Dr. Tony Collins Is one of the most revered experts and historians in the disciplines of football globally, especially in the different types of Rugby Football. We had the honor of having a discussion with Tony along with one of America's foremost experts on the early origins of our brand of football in North America, Timoty P. Brown of Football Archaeology. Tony sheds light on so many items in the relationship and shared history of these football games and what each has given to the other.
Transcript of the Discussion between Tony Collins, Timothy Brown, and Darin Hayes
Darin Hayes
Welcome to a special edition of The Pigpen, where we will discuss the great history of football, not just American football. We'll go back much further than that. To help me along the way, we've got a couple of guests. I think possibly this first one—we can't even give them the title of guests anymore—Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.
Timothy Brown
Thanks, Darin. Glad to be back here and especially looking forward to this conversation.
Darin Hayes
Tim, you approached me a few weeks ago and said you had contact with someone very special, an expert in football history who is slightly different from what we normally talk about. Maybe you could give us a brief synopsis of that.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, so, you know, as if, you know, those who read my blog regularly know that I've been doing a series on the original rules of football. So, from 1876, the original rules of gridiron football. And in doing that, you know, football was Rugby at that point. And so, I am trying to get a better understanding of Rugby. I had been doing additional research and came across Tony Collins, now Professor emeritus, in the UK at a university. He's, you know, Tony, you'll be able to tell us otherwise, but I think you're kind of the foremost authority globally on the origins of these various games we call football. And so anyways, because I'd come across some of this information, we eventually, you know, I eventually, or we kind of reached out to each other connected and had a conversation and just thought it'd be great to have Tony on here with you and let your guests kind of get a different flavor of the games that we love across the world.
Darin Hayes
The listeners, we are in for a real treat today because, as Tim said, Tony is an expert, but just listen to his bio line. Now, he is from the UK. He's a social historian specializing in the history of sports. Professor Collins is well-accredited as a Meritus Professor of History at De Montfort University, a research fellow at the Institute of Sports Humanities, and, in 2018, a visiting professor at Beijing Sports University. In 2020, Dr. Collins had his works come out and do some great things. In 1999, he had his first book, Rugby's Great Split, which won the Aberdare Prize for Sports History Book of the Year. He followed that up with some other prestigious books that won that same prestigious award: A Rugby League in the 20th Century Britain in 2007, A Social History of English Rugby Union in 2010, The Oval World, A Global History of Rugby in 2016, and A Social History of English Rugby Union was also the winner of the 2015 World in Union Award for the Best Academic Book on Rugby Union. To his credit, his other works are Sport and Capitalist Society in 2013 and How Football Began, How the World's Football Codes Were Born 2018. Tony Collins, welcome to the Big Ben.
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be here. I only hope I can live up to your billing, which is fantastic. So, thanks very much. I am also listening to the podcast and an avid reader of Tim's blog, so it's great to be here.
Darin Hayes
Well, I think we both speak for Tim. We both thank you for that. It's quite an honor to have you on here and to have you look at some of our work, too. So Tony, maybe you could just give us a real brief. You know, we saw all your accreditations in your books. How did you get to this point where you were such an expert on Rugby?
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, I guess, like most people, this has two aspects. So I was born, bred, and raised in a northern England port city called Hull, one of the few cities in the north of England where the major sport is rugby league football, which was the breakaway from rugby union. So, I kind of grew up involved in the culture and the heritage of rugby league from a very early age. I think possibly you guys as well. My father took me to matches; his father took him. So there's a long tradition there. So I was very interested in why this was so important to us. But also, when I went to university, one of the things that interested me very much was the social history of Britain and the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And that's precisely when all the different football codes started and became popular. So, I've been very lucky that I've been able to combine my interest in sports alongside a kind of scholarly academic interest in social history. I've kind of been lucky to be able to combine those two things.
Darin Hayes
Did you play the game when you were younger?
Dr. Tony Collins
well, very badly, which is why I became a historian. Yeah, but I'd say sports on the field was never. I discovered it very quickly, and it was not my strong point, so I guess sports off the field became a substitute for that. But no, I mean, I'm also involved in the heritage of Ruby Lakes. I've worked a lot with the Ruby League authorities and clubs on the heritage of game-organizing exhibitions and things like that. So I'm still involved in the sport's everyday life.
Darin Hayes
Okay. Now, I think I'm going to represent in this conversation. I'm unsure if Tim and I can be an equal representation, but we are the common American lovers of football and football history. And to tell you the truth, I know very little about the rugby game. I've seen a few games played. I don't know that I understand it. Uh, I'm not sure I, you know, I know a brief history of it. And so, as a representative of my fellow, common or here in America, not knowing the sport, maybe you could just give us a brief history of Rugby.
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, like all the different games that became modern football games, its roots are in this kind of pre-industrial society before people lived in towns and working factories and lived on the land. Many football-style games were played where the ball was kicked past and thrown to reach a goal, which is the basis of all the football games we know today. Rugby itself emerged, as the name implies, from an elite private school in the English Midlands, Rugby School in the town of Rugby. And it's... Rugby schools in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s became a kind of flagship of the British elite private school system. And one of the things that made it that was the importance that it placed on sport, both football in the winter and cricket in... It was another sport we won't get time to get into, which we won't get into now. In, you know, cricket was the summer game, Rugby was that Rugby and football was the winter game. One of the interesting things that happened was that it gave Rugby a massive advantage over the other football games played at other elite schools. So, all the elite English schools had their version of football. Some listeners may have heard of places and elite institutions like Eaton and Harrow. They also had their versions of football. But Rugby became popular beyond its school because of the popularity of a book called Tom Brown School Days, which you may have heard of. It came out in 1857 and was a massive, massive bestseller. A kind of the equivalent of Harry Potter, but without the magic. A football match played under rugby rules was at the core of Tom Brown School Days. And the popularity of the book meant that you know, people, not just in Britain, but people in the English-speaking world, decided that, you know, rugby football was an important part of a young man's education. So the game had a kind of moral importance, not just a... It wasn't just a recreation or an entertainment. So I had this moral, educative importance. And that meant that other schools took it up and also that, you know, people in the general public read the book and wanted to play the game. And, you know, that's also the case in the States. I mean, Tom Brown's School Days sold something like a quarter of a million copies in the States, and perhaps most famously, Teddy Roosevelt said that this is one of two books that every red-blooded American boy should read. So the game became popular on the back of Tom Brown School Days. And that led to the basis for its spread around the English-speaking world.
Darin Hayes
Okay, that clears it up, and that's probably, like you say, how it came across the pond here and over to the States. Now, Tim, I know you have a series of questions that you'd like to talk to and ask Tony about, you know, taking it up from that point where Rugby is in the States and, you know, sort of the transformation into what we know is the game of American football.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, and I guess I'd like to back it up just a bit because that is one thing I think about. So I've read, you know, Tony's book, how football began. And for me, the fascinating thing about it is that there was a stew of different folk games that, over time, some of them became more formalized, like Rugby, you know, developed established rules in the association game. So, just wondering if, you know, Tony, if you could talk a little bit about kind of what that looked like in England, this, you know, mishmash or stew of games, and then how it starts diverting or diverging into some of the different football codes that we know today.
Dr. Tony Collins
Sure, yeah. Well, there are two aspects to it. First, as I've just mentioned, the elite private schools in England each had their code of football rules, but there were also regional variations. So there were games of football played with widely varying rules, most of which resemble Rugby in the handling as well, and kicking of the ball was allowed. But it wasn't until the early 1860s when groups of young, well-to-do professional men who had left private school decided to continue playing football as adults and started to form their clothes. Still, one of their problems was that they'd all been to different schools, and they couldn't play; they didn't have a common set of rules by which to play the game. So they'd have this very unacceptable situation where the home team always played under its rules whenever a match was played, which meant that the home team won every time. So it's not very interesting for the players. So, in 1863, a meeting was called in London to try and form an organization that would come up with one set of rules that would unite all the different football clubs and schools to play the game under one set of rules, which led to the formation of the Football Association. However, it wasn't successful, and there was lots of infighting, politicking, and rivalry. The Football Association was founded in 1863, but several clubs were involved in the discussions which preferred a more handling code of football and left the Football Association eventually, in 1871, they formed the Rugby Football Union, which was the game that organized the clubs who based their rules on the rules of rugby school. So, those two organizations really set the agenda for the consolidation and codification of the two different sets of rules. One of the big things that helped soccer under the Football Association was the fact that the Football Association started a national knockout cup competition in 1871, the FA Cup, which soon became very popular and had great prestige. That meant that if you wanted to enter the cup and stand a chance of winning, you had to understand their rules and play them to a high standard. So, that started a differentiation between the two codes, meaning that clubs had to pick one side. You couldn't play both codes and expect to be successful in them. So, the consolidation of both codes was based on the need for competition with other clubs on a serious and well-regulated basis.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, interesting. So while that was going on in the UK, over here on the western side of the water, both in Canada and the US, the same kind of situation, elite young men were playing local codes. But then they started adopting both soccer rules and rugby rules. My understanding is that I probably get most listeners to know that we picked up Rugby through McGill University. And I think the first rugby game in Canada was British soldiers stationed there, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, that's right. I think in the 1860s, perhaps, but clubs were certainly being formed in Canada in the 1860s. Canada had a much closer link at that point. It's still part of the British Empire with the British. So, more football information flowed between the two countries than might have been between the States and Britain.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. And then, so then we end up with a, you know, kind of a mirror situation where we've got local, you know, basically to play one another, you know, you had to come up with a common set of rules because we face the same situation, whoever made up the rules won the game, you know, you know, so for us, it ends up that, you know, football emerges, you know, at the time. So, you know, this is kind of similar or taking off of what Darren said, where, you know, most Americans think of, of Rugby, the way it's played today, you know, not the way it was played in the 1870s. And so, can you describe how, maybe, association, football or soccer, and Rugby, those two games were played compared to your understanding of American football in the 18th, as American football started breaking away? What were those games like?
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, by the time we get to do it with soccer first, I think it's the easiest. By the time we get to the mid-1870s, soccer is not too different from today's. The rules have been consolidated. In the early years of soccer, incidentally, outfield players could catch the ball and knock it down with their hands. At one point in the mid-1860s, there was a provision in the rules to allow the scoring of rouges and touchdowns, allowing people to attempt to score a goal. So, the idea is that soccer has always been a game that's being played with the feet. It's not it's not quite right. But certainly, by the time you get to the 1870s, it's 11 11 players; no outfield player could touch the ball with their hands. Only the goalie could touch the ball with their hands. So it didn't change much of the well between then and now. However, Rugby was very different from what you see today in rugby union or rugby league. Firstly, the teams were 20 aside. This differs from today's 15, aside from rugby union, and 13, aside from rugby league. Of those 20 players, 15 were forwards, and the game was essentially a succession of scrums. And a couple of interesting things, I think, from the point of view of the links with football. Firstly, how the game was organized differed from how it was organized when a play was tackled. So before 1878, when a play was tackled, and his forward motion was stopped, he wrapped to his feet and waited for the other forwards in the scrum to gather around him. Then, he would place the ball on the ground and shout down, and each side would attempt to kick the ball through the other side. And I think the fact the player had to shout down when the ball was in play is the origin of football's system of downs. So that's quite interesting. The other very different thing is when you see a rugby game today, and the ball is put into the scrum, the ball always emerges at the back of the out of the back of the scrum. The idea is for the falls to heal the ball backward so it comes out and then be put in play by being passed to the backs. That wasn't the case in Rugby in the 1870s when it first reached America. The idea then was that the ball was in the scrum, and the forwards kicked the ball forward, tried to break through the opposing forward pack, and then dribbled the ball downfield. Eventually, it would come to hand. And there may be some passing, and the game's object was to score a goal. Tries, which were very important now to the game, again, were the same as touchdowns; tries were precisely what the name implied. Touching the ball down over the goal line allowed you to try to kick a goal, and only goals counted in the score. So again, there was no point system. As in soccer today, it was simply a question of which team scored the most goals. So the game was, in a sense, unrecognizable from what it is today. Mass scrummage in very long scrummage in not much lateral passing, not much kicking out of hand other than to try and gain territory to set up another scrum. But it was a scrum that was the core of the game. And that, I think, proved to be the, if you like, the pivot around which the other football games developed; it was by rejecting the importance of the scrum and the dominance of the forward pack and the reliance on the kicking of goals, which led to, in a sense, Rugby fracturing into the four different games that we have today.
Darin Hayes
Now, if I could ask a follow-up question on that, Tony, now you said that, you know, back in that era, there were attempts at scoring, but there was no scoring. So what was the purpose of the try if it was just the scored goals?
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, if you touched the ball down over the goal line and scored a try, you were allowed a kick at goal, a relatively unhindered kick at goal. In rugby rules, the rule was that you touched the ball down over the line, and then you had to throw the ball back out from the goal line to your kicker, who would then attempt to kick a goal. The rugby union abandoned that rule because it was too complex and also became quite dangerous. It allowed the kicker simply to take a kick at goal from the point at which the try scorer crossed the goal line. But it wasn't until 1886 that tries had any value in the scoring system, and even then, tries were worth one point, and a goal was worth three points. And the drop goal, which I think Doug Flutey was the last person to try in the NFL. I might be wrong, but a drop goal in those days was worth four points. So, that was the most valuable way of scoring up until the 1940s in rugby union.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, just for the listeners, a drop goal is, an American would call it, a drop kick. Yeah, but yeah, it's a goal from a kick. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And so yeah, it's really what you've described as fascinating because, from a scoring standpoint, that was football early on because football was Rugby, right? And so, and I think the one thing that surprised me intrigued me in, you know, reading some of your, your, you know, your website, your book is just the whole, you know, I always had the impression of Rugby being much more free-flowing game. So when I thought of football and adopted rugby rules, it still looked like the Rugby we know today, rather than the scrumming mauling kind of game you describe. And so I, we had an earlier conversation, but you know, when, about this, but when, when Americans change football to use 15, and then 11 players, that dramatically impacted the nature of play. And could you talk about that a bit?
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, and I think this is one of, again, one of the pivotal moments in the history of Rugby and football. So there was, as you might imagine, a lot of dissatisfaction with how Rugby was played because it's not much of a spectacle just to see 30 guys pushing and shoving a ball, which you rarely see anyway in that type of game. So there was pressure to reduce the size of teams and make the game more interesting and free-floating, partly in response to soccer, which doesn't have scrims as much more open game. So in 1875, the Rugby Football Union, the governing body, reduced the number of players in the team to 15 in response to that. Then, it changed the actual tackle law in 1878, which stated that if a player was tackled, he had to release the ball immediately. So, the old style scrimmage in which players would just line up, the ball would be declared down, and then the pushing would change rapidly. And that meant that the ball could come into play much more quickly.
Nevertheless, there was still debate about how Rugby developed over the next ten years and the constant centrality of the scrum. And we can say this in America and Canada: football in those countries moved away quite quickly from the scrum. And incidentally, one of the things that will be interesting in your thoughts is that the Canadians were the first footballers to seriously discuss getting rid of the scrum in 1875. They held a football conference in Toronto where they criticized the importance of the scrum and said it was a blight on the game, eventually leading to them adopting a more open formation. But that was also true within Rugby in Britain and Australia because there were lots of complaints about the importance of scrummaging, the fact that the game wasn't more open, the fact that goals were regarded as more important than tries, which certainly people in the north of England, south Wales, and Australia in Rugby felt that tries are much more important and much more interesting for spectators and also much more scientific in the way they use the term scientific in those days. So, this general dissatisfaction with the dominance of scrum in Rugby could also be found in Rugby itself. And so many of the reasons for the changes brought into American football, obviously most notably by Walter Camp, were responses to problems that were similarly being grappled with, obviously in Canada, but also within Rugby itself. This was one of the breakaways that led to the formation of the Rugby League in 1895, which again moved away from having so many scrums and reduced the number of players on the pitch to make the game more open and attractive. So's that late 1870s period when football started to become football as we know it, which is also a crucial period for the subsequent development of Rugby and the way Rugby itself split into two sports.
Timothy Brown
Yeah. And, you know, in an earlier conversation, we had talked about how when football, you know, in a game of 20 or 15 on a side, it was easier, in a sense, to keep the ball in the scrum. Once you have only 11 players, you start dropping some of them back off, off the line. So you have fewer forwards. Now, all of a sudden, it's easier for that ball to get out of there, right? And to heal it back. And so then that leads to the passing and openness. So, if I understood correctly, in many respects, American football, or possibly Canadian Rugby at the time, generated that openness or was the first to generate that kind of open game, as opposed to the scrummy, mauling game of the past.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I think that's true. As we've discussed before, I think adopting 11 aside teams meant that even if you wanted to have scrummage similar to what you had in Rugby, it's very difficult because you haven't got enough players. As soon as you start to kick the ball forward, the ball will come out with the scrum, and if you kick it forward, your opponents will get possession. If you're trying to hold it in the scrum, as was a common tactic within Rugby, you don't have the numbers to keep the ball in the scrum for long. It will come out, so I think that immediately raises the question of what you do and how you control the ball, which, you know, football is solved by the snapback. Canadian football had a similar thing with what they call a scrum. Eventually, in rugby league, they also introduced what was called the play of the ball, which is a similar type of thing and still is a similar type of thing to the original snap in football, where the ball was rolled back with the foot by the center to the quarterback. If you watch Game of Rugby League today, you'll see that when a player is tackled, he stands up, puts the ball, and then uses his foot to roll it back to what rugby league calls the dummy half, but it's equivalent to a quarterback.
Timothy Brown
So, can you distinguish between the Rugby Union and the Rugby League for the typical American?
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, it's a big question that takes two minutes. All right. That's the toughest challenge to that one. There are essentially two aspects to it. It essentially revolved around the question of payment for players. The leaders of Rugby, the Rugby Football Union, were committed to the amateur ideal in the north of England, where the game of Rugby was very popular amongst industrial workers and became a mass spectator sport. And at one point, it was more popular than soccer. Players had to take time off work to play the game and train, so they lost wages. And so clubs in the north started a campaign to allow players to be paid broken time payments, compensation for having to take time off work. The leaders of the Ruby Union said, no, this is equivalent to professionalism; we're not having it. Eventually, they started to ban players and suspend clubs. That led to the strongest clubs in the north of England deciding enough was enough and that we wanted to have a game where players were allowed to be paid. It's a spectator sport, and we think the players should be paid the same way as other entities. In 1895, they broke away to form what was initially called the Northern Union but later became known as the Rugby League. The other aspect of that split I just hinted at earlier is that there was also a different conception of how the game should be played. The clubs in the north didn't like the emphasis on scrimmaging and wanted to emphasize the scoring of tries, which they felt were more spectacular, scientific, and modern. They also wanted to make the game more open because of the threat from soccer. I mean, soccer was becoming, you know, essentially a juggernaut that was taking over everything. And so they wanted to be able to respond by making Rugby as attractive as possible. And so it's those two elements, the desire to pay players and the desire to have a more open, spectacular game that moved away from the traditional rugby scrimmaging that led to the creation of rugby league. A similar process occurred in Australia, where the game is now dominant in eastern Australia. The National Rugby League is probably the biggest club rugby competition of any rugby code worldwide. It's played in New Zealand, France, and many other countries. Rugby Union is still the biggest form and the most popular. The World Cup starts in France in a couple of months. And it's still a game of all the professional classes, more middle-class elements of society. Rugby League, wherever it's played, is very much a blue-collar sport. It's it's very easily distinguishable. The two constituencies of rugby union and rugby league are very different. So it's a combination of differences on and social differences off the pitch. And I think, in a sense, the rugby league probably has more in common with football than the rugby union. A famous Australian rugby league coach once said football and Rugby are the same sport but with different rules. We don't have the ball, and you've got to tackle hard. When you have the ball, you must run hard and score tries or touchdowns.
Timothy Brown
that is interesting. And I love the, you know, the, you know, it's the US had an analogous situation, you know, you talked before about, you know, the kind of the moral aspect of, of playing Rugby and, you know, kind of the rough and tough sport, the muscular Christianity issue. And so that's kind of the elite approach. And then you've got the spectator-oriented, professional, industrial focus. And so, you know, those same tensions played out in America between the elite universities playing football and the guys in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the leagues that they played, you know, in an industrial game of football.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, very similar. I remember years ago, in the 1980s, when British TV started broadcasting football and the NFL had an exhibition match with the Buffalo Bills at Wembley in the mid-1980s. Frank Gifford came over to England and, for English viewers, described the Bills as being very similar to one of the Northern Rugby League teams because they come from a similar industrial town that isn't doing too well. And that's the same, you know, that pretty much sums up where Rugby League's played in the UK.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, interesting. Another thing that intrigues me is, in American football, you know, because we had some rural changes, mostly the nature of tackling. Then, we've allowed blocking since very early on. And so our game ended up becoming this mass and momentum, very rough physical game, lots and lots of injuries, and ultimately deaths as well. And so, did other football codes go through similar kinds of experiences? And, you know, if so, how do they resolve it? How do they adjust their rules to try to remedy the situation?
Dr. Tony Collins
That's a really interesting question because this debate took place from the 1880s until the beginning of the First World War in 1914 across British sports. It was about the dangers of playing football, whether soccer or Rugby. Interestingly enough, the medical profession seemed to agree that soccer was more dangerous than Rugby because of the danger of broken legs. But there was nothing like the great crisis in the middle of the 1900s that confronted football. However, the only similar thing took place in 1870. There was a bit of a human cry, if you like, public consternation about deaths playing Rugby at schools. One of the reasons why the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871 was to organize the game and make its rules safer. There was the Times, you know, the famous London Times newspaper, the main newspaper in Britain. Well, it still is today. The Times had a kind of campaign against the point of Rugby because it carried lists of young men who had broken legs, broken collarbones, and who had even died playing the game. One of the motivating factors for forming the Rugby Union was to make the game safer and the rules a bit safer. So you can see very strange things in the first set of the Rugby Union rules, such as you can't use iron plates or steel toe caps on football boats, which was quite common in schools because hacking, kicking opponent shins, was an accepted part of the game in schools and was seen as a way of demonstrating your hardness. Not only being able to kick but also taking hacks symbolized how hard you are, your masculinity, and your fitness. But obviously, that led to great dangers, particularly when people fell over and could get kicked in the head with iron boots and things like that. So one of the things that the Rugby Union did when the Rugby Football Union was formed in 1871 was to make the game much safer, ban hacking, and outlaw the use of fortified boots. So that's the nearest thing that occurred, but there isn't the same number of deaths as what started to happen in football with the mass plays. And there's never the same type of outcry that you got in 1905, 1906, when the president called the heads of colleges to try and figure out what to do about stopping football from becoming so violent.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, well, one of the things that's interesting, you know, is that I've always said I'm going to write an article about it; it just takes so much work. But, you know, a number of the deaths in the, let's just call it 1895 to 1905, and even the next ten years, a lot of those deaths are, were not things that somebody would die from today. You know, it was, you know, literally scratches on the football field that got infected. Or, you know, you mentioned broken legs, you know, broken legs at one time could be a death sentence, you know, that's not the case anymore. You know, and so that's part of it, they were the crushed skulls and those kinds of things that were directly the result of the nature of the play, which is why they changed some of those things. But yeah, it's, you know, that whole, a lot of the safety issues wouldn't be safety issues anymore. You know, just because of the advances of modern medicine.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the other thing is that there's, as occasionally occurred in England, a bit of a moral panic about football for various reasons. So the numbers of deaths without wishing to downplay the personal tragedy, it's easy for the number of deaths to be exaggerated. I mean, for example, in the early 1890s, there was a London newspaper, the Paramount Gazette, that campaigned against football and compiled this list of 70-odd players who we claimed had been killed playing Rugby in the north of England in just three years, which, you know, if that was true, that would be a national scandal. Almost one player is being killed every week of the season. But, when you look back at the figures, they're not particularly robust. Some happen after matches, and some of them are things that, as you say, could have happened in any walk of life. People get sepsis from scratch, often broken fingers and things like that, which are not peculiar to football or peculiar to Rugby in this case. So, I think it's worth treating figures of deaths with something of a pinch of salt. That's not to downplay or decry them or say there's anything fake about them. But it's not quite as straightforward as I think the history books tell us at the moment.
Darin Hayes
Yeah, I think this is quite incredible and eye-opening to me, again, wearing that cap of the average American football fan. We consider Rugby a more brutal sport because of our perception today. In our football, we wear helmets, shoulder pads, and all kinds of protection. You look at these rugby players, who are pretty much just going out there with a shirt and shorts from our perspective and making a lot of contacts like you would in the game of football. So, I think it's incredible that the deaths and injuries weren't as prevalent in early Rugby as in American football.
Dr. Tony Collins
I think the other thing is that sometimes when football and rugby fans get together, you get this debate, which is the toughest. And the fact is, they're both different. I mean, one of the things I think that makes football is a game of short bursts. And so much emphasis is placed on yardage, which means there's much more force and impact in tackles than what you normally get within Rugby. But you've got to tackle and run with the ball, usually for a full 80 minutes, which, you know, footballs don't do. So that is the difference, as I say, with all football cards when people try to say, my game's better than yours, my game's tougher than yours, or anything. Each one has its challenges, and each one has its strengths. So it's, they're not, it's not worth comparing it in any way, I don't think.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, the other thing is Rugby doesn't allow interfering or blocking. Yeah, right. And so, while, you know, that just dramatically changes the nature of the game, the amount of contact, even if it's not, is the high-impact contact that you always see in, you know, from a tackle. Yeah. But you know, I know Rugby has its concussion issues, similar to one football face.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Darin Hayes
Go ahead, Jim.
Timothy Brown
Well, okay, I'll jump in. So, just wondering, did any other games that, at different points, allow the armoring of players, you know, the padding and, you know, football from early on had, you know, no hard surface or no hard materials? Hence, no iron, no, I believe it's called Gouda perch, or Gouda perch, you know, it's synthetic from Indonesian trees, right? Like a tar plastic sort of substance. That rule existed for a long time, so helmets were fairly soft until the 20s. But then obviously, football went away from that, you know, with the plastic helmets and harder leather. But did any other games have a period where they started allowing more padding? Or is it? Has it pretty much been? You're on your own, baby.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, kind of. I mean, for a long time, players in both games of Rugby, and one or two still lose it, wear what are called scrum caps, which are kind of like the old-fashioned leather helmets but made of much thinner material partly because it was believed that, for a long time, that would stop the dangers of concussion and head clashes. However, there's no evidence that they do. Scientists have claimed that giving players extra confidence makes them less aware of safety issues and head concerts. In the 1980s and 1990s, rugby league players wore thin shoulder pads underneath their shirts. There is nothing on the scale of football players' shoulder pads. But by and large, the rugby courts have stayed clear of that type of protective or offensive body wear. I think primarily because, in an 80-minute game, players are effectively playing both ways in football. So, carrying extra weight would not be a good thing.
Darin Hayes
No, go ahead, Tim.
Timothy Brown
I just have a quick comment: Just say, like, you know, in the 1910s, especially, there was a big movement to shed pads, and the game was going to be a speed game. So get rid of all paying it. And, you know, you're kind of looked down upon if you protect yourself with padding, and things went back the other direction. But so similar, a similar thing happened.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, I mean, just one quick note on that: what's interesting is that in the very early years of Rugby, the 1860s and 1870s, when hacking was still used, was still part of the game, to where shingards were seen as a sign of weakness. And there are a lot of stories where players would go on to the pitch wearing shin guards, and they'd be told either you take them off or we're going to kick them off, and often they end up worse for wear.
Darin Hayes
Interesting. Now, if I could, gentlemen, I just want to catapult us more to the modern times here and look at some of the differences between Rugby, football, both in the Union and the rugby league, and what we know, you know, in America. And I guess one of the things that, you know, football, our modern football, we are a society that just loves statistics. Baseball started over a century ago, and football looks for ways to get statistics to get fans more involved. Today, it's evolved into, you know, fantasy football and various things. Are there statistics important to the game of Rugby that folks keep track of today?
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, but not in the same way. I think one of the things that's very striking about football, and really, I think American sport, is the emphasis that there has been on statistics for a very long time. There's a little bit of it now, but for most of its history, the only statistics that mattered in terms of players were who scored the most tries in the season, who scored the most tries in the career, who scored the most goals. And individual accomplishments like that. So, in terms of measuring yardage, tackles made, kickoff returns, you name it, anything that any football fan knows off the top of their head, those things don't exist to any great extent in any of the other games. The rise of data analytics has meant that there's more of that now, even in soccer, which is much harder to keep any detailed stats. And certainly, in the two Ruby games, you can now find, if you want to go and find details of the yardage players have made, tackles they've made, tackle busts they've made, then you can find them. And they're certainly used by the coaching staff.
Darin Hayes
Okay. And I guess the other more modern question I have for you is from the UK, you know, from an American perspective, when we talk about the game of football, there's only one thing. It's, you know, the gridiron, it's American football, and we know that you folks in England are, when you talk about football, well, it could be a variety of things. So how would, if somebody's sitting there reading the London Times or any of the other periodicals over there and somebody mentions the game of football, how do they differentiate between all these different games that are considered football?
Dr. Tony Collins
Well, that's a really interesting question because it is a real problem when you look at reports of the various types of football in the 19th century in the newspapers. After all, it's assumed by and large that you will know which type of football is being referred to. So I think the basic rule of thumb in this is that whichever sport got to a place first, whichever, you know, whichever football code got to a place first, that is the one that is normally called football. So yeah, as I mentioned at the top of the show, I come from a town called Hull, and rugby league was the most important spot there. So my grandfather, who was born in 1907, always called it football. Whereas you go to other places and football, football means soccer. By and large now in England, then if you talk about football, people assume you're referring to soccer, and you get this, which, you know, I guess you may have had as well that soccer fans will say, how can it be football if it's not played with the feet? However, the other football codes are played with the feet, not to the same extent as soccer. Also, the nickname soccer is a very English invention anywhere because it comes from the word association, the SOC in association. When these games were played in the elite private schools, association football would be referred to as soccer and rugby football would be referred to as Rugby. So that's the origin of the two names. So it's, I'll tell you, the worst place to go there if you go to Australia, where there are four major football codes. Australian rules football, another oval ball code derived from rugby school. You have rugby football, rugby league football, and association football. Figuring out which code a person is referring to when they talk about football can sometimes be quite difficult. So yeah, I think the key thing here is, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and whatever their locals refer to as football, that's football.
Darin Hayes
Interesting, go ahead.
Timothy Brown
Yeah, your question raised an interesting question for me. You know, it's one of the things that we get into, especially in football. I think, you know because the game has changed so dramatically. I mean, to some extent, baseball is still baseball, right? But football has changed so dramatically from how it was back in the day. And so the goats are the greatest of all time; all kinds of arguments become very difficult because comparing a player from one time to another is tough, and you've got recency bias, etc. Does the same thing occur in Rugby? I mean, do people feel like they can go back and say somebody who played who was a star of 1910? You know, how does he compare to a player from the 1980s versus, you know, the 2020s?
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, it's a really difficult issue. I've been involved in panels where you decide who's the greatest player ever. It's pretty impossible because, obviously, as a historian, I've got a much greater knowledge of plays in the past than a regular fan. Naturally, your bias is towards players you've seen play and have had an impact that is still felt today. It's an incredibly difficult thing. As you said, when I first started watching football and British TV in the 1980s, it's a very different game today when I watch it than what it was when I was watching Mike Dick as Chicago Bears when Super Bowl in 1985. That's true of the other games, as well. I mean, Ruby Union has changed a tremendous amount. Not least, in the past 40 years, it's gone from being a purely amateur sport to being a fully professional one. It's changed its rules to become, in a sense, a little bit closer to Ruby League. There's more emphasis on the scoring of tries and less emphasis on scrums, but its principles are still the same.
Again, Ruby League has changed very much. I think one of the interesting things is football's impact on the other football codes. American football has impacted the other football codes, particularly the Ruby codes. I think Canada is an obvious example of what originally Canadian Rugby was. It slowly transformed itself, partly under the influence of what was going on south of the border, to become a 12-a-side three-game gridiron. But I think when you look at the Ruby League, it has also been influenced heavily by football over the years. For example, unlike Ruby Union, you only have a limited number of tackles to score.
Originally, in 1966, there was an unlimited number of tackles, similar to the problem that faced football in the 1880s before three downs were brought in. Seems to just hang on to the ball as long as they could, particularly if they got into the lead. That was changed in 1966 when the Ruby League authorities brought in the system of what you would call four downs; we call four tackles. Then, that was changed to open the game up a bit more to six tackles in the early 1970s. I was struck by something you wrote, Tim, at the weekend about Eddie Kokums at Wisconsin, who proposed five or six downs without any outage requirement, which is essentially the system that Ruby League plays today. You have the ball six times, and if you don't do anything if you don't score, you turn it over to the other side. Even though we're in the 21st century, the games have never been further apart; there's still a little influence going backward and forwards. Pete Carroll at the Seahawks is a big fan of Ruby tackling. There are links between the sports and the different types of football in the 1870s and 1880s, but there's still a little residue today.
Darin Hayes
Now, I guess, I mean, it's fascinating, um, our modern times, now I know we've seen it in the NFL, even, even, uh, recently where some former, uh, legends of the game of Rugby have come across in the United States and tried their hand at American football, trying out for, uh, you know, an NFL team. I know for a while there, we, in the NFL, had some players from Europe put on a practice squad to develop them. Still, I haven't heard other than maybe a kicker, uh, making it into American football from one of the other, um, items of football rugby or whatever is, has it, anything ever gone the other way where an American football player has become something substantial in the game of Rugby.
Dr. Tony Collins
There's a couple of footballs. One was Al Kirkland, who I think played semi-pro football. I don't think he's ever drafted in the NFL, but he came over and had quite a long career in the British Rugby League. There was a more short-lived guy called Manfred Moore who went to play Rugby League in Australia in the 1970s. I think they played for the Saints; I'm not sure. I'd have to check that one out. Interestingly enough, the most influential football player who came to play Rugby, to play rugby union was Pete Dawkins, who came to Cambridge University in the late 1950s. I think he was a Heisman Trophy winner.
Timothy Brown
from our army.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, and yeah, and Pete Dawkins was the man who introduced the spiral throw in Ruby Union when the ball goes out of bounds or into touch, as we call it. It comes back into play through the lineup when the two sets of forwards line up alongside each other, and balls are thrown back in, and they lift and try and get the ball and put it out to the pass. For a long time, the ball was thrown in like soccer over the head and sometimes under the arm upwards and over. Still, when he came to Cambridge, it was Pete Dawkins who introduced the torpedo pass, the spiral pass to the line out, and that's the system used throughout Ruby Union now for bringing the ball back into play in a line out. So yeah, Pete Dawkins has probably been the most influential American footballer ever to play Rugby. It's because what he introduced into the game in the 1950s is still prevalent today.
Darin Hayes
Tim, do you have any further follow-up questions to ask Tony?
Timothy Brown
Uh, no, I, you know, I mean, partly interested. I mean, I, we could stand here all afternoon. But, uh, I just wanted to say this is like, you know, I don't know, Darren, from your perspective, but certainly from my perspective, this is the greatest of all time session for the podcast. I mean, I just, like, this has been fascinating. It's so much fun to hear your perspective on these things, Tony. It's, it's fun. Very much appreciate it.
Dr. Tony Collins
Yeah, me too. It's really enjoyable because I think one of the problems that we have as football historians is that it's very easy to get tunnel vision. And so, you know, you just look at your football. And I think these types of discussions when you step back and then think, well, there's a lot in common here. And certainly, you know, certainly in the history and the origins that, you know, we're of the same parentage. But even today, how problems are dealt with, the way innovations are brought into the game, I think there's a lot that, well, I think there's a lot of the games can learn each other on the pitch, but also as historians, I think there's a lot of value from discussions like this and long may they continue.
Darin Hayes
I agree. Now, Tony, before we let you go, let's let the listeners know who may be interested in picking up one of your books, any of your other projects, your podcast, or your websites. Maybe you could just give us some idea how to get in touch with some of your work.
Dr. Tony Collins
Sure, yeah, thanks. My website is www.tonycollins.org, and you can get an extensive preview of how football began from the website by clicking on the cover. I also have a podcast, which has been a bit quiet this year because I'm working on another project, but that's been running for four or five years now, which covers a lot of the stuff we've talked about today. It looks at the history of Rugby, a little bit of football history, and certainly a lot about how they relate and are intertwined. So that's where you can find links to that at tonycollins .org, but also, you know, if you go to www .rubbyreloaded .com, that'll take you straight to episodes of the podcast. So yeah, that's where you can find me, and hopefully, the podcast will. I plan to get the podcast back up and running in the next couple of months, and we'll be doing many more of these very interesting discussions. Hopefully, I can reciprocate and have you guys on the show.
Darin Hayes
That would be very, very intriguing. I can't speak for Tim, but I'd be delighted to do that.
Timothy Brown
I also just wanted to say, you know, I've got a copy of it, and part of the reason we initially connected was because I've read how football began. And just so readers or listeners know, it kind of, it goes back to some of the beginnings that Tony described here, but then also, you know, kind of on a country by country or code by code basis, it goes through, you know, Canadian football kind of, what's the story there? How did it evolve and break away from this, uh, you know, stew of games that occurred? And so anyways, if you're, if you're in Australia, if you're in Canada, wherever, you know, there's portions of this book that are directly applicable to your world and then others that are very much global and just fascinating.
Darin Hayes
Yeah. Uh, most definitely now, you know, I can't tell you enough how thankful we are and honored to have you on here, Tony, and have this great discussion with us. I feel almost like, uh, it's sort of a family reunion of sorts of, you know, meeting some of the second and third cousins and different genres of football together and uniting them. And, uh, this is, uh, triumphant. I feel pretty, pretty honored to have this happen here. So, we thank you for that, and we thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge. Yeah.
Dr. Tony Collins
Thanks, guys; it's been a blast; I've enjoyed it.
Timothy Brown
It's been great talking because, yeah, yeah, right back at you.
