. Davis, Football the American Intercollegiate Game

All these give supposition that they in fact were precursors of American football through their influence on Association Football and Rugby football. Parke felt the lineage of these games were an integral part of the whole legacy and evolution of the gridiron. He also made the effort to connect the games occurring in the present with those of the past by recording as much information about games, players, coaches, and formations to set football on a course of being on par with baseball. He understood that people at home loved to read the box scores and talk about numbers after a game of hardball on the diamond and wanted this to be a part of gridiron lore too. By all accounts, he did a fantastic job in his book to start the momentum swinging that way.

Mr. Davis has not only prepared an accurate and complete treatise on the building up of the game as brought about through the legislation of the rules makers but has gathered together more material and records of the big intercollegiate contests than ever has been presented in one work. ~ The Boston Globe Saturday, November 4, 1911

With a desire for accuracy and tradition, Parke continually tried to make sure the record was as accurate as possible to chronicle the game. In 1933, apparently somewhat agitated with the integrity that some were writing about football, Davis decided to set all the records inline in the 1933 edition of Spalding's Football Guide. He painstakingly scripted the Evolution of American Foot Ball which was a multi-page compilation of a year-by-year record of major events in the gridiron game from 1869 through 1931. He also penned some tributes to Amos Alonzo Stagg and Edward Kimball Hall in the same 1933 Foot Ball Guide adding a concise bio of these important men of the game.

Soon after that, Parke retroactively began going through the records and began appointing a national championship team for college football in America from 1869 all the way through the 1932 season, awarding his Lafayette Leopoards the title in 1869. Davis' choice selections are so respected that they are included in the NCAA's official football record books, as the only championship teams that were chosen on the basis of research. Given that Davis, played, coached and lived in Eastern Pennsylvania, he showed little regard for the South and the West Coast teams, as he didn’t get as much information about teams out of his area or even get to see them play as he did the Penns, Yales, and Princetons of the day. But nonetheless, Davis continued to highlight the great teams across the country as more information about these autumn athletes came to light.

Much of what we know about the first 60 years of football is largely because of this self-proclaimed scribe and recording secretary, Parke Hill Davis, The Grandfather of Football Statistics. His influence on sports information cannot be understated, and with the increasing prevalence of data for football teams and football fans alike, Parke’s H. Davis’ contributions to the game are second to none. 

Here is a clip from the Lafayette a student newspaper from November 20, 1896 about the Yost affair.

The banner photo is of a Portrait of Parke H. Davis, college coach during the first years of American football in the USA. Special thanks to Lafayette College.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: Chatauqua Sports Hall of Fame website, Newspapers.com, and Football: The American Intercollegiate Game