The Archaeology of Bootleg Footballs

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Knockoffs and copy cat manufacturing are each nefarious elements of open Capitalism and industry. There have even been many times that football equipment and ideas have been copied and sold.

Timothy Brown examines some cases of Bootleg footballs,on a recent Tidbit he wrote on his Football Archaeology website, It all comes from his original article titled: Bootleg Footballs and Changing Specifications, concerning the 1925-1926 GoldSmith catalog and the "Slim Jim" ball. Tim shared the story with us on the podcast.

-Transcription of Bootleged Footballs with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to the portal that we're going to go back in time and look at some great football archaeology, some great old stuff that our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArchaeology.com is going to share with us from one of his recent tidbits. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, thank you. Looking forward to chatting about bootleg footballs. It's kind of an interesting idea or issue. Everybody talks about bootlegs, but this is a different deal.

These are bootleg footballs. When I first saw that, I was picturing a football full of illegal bathtub gin back in the prohibition days, but after I read it, I was straightened out right away. Sorry, the way my mind works, but why don't you explain to us the story of bootleg footballs? Yeah, well, so just following up on your comment, so the bootleg initially, the first bootleg was Pop Warner at Stanford.

He had a fake, so he basically ran a fake Statue of Liberty and the fullback because he was running a double wing at the time with a fullback getting a direct snap. He faked the Statue of Liberty to the wing coming around from right to left, and then the fullback ran to the right, and everybody went with the, you know, chased the right wing who was running to the left, and he just, the fullback ran into the end zone. So, that's where the original bootleg came from, and it had, you know, the name came from bootleg gin, bootleg rum, you know, so it was prohibition time, and you know, so that's where the name originates.

So, it's the idea of fake and illegal and inappropriate, and so during the same era, one of the things that was happening to teams were, you know, some teams were choosing to pass more often than others, and so some of the, you know, back then there were lots of different companies manufacturing footballs, and so some of those manufacturers began making balls that were, you know, the ball had changed, I think it was 1912, maybe I'm off on that, but, you know, somewhere in that area, the ball had been slimmed down from the big fat rugby ball. So, it had been slimmed down, but it was still bigger than what we're used to today, so it's remained difficult to throw. Typically, only guys with big hands could really throw it effectively, and so they, some of the manufacturers, started producing slimmer balls, slimmer footballs that didn't really meet the game specifications, because the game, you know, by then they had specified it's got to be, you know, you know, there was tolerance, but it had to be this much around this length, and so they started producing these balls, and obviously, if you were a running team, you looked at the slim balls of the, what is this doing here on the field, because I don't need it, you know, my team is going to run the ball, we're not going to go crazy and pass it 12 times a game like some of these passing teams.

So, you know, they, you know, it became a controversy, and so, you know, it kind of went back and forth for a while, and then eventually the, you know, the things, they changed the rules basically in 1934 to make, to change the regulations on the ball specifications, so the ball would be about an inch thinner around the girth, but, you know, so one of the things that, you know, sometimes it doesn't seem to make as big a difference, but, you know, you know, you have to realize that the ball in the night before the mid-1920s was not only a bigger, fatter ball, but it's kind of a different ball too, and by that I mean that at that, until the mid-20s, when they, when somebody invented the internal valves, if the ball deflated, and they did so regularly, because they just didn't have the quality control on these rubber bladders that were inside the ball, when the ball deflated, you had to unlace the ball, pull the bladder out, inflate it, much like you would a balloon, I mean, there was like a nipple kind of thing sticking off from the bladder, and you inflated that, and then you tied it off to keep the air inside the bladder, and then you stuffed it back inside the ball, and then you took this leather lacing that was comparable to the lacing, you know, any baseball glove today, you know, it's a flexible lacing, and you weave it in and out with the different fingers, and you know, the, but you know, so that's basically what the lacing was on a football back then, you know, now it's this really hard, it's polyvinyl chloride, this hard plastic, it's stuff we make plumbing pipes out of, you know, that's a stiff material, and so, but back then, it was the same laces that were on a foot, you know, in a baseball glove, right, and so it was fairly flexible, and it could only be as tight, the lacing on a football was only as tight as the guy who tied it together when they reinflated it, so, you know, quality control and standardization just weren't part of that picture, you know, at the time, so it's just one of those things where, you know, we kind of, it's easy to lose sight of the difference at the time, but so, you know, the ability for a quarterback to throw that, you know, to throw a spiral and flick their wrist, you know, and, you know, flick it over to get a nice tight spiral, it was just much harder to do, because these laces barely stuck up over the leather on the surface of the ball, right, and so once they, once it had the internal valve, and that became, you know, the late, the second half of the 20s was kind of a transition period where some balls had it and some didn't, but when they, you know, if you think about a football now in lacing, they, there's the laces that go, I'll call them, you know, perpendicular to the length of the ball, right, but then there's two laces that are underneath those perpendicular laces that kind of go back and forth, right, does that make sense? I don't know if you can picture that, but so under, so putting the lacing underneath the perpendicular laces raised the profile above the surface of the ball, and because they no longer had to replace the ball, they could make that lacing stiffer, even before they used plastics, they could make the lacing stiffer, and therefore, it was easier for the quarterback to grip the ball, to throw a spiral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so anyways, I mean, it's one of these things where there's a lot of parts of football blocking, you know, what we call blocking now was interference originally, that was illegal, and then guys started doing it, and they didn't call it, so then it became part of the game. The bootleg footballs, people started using them, they were illegal, but they kind of let it go, and then eventually, they changed the rules to reflect that, right, so there's a lot of parts of football where people did stuff that was against the rules or against the sportsmanship standards of the time, and eventually, people kind of said, oh, yeah, let's just let that go, and it became part of the rules, so bootleg footballs are the reason people throw long, tight spirals 60, 70 yards downfield nowadays. Hey, that, you know, fascinating stuff, your story of you telling us, you know, with the vulcanized rubber bladders, you know, pulling those out and blowing them up, it took me back to some things I read, I believe, from the rugby days, where they still used an actual pig's bladder, and the poor soul that had to unlace it and blow up that rotting pig's bladder, put their lips on that and blow up the ball, that poor sucker had to be the worst job you could have, I think, on a football field.

Well, and, you know, I mean, talk about the pig's bladder, but the, you know, a lot of people think that the reason football is played in the fall is because, you know, people had piglets that they raised all summer, you know, spring and all summer long, and then they slaughtered them in the fall, and what comes along with slaughtering a pig? Well, you have pig's bladders available all of a celebration. They have this kicking game where you try to kick this pig's bladder from your town into the next, or your village into the next, and that's where this football kicking game originated. And eventually, people started covering that pig's bladder with a leather cover to make it, you know, more sustainable or, you know, just to last longer.

But, you know, that's the origins of the game, right? So, it's kind of crazy, you know, kind of how it's all evolved. It's like every other technology; things become more uniform and consistent. But, yeah, that's where the game starts.

A lesson within the lesson. That's good stuff. And I'm sealing up my envelope right now from these advertisements for Goldsmith that you have on your website on this post to get my $10 football.

So, the F5 and the X5. So, I'm going to get one of each for ten bucks. Well, hey, you know, one of the images, so, I mean, for those who are just listening and haven't seen the post, this would be a fun one to go look at, just because there's a number of images from period catalogs that show footballs.

And there's one from D&M, which was a big manufacturer supplier at the time. They had a football they called the Slim Jim. And it was slimmer than the standard ball.

And they're advertising. It's right there in their catalog. There's no secret about it.

But it was slimmer than the specifications required it to be. Well, now you're making me hungry for a meat product that comes in plastic now. So, talk about Slim Jim.

Check-in with Nancy Pelosi. I think she's got some. She was eating some, well, you know, long story.

Hey, Tim, this has been another great lesson in helping us to understand the game of football, where it came from some of the intricacies and equipment, and just the history of the game and how the folks before us had to play with less than what we see today on TV and what the players play on a high school level even. We really appreciate you digging up this research and sharing it with us each week and evening. You can read it on your phone or computer.

Tim has a great way of delivering that message. And, Tim, why don't you share the information with us right now? Sure. So, footballarchaeology.com. You can just go out there and click on any link, and all of them are going to provide an opportunity to subscribe.

So, if you want to subscribe, it just guarantees that you get it every day. You don't have to read it every day. You can save them up and read them on the weekend, whatever.

But it'll be delivered to your inbox at 7 o'clock Eastern every night. And then alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archaeology. And if you don't like either of those options, just go out and check out Football Archaeology anytime you want.

And you can see the most recent article just listed out there in order of how they were posted. All right. Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Thank you, once again, for sharing these stories and this information.

And we'll talk to you again next week. Very good. Look forward to it, Darin.

Thank you.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.